MOORINGS

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MOORING S
/?
Portuguese Expansion and the
Writing of Africa

Jo s i a h Bl ac k m o r e

University of Minnesota Press

minneapolis
london
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance
provided for the publication of this book by the Victoria University Senate,
University of Toronto.

The map of Portuguese explorations and settlements in West Africa was originally
published by the Hakluyt Society. The Hakluyt Society was established in 1846
for the purpose of printing rare or unpublished voyages and travels. For further
information, see www.hakluyt.com.

Material in chapter 1 was published in an earlier form as “Imagining the Moor in

Medieval Portugal,” Diacritics 36.3–4 (2006): 27–43, published by The Johns Hopkins
University Press. Material in chapter 3 was published in earlier versions as “Africa
and the Epic Imagination of Camões,” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies
9 (2002): 107–16, and as “The Monstrous Lineage of Adamastor and His Critics,”
Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 7, published by the Center for Portuguese
Studies and Culture, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Copyright 2009 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blackmore, Josiah, 1959–

Moorings : Portuguese expansion and the writing of Africa / Josiah Blackmore.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8166-4832-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8166-4833-7
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Africa—Historiography. 2. Africans in literature. 3. Muslims in literature.
4. Imperialism in literature. 5. Historiography—Portugal—History—To 1500.
6. Historiography—Portugal—History—16th century. 7. Portuguese literature—
History and criticism. 8. Portugal—Colonies—Africa. 9. Africa—Description and
travel. 10. Africa—Foreign public opinion, Portuguese. I. Title.
dt36.3.b58 2009
960´.22072—dc22
2008032085

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 /?
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father

Jo s i a h H. Bl ac k m o r e II
(1934–2007)

lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore

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 Contents

Note to the Reader / ix

Acknowledgments / xi

Introduction: Into Africa / xiii

1. Encountering the African / 1

Some Medieval Formulations / 2
The African In-Between / 11

2. Expansion and the Contours of Africa / 33

Routes, Histories, and Chronicles / 34
Strangeness under the Imperial Sun / 73
Africa and the Imagination / 90

3. The Monster of Melancholy / 105

Adamastor melancholicus / 126
The Masculine Ship / 143
The Devil’s Map / 146

Notes / 155
Works Cited / 175
Index / 197
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 Note to the Reader

Throughout this book quotations of primary sources are first given in the
original language followed by translation into English. Quotations of non-
English secondary sources are given only in English. All translations are
mine unless otherwise attributed.
The chronicles of Gomes Eanes de Zurara studied here are quoted from
editions that retain Zurara’s orthography and grammar. These editions,
with their respective abbreviations, are:

Ceuta Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta por El Rei D. João I, ed. Francisco

Maria Esteves Pereira
Guiné Crónica dos feitos notáveis que se passaram na conquista da Guiné por
mandado do Infante D. Henrique, ed. Torquato de Sousa Soares

For full bibliographic information, see the Works Cited at the end of this
volume.

ix
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 Acknowledgments

I gladly acknowledge the support and encouragement of many individu-

als and institutions throughout the long process of writing this book. As
always, my students and colleagues at the University of Toronto have pro-
vided engaging discussion (and tolerance) of this project and have asked
hard questions at just the right times. Ricardo Sternberg, David Higgs,
Suzanne Akbari, David Rojinsky, Stephen Rupp, Kenneth Mills, Robert
Davidson, Néstor Rodríguez, Sanda Munjic, and Walid Saleh offered
scholarly conversation and help. I am very grateful to Victoria University
in the University of Toronto for the award of a Victoria Senate Grant in
support of this book. Miguel Torrens of the Robarts Library helpfully
acquired books and journals. Outside Toronto, I presented parts of the
book’s arguments to receptive and demanding audiences at Bridgewater
State College, the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, the Univer-
sity of Colorado–Boulder, the University of Chicago, Cornell University,
Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of the Witwaters-
rand, and a Faculty Weekend Seminar on José de Acosta at the Folger
Institute. To the facilitators and conveners of those institutional occasions
I express my gratitude. In particular, it’s a pleasure to thank Leora Lev,
Anna Klobucka, Victor Mendes, Vincent Barletta, Lisa Voigt, Pedro Schachtt
Pereira, Simone Pinet, Bruno Bosteels, Patricia Grieve, and Michael Title-
stad. I also gratefully acknowledge the University of Toronto and the
Connaught Foundation for the award of a Chancellor Jackman Research
Fellowship in the Humanities in 2003–4, which afforded crucial research
and writing time and funds.

xi
xii ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

This book benefited from the comments and criticisms of several other
colleagues and friends. The anonymous readers for the University of
Minnesota Press offered helpful criticisms. K. David Jackson continues
to be an ideal scholarly interlocutor. João R. Figueiredo, James Burke,
Gregory Hutcheson, and Barbara Weissberger all came to the book’s aid on
several occasions. For other favors and support, thanks to my sisters Anne
Wessels-Paris and Judith Dann, and to Nancy Ratey, the late Kathleen
Randles, and Manuela Marujo. Anything good that I do I owe to my
parents, Josiah H. Blackmore II and Joyce Blackmore, and to my father’s
unsurpassed example as a scholar and a gentleman.
The University of Minnesota Press has followed Moorings from the
beginning with unwavering good faith. I thank Doug Armato for his
support. To Richard Morrison I give thanks first as one of the early and
steadfast friends of this project and then for cheerfully tolerating more
delays and shifts in schedule with this book than with any of our previ-
ous collaborations.
 Introduction:
Into Africa

On August 21, 1415, a company of soldiers under the orders of King João
I of Portugal disembarked from a fleet of ships anchored off the coast of
Morocco and went ashore to seize the city of Ceuta. According to chron-
icler of the Portuguese court Gomes Eanes de Zurara (or Azurara, 1410?–
74?) in his Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta (Chronicle of the Capture of
Ceuta), Ceuta was in Portuguese hands by the end of the day. At a certain
point, the chronicler writes, one of the king’s men approached the Moor-
ish castle and paused and glanced upward at its walls

sobre o quall uio estar huva gramde bamda de pardaaes. Nom ueedes disse
elle comtra os outros como aquelles pardaaes alli estam assessegados, que
me matem sse Çalla bem Çalla com todollos outros nom he partido dalli, e
leixou ho castello uazio. ca sse assy nom fosse, nom estariam alli aquelles
pardaaes assy dassessego. (231)

on top of which he saw a large flock of sparrows. “Don’t you see,” he said
to his companions, “how those sparrows are calmly perched there, a sign
that, on my oath, says that the prophet Çalla bem Çalla along with all the
other Moors must have fled and left the castle empty, for otherwise those
sparrows would not be so calm?

Zurara tells us that indeed no Moor remained within the walls to resist
or fight. Relieved, the conquerors thanked God who “por semelhamte
maneira os posera em posse de todo” (in such a way had placed them in
possession of everything, 232).

xiii
xiv i n t ro d u c t i o n

Zurara’s semiotic overlapping of Moors and birds symbolically ren-

ders the capture of Ceuta as portentous, an expression of the providen-
tial mandate that was often considered both motive and justification
for Portuguese maritime expansion and which is a leitmotif throughout
the record of Portuguese empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Though it is possible, as Malyn Newitt observes (Portuguese Overseas
Expansion 11), to identify the first steps of Portuguese overseas expansion
with an expedition to the Canary Islands in 1341, the capture of Ceuta
traditionally stands as the first action of Portuguese—and European—
maritime empire that will soon lead to the Iberian voyages to the Amer-
icas, Asia, and the Pacific.1 The historical role of Ceuta is as important as
its symbolic dimension in European thought of the time. Peter Russell
argues that Ceuta is significant “[n]ot only in an ideological and political
sense but also in an institutional and administrative one . . . the experi-
ence of ruling Ceuta would give birth to models which spread overseas
in the wake of Portugal’s maritime expansion” (Prince Henry 51), while
Francis M. Rogers advocates for the place of Ceuta in the European
mind-set by noting that “Ceuta and the maritime discoveries captured the
imagination of Portugal and the world to a far greater extent than other
events of Portuguese history” (The Travels 71). If Ceuta is the initial event
of European imperial and colonial campaigns that will gain momentum
through the fifteenth century and last to the twentieth, and will include
the interests not only of Portugal but of other nations such as Belgium,
England, France, and Spain, then Zurara’s anecdote of the birds serves as
an appropriate marker of this fact etymologically: “to inaugurate” derives
from the Latin inaugurare, which means “to take omens from the flight
of birds, to consecrate and install after taking such omens or auguries”
(Oxford English Dictionary). Alongside the interpretation of Ceuta as the
beginning of European imperialist voyaging and colonization in the early
modern era, some scholars read the Portuguese capture of the city as an
end to or culmination of the ideology of reconquista, or Reconquest. For
Rogers, who opts for a heroic reading of the Portuguese action on the city,
“it sealed the Reconquest and was a crowning chivalric achievement” (The
Travels 8).2 Andrew C. Hess thinks along similar lines when he eschews
Ceuta as the first step of Portuguese seaborne imperialism and finds a
continuation of a crusading zeal, so that “at the time the arrival of the
 i n t ro d u c t i o n xv

Christians on the African side of the strait appeared to be no more than

an extension of old practices” (Forgotten Frontier 12–13). If the mentality
of a crusade constitutes the “old practices” identified by Hess, it is also
true that newly developing commercial interests in North Africa also lay
behind the armature of a Holy War.3
However the Portuguese campaign against Ceuta might ultimately be
viewed—as the first identifiable action in the historical trajectory of early
modern European imperialism or as a culminating manifestation of a
medieval crusading mentality that promoted Christian–Moorish inter-
action in conflictive terms—the fact remains that the invasion initiated
a new series of encounters and contacts with Africa and its inhabitants
and served as a catalyst for a Portuguese culture of writing on Africa that
exists to contemporary times. The primogenitor text of this tradition is
Zurara’s Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta, followed by three other chronicles
on Morocco and the exploration of the West African littoral. In Zurara,
Africa is in essence an ideologically new place since, after 1415, Africa was
no longer merely a site of commercial interaction but became both the
harbinger and first arena of empire. Zurara ignores the Portuguese his-
torical familiarity with the North African city in favor of his immediate
chronistic objective which is to narrate the arrival of the Portuguese in
another guise, that is, as conquerors in an incipient national practice of
maritime expansion. Zurara’s narrative of the capture of Ceuta is already
part of an expansionist mentality that has identified the city as the real and
symbolic initiation of imperial campaigns, so that Africa and its peoples are
mapped, appropriated, and incorporated into a rapidly expanding imperial-
mercantilist oikoumene. We may regard Zurara’s historical narratives, then,
as texts in the tradition of Portuguese/European writing that foundation-
ally lay out some of the characteristics of the imperial discourse of en-
counter in non-European spaces and the exploitation of those spaces and
the peoples in them.
Moorings is a book about the Portuguese culture of writing on Africa
in the first century and a half of maritime expansion, from Zurara’s
chronicles in the mid-fifteenth century to the epic poem Os Lusíadas (The
Lusiads, 1572) of Luís de Camões (1524?–80). The book explores, through
readings of representative texts, the Portuguese textual fashioning of
Africa and its peoples and how they were depicted and brought into the
xvi i n t ro d u c t i o n

expansionist imagination. It is, from one perspective, a book of imperial

discourse analysis, one that—I hope—will catalyze other studies of Por-
tuguese writings on and about Africa in both the colonial and postcolo-
nial periods. It seeks to delineate the inchoate practices of writing that
accompanied, and, at the same time, were the product of, maritime expan-
sion and voyaging.
The traditional, even stereotypical, figure of the African in medieval
and early modern cultures was usually the Moor, most often an Arabic-
speaking, (North) African Muslim. Thus the Moor, as the emblematic rep-
resentative of Africa, presides over the arguments in the pages that follow.
With the gerundive mooring I mean to designate a practice of excogitating
or fashioning Africa textually within an expansionist mentality or zeit-
geist, of creating a Portuguese “gnosis” (to borrow V. Y. Mudimbe’s term)
of Africa and its inhabitants. Moorings also gestures toward narrative
practices—such as those in Camões or Álvaro Velho’s account of the voy-
age of Vasco da Gama—that recall the oceanic origins of texts on Africa
and the stops and pauses of maritime journeying, the hiatus in forward
movement of an itinerary or planned course over land or sea. Such stops
typically allow for the encounters between Africans and Europeans, the
dynamic of human interaction that serves as the backbone of military, com-
mercial, and religious imperial pursuits. In Camões, this kind of mooring
or pause permits the realization of an expansionist design: moments of
suspended nautical movement allow the personages of Os Lusíadas to
construct historical narratives (such as Vasco da Gama’s long historical
peroration to the King of Melinde) that are part of Camões’s creation of
a collective, historical memory of Portugal as the head of Europe. Portu-
gal emerges as “the source of power and organization” (Nicolopulos 240)
in the geography of the Lusíadas and in the historiographic dimension of
the poem. The nautical moorings allow that historiographic dimension
to unfold.
In using the term “Moor” to name the African I do not mean to repeat
the imperialist practice of reducing the demographic diversity of Africa
to an undifferentiated mass of otherness with one label. Rather, I employ
this etymon since it was part of the lexical and conceptual currencies of
the late-medieval and early-modern periods and so was a component of
historical and imaginative thought. This premise shares an affinity with
xviii i n t ro d u c t i o n

and conquest of northern and western Africa in the first five decades of
expansion. These chronicles, with their dates of completion, are Crónica
dos feitos notáveis que se passaram na conquista da Guiné por mandado
do infante D. Henrique (Chronicle of the Notable Deeds That Occurred
during the Conquest of Guinea by Order of Prince Henry, or, more com-
monly, the Chronicle of Guinea, 1453), the Crónica de D. Pedro de Meneses
(Chronicle of Pedro de Meneses, 1458–64), and the Crónica de D. Duarte
de Meneses (Chronicle of Duarte de Meneses, 1464–68).5
Camões, on the other hand, writes after the conquest of Africa, India,
and Brazil, and after the establishment of complex colonial administra-
tions. He is an “innately” expansionist figure in that he was born once
maritime empire was well under way, but when he redacted his epic,
imperial fervor was somewhat on the decline. Zurara’s chronicles are
ideological in that they are written as part of the official machinery of
the expansionist state, and Camões’s poem is ideological in its attempts
to resuscitate an imperialist zeal among his countrymen and reinstate a
determination to vanquish Portugal’s competitor imperial power, Islam,
especially in the form of the Ottoman Turks.6 Os Lusíadas recapitulates,
synthesizes, and poetically reconstrues the mainly prose historiographic
tradition that is the poem’s immediate textual antecessor, the tradition
inaugurated by Zurara. The poem takes as its historical basis the 1497–
99 voyage of Vasco da Gama to India, which opened the Indo-Portuguese
maritime trade route known as the carreira da Índia (India voyage) and
which was the cause of most of the dramatic shipwreck narratives con-
tained in the História trágico-marítima or Tragic History of the Sea.7 Al-
though the poet identifies the attainment of India as the pinnacle of epic
achievement, and since the skeins of historical and mythological narrative
culminate in Gama’s arrival in Malabar (Calicut), it is understandable
that much criticism reads the Lusíadas as a poem “about” India. Yet the
first five of the poem’s ten cantos take place in Africa, so that Africa acts
as a principal space for the formation of the mythological and historio-
graphic structures of thought that serve Camões’s ideologically driven
poetic imagination. Camões allows historical narrative to occur in Africa;
he allows his protagonists and antagonists to linger on Africa’s sands and
along its coastlines in order to build stories, predict the future, construct
the entire history of Europe and Portugal, and mingle with the classical
 i n t ro d u c t i o n xix

gods and the governing energies of the cosmos that direct the efforts of
explorers and mariners. Africa is Portugal’s first conquest in the poem
in that Portuguese presence in it allows for the creation of the narrative
of Os Lusíadas, Portugal’s most developed expression of the ideologies
of empire that resides at the heart of the country’s literary and cultural
canons and of its identity as a voyaging, seafaring nation. In a general sense,
this book documents the textual culture on Africa that made Camões’s
poem possible.
A few definitions of working concepts are in order. I use “expansion”
or “expansionist” as synonymous with “empire” and “imperial” throughout
this book. Thomaz (“Le Portugal et l’Afrique”) defines expansion as the
“military occupation, peaceful colonization or simple commercial presence
[of Portugal]” (161) abroad. This definition provides an idea of the range
of activity and endeavor encompassed by “expansion,” though I would add
nonpeaceful colonization to Thomaz’s definition, and, more importantly,
the production of texts and documents as a characteristic practice of ex-
pansion. “Empire” and “imperial,” moreover, designate a spectrum of
activities—for example, geographic exploration, descriptions of the natu-
ral world, slaving raids, inland travel, or simple trading encounters—
that vary considerably with regard to stated or putative objectives and
do not always imply Portuguese power or domination over indigenous
or colonial subjects. Thornton writes of the considerable African resis-
tance to Portuguese expansionist interests while also noting the generally
peaceful relations between African states and Portugal in the sixteenth
century (“Early Portuguese Expansion” 122–23). Pagden remarks that for
the Portuguese in Africa, at least until the mid-fifteenth century, trade
was more profitable than conquest (64). Indeed, given the often shifting
purposes and unexpected contingencies of “imperial” actions, it is diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to identify one consistent form, definition, or prac-
tice of Portuguese empire. Costa (“La presencia de los portugueses”)
argues, in the context of the Portuguese presence in Asia, for “the substi-
tution of the notion of empire with that of network. The many spaces
occupied by the Portuguese did not form a territorial unity but, on the
contrary, a discontinuity” (438). Hespanha makes a similar claim in a
comparison of Portuguese and Spanish empire when he notes that “Por-
tuguese empire in the Orient did not constitute . . . a single, territorial
xx i n t ro d u c t i o n

entity, but a discontinuous political space. . . . it was, first and foremost, a

non-monotonous network of political relations” (18). These observations
might equally well be applied to the Portuguese presence in Africa. What
both these critics make clear is the necessity of undoing any notion of
“empire” as a unified or cohesive exercise of power in which Europeans,
Christians, or Portuguese always wield the upper hand in encounters with
non-Europeans.8 In the Portuguese context, imperial or expansionist writ-
ers document several reasons for expansion, such as the fight against the
infidel, the search for slaves or gold, chivalric honor, a providential plan,
and obedience to the Christian faith—and oftentimes all in the same text.9
Sometimes, but not always, imperial activity attempts to establish a power
differential in favor of the Portuguese, such as in combat or in the cap-
ture of slaves. Other circumstances find Portuguese explorers in situations
of humiliation or defeat. Joan-Pau Rubiés’s comments on imperialism and
textuality in the New World recognize what was a common practice in
early Portuguese empire, namely, that

any interpretation of the literature of travel and discovery must be an exer-

cise in cultural history which acknowledges the apparent contradictions
between the rhetoric of triumphant imperialism, too often portrayed as a
one-sided force both by critics and apologists, and the ambivalence of the
actual encounter with an indigenous world, human and natural, which was
neither passive nor homogeneous. (“Futility in the New World” 75)

There were structures of empire and colony, for example, in the Por-
tuguese presence in the Kongo, where commercial and political relations
and exchanges (satisfactory to both sides of the colonial divide) were
established and maintained for centuries and which stand as a caution
against reading this interaction in modern, colonial terms (MacGaffey
260). Or, P. E. H. Hair notes that

[i]n Guinea, as in maritime Asia, the Portuguese presence can be defined,

not so much as one of eager imperial conquest and predatory rule as one of
opportunist co-existence with “native” political and economic units, within
an existing and vigorous commercial network to which the Portuguese con-
tributed useful middleman services. (“Discovery and Discoveries” 21)
 i n t ro d u c t i o n xxi

Newitt speaks of an “informal empire” in Morocco in which private cas-

tles were built, private deals were struck with local Moroccan chiefs, or
freelance raids (that is, unauthorized by the Crown) were pursued (Por-
tuguese Overseas Expansion 71–72; “Formal and Informal Empire” 8–12).
Jonathan Hart’s comment is also apposite: “[t]he textual messiness—the
descriptions, opinions, proclamations, asides and other forms of verbal
record and report—makes difficult any single notion of imperial expan-
sion” (1). Hart’s observation has the advantage of concentrating the messi-
ness of empire at a textual level, and could be expanded to include the
proliferation of genres that accompany expansion in Africa.
The terms “to discover” (Portuguese descobrir) and “discovery” (descobri-
mento or descoberta), so often used in conjunction with the expansionist
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, carried particular meanings in docu-
ments of the time not always consonant with modern understandings.
Samuel Eliot Morison uncovers possible meanings of these Portuguese
terms based on passages from Fernão Lopes de Castanheda and João de
Barros, two of the preeminent Portuguese historians of Portuguese Africa
and Asia and whose works greatly influenced Camões. Morison observes
that “[descoberta means] the discovery of a land the existence of which
was already known to the Portuguese by fact or rumor; descobrimento . . .
implies both ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration.’ . . . Often it is only from the
context that one can tell which meaning is intended” (8–10). Wilcomb E.
Washburn cites historian Edmundo O’Gorman as providing the most
extensive treatment of “discovery” (here in the context of Columbus and
the New World): “‘Discovery’ implies that the nature of the thing found
was previously known to the finder, i.e., that he knows that objects such as
the one he has found can and do exist, although the existence of that par-
ticular one was wholly unknown” (quoted in Washburn 13).10 “Discover,”
then, does not necessarily mean “to come upon for the first time.” The Por-
tuguese explorers did not always “discover” Africa in the modern sense,
though they did “discover” parts of it along the lines indicated by Mori-
son and O’Gorman. Mudimbe argues that this fifteenth-century “discov-
ery” of Africa “meant and still means the primary violence signified by the
word” (The Idea of Africa 17) as the origin of the slave trade. In Portuguese
explorations of both coasts of Africa there was sometimes a folkloric idea
of what lay beyond the bounds of lived experience, and oftentimes it
xxii i n t ro d u c t i o n

conflicted with what was actually encountered. Africa, then, both was and
was not a “new world.”11
The most frequent term used by expansionist writers to denote the
arrival and presence of Portuguese in foreign lands is not “empire” but
conquista or “conquest.” It is Zurara who invests this term with the mean-
ing it will carry as Iberian empire expands as the strategic use of force
over the “barbarians” and/or the (divinely approved) campaigns of trade,
slaving, or colonization on a large scale. In writing of imperial Spain, J. H.
Elliott notes that “[t]he word conquista to the Castilian implied essentially
the establishing of the Spanish ‘presence’—the securing of strongpoints,
the staking out of claims, the acquisition of dominion over a defeated
population” (44). In a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls authorizing
a Portuguese trade monopoly over Africa, there is a sense of legal right
inherent in conquista that extends beyond Africa to the “Indies.” Zurara’s
understanding of conquista in the expansionist idiom will be repeated by
subsequent official or state-appointed writers.
Moorings, then, engages the Portuguese textual matter of Africa to the
time of Camões as an important moment in the history of western expan-
sion and reveals some of the mechanisms that create imperialism as a dis-
cursive practice. The rapidly evolving field of postcolonial studies makes
such an analysis urgent, as does the fact that the Portuguese documents—
in scholarly discussions of early modern Iberian empire within North
America, at least—recede from critical view because of the (over)empha-
sis on the texts produced under the Spanish, English, or French crowns.
The focus in Moorings on the early documents of expansion reflects the
fact that there is still much left to be done in considering how empire
functioned discursively in its initial years. Roland Greene, for instance,
subscribes to the idea that postcolonialism begins with colonialism (424),
an assumption I share. Barbara Fuchs has suggested a slight retooling
of terminology in her postulation of “imperium studies” as both a criti-
cal approach and a disciplinary label to designate the contemporary analy-
sis of early-modern empire and its textual productions. She notes, for
instance, that

[w]hen discussing early modern imperialism, the temptation is to turn

to postcolonial criticism, yet it clearly behooves critics working on earlier
 i n t ro d u c t i o n xxiii

periods both to develop theoretical concepts better suited to our field, and
to historicize postcolonial concepts in order to expose the early modern
foundations of later imperialist representations. (“Imperium Studies” 71)

Without engaging postcolonial criticism directly, Moorings might be

thought of as one possible response to the critical and methodological
necessity Fuchs identifies.12 The distinction between colonialism and im-
perialism, especially in the realm of discourse, is often elided in favor of
“colonial” as the more common term. Yet that distinction is worth noting
here, especially because it bears on Zurara and Camões. Ania Loomba
defines imperialism as “the phenomenon that originates in the metropo-
lis, the process which leads to domination and control” (12) and colonial-
ism as “[i]ts result, or what happens in the colonies as a consequence of
imperial domination” (ibid.). Zurara and Camões do not on the whole
occupy themselves with Portuguese colonial presence; their texts are more
imperial in that they focus on a practice of establishing power through
knowledge of other lands that radiates outward from the metropole and
returns in the form of a text. Camões is silent about Portuguese colonies—
in fact, he ignores the colonial history of the entire west African coast in
favor of the ideological factors that, for the poet, always and necessarily
motivated expansion into Africa. Camões structures his poem on an ideal
of maritime, expansionist itinerancy originating in Portugal and Lisbon,
as does Zurara. According to Loomba’s definition, Zurara and Camões are
practitioners of imperial, not colonial, discourse.13

/?
Chapter 1, “Encountering the African,” briefly explores the textual back-
ground of the Portuguese expansionist writing of Africa. It considers
medieval formulations of Moors and Moorishness in historiographic and
poetic sources, and outlines the ways in which the Moor occupies differ-
ent conceptual and geographic zones, thus making Moorishness a marker
of boundaries that are not fixed but shifting. In this fluidity of limits,
Moorishness is an interior, as well as exterior, quality. The chapter also
considers the “in-between” nature of Portuguese writings on Africa from
certain theoretical postures, especially the influential conceptual vocabu-
lary of discursive imperialism elaborated in Edward Said’s Orientalism.
xxiv i n t ro d u c t i o n

The “African In-Between” proposes that, in the map of European impe-

rial discourse, Portuguese writings on Africa challenge critics to rethink
the conceptual role Africa played in the idea of the East or the Orient as
the putative counterpart to European Christendom.
Chapter 2, “Expansion and the Contours of Africa,” studies the histori-
ographic and nautical writings that were the predecessors of Camões’s
influential poetic fashioning of Africa and maritime itinerancy in Os Lusí-
adas. Nautical movement and passage through space forms part of the
exercise of imperial power, and demonstrates how Africa was gradually
subsumed into the Oriental enterprise of India through nautically ori-
ented writing. In this discussion, I explore the strange in the conceptual
world of expansion. The strange functions as part of a mental framework
in which displacement and alienation are metaphors for a shifting and
evolving gnosis of Africa. I finally consider how Africa was infixed into
the imagination or imaginatio, a standard component of medieval and
early-modern theories of vision and cognition. This physiological imagi-
nation has important claims to make about Africa and the process of per-
ceiving and writing about Africa in Zurara and Camões that prepares for
a portion of the material in chapter 3.
Chapter 3, “The Monster of Melancholy,” examines the episode of the
phantasmal monster Adamastor in Os Lusíadas as the most significant
moment about Africa in the poem and connects this episode to prevail-
ing ideas on the imagination and melancholy in Camões’s time. The chap-
ter argues that the episode, central to many interpretations of the poem,
indelibly infixes Africa into the voyages traced through space and mind,
and posits that Adamastor’s melancholic monstrosity invests him with a
cultural and hermeneutic currency. Melancholy and monstrosity inform
the Camonian idea of Africa as both historiographic and imaginative real-
ities. The conquest of Adamastor by the Portuguese is part of the meta-
phoric erotics of imperial voyaging as represented by the iconic figure
of the expansionist ship, and the chapter concludes with an analysis of
Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s influential commentary on Os Lusíadas in the
mid-seventeenth century. Faria e Sousa’s critique stands as a milestone of
Camonian criticism and is perhaps the most important secondary source
on Camões’s rendering of Africa in the history of the poem in its inscrip-
tion of Adamastor into an expansionist, cartographic imperative.
 1
/?
Encountering the
African

For Portugal on the eve of expansion, Africa was familiar and

strange, a known place across the modest parcel of sea between the
Algarve and Ceuta, and, farther south, an unknown expanse of land that
glimmered black under the equatorial sun. It was at once a historical real-
ity and a vast, limitless land of myth, monsters, and biblical time. Like
Adamastor in Os Lusíadas, it was simultaneously spectral and concrete,
imminent and distant. In the early fifteenth century it became, for the Por-
tuguese, a laboratory of expansion, the primordial space of imperial and
colonial campaigns. Africa’s borders were crossed and plotted by explor-
ers, colonizers, slavers, traders, and missionaries; almost from the moment
of the arrival of João I’s army in Ceuta, the continent and its inhabitants
became a motor of textual productivity in the form of chronicles, let-
ters, reports, navigational rutters, and geographic treatises. As Africa’s west
coast was gradually explored under the orders of Prince Henry, old ways
of thinking gave way to new empirical realities. And for Portugal, as for
Spain, Africa was part of the demographics and history of home in the
figure of the Moor, simultaneously an other and a closer, more intimate
presence. The voyages of exploration along the west African littoral, round
the Cape of Good Hope, and onward to the eastern shore and the Indian
Ocean, generate the multitude of writings that shape Africa for Portuguese
imperialism in the late-medieval and early-modern periods and conscript
it into the imaginative and ideological frameworks of expansion.1 As a
first step in understanding how Africa and its inhabitants were variously
and diversely shaped in the Portuguese imaginary, it is best to begin with

1
2 encountering the african

a brief look at how Moors, Africa, and other inhabitants of the continent
were defined and conceptualized prior to expansion in the medieval period.
The medieval precedents to expansion collectively shape the Moor as a
historical, living presence in Portugal as well as a marker of boundaries
in the arenas of sex, race, and spirituality. The quality of being a Moor—
or Moorishness—can be determined by factors that are anything but stable
or predetermined. The medieval understandings of the Moor and Africa
will migrate to some extent into the writings of expansion and the ideo-
logical campaigns forged in African spaces.

