In 1925, Gago Coutinho spoke at a conference at the Portuguese Literary High School in Rio de Janeiro, at which he argued that the discovery of Brazil had been intentional rather than by mere chance. He subsequently published a set of works to prove his theory. In his customary brusque manner, he declared war on some of the historians of the time, saying that: “The History of the Discoveries, as written by the chroniclers of the past and repeated by the publicists of the present, is full of errors and fantasies.” (Precursor da Navegação Aérea, 1969, p. 53). Controversy erupted and there was immediately a direct confrontation between Gago Coutinho and one of his colleagues – his great friend Captain Quirino da Fonseca, with whom he had shared his younger years – about the question of the caravel. This was followed by other conflicts, with the naval historian and Rear Admiral Samuel Morison, Marcondes de Sousa, Roque Gameiro, and Henrique Lopes de Mendonça.

In reply to an open letter from Mendonça in Diário de Notícias, Gago Coutinho pointed to the importance of seeking, “not to convince artists to portray caravels in one way or another, but to study the old documents before drawing them”. He decried the fact that neither Henrique Lopes de Mendonça nor Quirino da Fonseca had used many reproductions of old Portuguese engravings, whose rarity made them harder to consult, quite apart from the obvious lack of time spent on their research. On the discovery of Mina, Gago Coutinho subscribed to the idea that: “It is as easy to believe that Mina was discovered by caravels with just lateen sails – like Prince Henry’s ones – as it is to accept that they carried the Cross of Christ on their triangular sails. I believe that those which carried it on the square-rigged foremast also carried it on the other sails, albeit triangular.” He considered that his friend Quirino’s position on the discovery of Mina resorted to sentimental arguments, and he criticised Roque Gameiro’s publication in both História da Inquisição (History of the Inquisition) and História da Colonização Portuguesa no Brasil (History of the Portuguese Colonisation in Brazil) of images “as false as the sea they are sitting on, which looks like a field (...) they (ought to) try to use better grounds for their drawings of old Portuguese ships.” (Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, Reserved Collection, Ms 1933/1956). Convinced that he was in the “presence of a technical error that is unacceptable in a country in which the caravel was most widely used”, he made his claim in the name of the Cartography Commission, which was legitimated by the fact that it was specifically made up of officers with maritime experience on sailing vessels and experience with the hydrographic cartography of the colonies. Quirino da Fonseca differed from both Gago Coutinho’s understanding that the sails of the caravels had been identical to those of 20th-century Indian dhows, and his view that the Azores had been discovered by chance on a return journey from the African coast, the explanation for which Fonseca accused of being “not very nautical”. Gago Coutinho’s opinion was that “the caravels used sails as flat as those of the caiques of the Algarve, which enabled them to sail close to the wind and made it practicable for them to come back from the coast of Africa to Lisbon, tacking against northerly winds and currents, without any need to go to the sea around the Azores in search of favourable winds.” (A Náutica dos Descobrimentos [Nautical Science in the Discoveries], vol. I, 1959, pp. 160-162). The intellectual dispute between the two of them was primarily fought on the field of naval archaeology, but also in the waters of the maritime voyages.

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