a rota da Baleia

Marine animals and maritime communities in the early modern Atlantic Over time, humans have been using and exploiting the natural living resources of seas and shores for their own convenience and profit. Coral, pearls, seashells, turtles, fishes, seabirds and marine mammals were, and are still, an important source of resources ranging from exchange currency to food items as even to daily life instruments, and for that reason they have been gathered, captured or hunted. They all became important economic activities in early modern oceans with severe impacts both in the ecology of marine ecosystems and in the human populations who relied on them. Whale hunting, for instances, was the most extensive form of exploitation of a living resource and the history of whaling is a classic example of the relation between humans and a given natural element. This activity can be tracked through time and space, from immemorial times to nowadays, and reveals social, cultural and economic as...

Presenting " Sea monsters in the early modern Portuguese production and transfer of knowledge about the natural world  " Capture, trade and collection of marine animals - specimens, remains and products, stories and illustrations - has a documented history that changed dramatically with the European Overseas expansion. Since the 15th and 16th century many exotic animals and several accounts, descriptions and representations, were brought to Europe opening up a new period in the global economy of Nature and in the making of the natural history. Most European naturalists, and practitioners, showed an ability to observe and comprehend the new (local and distant) natural world. Naturalists n their cabinets, through their connections or local journeys, greatly enlarged the knowledge about Nature. But the accounts from pilots, travelers, traders, missionaries and other, offered a significant contribute to the writing of a new Natural History. Moreover, local people in diffe...