Some Medieval Formulations

Let us begin by considering the word Moor, a shifting and slippery label
in medieval Iberia. Prior to the campaigns of maritime expansion initi-
ated by Portuguese travelers in the fifteenth century, the Moor (Portu-
guese mouro, Castilian moro) was the emblematic African in the Iberian
literary and historical imagination. Moor is alternatively denotative and
connotative, precise and imprecise, historically accurate and imaginatively
construed. Etymologically, geographic writings gave birth to mouro as a
generic label. The word derives from Latin maurus, an adjective meaning
“Moorish” or “of the Moors” that referred to the inhabitants of Maurita-
nia, a region of North Africa comprised of two provinces and frequently
described by classical geographers. In his Geography, for example, Strabo,
in speaking of Libya (i.e., Africa), mentions the Moors or Maurusians (from
Maurusia, the Greek word for Mauritania) as “a Libyan tribe living on the
side of the straight opposite Iberia” (157). Pliny the Elder includes Tangier
in his Historia naturalis (Natural History) as part of Mauritania, and in it
live “the Moors (from whom it takes its name of Mauretania), by many
writers called the Maurusii” (231). Pomponius Mela, like Strabo, juxta-
poses Mauritania and Spain as facing one another across the sea and identi-
fies the mountains Jabal Musa and Gibraltar as the Pillars of Hercules (41–
42). Maurus was one of the many terms used to describe the peoples
of Africa in classical texts, and often coincided with the Greek and Latin
terms for “Ethiopians,” which were, as Frank M. Snowden Jr. observes,
words synonymous with blackness of skin (5).2 In the Middle Ages, Isidoro
de Sevilla (Isidore of Seville) reiterates an etymological connection between
darkness of skin and the name Mauritania in his Etymologiae (Etymologies)
 encountering the african 3

by noting that “Mauritania takes its name from the color of its peoples,
since the Greeks called blackness maûron” (2:189).3
In a study of medieval texts written in Latin in Spain, Nevill Barbour
provides some specifics on the various understandings of maurus, in addi-
tion to the related terms sarraceni (Saracens) and arabes (Arabs). Barbour
acknowledges the common understanding of mauri and sarraceni as des-
ignations for the Muslim inhabitants of Spain or al-Andalus and notes
the etymological link to Mauritania (253–54). However, the location of
Mauritania as a geographic space is unstable:

[W]hile the name Mauritania meant properly the former Roman provinces,
Mauritania Caesariensis and Mauritania Tingitanis, corresponding to the
present western Algeria and north-eastern Morocco, Latin writers some-
times used it not only to cover all North Africa but also the whole of the
African continent as far as the Equator, beyond which geographical knowl-
edge did not then [754 CE] extend. From this it followed that there were
black as well as white Mauri. (255)

Maurus could, then, from an early date, be a catchall term for Africans in
the pens of Iberian writers. So varied were the understandings of maurus
in the early Middle Ages, in fact, that by the eighth century “‘Mauritania’
[became] a word, like Christendom, whose geographical significance de-
pends on the context” (Barbour 258). This is a crucial point because it estab-
lishes that Mauritania—and, by extension, Moor—was vulnerable to the
exigencies and positionalities of writers and discourse, even though puta-
tively what was being referenced was the “objective” fact of geographic
boundaries. Mauritania ceases to be a fixed region in Africa and becomes
an itinerant and constructed zone of religious, linguistic, and racial alterity
whose existence and location reflect culturally or politically determined per-
spectives and objectives. The location of Mauritania, then, far from being a
predetermined “fact,” can, in large part, depend on who’s doing the looking.
Vernacular uses are equally broad along the lines sketched by Barbour,
both in Portugal and in Spain. In Portugal, mouro is often the same as
mourisco or muçulmano as designations for an Arabic-speaking Muslim.
L. P. Harvey notes the terminological vagueness of moro in medieval Spain
by observing:
4 encountering the african

Moor (moro) . . . is a historical term which is authentic in the sense that it

occurs in source materials of the period, but it is a term we can rarely use
nowadays. It is not merely geographically imprecise, leaving us uncertain
whether the person it describes is of North African origin or simply a Mus-
lim, it is ambiguous with regard to the value judgment it implies. Often
Moor conveys hostility, but there are contexts where Muslims refer to them-
selves as Moors with evident pride. (Islamic Spain 1)

The related term morisco (a Muslim converted to Christianity) presents

similar difficulties: “Morisco illustrates particularly clearly the dangers
inherent in vocabulary. . . . [B]y employing [it] . . . we are tacitly accept-
ing and approving of the forcible reclassification of this group of Muslims
as something other” (ibid. 3).4 Harvey is correct in observing the histori-
cal authenticity of the word moro, yet the very factors he cites as militat-
ing against Moor as a useful label advocate, in my view, for the critical
interest of this word/concept. The slippages and imprecisions of mouro
are precisely those that construe the term as a marker and principle of
difference.
In literary and historical texts the Moor appears in a number of guises
before expansion in Africa in the fifteenth century. José da Silva Horta
(“A imagem do Africano”) surveys several medieval texts, focusing on the
conflation of blackness and Africa in the form of the Moor or Ethiopian
in historiographic, hagiographic, and Christian doctrinal texts and noting
the usually negative connotations of this conflation. Blackness most often
appears as a visible sign of sin or spiritual waywardness, often with dia-
bolical associations; thus the blackness of the African is a spiritual dark-
ness. In historiographic texts, such as Alfonso X of Castile’s General estoria
(General History), the Moor is in fundamental “politico-religious” (“A
imagem do Africano” 50) opposition to a presumed Ibero-Christian, his-
torical status quo. In poetic texts such as Alfonso’s Cantigas de Santa
Maria (Songs of Holy Mary, hereafter CSM), Moors appear as the foe
or foil to Christianity. These devotional lyrics, which often mix the reli-
gious poem of devotion and praise with historiographic narrative since
many of the cantigas take specific historical events as their basis, sing the
triumph of Christianity over Moors as the representatives of paganism or
Islam. This unilateral view of Moors responds to the didactic purposes of
 encountering the african 5

these songs, for they were meant to instruct as well as laud the Virgin, and
does not exemplify a more personal prejudice on Alfonso’s part against
Moors or Muslims, as Bagby (166) claims. The Moors of the CSM are
predominantly archetypes within the salvific logic of devotional verse, as
either the enemy of Christianity or the possibility of conversion, and as
such are the products of a kind of discourse rather than an indication of
what in modern terms we might call the racial or ethnic bias of the poet.
A similar view of Moors appears in the pages of Alfonso’s legal treatise
known as the Siete partidas (Seven Parts). Here, Moorishness is solely a
matter of faith with no visual exteriorization (such as dark skin) or lin-
guistic tags (such as speaking Arabic). In the seventh Partida, Alfonso
defines moro: “[m]oros son una manera de gente que creen que Mahomat
fue profeta et mandadero de Dios” (the Moors are a people who believe
that Muhammad was the Prophet and Messenger of God, 5:1438).5 Moor-
ishness is hence an internal quality, all the more dangerous because it is
not readily apparent to the eye.6 Alfonso adds that “[e]nsandecen á las veg-
adas homes . . . et desesperados de todo bien reniegan la fe de nuestro
señor Jesucristo et tórnanse moros” ([m]en sometimes become insane
and lose their prudence and understanding . . . and those who despair of
everything, renounce the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and become
Moors, 3:1439). Alfonso distinguishes between being a Moor at the outset
in the first citation and becoming a Moor—or “turning Moor”—in the
second, which, for the Learned Monarch, appears to be worse. To “turn
Moor” is a form of insanity that leads to an act of apostasy, so that the
question remains open of the possibility of curing Moorish converts of
their Moorishness. Moorishness can be an act of will as much as it can
be a spiritual belief, and as such enters the much dicier (from a legal per-
spective) arena of unlawful transgression.
Immediately preceding Alfonso’s definitions of Moors is a section on
Jews (Partida 7, title 24), who, like Moors, are defined by their faith, but
a faith that marks the body visibly in men with circumcision. Further-
more, Alfonso orders that all Jews, both men and women, must bear
marks on their heads so as to be immediately recognizable; to be caught
without the mark incurs a fine or a lashing (Partida 7, title 24, law 11). We
might think of Alfonso’s legislated mark of the Jew as a revival of the mark
of Cain in Genesis, bestowed on Abel’s fraternal murderer as a sign of
6 encountering the african

both damnation and divine protection.7 But in Alfonso’s Partida, the mark
serves simply to identify and indict, not to protect. Jewishness and Moor-
ishness comprise a legal demographic, a line that cannot be crossed with-
out punishment, as Alfonso’s injunctions against sexual intermingling
between Christians and Moors or Jews demonstrate.8 In the CSM, by con-
trast and unlike the invisible nature of Moorishness in the Siete partidas,
Moors bear visible marks of their “incorrect” faith. The inscription of
Moorishness on the body occurs through beards, blackness, and ugliness.
CSM 46 tells the story of a Moor who plunders a Christian village in the
Holy Land and brings back a statue of Mary as part of his booty.9 The
statue begins to lactate, and the astonished Moor converts to Christianity
along with his comrades, “estes mouros barvudos” (these bearded Moors,
l. 59). Beards identify Moors, a kind of infidel counterpart to the beard
as a symbol of Christian honor in medieval epic. The Moor possessed
by the devil in CSM 192 and who is freed from diabolical power by Mary
is likewise bearded, as are the Moors who lay siege to Marrakech in CSM
181 and are terrified by the emblems of Christianity wielded by their ene-
mies. These visible, hirsute markings, in addition to blackness, which is
linked to Satan (CSM 185, 329) it is important to repeat, function as part
of a moral-didactic narrative whose purpose is the immediate distinction
between Christians and Moors. The white and black world of the CSM
visualizes spiritual demarcations that do not allow for porosity. This capac-
ity for visualization in the imagery of the CSM facilitates comprehension
of the various lessons or exempla in these songs of Marian devotion.
Opposed to the sober readings and definitions of Moors and Moor-
ishness in the Siete partidas and the Cantigas de Santa Maria are the ludic
treatments in the corpus of Galician-Portuguese insulting joke poetry
known as the cantigas de escarnho e mal dizer (songs of mockery and in-
sult, hereafter CEM). These cantigas, composed between the late twelfth
and early fourteenth centuries, jokingly lampoon aspects of daily life in
Iberia, from sick mules to selling fish to fashion to sex, religion, and even
poetry itself. A number of these poems bring Moors to this vibrant and
often hilarious poetic corpus. Transgression of various kinds frequently
provides the tensions that are jokingly exploited in this poetry. In the case
of Moors, this transgression is characteristically sexual, so that boundaries
between sex and religion or race are dismantled and frequently fused.
 encountering the african 7

Moors often display a high level of sexual prowess and energy and invite
incursions into the forbidden zones of sodomy and fornication; Moors
demarcate the realms of “deviant” sexual practices and occasion trans-
gression into these realms.10 By way of example, consider two cantigas,
CEM 229 and 297, the first by Joan Soárez Coelho and the second by
Martin Soárez.11 Both poems take as their target one Joan Fernándiz. In
these cantigas, the poets relate Joan Fernándiz to sex through an unnamed
mouro. In CEM 229, Joan Soárez Coelho ridicules Fernándiz because a
Moor is sleeping with his wife under his own roof. Liu reads this cantiga
to mean that the Moor and Fernándiz are one and the same person, and
that Fernándiz in essence cuckolds himself because he is most likely a
Muslim convert to Christianity; Fernándiz is “simultaneously intended as
both the adulterous Moor and the newly Christian husband, who has been
cuckolded, paradoxically, by none other than his past self ” (105). Liu bases
this interpretation on the rubric to CEM 297, which reads “esta outra can-
tiga fez d’escarnho a un que dizian Joan Fernándiz, e semelhava mouro,
e jogavan-lh’ ende” (this other cantiga d’escarnho was written against one
Joan Fernándiz, who resembled a Moor, and that’s the joke against him).
Other CEM mention Fernándiz and contain allusions to his circumcised
member, so there is an intertextuality or interreferentiality that might be
assumed to underlie the jokes against Fernándiz and that the poets would
have assumed their audiences knew. Liu argues that these allusions “fuse
religious and sexual practice in a constant reminder of [Fernándiz’s] con-
vert status” (106). In CEM 229, then, Moorishness as a quality that can
be changed or discarded is the butt of the joke because it allows for the
boundaries separating legally distinct groups to be redrawn comically so
that a man may commit adultery with his own wife. Fernándiz’s unortho-
doxy in carnal matters becomes even more pronounced in CEM 297, a
poem which hints that Joan Fernándiz keeps a Moorish boy with him,
hidden from public view, for sexual gratification. For readers of the Can-
cioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (Songbook of the National Library [of Lis-
bon], the codex in which CEM 297 appears), one more layer of equivocal
complexity is added by the rubric to the poem, which contains the key
phrase “semelhava mouro” (resembled a Moor). There is an ambiguity in
the meaning of semelhar, “to resemble,” “to appear like,” or “to be similar
to,” that seems to advertise the joke in the poem. Most uses of semelhar
8 encountering the african

in the CEM denote a visible similarity or likeness between things, so that

one reading of the rubric is that Joan Fernándiz displays readily identifi-
able traits of Moorishness, such as dark skin, dress, mannerisms, or per-
haps even speech. If Fernándiz is a Muslim convert to Christianity, then
his similarity to a Moor is a physical trace or vestige of a quality that no
longer exists internally, that is, his Islamic faith. Yet, given the same-sex
innuendoes in CEM 297, semelhar mouro (to resemble a Moor) may imply
that Fernándiz is “like a Moor” in his deviant sexual practices—in fact,
the joke here might be that Joan Fernándiz not only looks like a Moor but
acts like one too, sexually speaking.
Roughly contemporaneous with many of the CEM in Portugal is the
writing of genealogical histories known as livros de linhagens (books of
lineages). The most well known of these is by D. Pedro, count of Barcelos
and bastard son of D. Denis, king of Portugal (and grandson of Alfonso
X) from 1279 to 1325. D. Pedro’s Livro de Linhagens was probably com-
posed between 1340 and 1344. In the political turmoil of mid-fourteenth-
century Portugal, D. Pedro was exiled to Castile, where he came into
contact with the fecund intellectual culture promoted by Alfonso X. He
returned to Portugal and composed his Livro, a text that combines the
tracing of genealogical lines of descent of the Portuguese nobility to bib-
lical times interspersed with short historical narratives. These narratives
sometimes mix the historical and the fantastic, and include some of the
earliest Arthurian literature in Iberia. One of the narratives recounts the
battle of Salado waged in October 1340 in which Portuguese and Castilian
armies joined forces to defeat the last Muslim attempt to invade the Penin-
sula (Livermore, A New History of Portugal 89). Another narrative recounts
the story of King Ramiro II of León, who “cobrou a terra a Mouros” (took
lands from the Moors, 204) and fell in love with the sister (Ártiga) of a
Moorish king in Portugal, Alboazar Alboçadam, who reigned over the ter-
ritories between Gaia and Santarém. This narrative is known as the Lenda
de Gaia (Legend of Gaia).12 It tells of Ramiro’s adultery in abducting the
beautiful Ártiga, her conversion to Christianity, and her eventual marriage
to Ramiro—all of this against Alboazar Alboçadam’s wishes. The story is
one of adultery, abduction, vengeance, and Moorish–Christian romantic
entanglement. Ramiro and Ártiga’s offspring are listed at the close of the
narrative, and the story, in its depiction of Moorish–Christian interaction
 encountering the african 9

as both erotic and hostile, may, as Miranda suggests, combine legendary

and factual accounts of the origin of the Maia aristocracy. Pedro’s frequent
references in his narratives to the fabled loss of Spain to the Moors by
King Rodrigo—a staple of Reconquest ideology—and the fashioning of
the flow of Luso-Hispanic history into an often anti-Islamic and Chris-
tian chivalric telos are countered by stories of erotic adventure that undo
the clean social and historical separation between Christian and Moor.13
The erotic currency between Moor and Christian in this narrative exposes
hostilities, both veiled and overt, that contravene the supposed genteel
idealizations characterizing Moorish–Christian coexistence in the litera-
ture of maurophilia (literally, “Moor loving”), traditionally epitomized in
Iberia with the sixteenth-century novel El Abencerraje.
We bring to a close this brief consideration of medieval Moors with
two examples from the early fifteenth century, after the invasion of Ceuta
but before Zurara’s redaction of the Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta. The first
is the Leal Conselheiro (Loyal Counselor, completed ca. 1438), a philo-
sophical treatise composed by D. Duarte, one of João I’s sons. The Leal
Conselheiro considers, in essayistic and frequently autobiographical form,
the moral and spiritual values for living well (viver bem), especially for
those charged with the onus of governance. The book frames the moral-
ity of responsible living and leadership in a strict Christian mold. In a
commentary on the sin of ira (ire), Duarte considers the “passions” that
can result from this sin, including hatred (ódio). The discussion of hatred
centers on the guerra dos mouros or war against the Moors and the ethi-
cal quandary that such an action presents. The topic is timely, because
Duarte wrote in the aftermath of the capture of Ceuta and the continued
pursuit of Portuguese interests in Morocco and North Africa. Duarte
proposes his topic of reflection: “por que razom fariamos contra elles
pelleja, ou moveriamos guerra, pois soportavamos antre nos vyverem
judeus e outros mouros taaes como elles?” (for what reason could we fight
against them or wage war, since we allowed Jews and other Moors like
them to live among us?, 62). He concludes that the guerra dos mouros is
just if the Moors themselves—and we are to assume here African, not Por-
tuguese, Moors—persist in denying the Catholic faith through the “delib-
eraçom de suas voontades” (deliberate acts of will, 62). Furthermore,
“[n]os e todos senhores catholicos lhe devemos fazer guerra pera tornar
10 encountering the african

suas terras a obediencia da santa madre igreja” (we and all Catholic lords
should wage war to convert their lands to the submission of Holy Mother
Church, 63). Although Duarte doesn’t use the word conquista, this state-
ment is tantamount to a defense of forceful military conquest. The extent
and magnitude of oppresive force (“prema”) used in such campaigns is
to be determined by the Pontiff (63), and the king has the right as well
to determine how his subjects will “matar, ferir e roubar” (kill, wound,
and rob, 63), and Duarte advises that these actions should be tempered
with “piedade” (pity).
Duarte’s defense of the guerra dos mouros was most likely first drafted
as a defense of a planned attack on Tangier in 1437; thus, we probably
should understand Duarte’s apologia of the war against the Moors as a
reference to a specific military attack. Duarte’s eventual offensive against
the North African city ended in disaster; it had been conceived as an
attempt to continue the pursuit of Portuguese interests in Morocco that
had been initiated with the capture of Ceuta. Maintaining these African
interests had been fraught with difficulties, and the Tangier plan was meant
to support the presence in Ceuta and facilitate progress inland against the
Muslims (Diffie and Winius 71). The attack on Tangier was a cause of con-
siderable disagreement at court. Duarte’s brothers João, Henrique (Prince
Henry), and Pedro all weighed in on the proposed action against “Bena-
marim” (or “Belamarim,” that is, western Morocco). Three documents
exist that contain the princes’ opinions. João argues at length against the
attack, noting, inter alia, that “reason” (syso) often contravenes the code
of chivalry and honor, and that such aggression is not necessarily in the
service of God and might occasion severe financial loss; Henry, as one
might expect, fully supports the proposal as consonant with service to
God; and Pedro, while acknowledging that battling enemy Moors might
well be honorable, opines that the cost in terms of men and money
strongly militates against such a plan.14 The controversy is a particularly
good example of the monetary and military interests at stake behind the
religious rhetoric that will increasingly surround references to the guerra
dos mouros in expansionist documents, beginning with the chronicles of
Zurara. The supposed spiritual antagonism of Moors boils down to their
obstruction or resistance to Portuguese designs of a much more practical
nature, and the guerra dos mouros—once a conceit in the medieval era that
 encountering the african 11

accompanied the “reclaiming” of Christian lands within the borders of

Iberia—has become a catchall expression for aggressive campaigns against
Moors in Africa and their natural resources.

The African In-Between

In the fifteenth century, the voyages of exploration along the west Afri-
can or “Guinean” coast pursue the coast as far south as it will reach. The
writings that record these voyages, such as Zurara’s chronicles or the
Italian Alvise Cadamosto’s eyewitness narrative, reflect an African-bound
project of conquest, a view of exploration that sees only the western
littoral and the encounters, including slave raids, on its sands and in its
inlets. Even when “India” is referenced in Henrican documents the term
refers to northeast Africa (Russell, Prince Henry 121). With Vasco da
Gama’s voyage to India at the end of the century there is a shift in expan-
sionist texts and explanations about the reach of Portuguese conquista in
that now Africa has become a middle ground in a larger and more “epic”
progression of empire in the attainment of India and the East.15 Sixteenth-
century writers will, with hindsight and to varying degrees, make the
voyages along Africa part of an ineluctable and gradual revelation of the
ultimate Indian objective and therefore as constituent of a kind of tele-
ology of expansion and maritime imperial travel. The “Moor,” “Guinean,”
or “Ethiopian,” terms that often are inconsistently applied, reflect shift-
ing encounters with Africa as the limits of the known expand. Africa and
the mouro, negro, guineu, or etíope become part of an expansionist cul-
ture that combines taxonomic observation with chronistic narrative as a
foundational mode of imperial discourse. The Portuguese encounters
with Africa, distinct from those of other European countries because of
the geographic and historical proximity of the continent to Iberia, pro-
duce a body of texts that recognize the enterprise of Africa as a discrete
undertaking while also situating that enterprise within a larger purview
that ultimately encompasses India and America. Africa occupies its own
place in the expansionist writings of Portugal, between the extreme East
and the West—an African in-between, as it were. This interstitial space
poses certain questions about the conceptual tools and vocabularies com-
mon in imperial/colonial studies as they intersect with the Portuguese
fashioning of Africa.
Map detailing major landmarks in the Portuguese exploration of West Africa from
1415 (Ceuta) to 1488 (Good Hope). From Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the
Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580.
 encountering the african 13

