Nevertheless, Brito Rebelo was one of the researchers who contributed most to this project with historical documentation, and his palaeographic transcriptions were characterised by their accuracy and were accompanied by scholarly notes. From the work he carried out in the Torre do Tombo emerged some valuable contributions to the history of the Portuguese Discoveries. These were very useful not only for his own parallel investigations but also for the work of Ernesto do Canto, who was trying to demonstrate the strategic importance of the Azores for the voyages to the West.

Aware of the national and international historiographical panorama of the time, Brito Rebelo became a bitter critic of both amateur and distinguished researchers. He argued with Teófilo Braga for having blindly, and wrongly, followed with no prior examination of sources – a frequent occurrence – the version proposed by the Viscount of Juromenha as to the ship that brought Luís de Camões to the Kingdom in 1570. The figure of Gil Vicente led to yet another disagreement with his “friend and countryman”, who he had to “fight” as he revealed to Ernesto do Canto whose opinion he wished to hear. What happened was that Teófilo Braga continued to claim that Gil Vicente the poet and Gil Vicente the goldsmith were one and the same person, and this twenty years after Camilo Castelo Branco and Brito Rebelo had refuted this idea supported by genealogists and various archival documents. What is more, Brito Rebelo disagreed that Gil Vicente had wanted to offend Garcia de Resende when in a poetic passage in the Cortes de Júpiter he referred to the latter saying he was “Feito peixe tamboril, E inda que tudo entende, Irá dizendo por ende: Quem me dera um arrabil” [Like monkfish made, And though all he sees, will go 'round saying: how I wish for rebec playing] (Ementas […], II, 1902, p. 23) when it was merely a simple but notable passage.

However, he reserved his most biting criticism for Oliveira Martins, for letting himself be carried away by fantasy and fleeing from historical and documentary rigour. In effect, being part of the so-called positivist historiographical current, Brito Rebelo stood out for his work which involved historical revision and the demystification of ideas put forward without any documental support as was the case of the Escola de Sagres [School of Sagres] – a controversial topic and a debate that would continue for a long time. If, on one hand, Brito Rebelo praised and was inspired by the work that Alexandre Herculano had done to dispel other legends of national history that had grown up over the centuries, on the other, he considered that there was still much work to be done.

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