Madeira and the Azores: start of Portuguese Atlantic expansion
Madeira y Azores: inicio de la expansión atlántica portuguesa
- Date
- 1419-1427 · confidence medium
- Place
- Madeira Island, Portugal
- Credited to
- João Gonçalves Zarco, Tristão Vaz Teixeira, Diogo de Silves; Henry the Navigator
- People
- 👤 Diogo de Silves?–1500👤 Enrique el Navegante1394–1460👤 João Gonçalves Zarco1390–1471👤 Tristão Vaz Teixeira1395–1480
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
The Portuguese reached and colonised Madeira (1419) and the Azores (1427), uninhabited archipelagos that served as a testing ground for sugar cane cultivation with enslaved labour and as a staging post on Atlantic routes.
Madeira and the Azores were uninhabited, unlike the Canary Islands (Guanches). Coordinates of Madeira. They appear on earlier Italian portolan charts, suggesting prior knowledge.
What it led to
- Sugar plantation model exported to the Antilles and Brazil
- Volta do mar: the technique of returning via westerly winds
- Exploration of the African coast
Built on
- Sagres school and the patronage of Henry the Navigator
- Rediscovery of the Canary Islands (14th century)
Made possible
- Caravelc. 1440
- Atlantic sugarcane plantation