Trajectories of Discovery: Henrique Leitão, the historian who set sail in search of the science of the Discoveries

After earning his doctorate in Theoretical Physics, Henrique Leitão ended up pursuing a career as a historian. The change in trajectory, which came about through an invitation to edit the complete works of Pedro Nunes, later opened doors to an ERC grant with the Discoveries as its backdrop. He still reads about physics, but his work on the first telescopes in Portugal, the Mercator projection, or ancient libraries leaves no doubt that he is “a historian 100%”.

Henrique Leitão may well say that he doesn’t know how to change a lightbulb, but he ended up shedding much light on what was previously unknown about the mathematician Pedro Nunes (1502-1578). The researcher from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Ciências ULisboa) also says that he prefers to switch scientific topics when he feels he has nothing more to add, but that was not the reason which led him, in the year 2000, to leave Theoretical Physics, which allowed him to ponder hypotheses “without entering laboratories” and thus became responsible for his metaphorical ineptitude in changing lightbulbs. “I was drawn into the study of History,” he recalls. Although unplanned, the change proved to be premonitory: in 2019, the researcher from the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences (DHFC) was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) which enabled Portuguese discoverers to be placed among the first creators of a science on a global scale.

“ERC Advanced Grants are intended for researchers who already have a reputation in the international scientific community. I thought I might win and so I applied. I ended up winning the grant. I feel it was a psychological barrier overcome at Ciências ULisboa,” says Henrique Leitão.

It was duly driven by the scientific–emotional momentum that the historian who came from the sciences carried out the project “Making the Earth Global: Early Modern Nautical Rutters and the Construction of a Global Concept of the Earth” (RUTTER Project). During the five years of the so-called ERC advanced grant, Henrique Leitão revealed how the descriptions of the voyages of Portuguese navigators were also at the service of a planetary-scale science, which took into account global precepts, theories or logics that attested to or explained phenomena observed locally. And this globalising tendency could arise either through records of the occurrence of storms or through the sighting of turtles recorded in logbooks. “Knowing that, in the 16th century, there were dolphins or turtles in a particular place may be relevant for understanding how biodiversity has changed in these years,” the historian illustrates regarding the current potential of the documents left by Portuguese sailors.

By the time the ERC grant was awarded, Henrique Leitão had already received the Prémio Pessoa, a Commendation of the Military Order of Sant'iago da Espada, and a nomination to the International Academy of the History of Science. He was not exactly an unknown figure. Nor were ERC grants unfamiliar to him. Two years earlier, he had closely followed the awarding of the ERC Starting Grant to Joaquim Alves Gaspar. And today, it is this same proximity that keeps the two ERC laureates in offices just a few steps apart within the Department of History, Philosophy and Science. Which is rather handy for day-to-day tasks. “We continue to work together. Joaquim Alves Gaspar is a great researcher. He has the mind of a 35-year-old,” he assures.

If age is not a rank, it is nevertheless an important indicator in science. Henrique Leitão recalls the old saying that recommends the exact and natural sciences “for the young” and points to History for “mature people with white hair”. If that is so, then Henrique Leitão can well say that he reached the age of 61 as a grandfather, having fulfilled both age profiles in full. “I still read a lot about physics, but when you leave research you lose your touch,” he admits, while describing the migration to the field of history “as a gradual process that lasted 10 years”. “It was only in 2000 that I became a historian 100%,” he adds.

Perhaps because he lived around the Renaissance, Pedro Nunes too had to spread himself across various fields of knowledge such as mathematics, medicine, astronomy or philosophy, until he rose to the status of “the greatest Portuguese scientist ever”. Today, not even with the vernier scale that made him famous could the historic scientist ever measure the impact he had, almost five centuries later, on the career of a certain Theoretical Physics researcher, with a PhD at Ciências ULisboa, who used to practise polyglotism with Latin and Ancient Greek classes on Sundays, at the same time as he began to take a liking to interpreting scientific texts from the past.

