Portugal ran the first long-term science project on Atlantic winds and currents
Long before oceanography had a name, Portuguese navigators were systematically mapping Atlantic winds and currents, decade after decade, under threat of death for anyone who leaked a chart. Their records burned in the Lisbon earthquake, but their routes survive: Vasco da Gama spent three planned months out of sight of land to ride the South Atlantic's currents.
Oceanography studies the physics, chemistry, biology and geology of the sea, borrowing from fields as far apart as astronomy and meteorology. People knew about waves and currents in prehistory, and Aristotle and Strabo wrote about tides, but early exploration mostly charted coastlines and sampled whatever fishermen hauled up. The Portuguese Atlantic campaign is the earliest example of a systematic scientific project sustained over many decades.
Their problem was getting home. South of the Canary Islands, the prevailing current and the calm doldrums made sailing north almost impossible, so pilots learned to swing far out into the ocean, a manoeuvre called the volta do mar, to catch winds carrying them back to Europe. Expeditions left at different seasons on different routes: Bartolomeu Dias hugged Africa in 1487, Gama cut through the open South Atlantic in 1497, and Cabral took a wider western arc in 1500, reaching Brazil after 29 days from Cape Verde. The mathematician Pedro Nunes, who trained pilots from 1527, insisted these voyages relied on instruments and geometry, not luck.
Science at sea grew from there. A Danish expedition to Arabia from 1761 to 1767, carrying naturalist Peter Forsskål, is often called the first oceanographic voyage. Benjamin Franklin made the first scientific study of the Gulf Stream, named it, and with Timothy Folger printed its first map around 1769 to 1770. James Clark Ross took the first modern deep-sea sounding in 1840, Edward Forbes's dredging in the Aegean helped found marine ecology, and Matthew Fontaine Maury's 1855 book Physical Geography of the Sea was among the first comprehensive studies.
Even so, by the mid-19th century almost nothing was known about the deep. The Challenger expedition of 1872 to 1876, launched by Charles Wyville Thomson and John Murray aboard a navy ship fitted with laboratories, is regarded as the founding event of modern oceanography.
Source: Oceanography
