Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus
by Roger C. Smith
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In this book, Smith has assembled a portrait of the small vessels invented and refined in the shipyards of Spain and Portugal half a millennium ago. He focuses on the advances in maritime technology that made the European conquest of the New World possible. Shipwrights worked by trial anderror to make ships that would travel faster and farther, carrying larger and larger cargoes. Pilots developed new methods of celestial navigation and learned the patterns of wind and sea currents. Long show more voyages taxed the physical and emotional well-being of the crew, requiring new methods ofsupply and sustenance. In addition to covering these developments, Smith's book shows how ships were built, outfitted, and manned, illustrating what life at sea was like in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Focusing on the advances in maritime technology that made European expansionpossible, this book will shed light on a neglected aspect of the European conquest of the New World. show lessTags
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macoram "Vanguard of the Empire" focus on the Iberian naval technology and artillery of the 15th and 16th centuries from shipwrecks and contemporaneous accounts. Both Portuguese and Spanish explorations and colonial organizations are dissected and compared.
"The conquerors" is a vivid account of Portuguese 15th and 16th centuries overseas Asiatic enterprises painstakingly taken from contemporaneous letters, diaries and documents.
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