Possible Move
Hello, Hivelander-type folks.
Missed me. So sorry for my absence, but I have been super busy looking into a property up north and to the right from these parts. Fingers crossed the sale goes smoothly, and it will be bye-bye to the wet skies and blue horizons of Vancouver and hello big skies and fields of gold on northern Alberta. Fingers-crossed come next February, I will be complaining about the snow and not the sop.
Our homeschooling and study of Europe has been progressing nicely, and we have moved onto the Age of Discovery. Specifically these last few days, we have studied the Portugal and its contribution to everything mariner in the middle-ages. I am learning a lot too with this one. Even up in Canada, we have tended to focus on Columbus and even the Vikings, as they landed centuries earlier in the New World on the east of Canada. But now when someone mentioned Vasco de Gama, I will know who they mean. Set you sails east and your time machine back.
The Portuguese on the Move in the Middle Ages
From our studies ...
In this video from CBS New we take a look at how Portugal became the first global sea power, using their boat-building abilities, navigation technology, and map-making skill.
Nazaré is famous in modern times for its giant waves, but in medieval Portugal, mariners would also come to Nazaré to pray. Among the pilgrims was the explorer Vasco de Gama, before he set out on his voyage, in 1497, around the African continent and into the Indian Ocean. Portugal's greatest heroes are its sea explorers, like Vasco de Gama, and also their land-based patrons, like the Prince Henry the Navigator. In the 15th century, their endeavours made the small country of Portugal into a wealthy global sea power.
In Sagres, Prince Henry the Navigator had a naval, intellectual out post. Those in the Middle Ages who believed the Earth was flat also believed that Sagres was the land's end of the world. Prince Henry's scholars, naval engineers, cartographers, navigators, astronomers, and sailors knew better. Henry financed some of the voyages that would expand the known world to Europeans for power and profit and to expand Christianity. Henry would die in 1460 and not live to see the discoveries he had enabled with his patronage of naval scholarship and exploration. Portugal had only reached Sierra Leone along the west African coast at the time of his death.
In 1688, Bartholomew Dias would round the Cape of Good Hope. Then finally, Vasco de Gama would make it to Calicut in 1497. Brazil, in the New World, would be discovered by Pedro Alvarez Cabral in 1500. Portugal's reach spanned from Brazil to Japan.
The exploration and colonization would not have been possible without Portugal's advanced for the time naval technology, including the triangular-sailed caravel ships. The sails allowed the vessels to sail very close to the wind for increased speed and maneuverability. You could sail when and where you wanted to. The boat wasn't just pushed from behind.
They also had cutting edge for the 15th century navigational tools. The astrolabe plotted location by calculating the altitude of the sun and the stars and their angle to the horizon.
Advanced and controlled cartography allowed the Portuguese to reliably chart course and return to where they had been. Keeping maps out of the hands of other countries gave them a monopoly on sea travel and colonization until other nations could match their cartography or through espionage obtain the maps. In the fifteenth century. maps were power.
We finished off the day's history lesson by traveling back to circa about now and an episode of Rick Steve's in Portugal. Pour yourself some port or whatever you wish to sip and enjoy and trip on Steve.
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