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Mister President of the Geographical Society,
Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education,
Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff,
Chief of the Naval Staff,
Professor Doctor José Pereira Osório,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Lisbon Geographical Society has taken the laudable initiative to pay tribute to the extraordinary figure of Admiral Gago Coutinho on the 140th anniversary of his birth.

As President of the Republic, as Honourable President of the Lisbon Geographical Society and, above all, as a Portuguese, I am particularly pleased to take part n this celebration.

Admiral Gago Coutinho was a Portuguese with a unique destiny: our great scientist-sailor who gained celebrity as the Navigator of an aircraft on one single flight.
It is fair, however, to state that Gago Coutinho deserves being remembered for much more than the crossing of the South Atlantic.

The centenary institution where we stand at this moment is the privileged location to enjoy the size of Gago Coutinho's contribution to Portuguese science and culture.
It is in the Lisbon Geographical Society, of which Gago Coutinho was a member for fifty seven years that the memory of this great scientist is annually celebrated with the award of the Gago Coutinho International Prize.

Both his library and his heritage were harboured here, and these give us a multifarious image of a distinguished officer who dedicated years of his life to the study of the history of the Discoveries and, especially, to the nautical techniques developed by the Portuguese.
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In this historical location the echoes of the main conferences addressed by Gago Coutinho are still felt.

I recall, for instance, that occasion, in 1902, in which a young naval officer addressed the audience assembled in the Portugal Hall of the Lisbon Geographical Society on the theme of wireless telegraphy. A pioneer in that field, the speaker did not hesitate, surely to the surprise of many, to proclaim that this would be the future for communication. Again in this same room, in 1920, Gago Coutinho presented to the members of the Lisbon Geographical Society – an institution formally devoted to the promotion of geography as a science – the setting up, in Portugal, of a course in geographic engineering.

Gago Coutinho was the first amongst us to highlight the role of the geographer, considering it as "necessary to the centuries of geographic duties which stand before us".

The geographer is, above all, a specialist in the field of positioning. His best technical qualification is to know one's location with infinitesimal precision.

A quality unanimously recognized in Admiral Gago Coutinho: he always knew where he was and he was always aware of his destination.

He carried out geodesic and topographical surveys and set borders in Timor, in Mozambique, in Angola and in S. Tomé. With relatively rudimentary tools he obtained prodigiously accurate results.

His first work as a geographer, carried out in Timor in the latter years of the XIX century was recently used, with extraordinary results, in the demarcation of the borders between the People’s Republic of East Timor and the Republic of Indonesia.

This deep connection to the area where Portuguese language is spoken, which stamps his career as a soldier and as a scientist, was also proven in the crossing of the South Atlantic.

This inspired flight, which took place in the year when the centenary of the independence of Brazil was celebrated, enlivened the fraternity between the two sister countries, as demonstrated by the triumphal reception given to the flyers.
To recall Admiral Gago Coutinho today is, for that reason, to pay tribute to the unity of the Portuguese speaking world.

It being true that, as I referred at the start of this speech, the legacy of Admiral Gago Coutinho greatly overcomes the memory of the aerial crossing of the South Atlantic, it is no less true that this flight was the culminating expression of the knowledge and inventiveness of great man of science.

The undertaking, conquering skies never previously traversed, was extremely plucky.
Feats of equal value had already been carried out by other pioneers in aviation. But never had such a distance been travelled in a scientific flight.

In his logbook, Sacadura Cabral, describing the most dramatic moment of the crossing, made very clear the real motives of the Portuguese flyers: if petrol came to an end and they were forced to come down in the ocean, in the middle of nowhere, “we would not be able to show what we intended to prove, that is, that aerial navigation can be as precise as sea navigation”.

It was thus a scientific demonstration that led them to risk all, including their own lives, in that flight between the city of Praia, in Cape Verde, and the rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul. There, after more than eleven hours without the benefit of any surface references, in a small and slow aircraft, with fuel coming to an end, they had to discover in the immensity of the Atlantic a tiny rock two hundred meters in length.

The calculations of imperturbable Gago Coutinho could not fail, under peril of all terminating ingloriously. As usual, they did not fail. An extraordinary feat when aerial navigation was taking its first steps.

How was it possible? "We were no heroes" - explained Gago Coutinho, showing his proverbial naiveté – "We used the guile of geographers, who are guided by the Sun and the stars ".

Guile, maybe. The truth however, is that no one had yet thought to use it. This was, after all, scientific innovation. Innovation which permitted a giant step in the history of aviation.

The crossing was carried out with anticipated certainty as to the course to be followed. Navigation depends upon the exact knowledge of the position at each moment and upon the direction and distance to the point of destination. Along the way, Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral always knew exactly where they were as well as the course and distance to be travelled to achieve the objective they had planned.

Gago Coutinho used an integrated system of air navigation which he had developed and perfected. A system made up of the famous artificial horizon sextant, which he liked to call a precision astrolabe.

A system which also included unpublished calculation and pre-calculation methods so precise that, in three minutes – without a computer or an electronic calculator –navigator Gago Coutinho was able to record in his Navigation Logbook their precise position.

As such, in addition to a human adventure a scientific feat was performed. The Brazilian great aviation pioneer, Santos Dumont, truly said it: "… Coutinho and Sacadura’s raid was mathematically carried out”.

Admiral Gago Coutinho was a positive spirit, rational and mathematic. He had such great belief in the scientific method he had developed that he serenely entrusted to it his life and that of his travelling companion.

The man of science to whom we are paying tribute today taught us that, to trust ourselves, we need to know where we are and where we are going.

This is the greatest lesson of the eminent geographer Admiral Gago Coutinho.

I pay tribute to the memory of a great Portuguese.