Before we traveled, I made sure to bring an umbrella; I would have been better served if I had brought sunscreen. Today it got up to 27 degrees Celsius. Flush-faced Northern Europeans, sun hats, shorts. We lit out for the wide river promenade in Bélem.
Cappuccinos at a cafe near a Portuguese-style RV park…
…then over a bridged walkway to the Coach Museum. Like an American car museum, this was about classy rides, only back when the look was carefully rendered wood, not mass produced metal.
Back when status symbols were one-of-a-kind, not limited issue.
Attention grabbing, certainly; but with leather shock absorbers and wooden wheels and the fact that macadam didn’t start being used until the early 19th century, not close to anything we’d presently call comfort. Seeing how coaches evolved from unwieldy Baroque modes of aristocratic delivery to stripped-down functional middle-class travel brought to mind Elon Musk’s strategy of first manufacturing high-end Teslas as status items he can sell for a big profit before he enters the less expensive mid-range market.
If there was any carriage that spoke to me (and my hidden malfactors), it was this dark two-eyed devil clattering down the backstreets of Lisbon in the rain on the way to either commit, or flee, a crime.
Smack in the middle of this horse-drawn display was the landau that the Portuguese crown prince had been assassinated in (1908). Those are the assassin’s bullet holes, bringing to mind Archduke Ferdinand and the risk of royalty riding in open air carriages.
Oddly, in a room next to this haunted carriage, was a brightly colored art exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Norberto Nunes. Here are a couple of panels from his mural of Portuguese history spanning the wall.
Speaking of Portuguese history…. We had notions of going to the National Archeological Museum across the street, but we found out it was closed (on Saturday?), sparing Ella the excitement of examining all those glass encased shards. So we opted for the Maritime Museum which, if we wanted to learn about how the Portuguese conquered the seas and maintained an empire, was a no-brainer.
Basically the museum was an exhaustive display showing off 600 years of kickass boat building complete with advances in naval gunnery and fearless exploration. I mean, check out this 17th century galleon:
And following in Vasco’s wake, let’s get a closeup of the Duke de Albuquerque.
With each vessel and bust and heroic painting reminding you that Portugal had an empire, there didn’t seem to be any room for talking about slavery at any length. There were some leg irons hanging on a wall and a paragraph mentioning that they had abolished the slave trade in the early 1800s, so the impression is that they aren’t overly burdened by guilt, or teaching critical race theory in their secondary schools.
Besides an awesome display of model making in the ship category, the museum was a visual reminder that if the Portuguese relinquished their colonies, they did so reluctantly, and wasn’t until the 1970s, after the Carnation Revolution (25, April, 1974) that the empire was history. (Except for Macao, the last colony given up in 1999.) Not much second-guessing in this museum. The painting below sums up the spirit of the place.
