A caravel comes into Sao Jorge da Mina, to join an anchored sister caravel and a more burdensome full-rigged ship some time after the Costa da Mina was settled in the late 1400s. (From Cogs, Caravels and Galleons: The Sailing Ship, 1000-1650 (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 1994))
was renewed in the 1470s under the great navigator king John II. Here also was the center of the trade in African slaves, seized in the endemic tribal warfare of the region. The dominant chieftains struck bargains with the Portuguese, securing guns and iron weaponry to strengthen their grip on the conquered tribes. This situation is spelled out at the restored fortress of Elmira in Ghana today-a story of man's inhumanity to man which the Portuguese incursion only reinforced. While Europeans ended the slave trade in the 1820s, slavery continued as a way of life among Africans into the present century. In the southward push of the Portuguese, they had been using, since at least the mid- l 400s, a new kind of ship, the caravel. In this ship the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope in his famous voyage of 1487-thus at last threading the Atlantic and Indian Oceans together with the white wake spun across the sea by his sure-footed caravel.
The Best Ships that Sail the Seas The lithe and able caravel-evidently developed from a Moorish fishing vessel which survived in Portugal's Douro and Tagus Rivers until recently-was a fine-lined, shallow open boat of 16 to 20 feet in length, suitable for rowing but propelled by the tall lateen rig, brought into the Mediterranean world by sailors, who had developed it for close-winded sailing in the Indian Ocean. The Venetian Ca' da Mosto, sailing for Henry the Navigator in 1456, had called his caravels "the best ships that sail the seas." By then, the little fishing craft had grown into a remarkably fast and weatherly ship, able to head close to the wind and claw her way back from a downwind run. In these ships the Portuguese developed the "Guinea Tack"-a long close-hauled leg to sea, returning from Africa through the Northeast Trades. When the trades fell off, the ships picked up the brave west winds of the North Atlantic and rode them home to Portugal. In time, more burdensome square-rigged ships were able to use the wind patterns the lively caravels discovered, keeping the sea for weeks and even months at a time-and learning how to measure their north-south position while far out on the trackless ocean as the great Portuguese historian Admiral Teixeira da Mota has pointed out. Recent research in Arab sources has shown that a group of caravels seeking to follow up Dias 's voyage were lost sailing in a bad season in the Indian Ocean. There followed a hiatus in the effort, as John II entered into intense diplomatic negotiations to secure Portugal's dominion of the sea following Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492. But in 1498 Vasco da Gama, leading a mixed fleet which included caravels built under Dias 's direction, reached Calicut in India, having picked up a skilled Arab pilot in Africa. So when the English Francis Drake came into the South Atlantic in the next century, he picked up the Portuguese pilot Nuno da Silva. Dias never achieved the recognition given to da Gama and other military leaders who followed in the wake of his caravels, and he himself died at sea in 1500 when his caravel went down in a squall off South America, en route to India. But it is he whom the seafaring world remembers, and the Portuguese sailors today look up to as the master mariner whose caravel proved to be the key that unlocked the ocean world. What Was It with These Portuguese? Why were the Portuguese sailors the first to open up the sea highway that connects ocean to ocean, right on round the SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996
world? Those great deepwater seamen, the Arabs had been sailing direct from the Hom of Africa to India, a 1400-mile stretch of open sea, for over 1000 years. They sailed always with fair winds, using the seasonal monsoons. They knew the Western world, for Muslim conquests ran clear across Africa to Spain. But they made no sustained effort to reach the West by water, ending their voyages far short of the southern tip of Africa. They apparently believed that there was no return possible from the southbound current that ran past Madagascar, as the Portuguese had believed of Cape Bojador. The Chinese under Zheng He built ships of advanced design in the 1400s, which they took in great convoys from China to India, Arabia and Africa. But this voyaging was abruptly halted by imperial command just 55 years before the Portuguese burst into the Indian Ocean. China turned her energies to offshore fishing and building an impressive network of canals to serve the economy of the Middle Kingdom, under the philosophic conviction that the crude barbarian peoples of the outer world would have to come to China, the world's center, if they wished to trade. In due course the outer world did come to China. When they did come they built Europeanized cities in China's major seaports. And they seized control of the age-old Arab trade routes along the way. Why the Portuguese-why did they lead in this breakout into the ocean world? There's no good short answer to this question, but everything we know seems to point to a sense of mission in their sailing-a mission nourished in the Reconquista and enriched by the participation of many nationalities in Portuguese national development, from Genoese sailors to English knights. This sense of mission carried the Portuguese past Bojador and, indeed, all obstacles. This made them leaders among the hard-bitten mariners of the Atlantic world. In their national mythology, they went back to those great mariners, the ancient Greeks, to find their own ancestry in Lusus, boon companion of Bacchus, the god of wine, after whom their epic bard Cam6es named these intrepid voyagers Lusitanians. And they hailed the far-wandering Odysseus as the founder of their capital city, Lisbon, a seafaring center where Columbus, among others, came to learn the hard-won truths of Atlantic seafaring.
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I was aboard the big square-rigger Sea Cloud on a delivery trip to the Mediterranean one brilliant spring day when the westerly wind sang a solemn anthem in the rigging and the narrow strips of the upper and lower topsails and a bulging, lifting forecourse drove the great ship shouting for joy upon her way--or so it seemed among the clamorous seas. Ahead the Azores sprang up over the horizon and on the skipper's decision we tore in between a couple of the islands, incredible encampments of emerald green pastures dotted with the descendents of Henry 's cattle who hardly looked up at our passage, though the Portuguese herdsmen waved their red knit caps. A few days later we raised St. Vincent, low on the northern horizon, the first outpost of the sea-besieged Atlantic coast of Europe. What a wide, wild ocean! What a thing it is to roar and stamp one's way across it in a great ship under sail! And what a strong will and binding sea culture planted those Portuguese herdsmen and their Lusitanian cattle out there in the midst of the Atlantic surge.