Arguably one of the most influential books in contemporary colonial

studies is Edward Said’s Orientalism. The tenets of Said’s theories con-
cerning the West’s construction of the Orient have become commonplaces
in much critical work: among them, that Orientalism is an ideologically
driven, hegemonic practice of discourse with supporting institutions and
vocabulary; that the ideological construction of the Orient participates
in formulations of western European identity or the European “self ”; that
Orientalism is a Western strategy for dominating, structuring, and having
authority over the “Orient” as a construct rather than as an “inert fact of
nature” (Orientalism 4); or that Orientalist discourse is more about Euro-
pean power over the Orient than it is a veridic discourse. In the years since
its publication, Said’s formulation of Orientalism has been criticized for a
number of its assumptions and arguments, including that of an unchang-
ing or static concept of cultural interaction with a “hegemonic, active West
imposing an idea upon a subordinate, passive East” (Hadfield 1) or the
Eurocentric nature of Said’s models, which leads to a “monolithic” charac-
ter of Orientalism and essentialist contrasts between East and West (Cass
27, 39).16 It has also been argued that Said proposes a more or less homo-
geneous concept of “empire,” and the result of this assumption is that
there is an assumed, internal consistency to Orientalist discourse. “Said
asserts the unified character of Western discourse on the Orient over some
two millennia,” Dennis Porter observes (181). Even if we allow that debates
on Orientalism have taken place only within the parameters set out by
Said, as Robert Irwin claims in his rebuke titled Dangerous Knowledge,
the fact remains that Said’s book has provided a conceptual vocabulary
for much of imperial studies (or “imperium studies,” as Fuchs proposes),
however much we might disagree with or modify the presuppositions or
applications of that vocabulary. In that fact the influence of Orientalism
cannot be overlooked; Cass notes how some scholarship has admittedly
stretched and contorted Said’s original concept but “into new and fasci-
nating shapes” (38). Bringing Orientalism into contact with imperial prac-
tices and cultures outside of Said’s original intentions and parameters
can generate provocative ideas about Orientalism as a shaping character-
istic of imperial discourse and can bring the textual, imperialist practices
of nations not included in Orientalism to the scholarly table. The Portu-
guese textual matter of Africa is a case in point. The question is, then,
14 encountering the african

in the late-medieval and early-modern Portuguese discourse on Africa,

how might it be possible to define a Portuguese Orientalism, or, to follow
Christopher L. Miller’s lead in his study of French texts, a Portuguese
Africanist discourse that postures with and/or against Saidian Oriental-
ism? In posing this question I am not suggesting that Said be modified
or rewritten to fit the Portuguese textual matter of Africa. Rather, I wish
to bring some of Said’s precepts into contact with Portuguese ideas about
Africa. For the sake of convenience, I will use the term “Orientalism,”
though it is probably better, as K. David Jackson suggested in an MLA
paper, to formulate the Portuguese imperial/colonial relationship to the
East in terms of “Orientalness.” Such a term has the advantage of acknowl-
edging a distinct Portuguese practice of fashioning and experiencing the
East prior to the Anglo–French engagements with the Orient studied by
Said, while still notionally retaining some of the postulations about the
importance of discourse as an ideological practice of empire, a discourse
that is anything but unified and that is a result of different historical
moments and purposes. And here we find the first note of dissonance
between Saidian Orientalism and Portuguese empire in Africa (and later,
in India): this was not an imperialist practice that fashioned non-Western
spaces solely on a discursive level but also as the result of lived and con-
crete experience. Jackson’s idea of Orientalness might thus be understood
to gesture toward the Portuguese experiential nature of the East as opposed
to the Saidian Orient that is abstracted through scholarly disciplines and
literature. The Portuguese texts do not exoticize the spaces of empire to
the extent present in Said’s arguments but bring them nonetheless into
often very ideologically driven agendas. The discussion here seeks to fill a
gap in Orientalist debate by bringing Portuguese materials to the fore.17
In Blank Darkness, Christopher L. Miller makes a critical rapproche-
ment between some tenets of Saidian Orientalism and French writings on
Africa from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Miller’s reading,
Orientalism is part of a reappraisal of European knowledge that studies
arbitrary judgments made by discourse (15). Miller delineates an African-
ist discursive practice that, in accordance with the Saidian construction
of the East, is born in Europe of European ideas (5) and is a European
attempt to fill an empty space called “Africa” (6). A central aspect of Ori-
entalist discourse is the creation of a monolithic Other and its opposition
 encountering the african 15

to the European. But unlike Orientalist writings, with their assumed pre-
rogative of knowledge and authority, knowledge of Africa “has tended
to be proffered with caveats; Africanist authors frequently call their own
authority and mastery of the subject into question” (19). These Oriental-
ist and Africanist discourses, nonetheless, manifest a “will-to-truth” (16).
For Miller, Africa and Africans are the locus of gaps, breaches, and fail-
ures in understanding and knowledge (20), and (black) Africa constitutes
a nullity, a nonspace that exists negatively until there is a European colo-
nizer to fill it.
In Portuguese writings, Africa occupies a place in the expansionist imag-
ination that is at once a named geographic space (or the parts of the con-
tinent that will gradually come to be referred to collectively as “Africa”)
as well as a less-defined geographic directionality referred to as the Ori-
ent. Once Vasco da Gama reaches India, for instance, eastern Africa was
subsumed into an expansive geomercantile territory that defined the cen-
tral arena of Portuguese imperialism. This territory was known as the
Estado da Índia (State of India), “the name given by the Portuguese to
all their possessions and trading-posts between Sofala and Macao, or, in
a looser sense, to the whole of maritime East Africa and Asia from the
Cape of Good Hope to Japan” (Boxer, Race Relations 41).18 Even before
the Estado da Índia was delimited, “Africa” was a geographic idea that
frequently was combined with the East or India. In speculating on what
the term “India” meant for fifteenth-century Portuguese, Randles notes
that “India” was applied to all territories that lay east of the Mediter-
ranean, beyond Islam, and south of the Sahara (“Notes” 21). Randles fur-
ther observes (22) that the state of geographic knowledge in Portugal at
the time is hard to assess, with almost all of our information coming from
Zurara’s Chronicle of Guinea. In that chronicle, Zurara describes the large
region of western Africa designated as “Guiné” as well as its inhabitants.
The Senegal River is the dividing line between the “terra dos mouros”
(land of the Moors) and the “terra dos negros” (land of the blacks); at one
point, Zurara equates the Senegal River with the Nile:

E esta gente desta terra verde he toda negra e porem he chamada terra
dos negros ou terra de guinee por cujo aazo os homees e molheres della
som chamados guineus. que quer tanto dizer como negros. E quando os das
16 encountering the african

carauellas viram as primeiras palmeiras e aruores altas . . . bem conhecerom

que eram preto do Ryo do nillo da parte donde vem sayr ao mar do ponente
ao qual Ryo chamam de Çanaga . . . (225)

And the people of this verdant land are all black and for that reason it is
called the land of the blacks or the land of Guinea, for which reason the men
and women are called Guineans, which is the same thing as saying black.
And when those on the caravels saw the first palms and tall trees . . . they
well knew they were close to the Nile at the point where it flowed into the
western sea, which is there called the Senegal . . .19

In the following chapter, Zurara summarizes biblical and ancient geo-

graphic knowledge about the Nile, culled, as Léon Bourdon and others
note in the French translation of the chronicle, from the General estoria
of Alfonso X (182n1).20 Here, Zurara claims that the Nile flows through
Mauritania, thereby linking the “land of the Moors” to the venerable
waterway. The point is that the Nile was considered to divide “India” from
“Africa,” so that, in this logic, lands south of the Senegal technically could
have been considered India (Randles, “Notes” 24). This was one of the
reasons the Portuguese may have sought the kingdom of Prester John in
Africa as opposed to the subcontinent (sometimes referred to as “Upper
India”), because the mention of India in a fourteenth-century copy of
the apocryphal letter of the Prester now in the National Library in Lisbon
may have been understood as meaning African lands.21 Another instance
in which Zurara’s separation of the eastern and western spheres occurs
in chapter 2 of Guiné, where the chronicler, in an apostrophe to Prince
Henry, refers to the farthest points reached by Henry’s expeditions:

Espantãme aquelles vezinhos do nyllo cuja grande multidom te ocupados

os termos daquella velha e antiga cidade de Thebas porque os veio vestidos
da tua deuysa E as suas carnes que nvca conhecerõ vestidura traze agora
roupas de desuayradas collores. . . . E que fez esto senom largueza de tuas
despesas e o trabalho de teus seruidores mouidos per teu vertuoso engenho
pello qual tresmudaste nas fijns do ouriente as cousas criadas e feitas no
ocidente. . . . Oo tu . . . que te metes no laberinto de tãta glorya. por que te
estas ocupando con as naçõoes ouryentaaes. (21)
 encountering the african 17

I am astonished by the dwellers of the Nile, whose great numbers possess

the ancient and venerable city of Thebes, since I see them clothed in your
livery, and their flesh that never knew any covering, is now adorned in cloths
of many colors. . . . And what has caused this but the largesse of your purse
and the labor of your servants inspired by your virtuous will, by which
you carried to the ends of the East that which was made in the West? . . .
Oh Prince . . . you who enter the labyrinth of such glory, why do you busy
yourself with the nations of the East?

What, precisely, Zurara means here by the “East” and by “nations of the
East” has been the subject of some discussion. In his edition of the chron-
icle, José de Bragança notes that Zurara’s reference to the “dwellers of
the Nile” refers to the blacks living by the Niger, which was thought to be
a branch of the Nile (16n5). The East Zurara mentions has led some schol-
ars to argue that Henry’s expeditions had already reached, by land, not
only Egypt but also India and perhaps Malacca, and that these expeditions
were kept secret by the so-called política de sigilo (policy of secrecy) by
which Portugal was supposed to have imposed a strict code of silence
on travelers and kept any documents resulting from such travels under
lock and key in order to protect its commercial interests from competi-
tors such as Spain.22 Zurara’s often unclear notions of world geography
will probably make this an unresolvable question, but it is important to
acknowledge that these references to the East may mean Africa, accord-
ing to the geographic inconsistency of “India” in the fifteenth century.
Even if Zurara theoretically considers eastern Africa and Asia as an “Ori-
ent” opposed to the West, the regularly blurred boundaries between East
and West in the chronicle inevitably draw sub-Saharan Africa into these
notions of Orientalness. The inconsistent use of toponyms and the gen-
eral confusion of (Eastern) geography in Zurara, then, including the shift-
ing and inconsistent uses of “Ethiopia” (which was considered part of Asia),
conflate Africa with the East and thus make it apposite to theorizations of
Orientalist–Africanist discourse. Furthermore, if we think of the “East”
not as a strictly denotative geographic term but rather as a relational term,
as Daniel Martin Varisco points out in his readings of Said (61, 66), and
which ultimately requires us to treat “[t]he very notion of Europe . . . as
an invention” (61), the Zuraran concept of African space places the East
18 encountering the african

as laterally adjacent to Europe but also relocates it southward.23 Africa is

an intermediate and shifting space that is both Eastern and non-Eastern
and is the first term of the conceptualization of the East to be developed
later in the sixteenth century (such as in João de Barros) when “India”
comes increasingly to refer solely to the subcontinent.
In medieval patristic and geographic writings, as Suzanne Conklin
Akbari points out (20), the world was conceived of in three parts (Asia,
Europe, and Africa) and the Orient was continually in the process of being
re-formed (31). The shifting space of the Orient and the tripartite divi-
sion of the world in the medieval period are echoed in Zurara’s confla-
tion of sub-Saharan Africa and Ethiopia/Egypt through the path of the
Nile; they maintain Mauritania as a discrete geographic entity (one of
the parts of Africa) distinct from the land of the blacks below the Sene-
gal. As a third term interposed between West and East, then, it is possible
to understand Africa in the years of expansion as a non-Western Other.
The aprioristic superiority of Christian culture over the barbaric gentile
or Moorish heretic, the supposed readiness of African indigenes to accept
Christian conversion, or the sometimes—but by no means consistent—
presence of a passive native population confronted by the (military) might
of Portuguese expeditions might seem to conform to Said’s notions of
positional superiority or the inherent passivity of “Oriental” or non-
European cultures. In such a situation, we might also be inclined to find
the Saidian binary opposition between Self and Other. But such similari-
ties are provisional. The third term of Portuguese (or Iberian) Africa as a
space of otherness is not geographically distant like the Orient described
by Said, nor is it exotic in a way that recalls the novelistic narratives that
underlie Said’s analyses. The geographic and historical proximity of Africa
to Iberia is different from the distances separating the Orient from Said’s
Anglo-French writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ques-
tion of the Other—the Moor, or the sub-Saharan African—in expansion
reflects the intertwined histories of Africa and Iberia that defy simple
categorization. On the other hand, as Diogo Ramada Curto reminds us,
from a methodological perspective Saidian Orientalism is a mode of im-
perialism that reveals the perspectives of those who wield power (“Intro-
dução” xiii), and, in the case of Portuguese texts like the histories of João
de Barros, allows for the reconstitution of the several means and manners
of the mediation between power and knowledge (xiv).24
 encountering the african 19

Africa’s stereotypical role as Europe’s Other glosses over the relational

intricacies of the African or the Moor to Portuguese or Iberian cultures.
The idea of Africa-as-other, outside of the Iberian context, has received
influential expression, such as Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World
History, in which the German philosopher provides an excursus on the
geographic basis of world history. There, Hegel proposes that Africa con-
sists of three distinct parts: North Africa, Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa
or “Africa proper.” For Hegel, North Africa forms a “single unit with
Spain” (173) and is oriented toward Europe; Hegel perpetuates the non-
Iberianist trope that Africa begins at the Pyrenees. Egypt has a destiny as
a great and independent culture and has nothing to do with North Africa
because it is not near the Mediterranean. The longest section describes
Africa proper (i.e., black Africa). It “has no historical interest of its own”
because its inhabitants live in “barbarism and savagery [without] an in-
tegral ingredient of culture” (174). Here history is “out of the question”
because there is no subjectivity (176); man has not progressed “beyond his
immediate existence” (177). Without explicitly saying so, Hegel resusci-
tates a medieval view of Africa as a space made up of discrete regions;
Hegel’s three divisions correspond roughly to the regions of Mauritania,
Ethiopia, and the Torrid Zone, though a Torrid Zone that is now inhab-
ited. Like the medieval conceptualization of Africa (when that label was
in fact used) as in parts, Hegel proposes the quasi paradox of immediately
proximate lands that are discontinuous. Hegel’s comments are an exam-
ple of the idea that the “African has an absolute alterity to the European”
(Snead 63) and stands as a “discrete otherness” (64).
In Iberia, the African as a “discrete otherness” is a problematic idea.
The coexistence of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures in the form of
convivencia (living together or coexistence) means that any notion of a
binarized, Moorish Other dissolves.25 In fact, as most theorists of Orien-
talism tacitly presuppose, it is the Christian European that is assumed
to be the neutral ground zero of the self in constructions of otherness.
Such arguments would have us believe that this Christian ur-Self is some-
how natural, a posture exemplified in the Iberian case, for example, by the
ideology of the Reconquest as a “rightful” reappropriation of Christian
territories or in the expansionist understanding of conquista. In medieval
Spanish culture, Mark D. Meyerson notes that the “other” was often “a
neighbor or a known quantity who had to be rendered ‘other’ if society
20 encountering the african

were to function as rulers and religious elites of all groups” (xiv). Jean
Dangler points out that one of the tenets of medieval alterity was that it
“girded epistemological and ontological modes that integrated rather than
expulsed the divergent” (2), and that shifts in alterity coincided with the
modern creation of the other as someone to restrict and disempower (6).
One incarnation of the Moor as a figure of alterity is the Saracen, and
Dangler notes the methodological necessity, exemplified in John V. Tolan’s
Saracens, of historical analysis according to specific time periods and social
contexts (3) that recognizes that there is no diachronic, uniform concept
of Moorish or African otherness. Jeffrey J. Cohen’s study of English and
French representations of the Saracen works toward freeing the Saracen
from the overly facile strictures of the Self/Other binary opposition by con-
sidering how literary depictions dovetail with the universalizing claims of
psychoanalysis.26 In the case of “Oriental” cultures in Spain, as Tofiño-
Quesada argues apropos of nineteenth-century perceptions of the country
by foreign travelers (143), there is a paradox inherent in the idea of Span-
ish Orientalism: as a country that orientalizes and colonizes the African
Other, Spain is often described as Oriental itself. Similarly, Mahmoud
Manzalaoui speaks of the overpolarization of Self and Other in Saidian
Orientalism and notes that, in Spain, “the study of the East is precisely
not a study of the Other, but a recovery of part of the Self ” (838, empha-
sis in original). The same claim could be made about Portugal, although
“Eastern” cultures (Arabic, Hebrew, or Moorish) were not as present to
the degree they were in al-Andalus. Nonetheless, the Arabic, Hebrew, or
Moorish sectors of Portuguese society means that there existed an a priori
Orientalness to the “self ” within the borders of the home country that was
the seat and origin of imperialism.
If medieval and early-modern convivencia in Spain constitutes one socio-
historical forum for questioning otherness and Orientalist tenets, expan-
sionist Portugal constitutes another. The nature of Portuguese empire in
Africa varied greatly from time to time and region to region, so that it is
a mistake, as Wyatt MacGaffey notes in the case of Portuguese colonial in-
teraction in the sixteenth-century Kongo, to read those relations in mod-
ern, colonial terms (260). It is necessary not to construe the imperial or
colonial relationship solely in terms of dominance versus subjugation, a
construction that tends to polarize the subjugated other from the European
 encountering the african 21

colonizer and thus distorts the variegated encounters in Africa. The Por-
tuguese spaces of imperialism and colonialism align more with Mary
Louise Pratt’s postulation of the contact zone as “social spaces where dis-
parate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly
asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4). Consider
the Arabic-speaking Moorish slave trader in Africa who facilitated the
trade in sub-Saharan captives, or the mussambazes, African traders who
worked for the Portuguese and acted as their commercial agents in the
Indian Ocean trade (Newitt, East Africa xix).27 Moors were often complicit
in the exercise of power over other Africans, and, because of the histori-
cal presence of Moors in Portugal, are already and necessarily part of the
culture that produced expansion. Throughout the late-medieval and early-
modern periods up to Camões, the operative distinction made between
Portuguese imperialist voyagers and African Others is not “Portuguese”
versus “African” but “Christian” versus “Moor,” “infidel,” or “pagan.” Yet,
as Chandra Richard de Silva points out, even “Christian” is not an alto-
gether accurate term; though all Portuguese shared at least an ostensible
bond through Christianity, there was a minority of New Christians grouped
under the “Chrisitan” label who were reluctant converts from Judaism,
and not all of them were Portuguese (296). In a study of early-modern
Portuguese presence on the Swahili coast, Jeremy Prestholdt argues that
the “other” is too limiting a concept for understanding the many situations
of intercultural exchange and that scholars should be wary of employing
this concept as an easily transportable conceptual tool (384). Prestholdt
presents evidence that overturns the idea that “totalizing conceptualiza-
tions of the Other were necessarily present in every historical encounter
between Europeans and non-Europeans” (399).
In an oft-cited analysis of colonial discourse, Homi Bhabha argues that
“[t]he construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise
of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms
of difference—racial and sexual” (67), and, furthermore, that “[t]he objec-
tive of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of
degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest
and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (70). In the
Portuguese writings on Africa prior to Camões, the construction of Afri-
cans as degenerate types is frequent, if not consistent, and the basis of the
22 encountering the african

differentiation is usually religious and often also linguistic. Sub-Saharan

Africans in particular receive the most degrading characterizations as bes-
tial or barbaric, though as military foes they are often depicted as formi-
dable. What we do not find in the Portuguese material is emphasis on
sexual difference or on the sexuality of the African as a characteristic of
his alterity to European paradigms of civility. The pre-Camonian writings
on Africa do not characteristically shape expansionist travel and appro-
priation in erotic terms; they do not participate in a tradition of “male
travel as an erotics of ravishment” or depict Africa as “libidinously eroti-
cized” (22) that McClintock claims predated the writings of Columbus.
The “racial” aspect of the African, however, requires comment.
“Race” as an applicable term to medieval and early-modern culture has
generated a fair amount of critical discussion, especially in regard to texts
composed during imperial expansion and the establishment of a sup-
posedly natural power differential in favor of European colonizers when
confronted with indigenous populations of differing physiognomies and
spiritualities. A major point of this debate is the degree to which modern
understandings of “race” may be said to obtain in the culture of expansion-
ist encounter, such as Zurara’s descriptions of black Africans. In the light
of such problems, some scholars prefer the term “racialist” to point to an
inchoate, premodern practice of negatively differentiating non-European
civilizations from European ones on the basis of physical traits, religious
practices, or language. The modern use of the word race, according to
Ivan Hannaford, is “to claim that there [are] immutable major divisions
of humankind, each with biologically transmitted characteristics” (17).
The biological determinism of modern racist thought does not always
or easily map onto earlier time periods. Hannaford goes on to note that
the words for “race” in European languages in medieval and premodern
times carried meanings distinct from modern usage: “‘race’ entered West-
ern language late, coming into general use in Northern Europe about
the middle of the sixteenth century” (5).28 In fifteenth-century Portuguese,
according to James Sweet, raça referred to groups of plants, animals, or
humans that shared traits through a common genealogy (144); it is im-
portant to note that the characteristics of a shared genealogy, in the case
of humans, were usually not physical but religious.29 Zurara does not use
raça to refer to Moors or Africans but instead uses geeraçom (generation)
 encountering the african 23

or naçom (nation). “Generation” is a term with biblical resonances and

was related to the curse of Ham as the origin of and justification for the
enslavement of black Africans: “[t]he family curse of Ham had turned into
the notion of permanent racial difference that extended back to the very
beginning of mankind” (Sollors 111). A major determinant, as Sollors fur-
ther observes (84), in the ready equation between Africa and Ham in the
Middle Ages, was the T-O map in a 1472 edition of Isidoro’s Etymologiae
in which the world is divided into three geographic areas, each associ-
ated with one of Noah’s sons (Asia=Shem, Africa=Ham, Europe=Japheth).
Slavery is undoubtedly the most strident and visible arena for the work-
ings of skin-based racialist thinking. In Zurara’s Guiné, the first European
capture of African slaves occurs with the incursions of Antão Gonçalves
and Nuno Tristão into the terra dos negros (land of the blacks).30 Zurara’s
chronicle constitutes a premodern, pro-slavery exegesis resting on the in-
terlinking of the curse of Ham, slavery, and skin color (Sollors 94),
and attributes less worth to human beings who had black or brown skin
(Sweet 165).
Yet, even if race or racist thought in the modern sense did not exist in
the minds of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers, there was undeni-
ably a “pre-idea” (Hannaford 8) of race in the thirteenth through sixteenth
centuries. This presence leads Kim F. Hall to consider the symbolism and
aesthetics of whiteness and blackness in early-modern European culture
that “recognized the possibilities of this language for the representation
and categorization of perceived physical differences” that then “become
infused with ideas of Africa and African servitude” (4). Hall counters
the skittishness of some critics to use “race” as an operative concept in
earlier periods by arguing that “[t]he easy association of race with mod-
ern science ignores the fact that race was then (as it is now) a social con-
struct that is fundamentally more about power and culture than about
biological difference” (6). Arthur L. Little further defines the concept by
noting that “‘race’ in the early modern era . . . works less as a stable iden-
tity category than as a semiotic field, one as infinitely varying as the cul-
tural discourses constituting what we have come to identify as the early
modern era” (1).
Whiteness/blackness (or, in Hall’s analysis, lightness/darkness) is another
of those imperialist binary oppositions or what Prestholdt might have
24 encountering the african

easily designated as another “conceptual category” that buckle under the

evidence of the early writings on Africa; these color nodes must not be
understood as two points in opposition, but rather as a continuum, a color
gradation. Whiteness or lightness appears in Portuguese writings on Africa,
but it is important to note that it is not only a European trait but an Afri-
can one as well. Whiteness, like blackness, is a relative, rather than abso-
lute, characteristic. It can not only distinguish Africans from each other
and from their European observers, but it frequently becomes naturalized
as a common trait shared by all Europeans. And, it is important to note
that Iberian whiteness is not necessarily English or French whiteness.
The sexual unions and marriages between Portuguese and Africans dur-
ing the centuries of colonization produced varied forms of whiteness (as
did the unions between Iberians and Moors since the eighth century), and
to invoke a white/black binary distinction is often an idealizing gesture.
And idealization confirms ideological importance.31 In Race Relations
in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, C. R. Boxer notes the “darkening” of
Portuguese whiteness in the years following the time of Zurara through
intermarriages of Portuguese with Africans in Africa, a fact that blurs
the boundaries between “Portuguese” and “African.”32 Blackness, as Lowe
points out in a discussion of Zurara, proved a “slippery concept” for dark-
skinned Europeans who were aware that their own darkness was less than
ideal (11).
In Portuguese expansionist writings, the contrastive divisioning of the
human inhabitants of Africa based on skin color went hand in hand with
the partitioning of Africa into geographic regions. Zurara’s Guiné describes
the new lands and populations of (black) Africans outside of Mauritania
and Ethiopia that emerge into view as exploration (usually in the form of
slaving raids) moves southward along the western shore. Zurara proposes
to create a national “memória” (memory) of this geo-human space. The
chronicler combines received ideas about Africa with the secondhand re-
porting of newness (novidade) south of Bojador and south of the Senegal
River, usually identified as the dividing line between the terra dos mouros
(land of the Moors) and the terra dos negros (land of the blacks). Accord-
ing to Horta, Guiné is a “representative archive of a cultural inheritance
and, simultaneously, of the impressions resulting from first contacts” (“A
representação do africano” 244).33 If, as Horta argues, the black African is
 encountering the african 25

the “new human” that attends the emergence of anthropological discourse

(212), then this new brand of human and discourse is part of the ideo-
logical reinvention of Africa that expansion and Zurara’s chronicle instan-
tiate. Zurara’s terminology for natives is inconsistent; for example, mouro
is alternately distinct from, and synonymous with, negro (black), mouro
negro (black Moor or blackamoor), or guinéu (Guinean), and refers to
Africans outside of the generally accepted boundaries of Mauritania.34
Zurara’s terminological inconsistency may demonstrate geographic con-
fusion about the regions of Africa but it also suggests that in Guiné a new
kind of Moor, the mouro negro, appears on the mental radar of the Portu-
guese as opposed to the northern Moor of Mauritania (Horta, “Primeiros
olhares” 83). Devisse and Mollat incidentally observe that the “classic Euro-
pean view of Africa and Africans and the view held by the Portuguese did
not overlap. . . . Yet the latter view contained certain basic factors which
the former could not long ignore—namely, direct contact with the hith-
erto unknown continent and the importation of blacks reduced to slav-
ery” (154). In addition to the mouro negro, Zurara documents the existence
of yet another kind of Moor, the azenegue (Azanaghi, modern Sanhaja), a
designation that usually means the lighter-skinned Berber Moors who live
on the coast, as opposed to the populations living in the interior (Marga-
rido 510, 533).
The narrative compilations of Valentim Fernandes (fl. 1494–1516) and
Duarte Pacheco Pereira (ca. 1465–ca. 1533) are important syntheses of
knowledge about Africa from the time of Prince Henry’s sub-Saharan
explorations through the mid-sixteenth century. Fernandes was a German
printer who set up shop in Lisbon and was active in printing books related
to expansion, such as the Portuguese translation of the book of Marco
Polo (Livro de Marco Paulo) published in 1502, the same year Vasco da
Gama made his second voyage to India. Fernandes also produced an
early-sixteenth-century compilation of writings on expansion that focuses
almost exclusively on Africa, known as the Códice Valentim Fernandes
(Valentim Fernandes Codex). This manuscript contains, among other
texts, geographic/ethnological descriptions of Africa and its inhabitants,
portions of Zurara’s Guiné, and the Latin De prima inuentione Gujnee
of Diogo Gomes de Sintra. The codex contains numerous descriptions of
Moors that reiterate skin color gradations according to geographic regions
26 encountering the african

in that the more southernly Moors are darker. The geohumoral idea that
dark skin is a climate-induced aberration of white skin appears in the
early folios when Fernandes notes that the inhabitants of Arguim Island
are “white men by nature” (“som homens aluos de naturaleza,” 22) and
become black by walking nude in the sun, an idea that will soon be refuted
by Pereira. The Moors of Arguim (or “alarbes boons,” good Arabs) are
noteworthy because of their brown skin and because they are free from
all vice, including sodomy (38). This is one of the only times in expan-
sionist writings of the period that the “çugidade” (filthiness, 38) of Moors
is linked to sexual sin and not to faith.
Duarte Pacheco Pereira’s Esmeraldo de situ orbis, completed sometime
in the very early sixteenth century, is a geographic treatise on the Por-
tuguese explorations but it is also a compendium of knowledge on Africa.
In its pages Pereira summarizes geographic information and lore, nauti-
cal sailing directions, and the characteristics of peoples beyond the bor-
ders of Portugal. Of interest here is Pereira’s designation of two Ethiopias,
upper and lower Ethiopia. Pereira’s reiteration of this geographic divide
solidifies certain notions about the distribution of Moors and the lands
of the blacks for the sixteenth century, some of which notions originate
in Zurara. Pereira identifies lower Ethiopia as the “Etiópias de Guiné”
(Ethiopias of Guinea, 78)—that is, all African territories from the Senegal
southward—and upper Ethiopia as “os opulentíssimos Reinos da Índia”
(the most wealthy kingdoms of India, 84).35 Pereira remarks that “na qual
região so acharia tanta multidão de novos povos e homens negros, quanta
do tempo deste descobrimento atégora temos sabido e praticado, cuja
color e feição e modo de viver alguém poderia crer, se não os houvesse
visto” (in this region a great multitude of new peoples and black men
would be found; as, in fact, have been discovered from that time to our
day; whose color and shape and way of life none who had not seen
them could believe, 62). The insistence on the newness of the peoples of
lower Ethiopia reinscribes the idea that Guinea marks an epistemological
boundary and beyond it lies a new world, a slight relocation southward of
Zurara’s boundary in the form of Cape Bojador, the end point of knowl-
edge and lore.
The alliance between land divisions and skin color means that Moors,
black Africans, Ethiopians, or Guineans function like monsters in that
 encountering the african 27

they mark geographic boundaries and the limits of the known and the
familiar. Perhaps one of the most dramatic and oft-cited instances of color
differentiation occurs in Zurara’s Guiné in what Lowe calls an “unprece-
dented spectacle of ‘blackness’” (10). The scene is the first documented
slave market, in August 1444, in the southern Portuguese town of Lagos:

era hva marauilhosa cousa de veer. Ca antre elles auya alguvs de razoada
brancura fremosos e aspostos. outros menos brancos que queryam semelhar
pardos. outros tam negros come tiopios tã desafeiçoados assy nas caras
como nos corpos que casy parecia aos homees que os esguardauam que vyã
as jmagees do jmjsperyo mais baixo. (107–8)

It was a marvelous thing to see. There were those among them of a rea-
sonable whiteness, appealing and in good form; others were less white, and
appeared brown; and there were others that were as black as Ethiopians, so
ugly in face and body that they appeared, to those who looked on them, to
be of the lowest hemisphere.

