Gil Eanes and the Volta do Mar

Podcast Transcript

For thousands of years, civilizations that rose along the Mediterranean or the European Atlantic coast mostly stuck to the shore.

They seldom sailed out into the open Atlantic, and they didn’t sail very far down the African coast because parts of the coastline were considered to be unpassable.

That was until an obscure 15th-century Portuguese mariner figured out a solution that changed human history and opened the door to the Age of Exploration.

Learn more about Gil Eanes, the man who conquered the edge of the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Prior to the 15th century, Europeans seldom sailed far beyond their own shores. For thousands of years, various seafaring civilizations arose, but they seldom ventured beyond the Mediterranean or the shores of the Atlantic.

While a very vibrant seafaring culture developed, it was very different from what arose in the Indian Ocean and the early navigators that set out from Asia into the Pacific Ocean.

There were several reasons for this. In the Mediterranean, ships had sails, but they were often powered by oars, allowing them to move regardless of the wind.

Sails, all over Europe, were square, which was fine when the wind was at your back, but they couldn’t tack against the wind like the triangular lateen sail, which was popularized in the Arab world.

Portuguese mariners, who will be the focus of this episode, were still using antiquated ships called barcas, equipped with Viking-style square sails. Barcas were slow, heavy, single-mast vessels that provided little maneuverability.

In the early 15th century, European maps had not advanced beyond the Mediterranean. They were highly inaccurate and largely incomplete.

15th-century Europeans were highly ignorant of the Atlantic Ocean, subscribing to the Medieval idea of Mare Tenebrosum, or Sea of Darkness. The maps of the era reflected these dangers, depicting regions beyond the known world as empty wastelands and warning anyone who dared to sail past them.

Sailors believed in legends that beyond certain geographic points, such as Cape Bojador on the coast of Northwest Africa, lay an abyss. Common fears held by sailors were that if they traveled beyond these points, the ocean would boil, and heavy fog would block their passage.

The famous Catalan Atlas, a critical resource for early Portuguese mariners, simply stopped drawing the Atlantic Ocean altogether once it reached the coast of Northwest Africa.

Some maps, like the bronze-cast Borgia Map of the early 15th century, were not just inaccurate; they were intimidating, issuing explicit warnings to those who dared to sail beyond the map’s edges by filling the sea’s outer edges of the map with terrifying, razor-toothed creatures straight out of mythology.

The Borgia map even offers the following warning to sailors looking to test these boundaries: “Here there are even men who have large four-foot horns, and there are even serpents so large that they could eat an ox whole.“

To be fair, there were reasons the West Coast of Africa was so little known compared to the East Coast. The west coast is largely desert, has no major population centers until you reach the Gambia River, and has no major natural harbors.

The extent of Portuguese exploration in the Atlantic was limited to a trio of island systems off the Atlantic coast of modern-day Morocco: The Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores.

Two of these, Madeira and the Azores, became important Portuguese possessions. Portugal settled these archipelagos under the Donataria System, a framework in which the crown divided authority into hereditary estates.

The Portuguese crown awarded these capitanias to brave and loyal knights, who extracted wealth from these territories on its behalf.

As Portugal’s imperial ambitions grew, it also eyed the Canary Islands. Unfortunately, they were not alone, as their neighbor, Castile, which would become the core of the Kingdom of Spain, also coveted the archipelago.

Portuguese maritime ambitions were driven entirely by their geographical limitations. They were a small territory on the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula, hemmed in by a larger neighbor to the east.

To thrive in a Europe of expanding nation-states, Portugal would have to become a powerful seafaring nation, pushing past the unknown boundaries of Africa.

The Canaries were the first test of this principle. Spain and Portugal fought a long war over control of the Canaries. Both kingdoms viewed the Canaries not only as a land rich in treasure, but also as a vital strategic location.

Sitting just off the coast of Northwest Africa, these islands were an absolute necessity for any nation hoping to expand into Africa.

The conquest of the Canaries was a lifelong ambition of the famed Portuguese explorer, and son of King John 1 of Portugal, Prince Henry the Navigator. More than just a sailor, Prince Henry used his wealth and position to bring master mapmakers, scholars, shipbuilders, and astronomers from all over the Mediterranean and the Arab world directly to his court.

Prince Henry surrounded himself with aspiring mariners who dreamt of obtaining the vast wealth that came with being awarded spoils under the Donataria system.

The Canary Islands, however, were never Prince Henry’s ultimate goal. They were only a stepping stone to a greater ambition as his attention was fixed on what lay far beyond the Canaries.

A major obstacle to achieving this was Cape Bojador, located just south of Morocco, one of the locations at the edges of conventional maps of the era. The rounding of Cape Bojador doesn’t receive much attention today because it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but at the time it was a huge problem.

