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Jaime Cortesão was a remarkable historian and the scholar responsible for drawing attention to the important question of the technical and scientific component of the voyages of the Discoveries, even though he was occasionally prone to an overly free imagination, as when he developed his theory of the existence of a policy of secrecy.
This theme as well as related topics were later worked on by Duarte Leite, who perhaps exaggerated in his spirit of criticism, and entered into a keen controversy with Jaime Cortesão. Luciano Pereira da Silva was responsible for such fundamental contributions as the biographies of the two Doctors Pedro Nunes, studies on 16th-century astronomy, and the dismantling of the myth of the School of Sagres.
PORTUGALIAE MONUMENTA CARTOGRAPHICA FULL
Being interested from early on in the scientific component of the history of the Discoveries, he later devoted himself, in the early 1960s, to following a tradition that had already borne fruit with the works of Luciano Pereira da Silva and Duarte Leite Pereira da Silva, both of them full professors of mathematics at the same university. The Coimbra section was joined by a university professor who was to play a fundamental role in later years: Luís de Albuquerque (Guerreiro 1998). In turn, the collaboration between these two authors on the above-mentioned research project gave rise to the creation of the Ancient Cartography Studies Group of the Overseas Research Board, initially divided into two sections: the Lisbon section headed by Teixeira da Mota, and the Coimbra section headed by Armando Cortesão. On his return to Portugal, he met Avelino Teixeira da Mota, a naval officer who had written hugely important works on Guinea (Valentim, undated), but who was increasingly interested in the history of nautical science and cartography. Armando Cortesão was already one of the leading names in the history of cartography, with a reputation that had been firmly established through the publication of two monumental volumes entitled Cartografia e Cartógrafos Portugueses dos Séculos XV e XVI (Cortesão 1935), and of subsequent works in English that had been given international exposure due to his years in exile and his connections with the Hakluyt Society. On the one hand, the 1950s had witnessed the birth of one of the main scientific research projects in this area in Portugal, culminating in the publication of the Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica (Cortesão Mota 1960-2).
The first International Conference on the History of Nautical Science took place in Coimbra in 1968, resulting from the coming together of two quite distinct processes that nonetheless met on this occasion to open up a new thematic area for research. International Commission for the History of
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