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India Route Shipwrecks Project
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The objective of this project is the study of the Portuguese Indiamen that sailed annually
from Lisbon to India, from 1498 to the 17th century, engaged in the commerce of pepper, spices, cotton, and many other goods.
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Introduction
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With his successful trip to India, around the
Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama opened a maritime route to the Asian markets of spices and exotic goods. The Portuguese
crown sought to keep this commerce under state control, and sent a fleet to India almost every year, for over a
century.
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View of Lisbon with ships
from Genealogia do Infante
D. Fernando, 1530-34, London,
British Library.
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These voyages are reasonably well documented,
as well as their routes, their ports of call, the names of the ship's captains, the Asian governors, and the notable
soldiers.
We know a good deal about the economics of this
trade, its impact in 16th-Century Europe, the business networks that were generated and developed in various countries,
and the role of the Church in the European expansion to East.
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At present we don't know much about the principal
vehicle of this expansion: the Portuguese Indiaman. In fact, it is amazing how little is known about the Portuguese
naus that plowed the maritime route to India from 1498 to about 1650.
A handful of interesting texts and treatises, a small number of representations in charts, drawings, and paintings,
and around twenty shipwrecks are all the clues we have to interpret, in the attempt to understand and reconstruct
these ships.We know almost nothing about the standard Portuguese Indiaman, its routes, evolution, and performance
at sea.
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The India Route
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We know very little about the way in which these
vessels were conceived and built, and there are enormous gaps in our knowledge about their size, shape, construction
details, structural strength, design of upper work, or even basic rigging solutions.
From an estimated total of around 220 shipwrecks,
only a few Portuguese naus have been found in the 20th century, and almost all were looted by curious divers or
destroyed by treasure hunters.
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Very few have been excavated or even surveyed
by archaeologists, and the rare scholarly publications that resulted from the archaeological recording of these
shipwrecks have become precious, considering the scarcity of information available.
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View of Lisbon with ships
from the so-called Livro
de Horas de D. Manuel,
1517-c.26, MNAA, Lisbon.
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This page is intended as a contribution to this
understanding, and a guide through the bibliography and other information available pertaining to the Portuguese
naus da Índia.
The main objective of this project is to gather, organize, and make easily accessible all available information
on Portuguese Indiamen.
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Shipwrecks
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Bibliography and Resources
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Texts
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