Since the dawn of Portuguese literature at the end of the 13th century with medieval songs, the sea and navigation have occupied a prominent place in Portugal's literary and historical imagination. Over the centuries up to the 16th century, a century that witnessed an incessant practice of Portuguese nautical travel on the world's seas, oceanic travel exerted a formidable power over writers, cosmographers, cartographers, and scholars in their worldviews and ways of conceiving content. of their own work. Although we can consider, on the one hand, The Lusíadas as a culminating expression of the Portuguese maritime imaginary, on the other hand we have to recognize that Camões lived and worked within a cultural context strongly focused on the sea and the empirical reality of overseas travel.

In this communication, philology, a field of humanistic study par excellence, will be studied as a way and metaphor of understanding what could be called “the knowledge of the sea.” Through an analysis of texts – mostly Portuguese literary and historical texts – in which a concern with the maritime domain is evident, an outline of a grammar of the sea will be proposed, that is, a way of constructing discourses textual as reflections of a forma lies oceanic.