Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University
“East Atlantic Crossings in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”
Atlantic historians tend to understand transoceanic crossings along an east-west axis, with people and goods seen as traversing the space between Africa and/or Europe, on the one hand, and the Americas, on the other. Yet in the early decades of the sixteenth century, even as the broader contours of Atlantic circumnavigation were becoming more evident to members of various maritime communities, impressions of transoceanic mobility did not yet assume the east-west axis as normative. Frequently traveled thoroughfares linking Seville to the Canaries, São Tomé to the Azores, and Cabo Verde to Rouen were themselves widely seen as transoceanic in scope, even if they hewed to the eastern side of the Atlantic. The weight of tradition lay behind this conventional wisdom. Maritime routes spanning the Gulf of Guinea, the Atlantic islands, and Iberia had since the mid-fifteenth century established patterns of voluntary and coerced movement that continued to be integral to an expanding Atlantic circuit even after 1492. In considering the shifting yet continually vital role of the eastern Atlantic corridor, this talk seeks to recover a largely overlooked geographic and temporal dimension of early Atlantic history. It does so by bringing together individual stories of conflict, negotiation, and struggle waged by a diverse range of individuals who interacted, in different ways, with the breadth and dynamism of the east Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
