At Naval School his interest in the History of the Discoveries, which first appeared in his teenage years, expanded to encompass the nautical and cartographic fields. A devoted reader of Jaime Cortesão, Joaquim Bensaúde and António Barbosa, during his studies as a cadet Teixeira da Mota “discovered” Captain Fontoura da Costa’s Marinharia dos Descobrimentos (“Seamanship of the Discoveries”, 1934) and Armando Cortesão’s Cartografia e Cartógrafos Portugueses dos séculos XV e XVI (“Portuguese Cartography and Cartographers of the 15th and 16th Centuries”, 1935) – two works that were to greatly influence those he himself later published. Following the example of a pleiad of officer-historians of the previous generation, and claiming that the Navy had played a leading role in the key issues of the history of the Discoveries, Teixeira da Mota lists a number of points that he thought indispensable to a renovation of the studies on the Portuguese maritime voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries: cartographic documents, the study of the nautical science of other navies and of magnetism, the evolution of the sea chart, the problem of longitude in cartography, and the influence of Portuguese cartography on that of other countries.

On 16 September 1943, Teixeira da Mota graduated to the Naval Officer Corps with the rank of Sub-Lieutenant, after which he was attached to a number of naval vessels – the destroyers “Dão” and “Vouga”, the gunboat “Faro”, the training ship “Sagres” and the sloop “Afonso de Albuquerque” – for further training at sea. The following year (21 September 1944), he embarked as “crew officer” on the destroyer “Lima”. However, a new phase of his life – service in the colonial administration – was to begin shortly afterwards when, in 1945, Captain Sarmento Rodrigues invited him to be his aide de camp in the government of Portuguese Guinea.

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