Museu de Marinha — Attraction in Lisbon

English speakers: I highly recommend you read “Conquerers: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire” by Roger Crowley. You’ll get a much more interesting and nuanced take than what the museum provides.

Here’s what I wrote to the museum after having visited:

To whom it may concern,

I visited your museum recently and would like to give you feedback.

While I loved the digestible nature of the content you provided, I was appalled to see how your curators completely ignored the atrocities committed against Indians during the voyages of de Gama, de Albuquerque, and de Almeida. There's no mention of the Meri, for instance. And there's no mention of the effects of Portugal's colonialism. And the considerable contributions of Jewish intellectuals are also completely omitted.

I was also horrified to see such a laughably short treatment of Portugal's role in the slave trade. I am an American and we have an abominable history of ignoring the effects of the slave trade and our role in perpetuating this horrible insitution. But at least we are making efforts.

Your museum's selective displays are one more example of Europeans' enduring refusal to look at their history honestly. In my mind, Germany is the only country to have courageously taken accountability for their past sins (though they have much work to do regarding their violent colonialist history). What's omitted is reflective of your conviction of your cultural supremacy. While there is much to admire in your collective achievements, your determination to ignore your country's oppression of other peoples, and how you benefited from that oppression, is depressing and beneath you.

Europeans constantly assert that they value the pursuit of knowledge, but it's hard to believe they truly do when I see such intentional erasure. Take some responsibility, for god's sake.

As a museum you have a sacred duty to share the good and the bad of your people's history. You do a disservice to your citizens, to tourists, and to humanity at large by hiding your country's sins. Again, as an American, I know that we are guilty of the same. We need to do better, and you need...

The museum is nice, but it intentionally don’t really tackle the big questions or offer knowledge on shipbuilding - managing both fresh and saltwater using wood, navigation and many more. It does shows an interesting collection of devices, both replicas, original, shipwreck recovered and models of ships. There is an audio guide and it is decent museum. But as very typical - organized weirdly, too many items, half of them don’t have English explanations.

I came in hope to see real discovery era ships (or models of), learn how they were built and what reason was for modifications - the entrance give you a notion this will be address in detail, why it seems shipbuilding degraded over time. (Maybe bigger ships needed power - square sails, and England being the real ruler of sea?)

What was the nature of the agreement since 14th century? Why at least according to the book shogun they were enemies regarding Japan? Missionary dark past is portrayed as a foot note or a desire to return to glory (aka childish and not realistic) slavery and local upheaval of the colonies is also portrayed as unjust gorilla war, privateering that probably ended slavery more than morality, glass that interferes with viewing the king and queen cabins and ship models.

The gallons room is mainly pleasure boat (small) and fishermen not very old or big. Again missing data way there are so many designs? There is better info when travelling Portugal and seeing those “modern” traditional boats that are still at use. There is also a whaling boat from 1970~ Azores. Although gruesome, would like to know more. I think this is the last European whalers. As not tribes in a very remote European islands, but maybe at that time there was no difference.

I don’t know. It feels like it has a lot of potential not being met.

Also, it is inside the monastery, but not the big white marble. This is confusing and cost me a lot of time and money and will unfortunately be my remembered experience from Portugal (and not the only such).

I do recommend this place, but don’t go out of your...

This was the final place we visited during our recent trip to Lisbon and, to be fair, was more for me than my partner. Now although I don't have any kind of nautical past, I did used to make model kits when I was younger, including ships. I therefore have a keen interest in the models that are usually on display in these museums. It must be said that, of all the maritime museums I've visited, the Museu de Marinha, Lisbon, must have the largest number of ship and boat models I have ever come across in one place. Not only that, the quality of the models is consistently high from start to finish. The layout of the museum is generally chronological while there are some separate sections for certain types of vessels, for example river craft and the royal yacht. Supporting the models are plentiful multilingual information boards. Again, the standard is good, containing useful information without becoming dull or irrelevant. Having said that, to avoid information overload, I would suggest that you are selective with the boards you read, keeping to the sections that interest you most. At the end of museum is a section containing real craft...yachts etc., that are significant in Portugal's maritime history. There is also the plane that first completed a transatlantic flight. My one, very small, criticism would be of the cafe. Considering the effort put into the various displays around the museum, this seems somewhat out of place, almost an afterthought, with no form of connecting theme to the museum itself. As we were short of time, we didn't actually sample anything from the menu but what we saw did look nice. In summary, whether or not you really like maritime history or not, I definitely recommend a visit but adjust your time to focus on the sections that are of most interest. Unfortunately, I cannot support my review with any photos. Sorry about that but there are probably plenty on...