An attempt to recover lost glory
“Iam sure it must be rather disheartening to my people who don’t find any trace in Canada of the extraordinary achievements of our ancestors.”
The words are those of the Portuguese ambassador to Canada, as he concluded the preface to a “study” (in fact, a 170-page book) published in 1964.
The intent of the book was to restore credit to those long-gone and forgotten Portuguese mariners who did as much, or more, as Cabot and Columbus to open up lands on the far side of the western ocean.
Eduardo Brazao (b.1907), a scholar and clearly also a diplomat in the written word, was frustrated with how history can be so biased and cruelly selective.
But he expressed himself in “The Corte-Real Family and the New World” with disarming dignity. (Gaspar Corte-Real and his family were well-known Portuguese mariners and land-finders in the late 15th, and early 16th centuries.)
Of the rolling brew of maps and men, facts and fragments, Brazao wrote:
“All the hypotheses put forward may be serious ones, worthy of belief, but they have not yet been completely clarified.”
In tracing his argument for the achievements of the seagoing ancients of his country, Brazao does not rant.
He does not throw up his hands at the dogged dedication to Cabot and Columbus which, to make the required points, seems to depend upon selected evidence.
S.E. Morison, the modern-day biographer of Christopher Columbus, said the famed voyage of 1492 was assisted by knowledge obtained from the Portuguese. How many Americans do you think know that?
That rolling brew of maps and men I conjured up becomes a debate in microcosm over on this side.
Did Cabot first see Labrador, or Cape Bonavista or Cape Breton?
Schoolbook historian V.P. Seary, writing in 1931 for students in the Canadian Maritimes, said of Cabot, “it took him almost two months to sail from Bristol to Cape Breton where he first sighted land again.”
The historian then has the temerity to say that men of the Matthew brought back to England “marvellous and not strictly true tales.”
Of course, as we (nearly) all will agree now, the debate over landfinding credit is pointless.
If we are not going to call the Norse visits of a thousand years ago a discovery, then we must dole out the kudos to a mix of late-15th, early-16th century mariners, sailing under an assortment of flags.
It may have been important to rewrite history in earlier periods in order to claim ownership by right of discovery.
But as Brazao said, “in those early periods of history, the concept of nation did not exist in the sense which it developed and was defined in the 18th and 19th centuries … the centre of life of those times was the Prince.”
Unless new evidence shows otherwise, Brazao was satisfied after painstaking research to credit particular mariners from the Azores as “the real discoverers of North America in that vast region that overlooks the Atlantic which nowadays belongs to Canada.”
While credit for discoveries in the western ocean really should be shared among many, even if it is a pattern of discovery and rediscovery, Ambassador Brazao was not reluctant to come on strongly in support of his native land:
“With all this information, on this and so many other Portuguese voyages in the North Atlantic in the course of the 15th century, can there still be doubts that we were the first to reach the New World, via the Antilles, Brazil and the north of the American continent?”
Eduardo Brazao’s “study” was published primarily for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador on the occasion of the Portuguese White Fleet presenting a statue of Corte-Real to St. John’s in 1965.
It was a very good time to reopen the debate and call up some long-forgotten mariners to take a bow.
They should get posthumous medals if for no other reason than for the vessels they used.
As Farley Mowat wrote (also in 1965), “compared to the knorr (the sleek Norse boat), the lumbering, top-heavy monstrosities which carried Columbus, Cabot, Cartier and the Corte-Reals over the western ocean were seagoing death traps.”
In April of last year, I did a column on the September 1965 address to Memorial University of Teixiera da Mota, professor of the faculty of arts at the University of Lisbon. At one point in that address, he pointed out:
“In the mid-1480s, a growing number of people in Portugal believed that there were new lands to the west and some even thought that they had caught sight of them.”
His address was presented to coincide with the unveiling of the Corte-Real statue.
By the way, I want to add here (irrelevant though it may be) that I have always viewed that statue as too big and clumsy. If Corte-Real were depicted lifesize and placed nearer his environment of coastline and salt water, it surely would have been more appealing.
Elsewhere in his book, Brazao points to Portuguese names on islands, capes and headlands on this side of the Atlantic as “important marks for navigation which could not be dispensed with or destroyed,” in use as they were down through the years by different generations and races of mariners, and with different languages. For Brazao, this strengthens his country’s claim to a new dawn.
“In spite of the oblivion that sank down upon the extraordinary work of our pilots on the north coast of the continent, the Portuguese presence in the whole region has resisted the unkindness of time and of men!”
And although his book was written to right an injustice formed by time and other agendas, he is far from cynical:
“All the legends which deal with the rediscovery of America may be defended, but the justice of history rises to the surface, sooner or later, even though we have to struggle against a lack of documents and charts to find it and prove it.”
He also called our new statue a “long-overdue tribute to that eminent pilot who was being forgotten with the passing of time, and also to old Portugal, the discoverer and creator (he cites Brazil) of new nations and new worlds.”