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Luís de Albuquerque left a very important oeuvre in the field referred to by Portuguese historiography as the History of the Discoveries and Expansion, which may also be called History of the Navigations. Sixty years after the book edition, the aforementioned Introdução is still indispensable, especially for its beginning, when it duly considers the imaginary geography as the motivation for some of the first navigations (which no other book on the early days of the Discoveries has done until today) , and for the explanation of the methods of navigation of the Mediterranean, and their consequent inadequacy for the navigation of the Atlantic, contrary to much that had been written in this regard.
Notwithstanding the great value of the studies on the Discoveries in general, with particular attention to the fourteenth-century navigations, and the extensive and consistent work on the Portuguese in the Orient in the sixteenth century, the set of studies devoted to the History of Nautical Astronomy are, undoubtedly, particularly noteworthy. William G. L. Randles was the author of a brilliant critical study that is both a reflection on the contribution of Luís de Albuquerque and an appraisal of the main steps taken in nautical astronomy in Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study ends with a sentence that says it all: "For future scholars of the Renaissance period, he has raised nautical astronomy to the status of an arcane ancillary subject to become an "incontornável" [unavoidable] core feature of the history of the Discoveries" (Luís de Albuquerque Historiador e Matemático. [Luís de Albuquerque Historian and Mathematician], p. 142). In short, it can be said that his contribution to this matter resided in two fundamental aspects: the publication of sources and the theoretical-conceptual definition.
With the publication of O Livro de Marinharia de André Pires [The Book of Seamanship of André Pires] in 1963, the Série Memórias [Memoir Series] was launched, which would become one of the most important publications of the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar [Overseas Research Council]. It was the first edition of a seamanship book by Luís de Albuquerque which followed the criterion that would become common, that of naming the manuscript after a pilot mentioned therein, even though the pilot was not the author, or the institution in which it was kept. He also published the books of Manuel Álvares, João de Lisboa, Bernardo Fernandes, Pero Vaz Fragoso, Gaspar Moreira and Manuel Pimentel; in other words, he defined the documentary corpus of the subject, leaving out only the manuscript of Prague, published a few years earlier with a set of introductory studies , and another one kept at the Real Academia de la Historia de Madrid [Madrid Royal Academy of History], which was reviewed by Albuquerque in depth in an article published in the Boletin [Bulletin] of the Academia and then reprinted in Estudos de História.
