The Age of Discovery - when Portugal ruled the Seas

Friday, October 25, 2019                                                                               Lisbon

Representational painting of Prince Henry the Navigator and school/workshop of pilots, astronomers and engineers

Inside the Maritime Museum, it was like a walk through my junior high history class, featuring all the accomplishments of Portuguese navigation, starting in the 1400s.  Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama are featured, along with many other statues, and the walls are covered with beautiful maps. 

Your visit to the museum starts here - confronting a massive Prince Henry and a map of the world

A student studying the world map depicting all the Portuguese voyages of discovery across the world's oceans

Two more Portuguese navigator explorers, with a student reading the historical marker

Windows on the world...

The illustrations of North and South American

"Old World" vs. "New World" as we learned in school

 Of course, the colonialization and exploitation of other regions are understood differently now, in context, than what we learned in school, and the features of the museum haven’t kept up with newer sensitivities about Eurocentric world views.  But that doesn’t take away from the exciting navigation and engineering accomplishments of the Age of Discovery, as it’s called in the museum.  A large school group was visiting with us, writing furiously in notebooks, looking for answers to questions their teachers have posed for their visit.

Vasco da Gama and his first voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and on to India to establish a maritime spice trade

Students busy searching for answers for their assignment

The famous Portuguese caravel ship design

Statue of Vasco da Gama, with a brass quadrant in the foreground

Beautiful cartography of the Mediterranean and western Africa

A celestial globe, with illustrations of the constellations

A terrestrial globe

A painting of St. Frances Xavier, performing a miracle to save the Santa Cruz vessel.  They had run out of water on a voyage from Macau to Japan and he dipped his feet in the sea, changing it from salt to fresh water.

A Portuguese fishing vessel