"The adventurous sailor and the merchant sailor" Mentalities of the men of the sea in the 16th and 17th centuries

Abstract

At the beginning of the Modern Age, in a long-term process were the past logics were broken and the creation of new significances, Europe started looking at the “Atlantic Sea”.  As Europe expended through the sea, it not only formed new trade routes, but also a new space, with new cultural logics of its own and built by diverse people who merged their experiences shaping a new more or less homogeneous mentality. These subjects saw themselves, along the XVI and XVII Centuries, as sailors. In this article, we will analyze these sailors’ experiences in the Atlantic Ocean and we will see which were the ruptures and continuances in the mentality of the sailors in those two hundred years.