The Escola Naval professor recognised the necessity of integrating different areas of knowledge to write history, emphasising that historians must be completely impartial. However, as he valued a national education grounded in history, he realised that readers often rejected long and tedious books. In his opinion, this prolixity, found in some works and authors, stemmed from "Michelet-style impressionist" historians, who embellished the narration of facts with vivid colours and striking effects. When the "general subject was History," it encompassed "everything that exists or has existed." Closely following one of his mentors, Herculano, who had concluded that "there is only one historical truth," Almeida d'Eça argued that history could be narrated based on the events that have occurred up to the present and the causes that determined them, through "the material objects of both the globe we inhabit and those we observe in limitless spaces, the psychological or artistic manifestations of humanity, and even errors and mistakes” (Maritime History, Vol. 1, p. 3).

Exhibiting an unusual interest in a "grammar of civilisations" for his time, he advised researchers not to confine their studies to what the writers of Classical Antiquity had documented but to extend their research to other peoples who had been overlooked: the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Amerindian peoples (ibid ., p. 6). Almeida d'Eça contended that the Portuguese had been entirely different during colonisation, as they had produced Creole sub-races and mestizos, resulting from marriages facilitated by Afonso de Albuquerque and even among the soldiers and workers of the plantations of his era. "All over the world, Portuguese blood is mixed with that of the conquered peoples” (A Abertura, p.18). The best example of this would be Brazil, which he illustrated with readings from Sílvio Romero and Artur Guimarães.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | (Pdf)