The Emergence of Nautical Astronomy in Portugal in the XVth century

Abstract

Of the great oceans of the world, the Atlantic, because of its violence, was the last to be mastered by man. The task in its entirety had to wait for the Portuguese sailors of the Renaissance. Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636), a Christian writer of the late Roman Empire, had written of the Atlantic that it was ‘incommensurable and uncrossable’. Although Pliny (a.d. 23–79) refers vaguely to the Canary Islands, all knowledge of them disappears in the Middle Ages until a Portuguese expedition under the command of the Italian Lanzarotto Malocello ‘re- discovered’ them in 1336. Italian charts of the XIVth century begin progressively to show the Canaries, Madeira, Porto Santo and the Azores, but all aligned along a N/S axis without any appreciation of the relative distances between them or how far they lay from the European shore. The first written evidence of the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the islands of Madeira and Porto Santo appears in 1419–20 and of the Azores in 1427, about the same time as they began to be colonised under the aegis of Prince Henry of Portugal, called the ‘Navigator’. The difficulties of returning to them on regular voyages was to motivate the Portuguese to develop methods of measurement using the Pole Star as a navigational aid and this led, not only to a greater accuracy in placing the islands on the charts, but also to a greater precision in the charting of the west African coastline which they were progressively exploring during the second half of the XVth century.

Claims that Portuguese nautical astronomy originated in Aragon and was transmitted from there to Portugal or was introduced into Portugal from Germany by Regiomontanus and Martin Behaim have long ago been shown to be baseless.