Lahon (“Black African Slaves” 262) notes the aesthetic judgment passed
on the blackest African male here as derisive—a judgment, according to
him, associated with the European fear of blackness. Sweet finds that
Zurara’s comments are shaped by a racial hierarchy (160); there can be
little doubt of this given Guiné’s justificatory rhetoric of the enslavement
of the sub-Saharan African. Yet, even if we accept the negative, racial val-
uation of blackness, it is important to note that this hierarchy is not a
rigid stratification differentiating two poles of black and white but rather
a continuum. What Zurara’s description of the slave market makes clear
is the connectedness between black and white, so that the presumed and
authoritative white I/eye of the chronicler, and of the conquistatorial
“we” that regularly appears throughout the text (defined mostly as Chris-
tian), belongs to an Iberian or Mediterranean inflection of white, even
if, following Hulme, we allow “the term as accurate to describe the color
of southern Europeans” (“Tales of Distinction” 162). Horta similarly notes
that the categories of “Portuguese” or “white” are not clear (“Evidence”
114). The spectrum of skin colors, beginning with “reasonable whiteness”
and ending in Ethiopian blackness, reflects the trajectory southward traced
28 encountering the african

by the Portuguese slavers that begins in northern Africa and ends in the
terra dos negros with each region’s by now characteristic pigmentation.
Zurara’s description aspires to geographic inclusiveness in that the color
continuum represents all of Portuguese Africa at the time of the chroni-
cle. The colors of the bodies of the slaves visually demonstrate the reach
of Portuguese conquest along the west coast.
In this same chapter, Zurara reflects on the plight of the slaves:

mas qual serya o coraçom por duro que seer podesse que nom fosse pungido
de piedoso sentimeto veedo assy aquella cõpanha Ca huvs tijnham as caras
baixas e os rostros lauados com lagrimas oolhando huvs contra os outros.
outros estauam gemendo muy doorosamente esguardando a altura dos ceeos
firmando os olhos em elles braadando altamente como se pedissem acorro ao
padre da natureza. . . . Mas pera seu doo seer mais acrecetado sobreueherom
aquelles que tijnham carrego da partilha e começarom de os apartarem huvs
dos outros . . . onde cõuijnha de necessydade de see apartarem os filhos dos
padres e as molheres dos maridos e os huvs jrmaãos dos outros. (108)

But what heart could be so hard that it would not be struck by painful
sentiment to see that company? Some kept their heads low and their faces
bathed in tears as they looked on one another; others moaned piteously and
turned their faces to the heavens, crying loudly, as if asking for help from
the father of nature. . . . But to augment their suffering even more, those
in charge of dividing the captives began to separate them . . . and it was
necessary to part children from their parents and husbands from their wives
and brothers from brothers.

A certain skittishness can be glimpsed in the chronicler’s commiserating

rhetoric. Margarido finds that Zurara’s description of the slaves is an indi-
cation of the “surprise” manifested before somatic diversity (515). Yet it is
possible to read the passage as if the Portuguese (or the observational “I”
or “we”) did not so much experience surprise at the range of pigmenta-
tion, but rather connection. Zurara’s slave market presents the possibility
of a somatic link between slave traders and slaves, between conquistator-
ial explorers and human booty. African darkness, Zurara implies, is not
all that different from Portuguese whiteness, and in this his narrative voice
 encountering the african 29

is sympathetic to the lamentations of the captives and to the genealogi-

cal violence the slave trade causes. Zurara’s commiseration may well be a
rhetorical move meant to distance himself and the proponents of expan-
sion from the dangerously close darkness of Africa through a gesture of
pitiful sympathy. This darkness becomes uncomfortably proximate through
the racial intermediary, the brown (pardo) captive, who is neither entirely
white nor entirely black. Brown is at once a color originating from Africa—
such as the light-skinned azenegue Moors—as it is also one produced by
expansion and the offspring of white Europeans and black Africans. Later,
the most emblematic figure of this mixing in the culture of colonization
is the child produced by the lançado, or the European who married in-
digenous women and lived in Africa, who “went completely native, strip-
ping off their clothes, tattoing [sic] their bodies, and speaking in the local
languages, and even joining in fetishistic rites and celebrations” (Boxer,
Race Relations 9).36 The children of such unions were often referred to as
“mulattoes.” Silva maintains that, as opposed to other European colonial
practices, “Portuguese colonists did not forcefully exclude or condemn
interracial sex” (“Raced Encounters” 27). Mulato as a designation for some-
one with brown skin may in itself be pejorative, if we accept the etymol-
ogy of the word as a term originally used for a mule (Tinhorão 238). In
Zurara, the brown-skinned African—either the mulatto or a light-skinned
native—is a third racial term that upsets the black/white opposition and
notionally connects explorers to their captives.
Zurara’s description of the skin color of the captives admits this con-
nection at the same time that it attempts to isolate brownness as a separate
or discrete pigmentational category. Brownness in this taxonomic perspec-
tive functions as a buffer zone between white and black and allows a racial
hierarchy to remain in place, however temporarily. The brown third term
as a color that threatens to loosen the black/white distinction and construe
southern European whiteness relationally rather than absolutely precipi-
tates Zurara’s recourse to aesthetics as an arbiter of moral categories. If the
fact of whiteness in itself is not corroborated by the natural world as an
innate marker of European superiority, then an aesthetico-moral reading
of the hues of humankind revealed by Africa rescues the European’s “nat-
ural” authority over the African. Pigmentational difference is, according
to Haydara, one of the Western criteria of categorization that makes Guiné
30 encountering the african

a founding text of imperialism (77). Those moments in which brownness

(or lesser blackness) appears and inevitably links black to white acti-
vate taxonomic distinctions that maintain blackness as an aesthetically
and morally “ugly” trait. If, for the crown-appointed chronicler and there-
fore curator of the ideological motives behind expansion, racialist differ-
ence serves as an easy way to maintain those motives in the encounters
narrated, the slave market is an especially and intensely marked moment
of this kind of difference and the value judgments it allows. That is, not
all awareness of color differentials, either in Zurara or in other texts, acts
in the same way or with the same force. Ann Laura Stoler summarizes, for
later British colonialism, the dynamics of racism that have a precursor in
Zurara; she notes that “studies of the colonial have only begun to recog-
nize that the quantity and the intensity of racism have varied enormously
in different contexts and at different moments in any particular colonial
counter” (24, emphasis in original).
The innate or essentialist connection that expansionist writers attempt
to establish between the lesser colors of black and brown and the gradu-
ally revealed peoples of Africa as a means of justifying conquest and of
maintaining an aprioristic separation between “us” and “them” also sur-
faces in the description of geographic regions. Zurara establishes equations
between space, its inhabitants, and the color(s) of inhabitants that will be
repeated throughout the early-modern period; these associations meto-
nymically transfer the color of inhabitants to the land itself.37 Guinea is the
“terra dos negros” (Guiné 116) much as Mauritania, up to the Senegal River,
is the “terra dos mouros,” the domain of the lighter-skinned azenegues.
The tight association between the color of Africans (or Guineans) and the
land itself creates specific regions of difference or otherness. In a study of
geographic difference in Shakespeare, John Gillies notes a “complex and
dynamic imaginative quality [to geography], with a characterological and
symbolic agenda” (3), in which imperial expansion brought with it hosts
of new others and the related need to differentiate, establish symbolic bor-
ders, and enact new rites of exclusion (6). Though Shakespeare’s England
and northern European experiences of imperial otherness (especially as
it relates to Africa) are different from those of Portugal, Gillies’s obser-
vation may be backdated to the fifteenth century and to the perceptions
of African geography by Portuguese writers. The zones of Africa exist
 encountering the african 31

within both real and symbolic borders, borders that delineate geographic
and cognitive newness and whose inhabitants unwittingly play a role in
a European-centered, historico-imaginative gnosis of the continent. Once
again Zurara’s slave market is instructive. If the hues of the slaves’ skin
collectively gathered at the market symbolically represent Portuguese
exploration through the territorial regions associated with those varying
hues, the partitioning of the slaves is a symbolic appropriation of African
space in absentia. Dividing the collected bodies is an analogue to the tex-
tual division and partitioning of Africa in Zurara, Leo Africanus, or Már-
mol Carvajal. In a study of the changing conceptualizations of Atlantic
space from the Middle Ages to the discoveries, Luís Adão da Fonseca
establishes that, in the later fifteenth century, the Portuguese had revised
an idea of geography as dominated by places to one characterized by
spaces, and that space was conceived of in terms of the bodies that occu-
pied it (16). The slaves in Lagos are living markers and products of Afri-
can space so that the tyranny of the slave market is yet one more act of
control over Africa. In Guiné, Zurara’s inconsistent use of mouro to refer
to peoples outside of Mauritania frees the label from a geographically
determined referentiality and allows for Moors to become the signifiers of
African space. Moors are emanations of African space, in and outside of
Mauritania, bodies that both conjure and mark Africa. In Fonseca’s line
of reasoning, Africa begins to exist in the fifteenth century in a fundamen-
tally different way from previous eras: Africa now exists primarily because
of the bodies it generates, and the capture and transportation of Guinean
slaves captures space itself for the purposes of exploitation.
By metonymically racializing African land through the colors of its in-
habitants, Zurara and others attempt to establish otherness as an inert fact
of nature waiting to be revealed through the hermeneutic activity of writ-
ing. The natural world colludes with Zurara’s Christian cosmos and its
moral hierarchy by marking its inhabitants visibly and therefore placing
those inhabitants in an order of being that it is up to interpreters like
Zurara to read. In the early pages of Guiné, the chronicler summarizes
geographic knowledge on Africa and writes:

Veio aqueles garamantes E aquelles tiopios que viue sob a ssoõbra do monte
Caucaso negros em collor por que Iazem de sob o posito do auge do sol o
32 encountering the african

qual seedo na cabeça de capicornyo he a elles e estranha quentura segvdo

se mostra pello mouimeto do centro de seu excentrico ou per outra maneira
por que vezinham cõ a cinta queimada . . . (20)

I see those Garamantes and those Ethiopians who live under the shadow of
Mount Caucasus, black in color because they live opposite the full height
of the sun; and the sun, as it is in the head of Capricorn, shines a strange
heat on them that is demonstrated by the movements from the center of its
eccentric or by the proximity of these people to the Torrid Zone . . .

In a later chapter (borrowed from Alfonso X’s General estoria), Zurara

again remarks on “o color meesmo daquelle pouoo de thiopya cujo sangue
he queimado da grande queetura do sol que ha ally o poder de todo seu
feruor” (the very color of the Ethiopian people, whose blood is burnt by
the immense heat of the sun which there commands the full power of its
heat, 239). The sun scorches the inhabitants of Ethiopia, and this black-
ness, in turn, is one of the signs of the natural world that expansionist
writers read authoritatively, like the color and run of the sea, the presence
of birds over water as indicative of the proximity of land, or the sign lan-
guage of Africans. In this context, Zurara’s locution “estranha quentura”
is notable—the “strange” or “wondrous” heat of the Torrid Zone traces
a line that, until the Portuguese expeditions, had not been crossed and had
therefore “naturally” prevented the passage of bodies and knowledge.38
Expansion abolishes this boundary and brings a corpus of knowledge
back from beyond the intense and strange heat of Africa; part of that
knowledge consists in the forms of African alterity and the beginnings
of a more comprehensive and verifiable African geography. By breaching
Cape Bojador and the storied Torrid Zone, Portuguese travelers-writers
create a geography of difference, if not strict otherness. This geography,
like the ontology of space studied by Syed Manzurul Islam in travel nar-
ratives, grounds otherness in spatial locations (5) and creates a sympathy
between spaces of dwelling and bodies that makes space a trope of essen-
tial differences (7). The expansionist texts on Africa create difference by
racializing space and the entire body and expanse of Africa as it gradually
revealed itself to expansionist eyes.
 2
/?
Expansion and the
Contours of Africa

The campaigns of exploration and conquest begun with the cap-

ture of Ceuta in 1415 and that evolve into the expansive presence in Africa
and India in the sixteenth century nurture a culture of writing that shapes
Africa into a historiographic enterprise, one that includes traditional
genres such as the chronicle as well as the kinds of texts that are a direct
product of maritime voyaging such as the roteiro (rutter) or the personal
account of nautical voyages. Numerous descriptions of expeditions into
Africa exist in manuscript and printed form.1 This cultivation of prose
writings immediately precedes and informs Os Lusíadas and its formula-
tion of Africa as a place of historical and imaginative experience and col-
lective memory. In the writings of authors like Alvise Cadamosto, João de
Barros, or Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, the spaces and contours of Africa
are submitted to scrutiny and Africa is verbally mapped under several
textual guises. Concomitant with explorations and travels through the
new continent we also find assumptions about Africa as a historical con-
tinuity to a national past. This perceived continuity in part is what makes
writings on Africa ideological in that, to varying degrees, they propose an
inevitability of exploration, conquest, and colonization, an inevitability
often expressed in the idiom of nautical travel and perception. The Por-
tuguese discursive regime on Africa in the years leading up to Camões’s
epic as it is evidenced in representative texts is the subject of this chapter.
This consideration, it should be noted, like P. E. H. Hair’s survey of early
documents on Guinea, is “necessarily Lusocentric” (“The Early Sources”
88) in that it focues on sources in Portuguese.

33
34 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Routes, Histories, and Chronicles

No matter how one might choose to interpret the invasion and capture
of Ceuta in general historical terms, either as the beginning of a new era
of expansion or as the culmination of a medieval, chivalric, and crusad-
ing mentality, the fact remains that the incursion into Ceuta triggers a
sustained textual productivity on Africa as one of the characteristic prac-
tices of empire. This textuality accompanies the exploration and conquest
of Africa and the numerous slaving raids and trading ventures that were
the backbone of the Portuguese Atlantic and Indian Ocean empire. “Colo-
nialism . . . then, is an operation of discourse, and as an operation of dis-
course it interpellates colonial subjects by incorporating them in a system
of representation” (3), write Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson; the Portuguese
discourse on and about Africa exemplifies the inextricability of textuality
from imperial praxis.
This textual productivity, so far as we know, began with Gomes Eanes
de Zurara’s Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta, completed in 1450, thirty-five
years after the capture of the Moroccan city. Although the kinds of writ-
ings produced on Africa will vary widely throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury, Zurara formally initiates this discursivity with the chronicle, a genre
that will remain a constant in the years of exploration and colonization
as a preferred mode of historical writing. Zurara’s chronicles are some of
the few (extant) narrative texts from the fifteenth century on the Portu-
guese presence in West Africa.2 The formation of Portugal as a seafaring,
imperial nation emerges alongside this historiographic activity, so that
what Richard Helgerson claims for Elizabethan England—that “[t]he
discursive forms of nationhood and the nation’s political forms were
mutually self-constituting” (11)—holds true for Portugal as it moved from
a land-bound, medieval past to a seafaring early-modern present and
future. Zurara’s works, together with the other kinds of texts I examine in
this section, establish a practice of how European subjects write about for-
eign spaces and peoples, often under the authority (directly or indirectly)
of the crown or its representatives. In their shared characteristics, these
writings collectively manifest a loose code for writing and reading the
world under early expansion. In order to characterize the culture of writ-
ing on Africa prior to Camões, I turn to a selection of texts of different
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 35

types: the eyewitness narrative, the geographic description, the nautical

roteiro or rutter, and the histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta, though technically the first Portu-
guese textual treatment of expansion into Africa, in reality deals less with
the Portuguese invasion and occupation of the North African city than it
does with the plans for the 1415 mission and the preparations leading up
to it. This may be due to Zurara’s own late coming to the project, because
his predecessor Fernão Lopes had likely drafted parts of the chronicle
before Zurara took over the post of cronista-mor. Ceuta, the third and
final part of the Crónica de D. João I, shares a focus with the first two parts
(which had been completed by Lopes) on João I’s reign in Portugal and
his political interactions with Spain. Ceuta is the foundational moment to
the chronicler’s ethics of expansionist historiography. Zurara links Ceuta
and the Portuguese conquest of it by naturalizing Portuguese movement
into African space; he begins the chronicle with the following claim:

Concrusam he dAristoteles no segundo liuro da natural filosofia que a

natureza he começo de mouimento e de folgança. E pera declaraçam desto
aprendamos que cada huva cousa tem calidade. per o qual se moue ao seu
proprio lugar quando esta fora delle entendendo aly ser confirmada milhor.
e por aquella mesma propriedade faz assessegamento depois que esta onde
a natureza rrequere. (3)

Aristotle concludes in the second book of natural philosophy that nature

is the beginning of movement and rest. As proof of this let us realize that
everything has a quality that compels it to return to its proper place when
away from it, and in that place it is in its best state. And, by that same prin-
ciple, it rests once in the place nature has deemed appropriate for it.

Following this, Zurara establishes João I’s role as the “natural” lord of
Ceuta by writing that

[o] tempo e grandeza das obras nos constrangem fortemente que scpreu-
amos nos seguintes capitullos a gloriosa fama da muy notauel empresa
tomada per este virtuoso e nunca vençido prinçipe senhor Rey Dom Joham.
que seu preposito detreminou forçosamente per armas conquistar huva tam
36 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

nobre e tam grande çidade como he Cepta. no qual feito consirando pode-
mos esguardar quatro sousas .ss. grande amor da fee. grandeza de coraçam.
marauilhosa ordenança. e proueitosa vitoria. a qual foy marauilhoso preço
de seu grande trabalho. (8)

Time and the greatness of certain deeds strongly compel us to write in the
following chapters the glorious fame of the remarkable enterprise under-
taken by this virtuous and undefeated King João. He resolved, with great
determination, to conquer by force of arms the noble and worthy city of
Ceuta. In considering this feat we may regard four things in relation to it,
namely, a great devotion to the faith, nobility of heart, a marvelous order,
and a worthy victory, which itself was a wondrous reward for this notable
effort.

Ordenança (order), Zurara’s favored term for expressing the confluence of

a providential and cosmic ordering of the universe and the fulfilmment
of that order through conquista and subsequently through the considered
activity of the historiographer, is “maravilhosa” in the sense that it is the
revelation of a divine plan. In Zuraran discourse, this “order” is a natu-
ralizing principle: anything that is a result of it has come about not by
human agency but by the operation of the celestial spheres that coordi-
nate historical action and its narrative expression. Within this scheme, the
chronicler historicizes Ceuta, not as a component of a more local or Iber-
ian past but in terms that trace the city to the beginning of the world:

E conta della Abilabez que foy grande doutor antre os mouros que esta
çidade foy fundada depois da destruiçam do deluuio duzentos e trinta e tres
annos . . . E diz que o fundador della foy seu neto de Noe. e que esta foy a
primeira que elle fundou em toda aquella terra dAffrica. e que por tanto lhe
pos nome Cepta que quer dizer em lingua caldea começo de fermosura.
e diz que mandou escreuer huvas letras na primeira pedra que se pos no
aliçeçe. Esta he a minha çidade de Cepta a qual eu pouoei primeiramente
de companhas de minha geraçam. os seus çidadãos seram estremados de
toda a nobreza dAffrica. Dias viram que sobre o seu senhorio se espargera
sangue de diuersas naçoões e o seu nome durara ata o acabamento do der-
radeiro segre. (10)
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 37

Abilabez, a learned man highly respected by the Moors, tells that this city
was founded two hundred and thirty-three years after the destruction
wrought by the flood . . . He further relates that the city’s founder was
Noah’s grandson and was the first city he founded in all the lands of Africa,
and because of this he named it Ceuta, which means “beginning of beauty”
in Chaldaic. And he ordered that letters be chiseled onto the first foundation
stone. “This is my city of Ceuta which I have populated with people from
my generation. Its citizens rank among the highest nobility of all Africa.
There will come days when the blood of many peoples will be spilled here,
and the name of Ceuta will last until the end of time.”

Zurara appropriates Abilabez’s narrative for the purposes of his chronicle

in its presentation of the history of Ceuta as a narrative of beginnings. The
story of Ceuta is literally a foundational story here since it is inscribed on
the very foundation stone of the city. A crucial element of this narrative
is the expression “começo de fermosura,” which, as a moment in the flow
of the chronicle itself, adumbrates the Portuguese campaigns of explora-
tion and conquest as that which is formoso (beautiful) in the overall divine
scheme Zurara persistently invokes. The beauty that Ceuta instantiates is
therefore ethical in nature because it refers to the city’s role as a primordial
space of Portuguese expansion that combats the insidious cult and presence
of “Mafamede” (Muhammad). Zurara’s chronicle, by extension, partici-
pates in this ethical mandate by rendering the actions on Ceuta into text.
Within this history the rhetoric of a crusading Christianity and its
violent manifestations become apparent as the Ceuta proposal undergoes
deliberation. Crusade intersects with chivalric honor when Zurara dedi-
cates two chapters at the beginning of the chronicle to João I’s desire to
find an appropriate occasion for knighting his sons. When the signing of
a treaty with Castile (the monarch’s initial choice) fails, João Afonso, a
member of the royal household, approaches the princes and suggests the
capture of Ceuta:

Vossos pensamentos disse elle sam assaz de grandes e boõs. e pois que vos
taal vontade tendes eu vos posso assinar huva cousa em que o podees bem
e honrradamente executar. E esto he a çidade de Cepta que he em terra
dAffriqua que he huva muy notauel çidade e muy azada pera se tomar. (27)
38 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Your ideas, he said [to the princes], are good and noble. Since you are
inclined to such an enterprise, I can tell you of a deed that would be easily
accomplished. And that is the city of Ceuta in Africa, a most famous city
and quite propitious for capture.

This chivalric motive is one element of a larger historical justification. For

Zurara, the importance of Ceuta prior to 1415 is not its function as an
important trading center but as part of a centuries-long legend of betrayal
that traces back to the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711.
Zurara refers to the story of Count Julián, governor of Ceuta, who took
vengeance on Rodrigo, the last of the Visigothic kings, by prompting the
Moors to invade Spain:

The Portuguese explorations and settlements in West Africa were coastal enterprises.
The region south of the Senegal River was commonly referred to as “Guiné”
(Guinea). From Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 1450–1560.
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 39

E assi devees de saber que depois que esta çidade primeiramente foy fundada
ata o tempo que a elRey Dom Joham filhou. nunqua foy nenhum prinçipe
nem senhor que cobrasse seu senhorio per força darmas. Por que ella foy
primeiro de gentios como dito he. e depois foy conuertida aa fee de nosso
Senhor Jehsu Christo. na qual durou ata o tempo que a o conde Juliam
entregou aos mouros quando por vingança delRey Dom Rodrigo primeira-
mente os mouros passarom em Espanha . . . (10)

So you should know that, since this city was founded and to the time that
King João captured it, no prince or lord ever took its governance by force
of arms. It first belonged to the gentiles, as we said, and was later converted
to the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and remained like this until Count
Julián surrendered it to the Moors, who first came to Spain as vengeance on
King Rodrigo . . .

The loss of Spain to the Moors is the first and authorizing incident of
what Zurara repeatedly refers to as the “guerra dos mouros” (war against
the Moors), an extension of the crusading enterprise. In chapter 11, titled
“Como os letrados tornaram com rreposta a elRey dizendo que era seruiço
de Deos de se tomar a çidade de Cepta” (How the learned men delivered
a response to the king, which said that the capture of the city of Ceuta
was in the service to God), the learned doctors who serve as João’s coun-
selors recapitulate the incentive to invade Ceuta in these terms:

abasta que nos que aqui somos presemtes per autoridade da samta escpri-
tura, assy como homees que ssem nosso mereçimento teemos graao na sacra
theollesia, determinamos que uossa merçee pode mouer guerra comtra qua-
aesquer jmfiees assy mouros como gemtios, ou quaaesquer outros que per
alguv modo negarem alguv dos artijgos da samta ffe catholica, per cujo tra-
balho mereçerees gramde gallardom do nosso Senhor Deos pera a uossa
alma. (37)

It is sufficient that those of us who are present here by the authority of Holy
Scripture, and who, though undeserving, hold degrees in sacred theology,
do declare that your worship may incite war against any infidels be they
Moor or gentile, or against whomever else denies any article of the holy
40 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Catholic faith; for this work your worship will earn great reward for your
soul from Our Lord.

