Masters of the Ocean Sea takes readers back in time to the great age of exploration and shows how Portuguese explorers were the first to push beyond the known seas and to develop maritime technology long before Columbus. What drew you to telling Portugal’s story of global exploration?

I live in the Algarve, just twenty minutes from the windswept shores of Sagres. Every day, I am reminded that the modern world was effectively born here. We often think the Age of Discovery began with Columbus in 1492, but for eighty years before that, the Portuguese were engaged in a “silent revolution”, a systematic, gruelling, and dangerous dismantling of the medieval world map. I wanted to restore that original “hinge” of history to its proper place, showing how a small kingdom at the edge of Europe managed to stitch the globe together by sea.

The book consistently pairs innovation with moral cost. Was that balance your starting point or something that emerged as you researched?

It was the starting point. I don’t believe you can write honest history by separating the brilliance of the caravel from the tragedy of the cargo it eventually carried. My personal background gives me an inherent wariness of “Great Systems.” I wanted to celebrate the staggering technical ingenuity of these explorers while remaining clear-eyed about the conquest, profit, and the early architecture of the slave trade that followed. To me, the “voltage” of history lies exactly in that contradiction.

The book gives winds, currents, and coastlines real urgency. How do you turn geography into narrative energy?

I wanted the reader to feel the deck tilting. Geography isn’t just a map; it’s a series of lethal obstacles. When I was researching, I didn’t see these routes as static lines on parchment; I saw them as battle plans against a physical enemy. The Cape of Good Hope wasn’t a landmark; it was a wall of water. By treating the environment as a primary antagonist, not just a setting, it turns historical navigation into a high-stakes survival narrative.

What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Masters of the Ocean Sea?

That the connected world we inhabit today was not an inevitability, it was forged by hand. I want readers to see that the “Age of Discovery” wasn’t a clean pageant of flags, but a messy, human, and often brutal reorganisation of the planet. If they walk away, realising that every horizon someone “opened” was already inhabited by consequences we are still living with today, then I have done my job.

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