Imogen Corrigan: Henry the Navigator and his World

Sat 26 April, 10 - 11am

Augustine Hall, AHg27, Augustine House, CT1 2YA

The world he lived in was Portugal, the world in his imagination was limitless.  At the end of the fourteenth century, when Prince Henry was born, Portugal was a small country, only recently independent from Castile. By the time he died, 64 years later, Portugal was a player on the international stage, opening up new trade routes and discovering lands on an unprecedented scale. And yet he himself never accompanied any of the expeditions and lived in monk-like conditions at Sagres, the far south-western point of Portugal.

Religion ruled his life, yet he would have no truck with superstition. He insisted that his commanders overcame their fears of boiling seas and the edge of the world to find more and more new lands and he gave them the tools to do the job: under his guidance better charts, equipment and boats were developed. Under his guidance too, the slave trade erupted onto the European stage.

Imogen Corrigan lectures for Martin Randall Travel, ACE Cultural Tours and other specialist travel companies leading tours in Britain, Europe and the Far East. She is a NADFAS lecturer as well as being a highly regarded speaker for the U3A, Kent Federation of History, and East Kent National Trust amongst other organisations. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the British Commission for Military History and has been admitted as a Freeman of the London Company of Communicators. Her first book, ‘Stone on Stone: the Men who built the Cathedrals’ was published in 2019.

Tickets

Tickets are £10 per event. If you are booking 10 or more tickets of any given type (e.g. 10 tickets to one lecture, or 1 ticket to 10 lectures) within a single transaction, then a discount of £2 per ticket will be applied at the checkout, and you will only pay £8 per ticket.

Student discounts

There are a limited number of £2 student tickets available for talks scheduled in Augustine Hall, AHg27; these are not available for tours, or talks taking place in AH3.31. To access this discount, please use discount code HISTORY2025 when prompted during the booking process. Please note that student ID must be presented with student tickets on the door of the events.