Saudade, and the Way Home
The Portuguese word for missing a place, the voyages that made it, and the stretch of coast the ships came home to.
Portuguese has a word the rest of us had to borrow, because nobody else needed one badly enough to invent it.
Saudade is the presence of someone absent. The ache for a thing that may not be coming back, and the stubbornness of keeping the ache anyway. It is said sow DAH thuh, and if you have ever come home from Portugal and caught yourself missing a street you walked down twice, you already know what it means.
It is no accident that the country which made the word spent a hundred years watching the horizon for sails.
Leaving, and coming back
The Discoveries get told as a story about leaving. They are just as much a story about coming back: about the exact stretch of coast a sailor carried in his head through two years of salt and bad water, and stepped onto again if he was lucky. Vasco da Gama sailed for India with a hundred and seventy men. Fifty five came home. The families of the rest went on watching the Tagus anyway, which is roughly how a word like this one gets made.
That is the half of the story this title is for. Not the going. The coming back.
All the way around
They did not stop until the map closed on itself.
Ceuta in 1415, then Madeira, then the Azores. Down the west coast of Africa a little further every year, past the cape everyone said no ship came back from, and round it. On to India, to Brazil, to Japan. A country of a million people redrew what the rest of Europe believed the world was shaped like.
Then in 1519 a Portuguese captain called Fernão de Magalhães, sailing under a Spanish flag because his own king would not pay for it, took five ships west to find the far side of the world. Three years later one ship came back with eighteen men aboard, having gone the whole way around. He was not among them. The world turned out to be a sphere you could sail, and it has been that ever since.
Where they came home to
Ships back from India and the coast of Africa raised the headland just west of Lisbon first, then worked up the Tagus to the city. It was the last thing a crew saw going out and the first thing they looked for coming in. Every title from this house comes with a souvenir plot on that stretch of coast, dedicated in the name on the certificate. Where the land is.