“[The] sea is a smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem did not arise in proximity to land. On the contrary, the striation of the sea was a result of navigation on the open water. Maritime space was striated as a function of two astronomical and geographical gains: bearings, obtained by a set of calculations based on exact observation of the stars and the sun; and the map, which intertwines meridians and parallels, longitudes and latitudes, plotting regions known and unknown onto a grid (like a Mendeleyev table). Must we accept the Portuguese argument and assign 1440 as the turning point that marked the first decisive striation, and set the stage for the great discoveries? Rather, we will follow Pierre Chaunu when he speaks of an extended confrontation at sea between the smooth and the striated during the course of which the striated progressively took hold.8 For before longitude lines had been plotted, a very late development, there existed a complex and empirical nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and noise, the colors and sounds of the seas; then came a directional, preastronomical or already astronomical, system of navigation employing only latitude, in which there was no possibility of "taking one's bearings," and which had only portolanos lacking "translatable generalization" instead of true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive astronomical navigation were made under the very special conditions of the latitudes of the Indian Ocean, then of the elliptical circuits of the Atlantic (straight and curved spaces)”