The rhetoric of subjugation of the infidel recalls the intractable rheto-

ric of the papal bulls (see below) that authorize the forceful capture of
Moors or “Saracens” in Africa in the name of the Catholic faith and, by
extension, condone whatever physical means might be necessary to effect
those captures. Zurara’s retrospective gesture here to the mentality of the
holy war against the infidel and, in the previous citation, to Ceuta’s “con-
verted” status, importantly authorizes its capture as an act of reappropri-
ation. The belief that Moors in (North) Africa were interlopers on lands
that by right belonged to Christians partly underlay the Portuguese under-
standing of conquest.
That the Moors themselves recognize and accept the imminence and
unavoidability of the Portuguese occupation of Ceuta is part of the chron-
icler’s recounting of a secret reconnaisance mission with prophetic over-
tones, and is part of the self-justifying logic of Ceuta in terms of the
political and mercantile interests of the crown. In chapter 17, the captain
of this mission, Afonso Furtado, relates an anecdote to João I in his de-
briefing session on his return to Lisbon from Ceuta. He tells the king of
a “marauilhoso acomteçimento” (marvelous incident) during a trip he had
made to Ceuta as a child with his father who was in the service of João’s
father, Pedro I. During that trip, he (Afonso) was approached by a vener-
able old Moor who asked him his origin. On learning Afonso was from
Lisbon, the Moor asked him who the Portuguese king was and if he
had any sons. Afonso told the Moor the names of Pedro’s legitimate sons
and, after considerable effort, recalled that Pedro also had a bastard son,
João (who would become João I). On hearing this, the Moor let out a sigh
and entered into a state of mournful sadness. Afonso asked the reason for
this, and the Moor answered that João was destined to become king, and
that “sera o primeiro rrey dEspanha que teera posse em Africa, e sera o
primeiro começo da destruiçom dos mouros” (he will be the first king of
Spain to hold a possession in Africa, and he will mark the beginning of
the destruction of the Moors, 57).3
Later in the chronicle, Zurara relates the story of a wise and holy
Ceutan Moor who had a dream during Ramadan in which he saw Ceuta
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 41

covered in bees, and saw a lion coming across the Strait of Gibraltar
accompanied by flocks of sparrows that devoured the bees. To interpret
the dream, the Moors sought the aid of a renowned astrologer who read
the stars, noted the presence of Orion and his sword (a sign of war), and
predicted a terrible fate for the Moors of the city by observing that the
bees of the holy man’s dreams were Moors and the sparrows, Christians.
The Christian symbolism becomes increasingly present as the chronicle
nears its end, such as in chapter 96 in which a Mass, celebrated after the
city’s capture, includes a sermon that interprets the three syllables of
“Ceuta” as a reflection of the Trinity and its five letters as mirroring the
wounds of Christ.
The prophetic and oneiric visions of Ceuta and Moors as yielding to
Portuguese power accomplish two main objectives, ones that will implic-
itly justify the campaigns of exploration of the uncharted west African
coast in Zurara’s next work, the Crónica de Guiné. Afonso Furtado’s anec-
dote and the Moor’s dream inscribe the capture of Ceuta within divine
order and the workings of the cosmos. In this logic the crusade against the
infidel is part of a cosmic directive that imposes a hermeneutic authority
on Moorish science (astrology) and religion, one that corroborates the
Christian holy war. The inscription of the Ceuta plan into the supernat-
ural world legitimizes the authority of João I as king, arguably Fernão
Lopes’s main objective of the first two parts of the Crónica de D. João I.
The prophesying of the destruction of Africa, in effect, naturalizes a bas-
tard’s claim to the throne.
With his next chronicle, the Crónica dos feitos de Guiné (1453), Zurara
focuses squarely and exclusively on the Portuguese exploration of West
Africa in the new geographic arena southwest of Morocco (generically
termed “Guiné”) in the three decades following the capture of Ceuta. In
this period, exploration, trading missions, and slaving raids set the stage
for Portugal’s mercantile ambitions on the African continent—trade was
the medium through which the Portuguese extended their influence, notes
Blake (36)—and on the western Atlantic islands. Guiné narrates explora-
tions along the west African coast to the mid-fifteenth century. The his-
torical narrative proper begins with Gil Eanes’s rounding of Cape Bojador
in 1434, and includes chapters on the first capture of black Africans in
1441, Nuno Tristão’s voyage to Cape Blanco in 1442, and his discovery of
42 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

the island of “Gete” (Arguim),4 and the first descriptions of non-Arabic

mouros (Moors) or negros (blacks) living south of the Senegal River. The
Crónica dos feitos de Guiné is the first text that details the experiences
of European navigators in the until then unexplored lands south of Cape
Bojador and that documents the initial moments of the Atlantic slave
trade.5 Zurara frames his narrative as a panegyric to the life and work
of D. Henrique or Prince Henry. Guiné begins with an apostrophe to the
prince:

An early pictorial representation of sub-Saharan black Africans in Guinea. The

Guinean is one of the new kinds of Africans encountered by Portuguese explorers
that appears in Portuguese writings on Africa beginning with Gomes Eanes de
Zurara. From the book of Balthasar Springer (a German merchant who traveled
to India with the fleet of Francisco de Almeida in 1505), 1508, in Walter Hirschberg,
ed., Monumenta ethnographica: Frühe völkerkundliche Bilddokumente, vol. 1 (Graz:
Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1962).
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 43

Oo tu principe pouco menos que deuinal. Eu rogo aas tuas sagradas ver-
tudes que ellas soportem com toda paciecia o fallecimeto de minha ousada
pena querendo tentar hva tã alta materya como he a declaraçõ de tuas
vertuosas obras dignas de tãta glorya . . . (19)

O Prince, little less than divine! I beg your saintly virtues to withstand, with
all patience, the deficiencies of my bold pen, as it attempts such noble mat-
ter as the writing of your deeds, deeds worthy of high glory . . .

Jerome C. Branche, in a study of the rhetoric of Guiné, finds that the

chronicle espouses a “discourse of power” and a “triumphalist tenor” (33),
in which the eulogistic portrait of Henry informs a crusading ethic.6 The
African Other, in Branche’s analysis, is submitted to an us/them dichotomy
that rests on a power differential of domination and conquest, one that is
tantamount to a “figurative erasure” (37) of the (black) African in Zurara’s
act of historical signification. Thus, in the “phenomenon of the manhunt”
(38), both people and the resources of the natural world are collapsed into
the category of “booty” (39). Branche concludes that Guiné, in its rele-
gation of the African Other to a position of natural inferiority and the
violence such relegation promotes, stands as a “foundational document
for colonialism and transatlantic slavery” (44); it “labels blacks and other
colonized people as inferior, under various rubrics, and articulates a jus-
tification for their subjection, thereby setting a discursive precedent for
subsequent colonial writing” (35).7
Branche is correct in finding here a discursive precedent of construing
the non-Christian Other as an inferior being, part of the ideological infra-
structure of Portuguese expansion. This ideological posture alternately
moralizes (black) Africans (distinct, it is important to remember, from the
north African Moors who often acted as slave traders for the Portuguese)
in negative terms, while also absolving them for their lack of Christian
faith. Thus Zurara, in the apostrophe to Henry, writes: “[o]uço as prezes
das almas Inocetes daquellas barbaras naçõoes em numero casy Infijndo
cuia antiga Ieeraçõ des do começo do mvdo nvca vyo luz deuinal” (I hear
the prayers of the innocent souls of those barbarous nations, almost
infinite in number, whose ancient generations, since the beginning of the
world, never saw divine light, 19). Zurara is speaking specifically of the
44 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

non-Arabic black African who was considered to be pagan rather than an

infidel or heretic. Much worse were the Moors who willfully followed the
“sect of Muhammad” and for whom Zurara reserves the term infiel (infi-
del). Yet, even with such an ideologically charged language, the extent to
which the capture of Ceuta and the explorations in Guinea are the prod-
ucts of a crusade mentality is open to critical debate. On the one hand, his-
torians such as J. H. Parry argue against the idea of the fifteenth-century
expeditions as a continuation of the Crusades, observing that crusades in
earlier centuries had been costly failures (22). On the other hand, Sanjay
Subrahmanyam notes the resurgence of the military orders in fifteenth-
century Portugal and, through them, the retrospective establishment of a
line of influence from the capture of Ceuta to the first Crusade (33–34). I
do not intend to resolve this debate here, but wish simply to note that,
whatever the historical praxis was in the fifteenth century, the survival of
a crusading rhetoric is discernible in Zurara’s chronicles and may stand in
opposition to the practical demands of a unified effort against the infidel.
Ceuta in this respect falls more comfortably into a crusading mold,8 for
by the time of the events narrated in Guiné the capitalist motives are ever
more apparent as the search for goods, slaves, and booty intensifies. Zurara
himself cannot entirely conceal the economic incentives of the incursions
into Guinea no matter how much he might refer to saving African souls.
The chronicler’s repeated use of “guerra dos mouros” points also to a sec-
ular impetus. Whatever crusading mentality Zurara invokes in Guiné is a
kind of performance, a remnant of a previous discursive tradition that
seeks to justify the raw capitalist underpinnings of the Guinean expedi-
tions with the hallowed veneer of militant Christianity. Zurara’s successor
to the post of cronista-mor, Rui de Pina (1440–1522), continues this vein
of language in the Crónica de D. Afonso V (Chronicle of King Afonso V)
by referring to Afonso V’s incursions into Africa as “cruzadas,” a reference
to the continuing threat of the Ottoman Turks and a prelude to the in-
tense ideological rhetoric of later historians such as João de Barros.9
The Crónica dos feitos de Guiné begins with Gil Eanes, the first known
European to round Cape Bojador in 1434. The event bears significance in
Zurara’s writing enterprise and in the demarcation of conquistatorial, geo-
graphic space. Bojador for centuries had been the outer limit of Western
knowledge about Africa. It was a “[psychological] barrier to the maritime
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 45

exploration of the African coast” (Russell, Prince Henry 111; similarly, Bar-
reto 84), a veil of fear separating Europe from sub-Saharan Africa beyond
which lay the “Green Sea of Darkness,” as ancient Arab geographers had
called it. With Eanes’s passage of Bojador in 1434, peoples living to the
south of it came into the consciousness of Europeans, peoples distinct
from the more familiar Moors and other African populations of the north.
Guiné, reputedly the first book by a European on the lands beyond Boja-
dor (Prestage, “The Life” 1), narrates an evolving encounter between Por-
tuguese travelers and Africa and its inhabitants that is as much geographic
as it is epistemological, since “Guiné” in Zurara’s usage is at once a loosely
defined coastal region and the idea of unknown, uncharted space. The
toponym refers to an extensive region of the west African coast extend-
ing from Cape Blanco and Arguim Bay southward to Cape Catarina and
beyond São Tomé and Annobom (Diffie and Winius 78). Bovill observes
that “Guiné” was the term used by the Portuguese to refer to the land of
the black Moors (mouros negros) in the Sudan as opposed to the brown-
skinned Moors of the Sahara (116). Russell notes the vagueness of the term
in the royal title “Senhor de Guiné” (Lord of Guinea) used by Portuguese
monarchs, a title that referred to “a vast expansion of the territorial and
and political possessions of the Portuguese crown . . . [that] included the
whole of the Atlantic littoral of Black Africa as far south as the continent
might prove to run” (“White Kings” 503).10 Horta argues that the term
ultimately carried political overtones in that

African spaces were . . . perceived within wider political spaces that only
made sense to outsiders, as spaces where European expansion and author-
ity, in reality or in fiction, was projected. “Guinea” had a political meaning
to the Portuguese crown, among other spaces that were part of a represen-
tation of overseas imperial power. (“Evidence” 115)

“Guiné,” then, is both an arena of imperial action and a symbolic represen-

tation of expansionist power and the contested sphere of political advantage
and prerogative, and as such is open to definition and redefinition. In its
politically and ideologically motivated uses, “Guiné” functions much as
Mauritania did in the Middle Ages as Barbour showed us in the preceding
chapter as a space whose demarcation responded to shifting circumstances.
46 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

In contrast to Ceuta, a historically familiar city, Guinea initially emerges

in the pages of Guiné as the region of the unknown so that its exploration
and appropriation realize a process of coming-to-know, an entry into
knowledge of a more expansive world space narrated by Zurara as the sur-
passing of both mental and physical borders. Guiné implicitly announces
that a new way of writing and perceiving the world lies beyond Cape Boja-
dor. Zurara first addresses this idea by identifying the reasons why Prince
Henry sponsored expeditions to Guinea. These reasons are (1) to know
once and for all what lay beyond Bojador, (2) to establish trade with what-
ever Christians might be found in those regions, (3) to discover the extent
of the power and dominion of the Moorish infidel in such territories,
(4) to locate a Christian prince or ruler in those lands as an ally in the
war against the Moors, and (5) to bring lost souls forward for salvation.
These reasons provide an access to knowledge: “[e]ntom maginamos que
sabemos algva cousa quando conhecemos o sseu fazedor e a fim pera que
elle fez tal obra” (we imagine that we know a matter when we are famil-
iar with its doer and the objective he had in doing it, 43). The identifica-
tion of Henry’s motivations for exploring Guinea inscribes ratiocination
into the Guinean voyages as both motive and outcome. Zurara’s chronicle
completes the revelation or journeys of knowledge initiated by the prince.
In another early chapter, the chronicler pauses to reflect on the place of
Bojador in the history of Portuguese navigation, because for centuries
Bojador was the southernmost point of Africa, an end-point of cognition.
Its strong currents and storms prevented safe passage. When Gil Eanes
successfully rounded the cape and returned to Portugal to tell his story,
Zurara writes that

elle [D. Henrique] tijnha voõtade de saber a terra que hija aallem das Ilhas
de canarya e de huv cabo que se chama do Boiador por que ataaquelle
tempo nem per scriptura ne per memorya de nhuvs homees nunca foe
sabudo determinadamete a callidade da terra que hya aallem do dicto
cabo. (43)

[Prince Henry] wished to know of the lands beyond the Canary Islands and
of a cape called Bojador, because until that time, the nature of the lands
beyond said cape was not known, either in memory or in writing.
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 47

Bojador hence marks a geo-epistemological boundary. The territories be-

yond are a no-man’s-land protected by fear. Zurara locates this fear in his-
torical time by placing it in the collective, apprehensive voice of the mariners:

Como passaremos . . . os termos que poserõ nossos padres ou que proueito

pode trazer ao Iffante a perdiçom de nossas almas Iuntamete com os cor-
pos. ca conhecidamente seremos omecidas de nos meesmos . . . Isto he
claro . . . que despois deste cabo nom ha hi gente ne pouoraçõ algva. a terra
nom he menos areosa que os desertos de Libya. onde nom ha augua nem
aruor nem herua verde . . . (47–48)

How are we to pass the limits imposed by our forefathers, or what benefit
can the loss of our souls and bodies bring to the Prince, since we will so
manifestly become our own murderers . . . It is clear . . . that beyond this
cape there is no human population and the land is not less sandy than the
deserts of Libya, with no water, no trees, no green plant . . .

This passage—whose imagery recalls the forest of the suicides in canto

XIII of the Inferno with its allusion to self-murder set in a landscape of
negativity—melds a medieval sense of spiritual voyaging and its possi-
ble perils with the geographic voyaging of this chronicle of exploration.
The land beyond stands as a border of spiritual and corporal danger that
breaks with a genealogical heritage of landboundedness. This geographi-
cally inflected fear and sense of peril, a precursor to Camões’s dramatic
prosopopeia of Adamastor, is an affective correlate of the nautical limit or
threshold. Briefly, but tellingly, Zurara links the structuring of the nautical/
geographic world to the interiorized realm of perception. South of Boja-
dor, uncharted Africa or Guiné comes into view through the navigational
eye of science and the interior eye of cognition and affect. These twin per-
spectives, laboring under the weight of divine directive, construe Africa
as an arena of blankness over which imperialism might be enacted and
written. In order to write—or, indeed, rewrite—Africa within the author-
ity of expansion, Africa must first be encountered within the frame of
maritime practice and the knowledge of the world such practice makes
possible. Africa is a space circumscribed by nautical experience that will
soon expand dramatically as Portuguese ships double the Cape. It is a geo-
48 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

graphic and nautical reality and a metaphor through which an expan-

sionist writing subject is brought into being.
Contemporaneous with Henry’s explorations/exploitations of Guinea
is a series of papal bulls that consolidate a campaign against inhabitants
of Africa as objects of subjugation. Within a year of the capture of the first
black slaves by Antão Gonçalves on the Saharan coast in 1441, these bulls
began to be issued and ratified Portugal’s rights (and not Spain’s, Portu-
gal’s competitor for these rights) to African territories and resources.11 The
bulls demonstrate the importance of theology in the colonial enterprise
(Raman 65). Branche notes that “such bulls would become the legitimiz-
ing instruments for future colonial (dis)possession” (45). The bull Illius qui
se pro divini (1442) grants Henry a monopoly over Guinean territories.
Subsequent to this document, the three other bulls considered to be the
most important for Portuguese expansion in Africa are the Dum diversas
(June 18, 1452), the Romanus Pontifex (January 8, 1455), and the Inter
caetera (March 13, 1456). The Dum diversas authorizes the king of Portu-
gal to conquer and subdue Saracens, reduce them to slavery, and confis-
cate their lands and goods. The Inter caetera grants perpetual spiritual
jurisdiction to the Portuguese over the regions conquered or to be con-
quered from Cape Bojador to the Indies, and “gave religious sanction to
Portugal to adopt an imperialist agenda toward the regions beyond Chris-
tendom” (Figueira 397n10).12 Nicholas V’s Romanus Pontifex stands out
among these bulls and is considered to be the charter of Portuguese impe-
rialism. The document reiterates the previous bulls and grants Portugal ex-
clusive rights of conquest on the African coast beginning at Cape Bojador
and extending southward. The bull reads, in part:

Nos, premissa omnia et singula debita meditatione pensantes, ac attendentes

quod cum olim prefato Alfonso Regi quoscunque Sarracenos et paganos
aliosque Christi inimicos ubicunque constitutos, ac regna, ducatus, prin-
cipatus, dominia, possessiones, et mobilia ac immobilia bona quecunque
per eos detenta ac possessa invadendi, conquirendi, expugnandi, debellandi,
et subjugandi, illorumque personas in perpetuam servitutem redigendi, ac
regna, ducatus, comitatus, principatus, dominia, possessiones, et bona sibi
et successoribus suis applicandi, appropriandi, ac in suos successorumque
suorum usus et utilitatem convertendi . . .
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 49

We . . . weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and not-
ing that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other
things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso [Alfonso V]—
to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans
whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the king-
doms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and
immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their
persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his
successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, pos-
sessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit . . .13

Mudimbe notes the “terrifying” (Idea of Africa 32) wording of this passage
in the powers it grants to the Portuguese king to subdue and conquer
Saracens and pagans; Branche finds a “sledgehammer legality” (46) to
the document. The language and implications are indeed sobering in the
wholesale authorization the bull grants to Portugal to confiscate (implic-
itly, by whatever means deemed necessary) African resources and peoples.14
Mudimbe argues that this (and other bulls) effectively empty Africa of any
native rights to land and resources, making Africa a terra nullius (no-man’s-
land) and advocating a European right of sovereignty outside of Europe
and of colonization and the pursuit of slavery (Idea of Africa 37; Invention
of Africa 45). The bulls are important moments in the European discourse
on Africa because their rhetoric conflates the several distinct populations
of Africans into an undifferentiated mass, which is itself a strident ideo-
logical gesture. Not only is the difference between “Moor” and “black”
null in the Romanus Pontifex, as Randles notes (L’Image 121), they are not
operative categories at all. Africans are either “Saracens” or “pagans,” all-
encompassing labels for the distant pontiff that do not recognize the dem-
ographic plurality of Africans as inchoately recorded in texts like Guiné.
From the outset of expansion, “Saracen” (in Latin or in Portuguese) is
always an ideologically charged term, unlike mouro, which can be neutral.
The bulls promulgate a way of speaking about Africa and Africans as much
as they authorize commercial interests under the cloak of evangelism. As
Lahon points out (Os negros 31), though the bulls do not specifically men-
tion the slave trade, they end up legitimizing it nonetheless. By the time
we get to Camões and Os Lusíadas, sarraceno is in common usage as a
50 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

synonym for “Muslim,” though the word’s remote etymological origin is

Arabic xaraqin, which means “Oriental” or “Asiatic” (Machado, Influência
arábica 227).15 If, as Machado claims (236), Portuguese sarraceno did not
come into use until the sixteenth century through Latin sarracenus, then
Camões participates in the early-modern fashioning of the term as a
counterpart to Christian in conquistatorial thought that is a rejuvenation
of the rhetoric of reconquista. Camões’s terms for Muslims are either mouro
or sarraceno, and the poet shapes the entire course of the Portuguese past
as a seamless battle against the infidel.16 For Camões, mouro has positive as
well as negative connotations (unlike the unilaterally negative sarraceno), as
the friendly relation between Vasco da Gama and the Moorish King of
Melinde proves, or the diplomatic facilitation of the Portuguese presence
in India through the Castilian-speaking Moor Monçaide in canto VII.
We continue our study of the textual matter of Africa by turning now
to an important non-Portuguese narrative on West Africa, Alvise Cada-
mosto’s account titled Navigazioni.17 Cadamosto was a Venetian merchant
who, during a trading voyage en route to Flanders in 1454, became inter-
ested in Prince Henry’s expeditions to Guinea and West Africa and eventu-
ally rose to a position of trust and confidence with the Portuguese prince.
Cadamosto made two voyages to Africa under Portuguese colors in 1455
as a young man of twenty-three who sought “aquistar alguna facultade
etiam de venir ad alguna perfecione de honore” (to acquire some mea-
sure of wealth and attain some degree of honor, 6).18 Cadamosto’s account
of his travels, redacted after he returned to Venice in the 1460s follow-
ing Henry’s death, includes information on a voyage made by Pedro de
Sintra in 1461 or 1462 to Sierra Leone. The Navigazioni is one of the im-
portant sources for Portuguese interests in Africa and the Henrican trade
in Saharan and black Africa subsequent to the information provided by
Zurara (Russell, Prince Henry 11).
Cadamosto’s text initiates a tradition of eyewitness accounts on Africa,
even though, in this case, the narrative was not composed until almost
a decade after the actual voyages and therefore relies heavily on memory
and probably other written sources. As with other eyewitness writers after
him, Cadamosto relates his story according to the chronological or linear
progress of a nautical voyage. Hence the ship and the idea of the ship are
primary structuring principles in the text. Throughout the numerous
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 51

expeditions to shore and contacts with natives, the writer/traveler assumes

a position of authoritative observation when confronted with the realities
of Africa. Peter Hulme, in a study of later European travels to the Carib-
bean, has called this the “position of ethnographic authority.” Hulme ex-
poses “a process founded upon the distinction between ‘self ’ and ‘other,’
that initial (and often implicit) splitting that constitutes the entity that sees
itself (again often implicitly) as authorized to make distinctions” (“Tales
of Distinction” 191). Not only does the position of ethnographic authority
allow Cadamosto to make distinctions, but it allows him to codify those
distinctions in writing as a detached, third-person observer, a narrative
posture that creates a de facto separation between “us” and “them” which
is a persistent trait of colonialist discourse. Cadamosto exercises this pre-
rogative (and its systematic correlate, the creation of taxonomies) most
notably in his descriptions of the African body. Like those in Zurara,
Cadamosto’s Africans are primarily distinguished from one another by
geographic region and skin pigmentation. This geodemographic lens is
purportedly the novelty of his narrative, for Cadamosto informs us that
he is the first Venetian to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and plumb the “terre
de negri” dela basa ethyopia” (lands of the blacks of lower Ethiopia, 3). He
then systematically partitions Africa and its inhabitants into a grid that
aligns skin color and geography: like Zurara, Cadamosto notes that the
Senegal River “parte generation che se chiama azanegi dal primo regno
de negri” (separates the Azenegues from the first kingdom of blacks, 18),
or adds that the men of the kingdom of Meli (not mentioned by Zurara)
“giera homini negrissimj e ben formadi de corpo” (were very black men
with well-formed bodies, 23). Other observations record deviances from an
assumed European cultural norm, such as the gender-transgressive behav-
ior of men in the first kingdom of blacks in lower Ethiopia (the Wolofs),
who “fano molti seruisi femenili como e de lauorar drapi e altre cosse e
filar gottonj” (perform womanly tasks, such as working with cloth and
other items, and spinning cotton, 31–32).
The imbrication of the land- and people-scapes of Africa occurs through
the seemingly transparent or neutral discursive mode of description. But,
as Ricardo Padrón advises us, although description appears to be the most
mundane and purely referential way of utilizing language, it in fact “entails
the encounter between data and expectations, between observations and
52 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

culturally contingent assumptions about the production of meaning” (21).

The alliance between African bodies (in their colors, shapes, and behaviors)
and spaces through descriptive taxonomies exemplifies a nonneutral use
of language in that Cadamosto’s eyewitness observations submit Africa
to European discursive control and reveal the strange, barbaric customs
Europeans expected to find. These descriptions result from an authorita-
tive optic over Africa that corporalizes its geographic expanses. Africa the
geographic space becomes a body to be controlled and subjugated (like its
human inhabitants) via the imposition of a grid that demarcates regions
by the skin colors of its peoples.
Cadamosto’s travels in Africa occur as a nautical voyage, which fur-
nishes a cohesion to his narrative that is, in its particulars, anecdotal and
episodic. The Italian navigator recounts numerous encounters with the
“terre de diuerse generatione stranie” (lands of many strange peoples, 6)
and uses “Africa” as a general toponym, a departure from Zurara’s usual
practice of referring to regions. With Cadamosto we find a fledgling per-
ception of Africa as a discrete geographic whole, a perception that will
not become standardized in Portuguese texts until the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury. The ship with its controlled steerage displays cultural and political
might and is the means, especially in texts that directly invoke the monarch
(through dedications or prologues, for instance) by which the crown estab-
lishes its sovereignty outside the metropole. It is the presiding image
that concatenates the diverse episodes of encounter and contact in Guinea,
and it represents the shaping power of Western science and thought over
undomesticated space and peoples. It is the vehicle of Western culture in
all its political, linguistic, technological, and spiritual force. The ship is
the medium, therefore, through which non-European or non-Portuguese
space and resources become “domesticated,” that is, annexed to and hence
transformed into the Portuguese domus or home. The deep-sea ship (nau,
navio, or caravela) lies at the heart of the arsenal deployed by travelers on
journeys of exploration or conquest. The technological superiority of the
ship differentiates the “civilized” mariner from “barbarous” peoples. Con-
sider Cadamosto’s observation:

Certificandouj quando costoro hebeno la prima vista de velle ne de nauili

sopra el mare mai per auanti ne per loro ne per soi antecessori hauea piu
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 53

visto credeteno che quelli fosseno vxelli con ale bianche che uolasseno che
de algun stranio luogo fosseno li capitati . . . non intendo lo artificio del
nauilio Si chel tuto teniano che fosse fantasme . . . (19–20)

I declare to you that when these people witnessed sails or ships at sea for
the first time (for neither they nor their ancestors had ever seen such a thing
before), they thought they were seeing huge birds with white wings in flight
which had come there from some distant land . . . and not being familiar with
the structure of a ship, they were certain they were seeing phantasms . . .

