Published in 1926, the Marquês de Jácome Corrêa’s História da Descoberta das Ilhas is the Museu Carlos Machado’s Publication of the Month—a work that looks beyond the moment of discovery to the centuries of knowledge, navigation and imagination that made the Atlantic islands possible on European maps.

Before an island is discovered, it often exists first as possibility: a shape imagined beyond the horizon, a mark on an uncertain chart, a sailor’s account repeated from port to port. História da Descoberta das Ilhas, published a century ago by the Marquês de Jácome Corrêa, returns to that long period before the Atlantic archipelagos became settled territories, examining the historical currents that preceded their discovery and colonization, with particular attention to the Azores.

Rather than beginning simply with Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century, Jácome Corrêa reaches back to Antiquity and the Middle Ages, tracing the gradual evolution of geographical, cartographic and nautical knowledge. In doing so, the book places Portuguese expansion within a wider accumulation of scientific and cultural traditions. The islands emerge not from a single moment, but from centuries during which humanity slowly learned to imagine, map and navigate the ocean.

The work also considers Portugal itself at the beginning of the fifteenth century—its political and social organization, maritime explorations and relationships with other European powers. Medieval representations of Atlantic islands receive particular attention, as does the question of English influence upon Portuguese discoveries and the subsequent processes through which islands moved from cartographic possibility to exploration, settlement and organized human communities.

For Azorean readers, the final chapter has particular resonance. It is dedicated to Frei Gonçalo Velho, placing him within the history of the discovery and settlement of the Azores. The figure who appears so frequently in the archipelago’s historical memory is thus situated within the book’s much larger narrative of navigation, knowledge, power and the opening of the Atlantic.

Chosen as the Publication of the Month, História da Descoberta das Ilhas is available for consultation at the Documentation Center of the Museu Carlos Machado. Its centenary gives the selection additional meaning: a book published in 1926 can now be read not only for what it tells us about the fifteenth century, but also for what it reveals about how Azorean history itself was being interpreted one hundred years ago.

Old books have this unusual ability to preserve two pasts at once: the history they attempt to reconstruct and the intellectual world from which their authors wrote.

A century after its publication, Jácome Corrêa’s book invites us once more to look toward the Atlantic horizon—and to remember that long before the islands became home, they first had to become imaginable.

Based on a press release from the Musuem. The photo is also from the musuem.