Sail Training and the Portuguese Experience by Commander Antonio Cardoso Translated by Rosa Silva. Beginning this year and continuing until the end of the century, Portugal will be celebrating five hundred years of maritime discovery. This year marks the quincentenary of the great Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias setting out on the voyage in which he rounded the Cape of Good Hope . This discovery of a sea route to India represents the culmination of the first great era of Portuguese-and European-maritime expansion and exploration. It climaxed almost a century of oceanic voyaging whose beginnings can be seen in the founding of a school of navigation at Sagres by the Infante D. Henrique, known as Prince Henry the Navigator. Through successive discoveries of new lands, increased understanding of astronomy , tidal phenomena, currents and winds, and the development of new shipbuilding techniques and advances in the art of sailing, the Portuguese navigators of the early fifteenth century became the first to systematically penetrate the South Atlantic and return to their port of origin from voyages into the virtually unknown ocean world . Pedro Nunes, who served as royal cos-
mographer to the Portuguese court and who was the leading authority on the Iberian voyages of the sixteenth century , embraced the magnitude of the Portuguese achievement in hi s Universal History when he wrote , " We have discovered new islands, new lands, new seas, new people and what is more , a new sky and new stars." The promontory of Sagres, the southwest comer of Portugal, and of all Europe, today symbolizes the Portuguese achievements initiated under the auspices of Prince Henry the Navigator. The school of navigation that he established at Sagres became a center of nautical learning for all of Europe . The Portuguese have honored many of their ships with the name "Sagres," the most famous of these being the two sail training ships which have carried that illustrious name in the wake of their ancestors. The first sail training ship named Sag res was built in Germany in 1896 as the Rickmer Rickmers, a three-masted full -rigged merchant ship. After losing a mast in a storm in 1904 she put into Capetown, South Africa, and was rerigged as a bark . Eight years later she was sold to Ham-
Her cadets wave farewell as Sagres leaves New York homeward bound. All photos courtesy the author.
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burg interests and renamed Max. When Portugal entered World War I in 1916, the Max was seized at the port of Horta in the Azores . Renamed Flores (after one of the islands in the Azores) she entered Portuguese service for the first time . In 1924 the Portuguese Navy acquired the Flores for use .as a training ship and renamed her Sagres . Given a new figurehead-a likeness of Henry the Navigator- the 98m-long steel bark had a crew of 180, and in sail-training voyages she carried a full complement of up to 400 . I made my first voyage in the Sagres in 1940 together with twenty-four cadets in my class at the Naval Academy. It was a voyage which was to greatly influence my life . Following a tradition that reaches as far back as the great age of discoveries , after a trip to the Monastery of Jeronimos at Belem , we set sail for Brazil , via the Cape Verde Islands. Life as a cadet is not very easy at times . Seasickness affects a number of the cadets . Getting the sails right, maintaining the rigging , trying one's hand at everything from peeling potatoes to cleaning the heads and mending clothes-participating in these tasks (which at times seem interminable) Sagres cadets aloft in fair wind, above a summer sea. Photo by the author .
SEA HISTORY , AUTUMN 1987