Cape Bojador’s coast offers some of the most dangerous sailing conditions in the world.

The shallow rocky reefs produced incredibly turbulent seas, and the constant pounding produced a white, frothing foam which made the ocean appear as if it were boiling.

To make matters worse, the scorching dry heat of the Sahara Desert collided directly with the cold moist Atlantic currents, producing a heavy fog.

There was another huge problem. The prevailing winds along the northwest coast of Africa blow north to south. This made it really easy to sail down the coast of Africa, but extremely hard to sail back home.

This might have been the biggest problem, because even if the other problems of navigating Cape Bojador could be solved, the problem of sailing home still remained.

For twelve years, Prince Henry sponsored expeditions to round the Cape.

Finally, in 1433, Prince Henry dispatched a member of his court, Gil Eanes, to sail past the Cape. Eanes and his crew failed in their first attempt and returned to Prince Henry with nothing but stories of boiling water and impenetrable fog.

Prince Henry was uninterested in their excuses and sent Eanes and his crew back again in 1434.

This time, Eanes was determined to try a new strategy: rather than use coastal navigation, they did something that most sailors feared. They sailed into deeper waters to bypass the cape. Eanes’ radical and simple new approach changed the course of history.

In steering his ship west into the heart of the ocean, Eanes unknowingly found the key to understanding Atlantic Ocean exploration: the Atlantic gyre.

The conventional understanding of Atlantic wind patterns at the time was deeply flawed. As Eanes and other explorers understood it, wind patterns blew in one predominant direction, and sailing against them was catastrophic.

What they didn’t know was that wind along the coast is only part of the equation. The Atlantic Ocean is governed by a powerful set of currents that don’t simply flow in one direction; rather, they operate like a large gear that turns clockwise.

This current pattern is the Atlantic gyre. The gyre flows southward along the west coast of Africa, then northward and westward into the Atlantic.

By sailing west, Eanes and his crew found the gyre that propelled them southward along the African coast past Cape Bojador. After the ship rounded the Cape, Eanes and his crew found calm waters and much easier sailing.

Recognizing the gravity of his discovery, Eanes claimed the land past the Cape for Portugal. Even though he couldn’t have known the full implications at the time, Gil Eanes had just started the Age of Exploration.

His expedition paved the way for others to sail past Cape Bojador, then the Cape of Good Hope, into the Indian Ocean, and beyond. Eanes opened the door for the establishment of the mighty Portuguese Trading Post Empire and cemented the Portuguese as early leaders in maritime exploration.

Despite the importance of his crew’s accomplishment, Eanes and his men still had to get back home to claim their glory. Sailing straight north along the African coast against the trade winds was simply not an option.

Worse still, attempting that route would bring the hazards of Cape Bojador right back into the equation. To solve this problem, Eanes decided to employ his radical open-ocean strategy in reverse.

He ordered his crew to steer even deeper into the uncharted Atlantic, sailing away from land to find the westerly winds that would ultimately propel them in a massive, sweeping arc back to the shores of Portugal.

Eanes had discovered the key to Portuguese exploration, the volta do mar, which means “turn of the sea”. By using the wheel of oceanic currents, the Portuguese unlocked exploration of the Atlantic Ocean.

Their conquest of Cape Bojador had dispelled the myth that it was impossible to sail further south. The regions that were undocumented on the maps simply had yet to be explored.

At this point, Prince Henry’s goal of simply gaining the Canary Islands seemed small compared to the expanded possibilities that lay beyond Cape Bojador.

To fully take advantage of these new possibilities, the Portuguese developed a new type of ship, the caravel. Caravels were lighter, more maneuverable, and used lateen sails, which provided greater flexibility in dealing with changing wind and current conditions.

By adopting these triangular sails from Arab dhows, Portuguese mariners gained the flexibility to sail at an angle into a headwind. Portuguese mariners now had the technology to conquer the seas.

Within a few decades, the Portuguese mapped the entire West African coast, reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and arrived in India by the end of the 15th century.

Gil Eanes did not establish the lucrative Portuguese trading-post empire. He didn’t round the Cape of Good Hope, and he didn’t sail to India. All of these are better-known feats by Portuguese explorers that get mentioned in the history books.

But he took the first crucial step. He did what was considered the hard part at the time. He went where no other sailor had gone before, and in the process knocked down the barrier to European exploration of the rest of the world by sea.

He proved that the world did not end at the maps, that the sea did not contain monsters, and that it was possible to sail home after sailing down the coast of Africa.

I’m guessing that the vast majority of you have never even heard of Gil Eanes before, but perhaps more people should. While he didn’t discover new lands or open new trade routes, his discovery of a navigation technique made everything else that came after possible.