It is not that the Africans are ignorant of sailing; Cadamosto frequently

refers to their dugout boats (almadias) and their practice of offshore
fishing. What supposedly arrests the Africans’ attention is the design and
build of the deep-sea vessel, so wholly different from their own boats in
construction that it seems to come from the other world. Cadamosto in-
dicates the presence of nautical science in Africa as an indisputable sign
of authority, because there is nothing given about such technology—it is
a construction, an “artifice,” and hence the result of powers of rationality,
assessment, and calculation that outstrip the Africans’ more naturalistic
seafaring knowledge as evidenced in the simplicity of dugout boats. This
seafaring technology, in turn, bestows a cohesion on Cadamosto’s epi-
sodic narrative in that the forward-moving, controlled route of the ship
binds the several and often disparate episodes of the text into a discernible
whole or trajectory.
Cadamosto’s indications of distances traveled and of time are typical of
the genre of nautical writing developed by Portuguese maritime travelers
known as the roteiro (rutter), a type of navigational guide. In this kind of
text, coasts and coastal waters are described, and natural signs or mark-
ers (e.g., rivers, trees, or gulfs) are mentioned in order to help pilots nav-
igate and recognize certain stretches of land. Cadamosto’s text displays
characteristics of the rutter that will be developed throughout the fifteenth
century, and it is in response to the realities of Africa that this nautical
mode of perceiving and writing the phenomenal world finds full expres-
sion. Some scholars have pointed out the inaccuracies of Cadamosto’s
nautical information (such as his calculations of distances), but the accu-
racy of his nautical measurements or dating of events is secondary to the
54 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

habits of thought demonstrated in making such observations in which

horizontal space and chronological or linear time are infixed into the Nav-
igazioni. These habits of thought, to be repeated by all future authors
of roteiros or similar writings in which encounters with indigenes and
foreign lands are interpolated among observations of navigational infor-
mation, overlay the navigational, linear progress along coasts or riverine
waterways with the spatialization of chronological time; the directional
progress of nautical voyages creates spaces of chronological time. Such
spaces in part define Western imperial itinerancy. In Ulysses’ Sail, Mary W.
Helms explains how, in “traditional” societies, conceptions and construc-
tions of geographic space and distance are “neither neutral nor homoge-
neous concepts” (8). What holds true for Helms’s anthropologically based
study of traditional societies finds an interesting correlate in early writings
by Europeans on Africa because a similar practice obtains of construing
geographic distance and space in nonneutral terms according to a vision
of Africa and Africans as unmarked by history or technology and as there-
fore barbarous. Anne McClintock’s comments on technologies of surveil-
lance in the late-Victorian era encounter an important precursor in the
textual matter of Africa; McClintock, in explaining the idea of “anachro-
nistic space,” a notion based on the premise that colonized lands are empty
because “indigenous peoples are not supposed to be spatially there,” argues
that “colonized people . . . do not inhabit history proper but exist in a per-
manently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire
as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency” (30).
Space, distance, and time can therefore be ideological constructs. They
relate Africa to a Western manner of measuring experience, space, and
movement. Written discourse as the concrete instantiation of this manner
is yet another technological advantage of the European. The perambula-
tions of the deep-sea vessel write space, time, and historical consciousness
onto the sands and waters of Africa.
Two other important texts continue the genre of the firsthand account
and structure historical experience within the mold of a nautical voyage.
These texts are Diogo Gomes de Sintra’s Descobrimento primeiro da Guiné
(First Discovery of Guinea) and Álvaro Velho’s Relação da viagem de Vasco
da Gama (Account of the Voyage of Vasco da Gama), both from the late
fifteenth century.
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 55

Diogo Gomes (d. 1502) was almoxarife or royal tax collector of the town
of Sintra on the Atlantic coast just west of Lisbon. Gomes became active
in oceanic navigation in 1444 and made expeditions to Guinea. He was
in the service of both Prince Henry and Afonso V. The narrative that
bears Gomes’s name is his recollection of Guinea expeditions as dictated
to Martin Behaim (who would later become famous for his globe) while
Behaim was in Portugal. Behaim composed the text in Latin. The accuracy
of Gomes’s technical information is open to question; as Russell notes,
there are serious chronological errors and the narrative is often incoherent
and contradictory (Prince Henry 327–28). The inaccuracies are likely the
result of Gomes’s recollection of events long past and the transmission of
information from Gomes’s spoken Portuguese to Behaim’s written Latin,
possibly through the mediation of an interpreter. The Latin version of the
text (De prima inuentione Gujnee) appears in Valentim Fernandes’s Códice
Valentim Fernandes.
Despite Gomes’s inaccuracies, Gomes’s text, like Cadamosto’s, is im-
portant for how it shapes and depicts Africa in narrative form. Although
his memory may have been faulty, Gomes’s memorialist structuring of
his narrative implicates the individual memory into an evolving, collec-
tive memory that foreshadows Camões’s act of poetic creation as a new
“historical” memory, one that is the basis for the mythification of the
Portuguese past. Gomes’s sometimes desultory style, while frustrating for
those seeking “historical” accuracy or coherence, foregrounds the Desco-
brimento primeiro as an act of memory, a valuation of memory making as
part of the history of Portuguese presence in Africa. Gomes’s first memo-
rialist action is to begin his narrative in this manner:

No ano do Senhor de 1415, um fidalgo do reino de Portugal, D. João de

Castro . . . navegando pelo mar Atlântico, tomou pela força uma parte de
uma ilha dita Grã-Canária . . . (51)

In the year of Our Lord 1415, a nobleman of Portugal, D. João de Castro . . .

navigating the Atlantic Ocean, took by force part of an island called Grand
Canary . . .

Gomes identifies 1415 as a historical beginning of which his own narrative

will be a continuation, yet surprisingly he identifies the importance of this
56 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

year as being an expedition to the Canaries, not the capture of Ceuta. This
may simply have been an error on Gomes’s part, or a reference to a hith-
erto unknown fact about how the Ceuta expedition began, as Nascimento
speculates in his edition of the text (132n12). Whatever the case, Gomes’s
citation of 1415 consolidates the year as the iconic beginning of Portuguese
exploration and consequently of the textual tradition attending it.
Gomes’s vision of Africans echoes the categorical generalizations of the
infidel contained in the papal bulls. Accordingly, his preferred term for all
Africans is sarraceno. He refers to the bull of Eugene V (incorrectly attrib-
uting it to Eugene IV, as Nascimento [148n85] notes) that grants Portugal
a monopoly on the Guinea trade (65), and to the bull of Eugene IV per-
mitting the Portuguese to enter into trade with the Moors so long as it is
not a trade in arms (89). The crusading rhetoric of the bulls finds a ready,
concrete counterpart in the sanctification the figure of Prince Henry. We
noted earlier Zurara’s eulogistic portrait of Henry in the opening pages of
Guiné; Gomes elaborates on this by not only eulogizing the prince but by
ascribing saintly attributes to his corpse:

Eu . . . chegando junto ao cadáver, descobri-o e encontrei-o seco e íntegro,

com excepção da ponta do nariz . . . Bem canta a Igreja: “Não consentirás
que o teu santo veja a corrupção.” (87)

In approaching the cadaver, I found it dry and whole, with the exception of
the tip of the nose . . . Well does the Church observe: “You will not allow
your saints to suffer corruption.”

The incorruptibility of Henry’s body constitutes a de facto canonization

of the prince and molds his Guinean projects and those of his successor
as expressions of devotion and sanctity.
One of the most important fifteenth-century documents to combine the
nautical rutter and historico-ethnographic description is Álvaro Velho’s
Relação da Viagem de Vasco da Gama (Account of the Voyage of Vasco da
Gama), the record of Gama’s journey from Lisbon to India (Calicut) and
of the return voyage as far as the Rio Grande in Guinea in 1497–99. Velho
was a scribe on board one of the four ships of the fleet, the São Rafael,
captained by Gama’s brother, Paulo da Gama.19 This text is most typically
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 57

identified as a roteiro or rutter, but its mixture of nautical observations

with interpolations that provide realistic details and description, as Luís de
Albuquerque observes (6) in his edition of the text, makes it difficult to
fix Velho’s text as a pure roteiro or diário a bordo (ship’s diary). None-
theless, the genre of the roteiro underlies Velho’s narrative. These nauti-
cally motivated and structured texts were the products of a plurality of
exigencies and circumstances, a fact reflected in the shifting and inconsis-
tent mix of nautical detail and prose narrative. Velho’s account was most
likely used by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda in the redaction of the His-
tória do descobrimento e da conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (History
of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese) and, probably
through Castanheda, reached Camões. The voyage and route traced by
Velho serves as the backbone of Camões’s poetic rendering of Gama’s trip
in Os Lusíadas.
The enthusiasm for empirical description in Velho’s account, together
with Velho’s regular observations on technical matters such as dates, dis-
tances traveled, or characteristics of the shoreline, might tempt one to con-
clude that these are “practical” texts, primarily meant to serve future pilots,
captains, or explorers. While the practical side of documents like these is
to some degree evident, to ascribe a pragmatism to them as their raison
d’être is to ignore—or at the least, underestimate—their significance as
manifestations of evolving habits of mind that perceive and shape the
phenomenal world through nautical (including cartographic) modalities,
as we noted earlier with Cadamosto’s narrative. Since the notation of tech-
nical information is not systematic and frequently based on contingency
(for example, as a result of an unexpected event or as linked to a specific
moment of encounter with indigenes), it is difficult to see how these texts
would have been able to guide the travels of subsequent mariners in any
systematic fashion.20
The empirical observation, then, becomes part of a larger state of mind
about how space is traversed nautically and the gestures of authority and
the appropriation of space enacted by the writing of texts like Velho’s
Relação. For Luís Madureira, roteiros “are putatively the genre that most
patently registers Portugal’s contribution to Europe’s empiricist ‘revolu-
tion.’ In effect, the roteiros attempt to codify and stabilize both nautical
knowledge and the boundaries of Portugal’s maritime dominion. They are
58 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

in a sense the textual indices of the triumph of Portuguese maritime tech-

nology” (34).21 Consider Velho’s opening observations:

Em nome de Deus, ámen. Na era de mil quatrocentos e noventa e sete

mandou El-Rei D. Manuel, o primeiro deste nome em Portugal, a descobrir,
quatro navios, os quais iam em busca da especiaria, dos quais navios ia
por capitão-mor Vasco da Gama, e dos outros: dum deles Paulo da Gama,
seu irmão, e do outro Nicolau Coelho [e um Gonçalo Nunes, criado de
Vasco da Gama, que ia por capitão da nau dos mantimentos].
Partimos do Restelo um sábado, que eram oito dias do mês de Julho . . .
[seguindo] nosso caminho, que Deus Nosso Senhor deixe acabar em seu
serviço, ámen.
Primeiramente chegámos ao sábado seguinte à vista das Canárias . . . (9)

In the name of God, Amen. In 1497 King Manuel, the first of that name in
Portugal, sent four ships on a voyage of discovery, ships that went in search
of spices. Vasco da Gama served as captain-major of all of these ships; Paulo
da Gama, his brother, was captain of another; Nicolau Coelho, of another;
and Gonçalo Nunes served as captain of the supply vessel.
We left Restelo on Saturday, July 8 . . . and pursued our course; God grant
that it may be in His service, Amen.
First, we arrived in sight of the Canaries on the following Saturday . . .22

Velho takes care to note the royal mandate behind the voyage, its ulti-
mate divine purpose, the constitution of the fleet, the date and place of
departure, and the sequentiality of its various stages beginning with the
sighting of the Canaries. There is a close coalition between royal/provi-
dential purpose, the fleet as a collective body (the itinerant subject of
the Relação), and directionality; all these elements imbue Gama’s trip with
an authority and an objective, and with a predetermined way of travers-
ing space sequentially and therefore in linear fashion which Velho terms
caminho (course, way) or rota (route).
Velho records the journey according to a linearity created by the ship
as it moves along the west and east coasts of Africa, on to India, and par-
tially back again. When shorelines, dates, location, or depth of waters are
noted, it is to establish location as part of a larger placement in geographic
space, as a continuous act of orientation in a world being (re)revealed and
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 59

experienced nautically. In a study of maritime orientation, Ulrich Kinzel

notes how navigation itself was conceived as a “principle of connection”
in that it connects two distant places (30) and that its object is a “route,”
or the recurrent passage which is directed to a place assigned (ibid.). Nav-
igation seeks to track the trackless sea; it “conquers this powerful figure
of oblivion by finding the routes that it does not seem to have” (Padrón
83). However, if we follow Kinzel’s definitions, Velho’s account technically
describes more a journey of pilotage (sailing close to the shore) than nav-
igation (sailing on the high seas), although it does exemplify the idea of
(nautical) orientation in that “[o]rientation either implies that a position
is fixed (on a map) or a direction is defined (in a route). These two modes
have to be distinguished from a mode which is orientation-free and might
be called situation, or . . . passage or way” (Kinzel 29; emphasis in origi-
nal). Velho’s caminho is analogous to Kinzel’s definition of “situation,”
though it is not always possible to extract the idea of directionality out of
it that Kinzel finds in English “orientation-free” writings. In Portuguese
nautical narratives, caminho usually implies a general movement in a cer-
tain and predetermined direction. The caminho is a principle of spatial
movement not only because of an implied and controlled directionality
but also in its potential repeatability or recurrence. For Godinho, desco-
brimento (discovery) means to be able to understand space, move through
it, and relate to its inhabitants, while the concept descobrir (to discover) is
the ability to trace a route successfully back to a point of departure, return
to a previous destination, and then return safely to the point of departure
(633). This principle applies to journeys over both land and sea. Just after
the incipit of Velho’s account quoted above, we find a reference to the
fleet’s first storm in which Paulo da Gama’s ship (on which Velho travels)
is separated from the others and is lost to sight of the fleet.

E, depois que amanheceu, não houvemos vista dele nem dos outros navios;
e nós fizemos o caminho das ilhas de Cabo Verde, porque tinham ordenado
que quem se perdesse seguisse esta rota. (10)

And, once day had come, we could not find him [Vasco da Gama] or the
other ships; we then made our way to the islands of Cape Verde, because it
had been agreed that whoever might get lost should follow that route.
60 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

As the lost ship, Paulo da Gama makes his way or caminho to Cape Verde.
The caminho occasioned by the storm stands in contradistinction to the
general caminho of the India-bound fleet, and the rota is a specific path
to reach Cape Verde that exists independently of the caminho to India—
it would exist even if the storm had not occurred. Velho notes a similar
interruption when some of the crew suffer from scurvy in southern Africa;
afterwards, “fomos nosso caminho, e andámos seis dias pelo mar” (we went
on our way, and we traveled for six days on the sea, 27). Here, as above,
the “way” refers to the predetermined direction of the voyage and there-
fore to the voyage itself as an exercise of inscribing Portuguese direction-
ality, iterativeness, and knowledge on the coastlines and waters of Africa
and Asia. The caminho, then, is the time-delimited instantiation of an
organizing and orientational principle of which Velho’s Relação is but one
example. Notations of chronological, astronomical, or nautical data, in
addition to whatever practical use such data might be put by future trav-
elers, support this exercise of nautical cognition and experience. Africa is
appropriated by moving, in a certain way and with a certain technology,
through it.
In the first lines of his own narrative, Cadamosto refers to his journeys
(and, implicitly, to the written account of those journeys) as “mio itiner-
ario” (my itinerary, 3). With this term, Cadamosto locates his account
in a tradition of medieval travel writing that also underlies the burgeon-
ing culture of cartographic writing in the sixteenth century. The itinerary
Cadamosto mentions undergirds Velho’s narrative as well. These writers
therefore manifest, in discourse, the visually oriented itinerary map. In a
study of maps and verbal mapmaking in early-modern Spanish empire,
Padrón notes that the itinerary defines a way of arriving at a destination,
of delineating a way to get to a particular place or places; it represents
a network of routes connecting travel destinations (54, 58). One of the dis-
tinguishing characteristics of the itinerary is the perspective of the reader:
while the map addresses a reader “who enjoys an abstract, idealized, and
static point of view, the itinerary addresses a reader who is embodied,
earthbound, and dynamic” (61). As a genre of cartographic writing, the
itinerary or itinerarium is a “unilateral trajectory defined in terms of a
succession of sites” (Conley 140). Cadamosto and Velho share character-
istics with the itinerary insofar as they delineate (and therefore loosely
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 61

connect) a succession of sites and present not an embedded reader but

an embedded traveler/writer. They do not purport to be a vade mecum
meant to get a future traveler from one place to the next, though there is
information in these accounts that may be used in the ongoing business
of navigation, travel, and information gathering. There is a certain privi-
lege of abstraction enjoyed by the writers, like the reader of a map, in that
a generalized view of geography and spatial distribution emerges from the
itinerancy of the embedded subject who goes from point A to B to C. The
rehearsal of technical information is significant in its iterative capacity.
The embedded movement of the traveler/writer—that is, the movement
through horizontal space—enacts a repetitiveness of encounter with the
natural and human worlds that establishes saber or knowledge. The rep-
etition of distances as expressed by leagues traveled, or soundings taken,
is not simply practical but conceptual: the authority of imperial travel
and writing rests in large part on the nonaccidental, on the deliberate
scripting and repetition of the same experiences in the empirical realm.
It is possible to find an analogue between the rehearsal of technical infor-
mation in texts like Velho’s and the monotonous, repetitive narratives of
battles between Christians and Moors in chronicles like Zurara’s Crónica
de D. Pedro de Meneses (Chronicle of D. Pedro de Meneses) and Crónica de
D. Duarte de Meneses (Chronicle of D. Duarte de Meneses). What is at
stake in these historical texts is not so much the addition to historical
memory of any one particular battle but the fact that such encounters
are repeated. This repetition proves the providential inevitability of fight-
ing the Moors. A series of victories over the infidel (or over “gentiles”
or “pagans” like the sub-Saharan Africans), tirelessly and monotonously
narrated, manifests the ineluctability of Christian imperialism. In like
fashion, the iterative recording of information by an embedded traveler
in an itinerary-like narrative through African space solidifies an evolving
and cumulative corpus of knowledge. The validity of any one piece of in-
formation is secondary (or even irrelevant) to the overall assumption that
nautical travel will always produce authority.
Velho does not fail to note the geographic distribution and color of
native Africans and then of Indians as Gama’s voyage progresses. In São
Brás (Mossel Bay), for instance, he notes that the people are black and,
during a trading excursion to shore, they begin to play pipes and dance;
62 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Velho notes with some surprise that “não se espera música [de negros]”
(one does not expect music from blacks, 17). In East Africa, Velho states
that the mouros are “ruivos” (red-haired, 28), and later notes the presence
of white Moors in Mozambique (33). The association between the color(s)
of Africans and distinct geographic regions has become a constant in
these texts ever since Zurara’s descriptions of the various levels of dark-
ness and whiteness among the sub-Saharans in Guiné. Like characteristics
of the littoral or the ocean waters, Africans and their varying skin pigmen-
tation act as geographic markers and delimiters of space. Moors, blacks,
or Guineans mark and inhabit certain geographic regions and come to
stand as emblems of those regions, much like the monsters of Pliny or
Marco Polo. Native Africans are flesh-and-bone embodiments of spatial
boundaries. They thus fulfill an orientational function, like the astrolabe,
in that they can be used in the calculation of location. The realm of Prester
John of the Indies acts in a very similar manner in Velho’s account and
in many histories of the sixteenth century. The legendary priest-king’s
elusive realm—“nos disseram que [o] Preste João estava ali perto, e que
tinha muitas cidades ao longo do mar” (they told us that Prester John
was close by, and that he had many cities along the coast, 29–30), Velho
observes—acts as a principle of orientation. Like magnetic north, the king-
dom of Prester John is a guiding beacon that influences both the overseas
and overland caminhos of the travelers; unlike magnetic north, the realm
of Prester John is nomadic, never fixed, always over the next hill or too
distant into the interior to be conveniently verified.
Like the padrões left behind in Africa by Gama and his crew, Velho’s
text symbolically appropriates the lands and waters of coastal Africa on
behalf of the imperial monarch.23 In the progress of the voyage, Africa
is an anticipation of, and obstacle to, India, something to be overcome and
something that prepares for the arrival in Calicut. This sense of prepara-
tion becomes evident through the numerous stops or moorings the fleet
makes along the African coast. At one point Velho relates an interaction
with a Moor who informs the travelers that ships such as theirs have
passed that way before: “e dizia que já vira navios grandes, como aqueles
que nós levávamos; com os quais sinais nós folgávamos muito porque nos
parecia que nos íamos chegando para onde desejávamos” (and he said
that he had previously seen large ships such as ours; in this we took great
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 63

pleasure, because it seemed that we were getting closer to our desired des-
tination, 26). Africa is a transitional, albeit important, part of the caminho
delineated by Gama’s ships in the attainment of the East and as such func-
tions as an intermediate space in the Portuguese realization of the Orient.
In the sixteenth century, historical writing on a large scale flourishes
and historians take on the task of narrating the Portuguese presence in
India. In this historiographic milieu prior to Camões there is no extant
text dedicated exclusively to Africa. Africa appears either in the histories of
Portuguese India or as part of the chronicles of the reigns of individual
kings or colonial administrators. Generally speaking, expansion in Africa
follows a rather pro forma recitation of military encounter, trade, the
capture of slaves, or negotiations with African potentates, and chroniclers
by and large do not engage in geographic descriptions of Africa. What is
most important in these histories is the framing of Africa within a his-
torical purview as part of expansionist activities and of the expansionist
mind-set. The remainder of this section considers the work of three writ-
ers who best represent the sixteenth-century culture of historical writing
that leads to the imagining of Africa in Camões. These writers are João de
Barros, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, and Damião de Góis.
The humanist João de Barros (ca. 1496–1570) worked during the reigns
of Manuel I (1495–1521) and João III (1521–27), the monarchs whose respec-
tive rules encompass the most active and formative years of the establish-
ment of Portuguese empire in India and in Brazil. Barros was treasurer of
the India, Ceuta, and Mina (Guinea) customshouses and archives in Lis-
bon, important posts in the bureaucratic machine of empire. Like Zurara,
he was official chronicler or cronista-mor. Manuel I encouraged Barros to
write an epic history of the Portuguese in Asia, and in response the his-
torian conceived an ambitious historiographic project that was meant to
cover Portuguese expansion in all of its aspects and geographic reach across
the globe. The completed history was to be divided into three major parts.
The first, Milícia (Warfare), would document Portuguese conquest and mil-
itary efforts in the four parts of the world (Europe, Africa, Asia, and Santa
Cruz [Brazil]). Each of the sub-parts of Milícia would bear the generic title
of Décadas (Decades), following Livy. The second part, Navegação (Navi-
gation; alternately titled Geografia [Geography]), was to be a geographic
treatise of the world and written in Latin. Barros conceived the third and
64 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

final part, Comércio (Commerce), as a manual of natural and artificial

products along with calculations of weights and measurements. Barros
only lived to publish a small portion of his ambitious project—the first
three Décadas da Ásia (Decades of Asia) published in 1552, 1553, and 1563—
though his frequent references in the Décadas to other parts of the project
(such as the Geografia) suggest that these other portions may have existed
in draft form.24 If so, they have since been lost.
It is unfortunate that we do not have Barros’s África (one of the vol-
umes of Milícia); however, the first three books (and a small portion of
the fourth) of the first Década da Ásia deal with Africa, so we have an
indication of how Barros conceived of the continent in the context of his
larger enterprise.25 In these books, the historian begins by narrating the
history of Morocco, makes reference to the Moorish invasion of the Iber-
ian Peninsula in 711, and then proceeds to the history of the Portuguese
exploration of Guinea and the Cape of Good Hope. This history includes
the voyages to Guinea ordered by Prince Henry, as well as the history of
the factory of São Jorge da Mina (established in 1482), one of the main-
stays of the Guinea trade. It also includes the discovery of Madeira, Cape
Verde, the Canary Islands, and provides considerable detail about the search
for the kingdom of Prester John. Barros tells us that his main source for
the Henrican material is Zurara, though Barros’s historiographic style and
tone differ significantly from the fifteenth-century chronicler. Barros’s dis-
cursive reshaping of the matter of Africa will have a significant influence
on Camões. The end of the treatment of Africa proper comes at the begin-
ning of Book Four of the first Década with Vasco da Gama’s 1497 voyage
to India. In these books, Barros does not inform us what his principle of
selection is regarding the material included: that is, we do not know how
these initial chapters supplement or repeat the material to have been nar-
rated at more length in his África.
What we do know is that Barros sets his narrative in an ideological
rhetoric and maintains it throughout his history. This is how chapter 1 of
Book One of Ásia begins:

Levantado em terra de Arábia aquêle grande antecristo Mafamede . . . assi

lavrou a fúria de seu ferro e fogo de sua infernal seita, per meio de seus
capitães e califas, que em espaço de cem anos, conquistaram em Ásia tôda
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 65

Arábia e parte da Síria e Pérsia, e em África todo Egipto àquém e àlém do

Nilo. (7)

The great Antichrist Muhammad, arisen in the land of Arabia . . . so forged

the fury, like iron and fire, of his infernal sect that, through his captains and
caliphs, conquered all of Araby in Asia and part of Syria and Persia, and in
Africa all of Egypt both on this side of the Nile and beyond, in the space of
one hundred years.

Barros does not relinquish in the hundreds of succeeding pages the tenor
of this ideological zealousness, a zealousness Camões will repeat through-
out Os Lusíadas whenever the poet speaks of Moorishness as the antagonist
to Christendom. In Ásia, Barros overlays this rhetoric onto the narrative
of the voyages of African exploration traced and recorded by Zurara. In
comparison to Barros, Zurara’s narrative style in Guiné (or Álvaro Velho’s
in the Relação) appears flat or even pragmatic.
The historian’s demonizing of Muhammad and Mauritania relies on
a strategy that is as unrelenting as that found in the papal bulls of the
fifteenth century. But unlike the papal edicts, Barros’s view of Moors as a
“praga” (plague, 7) from the east, as always and definitionally foreigners
or strangers, is retrospective to medieval, pre-expansionist Portugal. Thus
Barros speaks of military actions against the Moors as “cleaning house”
(alimpar a casa, 11), actions that date back to before the reign of D. João
I of Avis (1385–1433), the architect of the Ceuta invasion; by João I’s time,
Barros claims, “the house was clean” (assi estava limpa [a casa], 11). Barros
ignores the presence of Moors and Moorish culture in Portugal during the
time of João I and after. Expansionist activities in Africa and Asia will not
so much “clean house” as continue the cleansing battle, initiated at home,
in foreign lands. It is tempting to find in Barros a “Crusade doctrine
against the infidel” (Rebelo 80), or a neo-Reconquest view of the Moor,
a feasible assumption given Barros’s initial emphasis on the 711 invasion
as the “perdição de Espanha” (perdition of Spain, 11). If we are to apply
the idea of a crusade to Barros’s work, it must be understood to include
aspects besides spirituality per se. Marques notes, in a discussion of the
conquest of Ceuta, that a crusade involved several aspects and several goals,
such as the defense of Christendom against non-Christians, attacking the
66 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

infidel so he could not spread his error among others, securing economic
bases for the prosperity of Christendom, and saving the souls of unbeliev-
ers (History of Portugal 141). It is clear here that “Christendom” is a label
that can denote a collectivity of not just religious but also economic and
political interests. The historical circumstances of Barros’s sixteenth cen-
tury were different, though, than those of the medieval crusades or the
reconquista. Barros developed his historical project at a time when the
bases of the Portuguese African, Asian, and American empires had already
been laid; the initial years of Portuguese imperialism on three continents
were over. Barros’s history, unlike the texts of Zurara, were redacted after
a significant period of time had elapsed since the earlier voyages of explo-
ration. Ásia seeks to infix the history of expansion into a monolithic frame
of spiritual militancy against Moors, Africa, and Araby in general. This is
the aspect of Barros’s work Camões found most apposite to his poetic
project: in his historical vision, Barros establishes the war against the in-
fidel for the sixteenth century as a defining trait of Portuguese maritime
nationhood. This war not only is justification for conquistatorial action,
but it has accompanied expansionist experience abroad long enough for it
to be the defining trait of overseas expansion itself:

É se ante da tomada de Ceita, não pôs em obra êste seu natural desejo,
foi porque já em seu tempo neste reino não havia mouros que conquistar,
porque os reis seus avós . . . a poder de ferro os tinham lançado além-mar
em as partes de África. (14)

And so it is that if before the capture of Ceuta, [Prince Henry] did not put
into practice this natural desire [of war against the infidel], it was because
in his time in this kingdom there were no more Moors to conquer, because
[Henry’s] ruling forefathers . . . by the force of iron had expelled them over-
seas to the various parts of Africa.

