Work by Álvaro Garrido received honorable mention from the Academia de Marinha under the 2022 Almirante Teixeira da Mota Award

Admiral Teixeira da Mota Award 2022

The book “Fainas Épicas do Mar Português”, by Álvaro Garrido, received an honorable mention in the 2022 Almirante Teixeira da Mota Prize.

This biennial award, instituted by the Academia de Marinha, distinguishes the best scientific research work published in Portugal in the areas of arts, letters and sciences related to the Sea and the Marines.

The Solemn Session for the delivery of the Admiral Teixeira da Mota Prize will be chaired by the Chief of Staff of the Navy and National Maritime Authority, Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo and will take place on March 28, at 5:30 pm, at the Academia de Marinha.

In a time when the “new economy of the sea” seems to forget the human and social dimension of maritime life that marks the coastal landscape, this edition invokes three major activities in the Portuguese sea: cod fishing in Newfoundland and Greenland, hunting whale watching in the Azores islands and tuna fishing with traps off the coast of the Algarve. In a Cultural History register, the book includes a preliminary essay on the representations of Portugal's relationship with the sea and a state of the art on the historical study of fisheries and their images in social memory. There follow three monographic chapters on the three chosen fisheries, a section of conclusions and bibliography.

An economic activity linked to the exploitation of living sea resources, fisheries are a domain of maritime culture whose heritage is fragile. Precisely for this reason, and due to lack of knowledge, fishing and sea activities, in general, are the subject of persistent myths.

The works of the sea whose imagery has taken on an epic sense are full of superlative images, a certain primitivism or cruel beauty. This is the case of the large transatlantic fisheries and other civilian tasks that involved long navigation journeys and real risk communities. The odyssey traits of the three great tasks analyzed in this book created a legendary dimension and aroused an international curiosity, which grew as these activities withered and time condemned them to disappear.

Cod fishing by the mythical “white fleet”, which marked generations and generations of fishermen throughout the Portuguese coast, whaling off the Azores islands and tuna fishing in old frames launched on the Algarve coast are eloquent examples. this tremendous cultural heritage.

Civilian fishing activities all involved great human ingenuity, discipline and fearlessness within an institutional framework that led to the unrestricted appropriation of resources. Not by chance, they all ended in the seventies of the twentieth century, in a context of great change in the Law of the Sea, when new scientific perceptions about the use of marine resources emerged and, not by chance, when the dictatorship of Salazar and Caetano collapsed.

All of these tasks have a forceful expression in the collective memory that remained of Portugal's relationship with the sea, but all call for new interpretations of meaning, in an educational logic and in a critical perspective that can go beyond the myth.

Aimed at a vast universe of readers and written in Portuguese and English, this book inscribes in the public space memories of human work associated with the great tasks of the sea in its connection with its coastal territories: Azores (fishing/whale hunting); ports on the west coast of Portugal (cod fishing); beaches in the Sotavento Algarve (tuna). In a beautifully illustrated edition, the book portrays each of the tasks at sea in its most unique aspects: historical origins, economic and social organization, work relations, cultural images and symbolic imagery. It is a book that reconciles science with culture and adds a sociocultural dimension to the current debate on the resources of the sea and the environmental role of the Oceans.

Álvaro Garrido is Full Professor at FEUC and its current Director. A researcher at CEIS20, he has published a vast body of work on topics such as the history of the economy and institutions and contemporary maritime history. Recently published the following books: As Pescas em Portugal (Lisbon, FFMS, 2018); The Social Economy in Motion. A History of Organizations (Lisbon, Tinta da China, 2018); We want a New Economy! New State and Corporatism (Porto Alegre, EDIPUCRS, 2018); Too Valuable to be Lost: Overfishing in the North Atlantic since 1880 (De Gruyter, Berlin, 2020); Il Portogallo di Salazar. Politics, Società, Economy (Bologna University Press, 2020, co-authored with Fernando Rosas).