Publisher's Synopsis
Roger Smith has assembled from fragmentary evidence a portrait of the small vessels invented and refined in the shipyards of Spain and Portugal half a millennium ago. The work focuses on the advances in maritime technology that made the European conquest of the New World possible. In addition to covering these developments, Smith shows readers how ships were built, outfitted and manned, illustrating what life at sea was like in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In focusing on the advances in maritime technology that made European expansion possible, Vanguard of Empire sheds light in 1992 on a neglected aspect of the European conquest of the New World.