Barros implicates the medieval history of Christian–Moorish interaction

in Portugal into the impetus of African expansion under Henry’s initiative.
He everywhere advocates for the religious and chivalric motives behind
African expansion. While investing expansion with a religious mandate that
makes possible the attainment of chivalric honor, the historian nonetheless
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 67

denies any interest other than religious on the part of Henry for under-
taking the Guinean voyages (32, 52); the prince captured blacks in West
Africa solely for the purpose of conversion. Randles informs us that the
Portuguese historian was the first to analyze systematically the legal impli-
cations of the discoveries (L’Image 128). Such attention to the legal bases of
conquista is apparent, for example, when Barros notes Manuel I’s attempts
to discover “terras habitadas de gentio idólatra e mouros heréticos, pera
se poderem conquistar e tomar das mãos deles como de injustos possuï-
dores” (lands inhabited by idolatrous pagans and heretical Moors, [so
that] he could conquer them and take these lands away from their hands,
as if they were unrightful owners, 228–29).26 In a panegyric (1533) dedi-
cated to D. João III, Barros draws a series of lessons for Portuguese empire
from the example of Rome, and elaborates on what constitutes conquest
and colonialism:27

Os caminhos pera conquistar, são estes: aos vencidos não dar muita opres-
são, mandar que os vassalos e naturais vão morar nas terras ganhadas, as
quais povoações os romãos chamaram colónias; dos despojos fazer tesouro;
afadigar ao imigo com cavalgadas, entradas e batalhas campais e não con-
certos . . . (Panegíricos 113)

The ways of conquest are these: do not overly oppress the vanquished, order
vassals and subjects of the realm to live in the lands that were won—these
populations were called colonies by the Romans; add booty to your wealth;
exhaust the enemy with cavalcades, entrances, and field battles, and not har-
mony and order . . .

By making Africa a prelude to the Portuguese colonial occupation of Asia,

Barros casts Africa as part of a larger, “Orientalist” enterprise. In the Ásia,
Africa emerges as an intermediate step in the equally ideological and “epic”
Portuguese attainment of the East, an exemplification of Portuguese im-
perial aggression and colonial exploration (Boxer, João de Barros 95).
Africa is also, and perhaps just as importantly, a product of Christendom’s
competitor empire, Islam—recall that Barros opens the first Década da
Ásia with a brief account of the history of Morocco. The work of João
de Barros firmly locates Africa in a culture of writing and thinking that is
68 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

best described, as we noted earlier, as the culture of Portuguese “Orien-

talness.” The Décadas da Ásia make Africa part of a historiographic idiom
of empire that is global rather than regional in its referentiality, an ideo-
logically inflected narrative of beginnings. In this evolving, textual prac-
tice of Orientalness, Barros writes, like Zurara and unlike Cadamosto and
Velho, from a bookish perspective in that his history is not the product
of eyewitness experience. In this regard, Barros is thus an early Oriental-
ist in the Saidian sense: his Africa and the Orient are part of a systematic
or institutional discursive practice on the broadly defined East.
João de Barros’s contemporary and rival, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda
(d. 1559), published several books of his História do descobrimento e con-
quista da Índia pelos Portugueses (History of the Discovery and Conquest
of India by the Portuguese) between 1551 and 1559; the final book was
printed posthumously in 1561. Unlike Barros’s treatment of Africa that
includes the exploration of the Guinea coast from the time of Ceuta to
Gama’s voyage, Castanheda includes Africa only in the form of Gama’s
trip. For Castanheda, pre-Gaman African exploration does not relate to
the Asian enterprise. The differences between Barros and Castanheda in
how each writer implicates Africa into the larger historiographic narra-
tive are pronounced. Whereas Barros writes—or better, rewrites—Africa
as an object of imperial pursuit informed by an ideological mind-set, he
nonetheless does so by recognizing the historical depth of Portuguese
experience there (in his reliance on Zurara’s work) and takes care to lay
out rather detailed descriptions of African geography. Barros’s narrative
style is proto-novelistic with its invention of dialogues that foreground the
chivalric and religious motives of African expansion, and indeed it is fea-
sible to say that Barros composed the Décadas as if it were a chivalric novel
(we should not forget that in his youth Barros also penned a chivalric nar-
rative, the Crónica do Imperador Clarimundo [Chronicle of the Emperor
Clarimundo]). Castanheda, on the other hand, eschews religious ideology
in favor of mercantilism. Portuguese expansionist activity prior to India
is only important for Castanheda in these terms:

Antes que a India fosse descuberta pelos Portugueses, a mayor parte da

especiaria, droga & pedraria dela se vazaua pelo mar roxo donde ya ter á
cidade Dalexandria, & ali a comprauão os Venezianos que a espalhauão pela
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 69

Europa, de que ho reyno de Portugal auia seu quinhão, que os Venezianos

leuauão a Lisboa em galés . . . (5)

Before India was discovered by the Portuguese, most spices, drugs, and gems
were carried across the Red Sea to the city of Alexandria, where Venetians
bought them and distributed them throughout Europe. The kingdom of
Portugal was entitled to its share, which the Venetians brought to Lisbon by
boat . . .

For Castanheda, the Portuguese African enterprise only begins with João II
(reigned 1481–95), a date that relegates to the background all Guinean ex-
ploration conducted under Prince Henry. Castanheda writes that João II
“determinou de prosseguir ho descobrimento da costa de Guiné que seus
antecessores tinhão começado: porque por aquela costa lhe parecia que
descobriria ho senhorío do Preste Ioão das Indias de que tinha fama . . .”
(determined to continue the discovery of the coast of Guinea that his fore-
fathers had begun, since it was along that coast that it seemed likely he
would discover the realm of Prester John of the Indies, of which he had
often heard . . . , 5). Absent from Castanheda’s comments are references
to the slave trade, to the various regions of sub-Saharan Africa mapped
by Zurara, or to religious difference (though the Moorish hatred of Chris-
tians is documented in chapter 8). Chivalric pursuits and providence also
receive no mention. Castanheda does not specify what aspects of Prester
John’s realm informed João II’s interests and efforts: Was it to establish
trade? To find the fabled communities of eastern Christians? To establish
diplomatic relations? One might argue (as some critics have done) that
there is a lack of zealous ideology in Castanheda’s history—and that there-
fore Castanheda is more “objective”—as opposed to the religious rhetoric
of João de Barros, but such an argument overlooks the fact that the heav-
ily mercantilist focus of Castanheda is just as ideological. Castanheda’s
history of Africa in the first book offers no specifics as to the division of
lands or to the demographics of Guinea and southern Africa established
by the writers we studied above. Even with the caveat that Castanheda’s
focus here is India and not Africa, there is a vision of Africa that subsumes
it into an undifferentiated sameness. Africa, in Castanheda, verges on an
abstraction. It is pushed into the background of Gama’s India voyage, and
70 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

then only as a precursor to the importance of the carreira da Índia (India

voyage) as a trade route that challenges the Venetian monopoly.
João II, known as the “Príncipe Perfeito” or Perfect Prince, was instru-
mental in continuing African exploration in the years following Henry’s
death. He resolved to penetrate the African interior, a further development
of the coast-hugging expeditions carried out under Henry. The king sent
Diogo de Azambuja to Mina in 1481 to build a trading factory, which
Azambuja did in 1482, the same year Diogo Cão reached the Kongo. News
of an inland priest-king by the name of Ogané was received sometime
between 1485 and 1487 by João Afonso Aveiro, a factor at Benin; Ogané
was thought to be Prester John. João II organized an expedition to search
for this priest-king and to reach Ethiopia and India overland. The travel-
ers sent on this expedition were Afonso de Paiva and Pero da Covilhã.
Covilhã eventually reached India, but Paiva died somewhere in Africa.
Under João II’s orders, Bartolomeu Dias discovered the Cape of Good
Hope in 1488.
João II’s history is first recounted in a chronicle by Rui de Pina (1440–
1522), Zurara’s successor to the post of cronista-mor. Garcia de Resende,
compiler of the famous Cancioneiro Geral (General Songbook, 1516), com-
posed an anecdotal Crónica de D. João II (Chronicle of D. João II), pub-
lished in 1545. The chronicle that is of most interest here, both because of
its chronological proximity to Camões and its formulation of the African
historiographic project, is the one completed by Damião de Góis (1502–
74). Góis—a scholar, diplomat, and friend of Erasmus—spent two decades
abroad and returned to Portugal in 1545 when he became the guarda-mor
(royal keeper) of the Torre do Tombo archives in Lisbon. A defender of
Erasmian orthodoxy, Góis was consequently imprisoned by the Inquisition
and died while incarcerated. Góis penned his Crónica do príncipe Dom João
(Chronicle of Prince João) while João was regent, and it was published in
1567. Like Barros, Góis was a humanist, well versed in Latin and classical
learning, and his chronicle reflects his scholarly training and disposition.
The first portion of the chronicle narrates João’s African ventures. Góis
opens his narrative with a criticism of Zurara by implying that the chron-
icler stole material from his predecessor Fernão Lopes in his writings
on Ceuta and Morocco, and he impugns Zurara’s historiographic style as
having “razoamentos prolixos, & cheos de metaphoras, ou figuras que no
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 71

stylo historico não te lugar” (long passages, filled with metaphors or other
figures that have no place in historical style, 13). According to Góis, ex-
pansion was a capitalist enterprise and was what made Portugal famous
abroad. Foreigners came to Portugal hoping to take part and cash in on
these endeavors.28 For Góis, the explorations along the west coast under
Prince Henry were meant to find the sea route to India, a claim that makes
Gama’s journey the end result of a single, decades-long project:

[O Infante] determinou de mandar nauios aho longuo da costa Dafrica com

tençam de chegar aho fim de seus pensamentos, que era descobrir destas
partes ocçidentaes ha nauegação pera ha India oriental, ha qual sabia por
çerto que fora jà em outros tempos achada. E esta çerteza que assi alcançou
do trabalho de seu studo, lhe fez cometter tamanho negoçio, & nam per
inspirações diuinas, quomo algvas pessoas dizem . . . (14–15)

[The Prince] resolved to send ships along the coast of Africa to achieve the
objective of his thoughts, and that was to discover, through these western
parts, the maritime route to eastern India, which he was certain had been
found in earlier times. And this knowledge he came to through the diligence
of study, which was what led him to undertake such an enterprise, and not
through divine inspiration, as some say . . .

Góis rejects a divinely inspired master plan for Henry’s explorations in

favor of a resolve that is the result of scholarly inquiry, and portrays Henry
as a student of astrology and cosmography, as Russell points out (Prince
Henry 6). The emphasis on cosmography (the book-based study of nature
and the world) has important implications for the nature of African ex-
ploration, apart from the detail it adds to the biographical lore of the
prince. To construe African exploration as a product of Henry’s “pensa-
mentos” (thoughts) and “studo” (study) is to make it an intellectual and
epistemological enterprise, a pursuit informed by the creation of knowl-
edge and a way of knowing the world. In postulating this impetus to
Henry’s maritime activities, Góis remobilizes Zurara’s framing of sub-
Saharan conquest as the initiation of a new knowledge of the world that is
reflected in the “razões” or reasons behind Henry’s exploration of Guinea,
as we saw earlier.
72 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Góis presents a summary of the “navegações” or maritime explorations

carried out in Henry’s time in chapter 8. He predictably begins the sum-
mary with the seizure of Ceuta. The recapitulation of navigational explo-
ration here reaches to 1455, the year of João’s birth. Events are presented
in chronological order and, as in other chapters of the chronicle that detail
the Portuguese voyages, receive little critical commentary by Góis. This
summary, though, is significant because it establishes a genealogy or lin-
eage of discovery, and Góis takes cognizance of previous writings so that
new discoveries become part of an extant discursive regime on Africa, of
a by now fairly long-standing tradition of expansionist auctoritates. The
chronicler specifically mentions the “itinerario” of Cadamosto (21) among
other, unnamed sources on the history of Guinea, and in so doing sub-
sumes Cadamosto’s individual experience into a larger historiographic
enterprise, the more expansive history defined by João II’s life and reign.
This absorption invests Cadamosto’s firsthand narrative account with a
teleological ineluctability. The chronicler presents this “fim” (objective)
early in the narrative so that all that follows, even those journeys made
after Henry’s death, originate in Henry’s initial plan. Historical action
(and this includes writing) moves toward a certain end; Góis’s histori-
cal perspective makes individual actions part of a larger hermeneutic of
empire. This is one of the lessons Góis will impart to Camões. One of the
means the chronicler uses to construct this teleology is to identify the gaps
in the history of expansion. At the close of his summary of discoveries
made by Henry, for example, Góis states: “E deste tempo [1446] atté ho
ano de M.cccclv. em que elRei dom Ioam nasçeo, nam achei cousa scripta,
nem per memoria, de calidade pera se della fazer meção” (And from this
date [1446] to the year 1455 in which King João was born, I found nothing
in writing or in memory worthy of mention, 23). After mentioning this
gap, Góis fills it in with a short excursus on the discovery of the Azores.
What is not clear is how Góis judges the “calidade” (quality or worthiness)
of deeds written or remembered as appropriate for his historiographic
standard, but it seems that Góis desires to foreground the power he has
in overriding previous texts and perceptions of history. He thus brings
to the forefront his role as a determiner of historical interpretation. The
gaps in the historical narrative of Africa—if we understand, pace Góis,
“narrative” to mean both the written form of history and individual or
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 73

collective memories—are propitious moments for the individual writer to

(re)direct historical interpretation, even if those gaps may be artificially
created by rejecting any previous accounts as “unworthy of mention.”
Here we might find a narrative analogue to the “positive” empty spaces on
grid maps, if we understand historiographic accounts of expansion as a
mapping in verbal space. An empty space on a geometrically structured
grid map is not a blankness or negative area produced by ignorance of an
undiscovered geographic feature, but a “positive emptiness,” an abstract
space into which geographies are written, as Padrón (35) explains. Simi-
larly, the genealogy and chronology of discovery traced by Góis invests
the period between 1446 and 1455—“empty” in that nothing worthy of
mention from this period can be found—with a positiveness, a receptiv-
ity and readiness for narrative. It is a positively charged, empty space in
the overall map of history; it is empty precisely and only in relation to the
other narrated events surrounding it, to the matrix of episodes and chap-
ters constituting the chronicle. The discursive act of filling in the gaps
establishes metonymy as an act of historiographic authority—the narra-
tive part relates to the whole as a completion and fulfillment. “One of the
ways in which ideologies work,” Hulme writes, “is by passing off partial
accounts as the whole story” (Colonial Encounters 15).

Strangeness under the Imperial Sun

In the texts we have just considered, writers on Africa make observations
on geography, the customs and skin color of natives, and the new natural
and human worlds that nautical travel reveals. These observations seek to
taxonomize—and therefore contain and control—the spaces and peoples
of Africa. The Western observer shapes the world and its inhabitants and
infixes them into a schema of observation and knowledge; these writer-
observers are the possessors of the “imperial eyes” that Pratt studies in
texts of a similar nature in later centuries. The body of texts on Africa in-
crementally but surely creates a corpus of authority. The more texts, the
more stable the practice of writing on Africa and the African and there-
fore, in imperialist thought, the more authority gained and wielded. The
frequency and number of writings is in itself significant; taken collectively
and over time, these texts constitute a systematic practice of writing. The
discursive regime on Africa, independently of lived experience, is the basis
74 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

of its own authority. The texts manifest a knowledgeable observer and

writer while they also create an archive that serves to authorize further
documents. The repetitiveness of taxonomic schemata similarly acts as an
authorizing strategy in that, once the kind of information to be recorded
about Africa has been established through practice, subsequent writings
apprehend and shape Africa in the same manner. The writings we have
been considering establish a frame through which Africa—and then Asia
and America—will be textually rendered, known, and conquered. So it is
that writing about Africa constitutes part of the Portuguese exercise of
power known as conquista.
As an exercise of power, the creation of knowledge rests on both the
empirical and imaginative realms. I wish now to turn to a concept that is
notably present in the work of Zurara and Camões and that links these
two authors who reside at distinct and distant points on the continuum
of expansionist textuality. The concept I am referring to is the strange
(o estranho), one of the ideas that allows us to place Zurara and Camões
in dialogue as representatives of the historical and historico-imaginative
rendering of Africa. Zurara envisions his activities as court chronicler as
part of the cosmic structure of the universe, a clog in the “rodas celesti-
ais” (celestial wheels) that move human action. As the vehicle that allows
for Zurara’s participation in the workings of the divine and human worlds
through writing, Africa is historiographic in nature because, from its phys-
ical and imaginative boundaries, a new writing of history unfolds. Camões’s
Os Lusíadas similarly places Africa at the center of its several narratives
because the first five of the poem’s ten cantos take place in African space.
On Africa’s sands and along its coastlines the actors of Camões’s poem
linger in order to narrate the history of Portugal and of Europe, to hear
prophecies of the future, and to interact with gods of the Greco-Roman
pantheon and participate in the governing energies of the cosmos. Camões’s
placement of this mix of history, myth, prophecy, knowledge, and action
in Africa points back to a Portuguese writing subject and a Portuguese
project of knowledge gathering. These African locales “suppose a non-
African epistemological locus,” as Mudimbe defines the European gnosis
of Africa (Invention of Africa x).
Expansion is by definition a process of displacement, alienation, and
outsiderness. To extend the boundaries of the pátria (country) outward is
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 75

to create and inhabit foreignness. However ideologically cohesive the ex-

pansionist enterprise might be as rendered by its apologists, in practical
terms its implementation is often disorienting, fraught with danger, and
met with peril. Conquest voyagers confront the limits of knowledge and
of supposed military or linguistic superiority in empirical terms that are
as unexpected as they are dangerous. As itinerant conquerors, colonizers,
traders, and missionaries become displaced from a grid of power and
authority of the home country, they become out of place. The European
(or those traveling under European organization) cannot help but become,
to some degree, that which must “officially” be sought to be repressed,
subdued, or controlled: a dislocated and vulnerable subject, largely depen-
dent on the contingencies of time and place for survival. As the initial space
of Portuguese expansion, Africa is therefore a vast contact zone between
Europeans, Africans, Western knowledge, and the world “out there.” Luso-
African encounter—if we momentarily accept the viability of distinguish-
ing “Portuguese” from “African” as stable categories of identity—generates
the strange as a product of the encounter between spheres of experience
and perception.
The Portuguese adjective estranho derives from Latin extraneus (exter-
nal, extraneous, or foreign); something that is “strange” is therefore some-
thing that comes from outside. Africa itself is a locus of outsiderness,
according to the possible etymological origins of the term explored by
Miller. “Africa” may be an Arabic word, Ifriqiyah, that entered European
languages through transliteration into Latin. Miller’s etymological com-
ments reveal sources that conceive of Africa as essentially separate or lim-
inal, a void until brought into being by an outsider.29 If, as Miller argues,
“there is containment, subjugation, and negation of the object [i.e., Africa]
at the same moment that the object is brought into being” (12), then Africa
exists only as a place of strangers and strangeness because it is the out-
sider who calls Africa into existence. As a historical concept, outsiderness
or foreignness carries political overtones, as Julia Kristeva explains:

If one goes back through time and social structures, the foreigner is the
other of the family, the clan, the tribe. At first, he blends with the enemy.
External to my religion, too, he could have been the heathen, the heretic.
Not having made an oath of fealty to my lord, he was born on another land,
76 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

foreign to the kingdom or the empire . . . With the establishment of nation-

states we come to the only modern, acceptable, and clear definition of for-
eignness: the foreigner is the one who does not belong to the state in which
we are, the one who does not have the same nationality . . . The group to
which the foreigner does not belong has to be a social group structured
about a given kind of political power. (95–96)

The political nature of strangers and foreignness Kristeva identifies ex-

plains in part the practice of imperialism as an imposed dynamic of out-
siderness, of foreign genealogies and nonnative coalitions of power. Both
conquerors and conquered constitute strangers because they do not belong
to the same “social” group, although in the early-modern imperial con-
text, instead of social groups it would be better to speak of racialized,
religious, or linguistic groups. The mixing or dismantling of these group
identities existed on a practical level in Portuguese empire with the infor-
mal category of “stranger”:

[strangers were] the civilian Portuguese who for various reasons moved
outside the areas of formal Portuguese jurisdiction and married into the
local “native” population. These often formed distinct Luso-African or Luso-
Asiatic communities, but sought neither to adopt Portuguese civilian institu-
tions nor incorporation into the formal empire. Indeed these often formed
a recognized category of “strangers” who enjoyed special privileges and pro-
tection within African or Asiatic societies. (Newitt, “Formal and Informal
Empire” 5)

Moreover, strangeness as a political concept does not necessarily acknowl-

edge the process of integration or shifting power dynamics that obtain in
the contact zone, or the fluidity of markers of identity negotiated between
different ethnocultural groups that is the result of colonialism. Once a
foreigner does not mean always a foreigner; the culture-crossing figure
of the Moorish interpreter who is, linguistically speaking, both colonizer
and colonized, and the lançado (a Portuguese who lives in colonized ter-
ritory and who adopts indigenous habits of dress and language and fre-
quently marries native women), are testimonies of the deliberate blurring
of boundaries between groups of strangers.
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 77

This is not to say, however, that a political or politicized sense of

strangeness does not appear in authors like Camões, if by “political” we
mean interested relations of power in the appropriation and domination
of foreign resources. Rather, as the texts of expansion continue to be writ-
ten and expose the difficulties in any putative master narrative about
the success of empire, the concept of the strange also expands to mark
transitional moments in the European knowledge of the world and the
imposition of Western culture as an ethical imperative. In a more general
sense, Achille Mbembe reminds us that Africa has always been the locus
of the strange with respect to the West’s perception of itself:

[Africa] the continent is the very figure of “the strange” . . . In this extrem-
ity of the Earth, reason is supposedly permanently at bay, and the unknown
has supposedly attained its highest point. Africa, a headless figure threat-
ened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy,
or stability, is portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and
distinction come together in total confusion.30 (3)

Mbembe is speaking of the West’s configuration of Africa as a place of

“absolute otherness” that has allowed the West to define itself and that
“still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents
the origin of its own norms . . . [and asserts] what it supposes to be its
identity” (2). Mbembe’s formulation of African strangeness signals not
so much any particular moment in the history of the West as it does a
conceptualization of Africa as the other half of a binarism—West/Africa—
throughout history. Mbembe identifies a process of making Africa an
Other that has roots in classical antiquity and is intensified throughout
the Middle Ages. As the dark counterpart to the West’s construction of
itself as rational and civilized, this formulation of African strangeness,
though manifested at specific junctures in history, is predominantly ahis-
torical in that it is always more or less the same.
Zurara, Camões, and the expansionist writers in between only partially
manifest an understanding of Africa as unsurmountably and persistently
other, because, for instance, the North African enclaves of mercantilism
(such as Ceuta) receive recognition as sites of culture and civilization with
their own histories, laws, and spiritual practices, no less historically deep
78 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

than their European counterparts. Zurara, for example, acknowledges the

historical dimension of Islam and the sobriety of its rituals. While Arabic
Moors adhere blindly to the precepts of their “sect,” they also harbor a
capacity for abstract and symbolic thought that the codified and ritualistic
manners of religious observance make evident. This capacity demonstrates
the existence of a kind of mental template that predisposes the Islamic
Moor inherently or “naturally” to Christian conversion. The growing famil-
iarity with Africa that the texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
attest incrementally and increasingly banishes the possibility of Africa as
diametrically Other. Familiarity allows for a nuanced comprehension of
difference, if not even for moments of approximation or assimilation.
Let us consider specifically Camões and Zurara. The strange is a pre-
dominant conceit in the lexical and mental worlds of Os Lusíadas, a con-
ceit that attends the dynamic of contact and expansion, a consequence of
encounters with otherness that consolidates providential and hermeneu-
tic imperatives. It is a principle of interaction that partially defines Por-
tuguese império (empire). It signals the reformulation of knowledge and
the arenas in which those reformulations occur. As such, the Camonian
strange encompasses a variety of meanings that conjointly function as nar-
rative and imperial principles, principles that are preliminarily sketched
by Zurara.
In the chronicler’s writings, as we might expect, strangeness is a con-
cept related to the spatialization of Portuguese influence that will later
come to be referred to as “empire,” though the chronicler never uses this
term. For Zurara, strangeness emerges mainly from the itinerant nature
of the Portuguese cultural and political home. For instance, in the open-
ing pages of Ceuta, as Zurara recounts the history of João I’s decision
to conquer the city, he presents a quasi-Edenic description of Portugal
as a land of abundance, rich in resources and food. This image of the
home country as a cornucopia implies that the plenitude found within its
borders is a “natural” resource that can be carried abroad by ships, and
that in such plenitude lies a power which is best expressed by conquest.
“Temos muitos vinhos e de desuairadas nações. de que nam soomente a
nossa terra he abastada mas ajnda se carregam muitas naaos e nauios pera
socorrimento das terras estranhas” (We have many vineyards of various
kinds which not only provide for our own land but which also allow many
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 79

ships to be loaded and come to the aid of foreign lands, 20). The unspeci-
fied foreign or strange lands mentioned here to which Portuguese ships
travel anticipate the specific land of Morocco in later chapters, except that,
in that case, ships do not carry grapes or wine but a cargo of civilization.
Once Ceuta has been captured, Zurara tells us, João I considers the pos-
sible and desirable role of the city as a place for the exercise of arms:

com menos da quall despesa os eu posso . . . emuiar a esta çidade, homde

me faram mujto mayor seruiço. E ajmda mujtos de meus naturaaes, que per
alguvs negoçios ssam desterrados de meus rregnos, milhor estaram aqui
fazemdo seruiço a Deos, e comprimdo sua justiça, que sse hirem pollas ter-
ras estranhas e desnaturaremsse pera todo sempre . . . (258–59)

With less expense can I . . . send [those who wish to serve me in arms]
to this city, where the service would be better rendered. And even many of
my subjects, who on account of a number of matters are away from my
realm, would render much better service if they were here, serving God and
administering His justice, than to wander through foreign lands and become
exiles forever . . .

Zurara’s term for subjects is naturaaes (literally, “naturals”) and, for “to
be exiled,” desnaturar-se. These ideas stand in opposition to “terras estran-
has” (foreign lands). There is a demarcation of “natural” as opposed to
“foreign” territories, and Zurara includes Ceuta in the first of these cate-
gories. Ceuta no longer constitutes a strange land after its conquest, and
has been appended to Portuguese soil.
As a spatial notion, foreignness partitions and reconfigures the globe as
expansion progresses. The Moorish lament on the loss of Ceuta acknowl-
edges the Moors’ forced dispossession of the city that occasions a dislo-
cation of Moorish populations as the Portuguese traveling political home
literally gains new ground. The conquest of Ceuta decenters Moorish
trade, so that Portuguese occupation has created a new economic orien-
tation to eastern trade routes. “[A]uia hy tal que numqua com tamanha
femença esguardara onde viam os seus muros cheos de gentes estranhas”
(No [Moor] there had ever contemplated with such great anxiety the walls
of Ceuta, filled with foreign peoples, 247), Zurara writes. Then we hear a
80 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

collective plaint by Moorish voices as they address the loss of the flower
of all African cities:

onde acharam daqui adiante os mouros estranhos que vinham de Ethiopia

e de Alexandria e de terra de Siria e de Barbaria e de terra de Assiria que
he o rregno de Turcos. e os do oriente que uiuem aalem do rrio de Eufrates
e das Indias. e doutras muitas terras que sam aalem do exo que estaa ante
os nossos olhos todos estes vinham a ti carregados de tantas e tam rricas
mercadorias. (248)

Where will [its inhabitants] find the foreign Moors who came from Ethi-
opia, Syria, Barbary, and Assyria, in the realm of the Turks? Or those of the
Orient who live beyond the Euphrates River and India? Or those who live
in any other lands beyond this center we see before us, who come to you,
Ceuta, laden with such plentiful and valuable goods?