By that time, the historian was already taking shape without the physicist inhabiting the same person managing even to formulate a thesis or predictive model about the metamorphosis under way. Until the phone rang. It certainly was not Pedro Nunes – but it is known that there are projects that tend to ring like that. On the other end of the line was an administrator from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation who told him that he wanted him to lead the edition of the scientific works of the sixteenth-century mathematician. Shortly afterwards, the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon joined the process. “They told me that the only condition was that I should be the one to lead the project,” he recalls. Even Mariano Gago, former Minister for Science, took an interest in the initiative, Henrique Leitão also mentions as he recalls the support received.

As one of “those things that only happen once in a lifetime”, the proposal soon proved, clearly, to be “irresistible”. “Two hundred years ago there were already those writing that it was unbelievable that the works of the greatest Portuguese scientist were not published,” says Henrique Leitão. The challenge more than justified the mixture of pride and enthusiasm – but it also involved hardship. “It was a proposal that meant working 12 hours a day, for 10 years. It was simply insane,” he says, as though confronted with a programme for crossing the Cape of Storms which, in this case, would always have to be imaginary, because, as far as is known, Pedro Nunes did not make any sea voyage worthy of record and even gained a reputation for having come to the University of Coimbra the wrong way round, which had to take him in “without competition and by order of the King”.

Today, the product of the “insane labour” carried out between 2001 and 2012 runs to six volumes and more than 3,000 pages. Enough to fill any historian’s bookshelf, the collection of Pedro Nunes’s works on its own does not reveal everything that was involved before it reached the press: after combing through libraries in half the world in search of Pedro Nunes’s works or of authors who studied him, the researcher from the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT) had to immerse himself in the cataloguing of old manuscripts and sixteenth-century scientific printed works held at the National Library of Portugal (BNP), and he went on to study the role that the College of Santo Antão played in disseminating Pedro Nunes’s works. There was little room for illusions: the scale of the project required more manpower for research.

Among the young and the not so young, the humanities and the exact and natural sciences, Henrique Leitão sets out a list with the names of the researchers he would like to single out not only as companions on the trail of Pedro Nunes, but also in many subsequent works on nautical cartography; the Mercator projection; the first telescopes in Portugal; the circulation of scientific books in more than 500 old national libraries; the publication of the work of the mathematician Francisco de Melo; or even the most recent book on longitude, which has already sold out in bookshops.

Bernardo Mota, Samuel Gessner, Pedro Raposo, Teresa Nobre de Carvalho, Francisco Romeiras, Luís Ribeiro, Luana Giurgevich, Joaquim Alves Gaspar, Bruno Almeida, Luís Tirapicos, José Malhão Pereira, and Helena Avelar appear on the list, which also contains two more names that are highlighted separately here only because they help to illustrate the strategy used to recruit talent, which he helped to shape with the aim of expanding the History of Science in Portugal.
“I hired Antonio Sánchez in five minutes, on the way out of a conference in London,” he says. “And I went and got Thomas Horst from Belgium,” he adds, before assuring that the relocated researchers did not waste their time.

“We have to go and find the best talent wherever it is. We can’t just wait for that talent to walk through the office door”, he reiterates. “There were several researchers who didn’t do their doctorates here, but made a point of spending periods of study at the DHFC, preparing for admission to doctoral programmes abroad”, he emphasises.
Many of those students are now at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Princeton or Stanford, among other leading academic institutions.

If Pedro Nunes changed his career, the ERC Grant that took him back to the period of the Discoveries catapulted him into the international league of historians of science. Henrique Leitão does not stint on praise for the ERC’s selection methodology: “If the project is innovative and the principal investigator shows that they have the ability to carry it out, the position or hierarchy does not matter. It is a system that is very well set up to find talent wherever it may be within an institution”.
As a benchmark in the awarding of grants, the “ERC methodology” quickly took on new meaning in the academic world, the historian also concludes: “It has become one of the most recognised metrics (of scientific quality) in Europe”. Decidedly, it does not appear that the ability to screw in light bulbs forms part of the assessment criteria.