Finding a way by sea: experience, geography, and maritime imagery in sailing tales

Abstract

This essay studies the way in which voyage narratives represent the sea during the 16th century. These representations arise in the context of an important widening of the geographic horizons, as well as in the onset of new practices, images and conceptions about the space and the territory. Analogously to the invention of America as a continent with its territorry and inhabitants observed in colonial texts, the voyage narratives conceive a new world order taking also the oceans into account.