There is a geographic relativism here in that this passage demonstrates a

non-Western perspective of the foreign or the strange, and this permits
the redrawing of the map of the world to be regarded as an activity that
is universally comprehensible by Europe and its various Others and there-
fore “natural,” as objective as the fact, say, that Africa lies south of Europe.
If the Moors, spiritually blind because of their adherence to the law of
Muhammad, are unable to grasp Christianity as the organizing principle
of the division of the globe, their awareness (as Zurara writes it) of Africa
as a center (“exo”) that has now been supplanted by the West draws them
complicitously into the colonialist enterprise. Zurara’s attribution of the
foreign to both Portuguese and Moorish perspectives is a discursive move
that creates a single optic determining geographic space. The foreign oper-
ates as a marker of positionalities which, in turn, attest to the inevitabil-
ity of expansion. The labeling of the Portuguese as “foreign peoples” on
the walls of Ceuta identifies not just the invader but also marks a recon-
figuration, an estrangement, of the history of Portuguese–Moorish contact
within the land borders of Portugal prior to 1415. Only in a presentist sense
are the Portuguese strangers or foreigners in Ceuta, because long before
the date of its capture the city had been frequented by Iberian traders and
merchants. Zurara estranges the deep-rooted, historical familiarity between
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 81

“Portuguese” and “Moors” by implicitly claiming that there is a new kind

of contact here, one that exemplifies the cognitive conceit of the “shock of
newness” (espanto da novidade) Zurara repeatedly invokes in Guiné. The
foreignness evident in Ceuta marks a new paradigm of contact, a first
encounter that is meant to be prophetic of the later history of Portuguese
exploration along the Guinean coast.
More than a century after Zurara, Camões likewise infixes the idea of
the strange into the ideological discourse of Os Lusíadas, though the poet
relates it to writing as well as to expansion itself. In the introduction,
Camões invokes foreign Muses in a pronounced intertmingling of the his-
torical and the mythological:

Ouvi: que não vereis com vãs façanhas,

Fantásticas, fingidas, mentirosas,
Louvar os vossos, como nas estranhas
Musas, de engrandecer-te desejosas. (I.11.i–iv)

Hark! Thou shalt never see, for empty deed

Fantastical and feigned and full of lies,
Thy people praised, as with the foreign breed
Of muses that still vaunt them to the skies.31

The “foreign breed / Of muses”—that is, those Muses responsible for in-
spiring the epics of Boiardo and Ariosto—opposes Camões’s “my nymphs
of Tagus” (Tágides minhas) identified in stanza 4 before the lines cited
above, the Muses of the Tagus River to whom Camões appeals for his voice,
decorum, and stamina. Camões’s invocation of homegrown Muses acts as
an apologia of Portuguese history and his own text in that the deeds and
epics of antiquity have been surpassed by the events about to be related.
The banishing of the foreign Muses in favor of domestic ones shapes ex-
pansion as an epic act and Portugal as a site of literary and mythological
genesis: it creates a center or home that is at once Portugal and Camões’s
poem. This unprecedented literary/historical/mythological home entails,
in Camonian logic, the creation of an equally unprecedented archive in
the form of national memory, a national and collective historical aware-
ness in which expansion figures in all of its providential and prophetic
dimensions. When Jupiter foretells the success the Portuguese will have in
82 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

attaining the East, for instance, Bacchus resents the proclamation because
it confirms what the Fates had prophesied, that

. . . viria
Hva gente fortíssima de Espanha,
Pelo mar alto, a qual sujeitaria
Da Índia tudo quanto Dóris banha,
E com novas vitórias venceria
A fama antiga, ou sua ou fosse estranha.
Altamente lhe dói perder a glória
De que Nisa celebra inda a memória. (I.31)

There would come . . .

From Spain a people, terrible in war
O’er the high seas, and they would subjugate
As much as Doris bathes of India’s shore,
And with new victories they would make less great
Old fame of his or other conqueror.
Sorely it irked him thus to lose the fame
For which yet Nysa venerates his name.

In Camões’s pantheon Bacchus is the antagonist of Portugal because, as

the mythic conqueror of India, he stands to be eclipsed by the actions
of Vasco da Gama. In these lines—and what the translation cited here
does not make entirely clear—foreign fame (“fama estranha”) and mem-
ory (“memória,” translated loosely as “name”) are a conceptual dyad, a
definitional pairing since the India enterprise works against a presumed
bacchic privilege in the form of the god’s fame or historical memory as
the conqueror of India. The Portuguese navigators sail against Bacchus,
the deity who in the world of heroic and unheroic passions is dangerously
brooding and melancholic, like Adamastor. Camões creates a historio-
graphic home and authority that legitimizes Portugal’s foreign enterprise
and resides at the heart of a new memory, one that supplants the pagan,
melancholic memory of Bacchus and his dominion over the East.
Following the initial presentation of foreignness or the strange as under-
lying a new authority, Camões then unfolds o estranho into a plurality of
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 83

meanings throughout his poem. The first five cantos (those in which the
poetic narrative is situated in Africa) contain the widest semantic range.
Africa is a Camonian locus of the strange. The Portuguese acquire new
knowledge of the world and new ways to acquire that knowledge in the
form of maritime experience; the strange is a marker of these epistemo-
logical shifts as well as of the conversion of indigenous peoples to Chris-
tianity and therefore to the ideologies (including the Christian geographic
optic, as Zurara formulated it) of empire. Cantos III and IV, for instance,
contain the long narrative of Portuguese and European history delivered
by Vasco da Gama to the King of Melinde during the fleet’s stay in East
Africa after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and before crossing the
Indian Ocean to reach the subcontinent. Gama’s historical peroration is
itself a symbolic act of conquest in that to produce narrative in the space
of expansion is to appropriate that space, more so when the peroration is
in answer to the king’s request to tell that story:

Mas antes, valeroso Capitão,

Nos conta (lhe dezia) diligente,
Da terra tua o clima e região
Do mundo onde morais, distintamente;
E assi de vossa antiga gèração,
E o princípio do Reino tão potente,
Cos sucessos das guerras do começo,
Que, sem sabê-las, sei que são de preço. (II.109)

“But, first,” he said, “courageous Chief, make plain

To us distinctly and in order due
The climate of your land, the region main
As of this world that it pertains untó,
There where you dwell. Tell what your ancient strain,
Whence its beginnings your strong kingdom drew.
And from the first your deeds of war relate,
Which, knowing not, I yet must know are great.”

The king listens in attentive, if symbolically subjugated, silence. Gama’s nar-

rative ranges chronologically from the pre-Roman history of the Iberian
84 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Peninsula to the safe passage of Good Hope just prior to Gama’s arrival
in Melinde. In the opening stanza of canto III Camões calls on Calliope
to provide him with the wherewithal to renarrate Gama’s history (thus
fusing poetic and historiographic authority) and observes:

Pronto estavam todos escuitando

O que o sublime Gama contaria,
Quando, despois de um pouco estar cuidando,
Alevantando o rosto, assi dizia:
‘Mandas-me, ó Rei, que conte declarando
De minha gente a grão geanalosia;
Não me mandas contar estranha história,
Mas mandas-me louvar dos meus a glória.’ (III.3)

Now eagerly all men stood listening by

To hear what noble Gama might relate,
Who, after giving thought to his reply,
Looked up again and made his answer straight:
“Thou hast commanded, O great King, that I
My nation’s splendid lineage should narrate.
Thou dost not ask me for some foreign story,
But plainly bidst me speak of my people’s glory.”

Gama’s “estranha história” (foreign story) is crucial. The narrative project

of nationhood, conceived of as a lineage or genealogy, takes place on African
soil and thus makes a historiographic home of Africa. The multilayered
refraction of voices we find in this stanza—the King of Melinde asks Gama
to tell his story as Gama responds to the request through the narrative voice
of Camões—is compounded when we consider the positional perspectives
implicit in the adjective estranha: the king, a foreigner to Gama, asks the
foreigner Gama to tell a story that is both foreign (to Melinde) and domes-
tic (to the Portuguese traveler). Gama’s story makes the implicit claim that
Portuguese expansion and its narratives, while definitionally a project of
strangeness or foreignness, creates “homes” throughout the world.
Gama identifies the allure of reaching strange lands and strange peoples
as an underlying motive of expansion, doing so in a manner that invests
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 85

imperialism with a heavy epistemological charge. As he details the years

immediately prior to his own expedition, Gama singles out the reigns of
João II (1481–95) and Manuel I (1495–1521) as the most decisive ones in
terms of the Portuguese arrival and presence in India and of expansion as
a “strange” enterprise. The pivotal role that Manuel I plays in expansion-
ist voyaging and knowledge (since it was under his orders that Gama was
appointed to the India fleet) transcends the immediately temporal or his-
torically circumstantial and is raised to a quasi-mythic status by Gama’s
narrative of Manuel’s prophetic dream of Portuguese expansion (canto II,
stanzas 65 to 70). In that dream, the king learns of the imminent, world-
wide reach of Portugal through the medium of the Ganges River, anthropo-
morphized as an old man. In Manuel’s dream, the monarch is transported
to a celestial height from which he views the globe beneath:

Aqui se lhe apresenta que subia

Tão alto, que tocava à prima Esfera,
Donde diante vários mundos via,
Nações de muita gente, estranha e fera . . . (IV.69.i–iv)

It seemed to him that he had climbed so high

He must have touched on the first sphere at last,
Whence many various worlds he could descry
And, of strange folk and savage, nations vast . . .

Manuel I apprehends the eventual spaces of empire through elevated sight

as he views the globe as he would a map. In this the view is tantamount
to completed expansionist action: “Maps reflect a desire for completeness,
a dream of universality, a yearning for power in which seeing from a point
of view forbidden to all others [i.e., from a zenith] . . . is equivalent to
possession” (Jacob 1). Strangeness implicates itself into the visual sphere
that is a proclamation of power and of an imminent appropriation of other
spaces, peoples, and nations, and of the knowledge acquired through that
appropriation. The strange indicates a temporal disjunction between the
world as it is when Manuel views it and its inevitable future incorpora-
tion into the Portuguese ideological oikoumene. The lands and peoples are
“strange” insofar as they have not yet been reached by Portuguese travelers,
86 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

so this strangeness is equivalent to futurity; yet Manuel’s visual cogni-

zance of the globe is an act of appropriation, and his imperialist eyes, at
the moment of seeing from above, make the strange familiar or “natural,”
as Zurara might have termed it. Manuel’s zenithal optic thus conflates
the future and the present in an instant, and so refutes chronological time.
His perception carries a mythic charge as an experience of time and des-
tiny not available to the earthbound traveler.
In a consideration of the “strangeness of experience” in Os Lusíadas,
Fernando Gil (“O efeito-Lusíadas”) argues that strangeness is premised on
the idea of the absolutely new (37) and of the extraordinary (38), and this
premise links strangeness to the marvelous. For Gil, “[o]ntologically . . .
the strangeness of experience is perhaps a result of the voyage as a kind
of unavoidable compromise between different experiences—all of them
disquieting, both in and of themselves and in their confluence” (40). I con-
cur, though in my view Camonian strangeness also reflects the epistemo-
logical challenges posed by expansionist voyaging and the specific moments
of unknowability regularly marked by Camões with the adjective estranho.
This is distinct from a more passive understanding of the marvelous as a
kind of surrender to the inscrutability of the phenomenal world, an apo-
ria of rational thought. In fact, the Portuguese negotiation and triumph
over the strange in Os Lusíadas is one of the victories the poem records.
Camões implies strangeness into an expansionist telos by linking it to a
continuum and development of knowledge; only after empire has achieved
these peoples and places will they cease to be strange, and only then will
empire have reached its plenitude as an exercise of power.
Manuel’s beholding of the Ganges River and the Indian landscape in his
prophetic dream is a precursor to the vision of the globe, of the “máquina
do mundo” (model of the world) that will be afforded to Gama during
the return voyage to Portugal in canto X. There, the full geographic reach
of Portuguese expansion is laid out and the future deeds of conquerors
are narrated in detail as Gama contemplates a crystalline model of the
earth suspended in the air. It is the goddess Tethys who shows Gama
the globe:

“Faz-te mercê, barão, a Sapiência

Suprema de, cos olhos corporais,
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 87

Veres o que não pode a vã ciência

Dos errados e míseros mortais.
Sigue-me firme e forte, com prudência,
Por este monte espesso, tu cos mais.”
....
Não andam muito, que no erguido cume
Se acharam, onde um campo se esmaltava
De esmeraldas, rubis, tais que presume
A vista que divino chão pisava.
Aqui um globo vem no ar, que o lume
Claríssimo por ele penetrava,
De modo que o seu centro está evidente,
Como a sua superfície, claramente. (X.76.i–iv; 77)

“Wisdom supreme, O hero, shows you grace,

In that you shall behold with corporal eye
What the vain science of the erring race
Of wretched mortal men cannot descry.
Firm, strong, and prudent, follow me apace
Up this wild crag, with all your fellows by.”
....
Not far they went, ere on the towering height
Within a field themselves they shortly found,
With ruby and emerald so thick sown the sight
Conceived that they were treading holy ground.
There, high in air, they saw a globe, for light,
Piercing right through it, shed such glory round
That to the eye the center was as clear
As ever was the surface of the sphere.

Tethys then describes each part of the globe in detail, noting where the
Portuguese have already arrived and their deeds yet to come.
In this passage, Camões continues the conceit of the viewing of the
world through a cartographic eye, an eye that beholds the Portuguese occu-
pation of foreign or strange space and is the first agent by which that space
is mapped and appropriated before the arrival of ships. The surveying of
88 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

the arena of empire and colonialism, those realms of strangeness that are
literally “supervised” (in the etymological sense of “to see from above”)
by a Portuguese, scopic agency and therefore symbolically subjugated, for-
malizes the authority of the expansionist pátria. Camões grants primacy
to the eye, a common valuing of the hierarchy of the bodily senses in the
medieval and early-modern periods. The eye is the medium of moral dis-
tinction and judgment. The owners of this superior sense are European,
or at least are so within the symbolic play of Christian seeing, pagan
blindness, and the power of cartographic perception. The poet takes pains
to clarify that it is to Vasco da Gama’s “corporeal eye” (or “eyes,” “olhos
corporais”) that the expansionist world is revealed. Tethys declares: “aqui
te dou / Do Mundo aos olhos teus, pera que vejas / Por onde vas e irás e
o que desejas” (I have conveyed / Hither before your eyes, that you may
know / Your heart’s desire, and where you come and go, X.79.vii–viii). The
verb translated as “know” is, in the original Portuguese, “to see.” Camões
establishes a causal connection between seeing and knowing. In a paral-
lel fashion, earlier in canto IV, the anthropomorphic figures of the Ganges
and Indus rivers present themselves in Manuel’s dream as manifestations
before oneiric eyes: “Das águas se lhe antolha que saíam, / . . . / Dous
homens” (from the waters issued [or so fancy told] / Two beings, IV.71.i–
iii). There is a prevalence of sight, a visual conjuration; the impersonal
verb “se lhe antolha” (perhaps translated better as “it became apparent to
[his] eyes”) insists on the eye (ante [before] + olho [eye]) because it is
the mode of both oneiric and waking cognition. The inextricability of
dreams and sight also appears in the prelude to Manuel’s dream where
Camões states that sleep is an activity primarily affecting the eyes: “Os
olhos lhe ocupou o sono aceito” (sleep o’er his eyes accustomed influence
shed, IV.68.v). Again the Portuguese original reveals a shade of meaning
not apparent in the translation, because Camões employs the verb ocupar
(to occupy) to describe the action of sleeping and dreaming. Sleep not
only closes the eyes but actively engages them.
The authoritative, cartographic gaze wielded by Gama and Manuel that
enacts expansionist power and confirms a Christian privilege over the spaces
of the globe contrasts with an African gaze as Gama narrates his fleet’s ap-
proach to the Cape of Good Hope just prior to the encounter with Adam-
astor. Here, the crew encounters and captures a native honey-gatherer:
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 89

Eis, de meus companheiros rodeado,

Vejo um estranho vir, de pele preta,
Que tomaram per força, enquanto apanha
De mel os doces favos na montanha.

Torvado vem na vista, como aquele

Que não se vira nunca em tal extremo;
Nem ele entende a nós, nem nós a ele,
Selvagem mais que o bruto Polifemo. (V.27.v–viii–28.i–iv)

And lo, a black-skinned man of aspect dire [lit., “strange man”]

I saw, by my companions hemmed around,
Whom, without more ado, by force they caught,
While on the hill sweet honeycomb he sought.

The man’s whole countenance was full of woe,

As one who ne’er was in such dread extreme.
His speech we knew not, ours he could not know
A savage worse than brutish Polypheme.

The sighting of this black African is noteworthy in the demographic logic

of Camões’s poem because the honey-gatherer is not a mouro, the blanket
term used to cast Africans and natives of India as inimical to expansion
as practitioners of Islam.32 This African is a preto (black), a sub-Saharan
African without culture, religion, or intelligible language. The compari-
son of this “savage” to Polyphemus not only anticipates Adamastor a few
stanzas later but construes indigenous or pagan brutishness as a kind of
blindness. Camões writes that the honey-gatherer is “torvado na vista,”
or “twisted in sight” (Bacon translates this as “with a countenance full of
woe”), comparing Polyphemus’s monstrous and restricted sight to the
strangeness of the sub-Saharan who stands as a figure of utter inscrutabil-
ity, not decipherable by a Portuguese, Christian viewer. The strange man
from a realm of geographic unfamiliarity speaks a language foreign to
both Portuguese traveler and Moor and experiences the world through
a deformed perception. All that is recognizable in him, Camões seems to
suggest, is an instinct for survival demonstrated by his fear and his harvest-
ing of honeycomb. This African embodies strangeness or the possibility
90 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

of the lack of knowledge as a kind of force or product of the natural

world. He is stripped of the signs of culture, civilization, and history, so
his brutally twisted, uncomprehending view of the Portuguese travelers
corroborates his baser nature and therefore justifies his abduction. The
“estranho vir” is the untamed, geographically bound cipher that must
be forced into subjugation because even the supposed universality of the
appeal of precious metals and exotic goods is unknown to him:

Selvagem mais que o bruto Polifemo.

Começo-lhe a mostrar da rica pele
De Colcos o gentil metal supremo,
A prata fina, a quente especiaria:
A nada disto o bruto se movia. (V.28.iv–viii)

A savage worse than brutish Polypheme.

To him rich fleece of Colchis did I show,
The gentle metal, above all ores supreme,
And silver fine and the hot burning spice,
But all to move the brute could not suffice.

The honey-gatherer is representative of a brutish, African blindness to the

products of culture, and over this blindness Gama’s enticements hold no
power. Gama’s expansionist embrace of the world, present here by the list-
ing of products foreign to Portugal, trumps the unenlightened vision of
the hapless African.

Africa and the Imagination

Sight and seeing are part of the expansionist ethos of Os Lusíadas, a
dynamic of appropriation of foreign space and the inscription of that space
into a Portuguese, maritime gnosis of the world. Gama and his company
encounter the world that reveals itself before the prows of his imperial
ships by seeing it first; the ship becomes a metaphor for cartographic see-
ing. Fernando Gil interprets the reading of maps as an activity that relates
to Os Lusíadas as the “victory of the gaze over distance and the inaccessi-
ble” (“Viagens do olhar” 91), in which ships, in their traversal of oceanic
space, perform a “first-person effect” (91). A visually oriented means of
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 91

knowing dovetails not only with a cartographic gaze but with the Portu-
guese preeminence in the ocularcentric science of celestial navigation, so
that the Gaman method of traversing the world and the manner in which
he comes to know it are seamlessly overlapped. Camões first dramatizes
the primacy of sight as the basis of an expansionist epistemology by hav-
ing Gama corroborate the legend of Saint Elmo’s fire and report on the
existence of waterspouts off the coast of Africa:

Os casos vi que os rudos marinheiros,

Que tem por mestra a longa experiência,
Contam por certos sempre e verdadeiros,
Julgando as cousas só pola aparência,
E que os que tem juízos mais inteiros,
Que só por puro engenho e por ciência
Vem do Mundo os segredos escondidos,
Julgam por falsos ou mal entendidos.

Vi, claramente visto, o lume vivo

Que a marítima gente tem por Santo,
Em tempo de tormenta e vento esquivo,
De tempestade escura e triste pranto.
Não menos foi a todos excessivo
Milagre, e cousa, certo, de alto espanto,
Ver as nuvens, do mar com largo cano,
Sorver as altas águas do Oceano.

Eu o vi certamente (e não presumo

Que a vista me enganava): levantar-se
No ar um vaporzinho e sutil fumo . . . (V.17–18, 19.i–iii)

But I beheld those things, which sailors rude,

Who long experience for their mistress own,
Count ever truth and perfect certitude,
Judging things by appearances alone.
But they with more intelligence endued,
Who see world mysteries, only to be known
92 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

By science or pure genius, reason still

Such things are false or else conceived of ill.

And I have clearly seen that living light,

A holy thing, as mariners consent,
In time of storm with wicked winds at height
And dark tornado making sad lament.
Nor was it less miraculous in our sight,
And surely ’tis a terrible event,
As in a pipe, the sea-mists to descry
Drawing up to Heaven Ocean’s waters high.

I do not think that my sight cheated me,

For certainly I saw rise up in air
A smoke of fine and vaporous subtilty . . .

Gama promotes an equation between vision and certitude, but a vision

buttressed by the workings of reason and deliberation, as opposed to the
uneducated reliance on appearances by “sailors rude.” This kind of in-
formed seeing is a veridic discourse on the phenomenal/maritime world,
one that corroborates the folkloric legends of unlettered sailors and records
novelties of the natural world.
Sight, then, is implicated into the many journeys of Os Lusíadas: jour-
neys through geographic space, through history, affect, knowledge, and the
very imaginary of Portuguese Renaissance culture. The landscapes charted
by Camões are as much exterior as they are interior; the voyages of the
poem trace inner cartographies of memory, knowing, and writing as much
as they do the land- and seascapes of Africa and India. Sight is part of a
larger dynamic of perception and cognition inherited by early-modern
artists and thinkers from medieval expositions of the topic, especially those
relating to “faculty psychology,” a complex theory of cognition based on
the interaction of the exterior world and the human brain and soul. In
postulations of faculty psychology, the external world enters the body
through the five external senses, which then create images or impressions
to be processed by the internal senses, or “inward wits,” the human pow-
ers that occupy the area between the body and the soul (Harvey, Inward
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 93

Wits 2). The term “faculties” refers to the several areas or “ventricles” of
the brain and to their functions involved in the processing of images and
the subsequent deliberations and judgments made on these images. The
theories of the interior or inward wits constitute an early speculative elab-
oration of the relation between the sensorial world and the powers of the
soul to process data and then deliberate on that data.33 This process hap-
pens in the “sensitive” soul, one of the two souls resident in the human
body (the other is the “vegetative” soul). One of the internal senses con-
nected with sight is the imagination or imaginatio, a concept we find in
the Portuguese textual matter of Africa as informing both the writing of
Africa and, in Camões’s case, the creation of a “memory” or collective,
mental archive of history that is gradually charted in Os Lusíadas. The
imagination appears in some of these texts on Africa as one of the mech-
anisms of visual and mental perception—Clark reminds us that in this
time period perception was a visual process (5)—and is related to judg-
ment, assessment, and the (un)reliability of the seen and empirically expe-
rienced world.
Generally speaking, the imaginatio is the interior wit that acts as the
“image-making power” (Carruthers 54) of the brain. This faculty receives
and stores images received through the eyes before further deliberation of
the images by the intellect causes them to enter into memory. Robert Fol-
ger, in discussing a sixteenth-century Spanish treatise on the interior wits,
summarizes the process by which the faculties interact:

The common sense receives the first “impression” . . . of the “debuxos” which
the external senses generate when stimulated by an object. The “forms” of the
objects perceived are also imprinted in the fantasy . . . In contrast to the com-
mon sense, which is only capable of representing objects while excited by the
external senses, fantasy represents its object . . . “segun que es absente” . . .
[I]t is, then, a retentive power that stores the sense impression temporarily
after the object is no longer sensed by contact. The third interior wit, the
“ymaginatiua” . . . is the power to transform sense impressions and create
new images on the basis of previous experience and sense data. (29–30)34

Both humans and animals possess this capacity for processing data but,
according to Thomas Aquinas, humans also possess a “cogitative” power
94 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

that allows them to deliberate on the images stored in the imagination

(Carruthers 51). Aquinas posits that humans have an “intellectual mem-
ory,” a theory that

arose in part to resolve the problem of how one could remember concep-
tions, since one’s memory stored only phantasms of particular sense objects
or composite images derived from particular sense objects. The type of
memory which recalls abstractions, things created in thought rather than
sensorily perceived, is a part of the intellect. (Ibid.)

The Persian physician and philosopher Ibn Sina or Avicenna proposes

the existence of a “deliberative” imagination, “which has a composing
function, joining images together . . . This power of composing an image
in both humans and animals is joined to a power of judgment, whereby
we form an opinion of the image we have composed” (Carruthers 53). In
Iberia, one of the most available and influential explanations of the inte-
rior wits and the imagination is Alfonso X’s Siete partidas, though here
Alfonso avoids the physiologically based idiom typical of other treatments
of the topic.35 Moreover, Alfonso discusses the interior wits in the laws
devoted to how people must serve their king to the best of their abili-
ties; this context of moral and civic responsibility to the crown maps well,
for example, onto Zurara’s chronistic enterprise as a service to his patron
D. Afonso V. Alfonso’s laws lay out a code of ethical behavior that, in
Zurara’s pen, becomes implicated into historiographic discourse as an
ethos of expansion.
These basic tenets of faculty psychology help us to understand the allu-
sions made to the imagination and the visually oriented world we find in
Zurara, Barros, and Camões. References by these writers to faculty psy-
chology are only general and do not engage in detailed allusion, but by
context and use we can discern a familiarity with the basic concepts that
is brought into the specific writing projects at hand. Let us begin again
with Zurara. In both Ceuta and Guiné the chronicler regularly invokes the
imaginaçom as a mechanism of perception of the world related to conquest
in Africa. Zurara’s use of “imagination” at first might seem to be nothing
more than the chronicler’s term for intellectual capacity or the power
of mental abstraction or speculation, but the term’s use as a method of
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 95

perception of a visual nature allies it with a general understanding of fac-

ulty psychology. Zurara ascribes perceptual powers to both Christians and
Moors, but takes care to specify the failure of the Moorish imagination
and implies that this is what relegates Moors to a naturally inferior status
and elevates Portuguese perception to a level of uncontested authority.
In the early pages of Ceuta, as the numerous deliberations by members
of the Portuguese court on the viability and desirability of seizing the
Moroccan city are narrated, there is an evolving conviction among João I’s
sons that the invasion of Ceuta is urgent, a conviction that is not so much
a result of any one reason or argument but the product of a spiritual im-
perative. Here is how Zurara depicts the princes’ preoccupation with Ceuta:

ca os seus pemssamentos numca podiam seer liures nem apartados daquella

maginaçom, e tamto corriam per ella em diamte, que passauam per todallas
duuidas, e começauam e proseguiam o feito per tall guisa que sse esqueçiam
do pomto em que estauam, e uiamsse no meyo daquella çidade emuolltos
antre os mouros allegramdosse com o espalhamento do seu samgue. E tamta
duçura semtiam em taaes maginaçoões, que lhes pesaua quamdo see lhe
offereçia cousa per que sse tirauam dellas. E porque assi como naturall-
mente os feitos em que a maginaçam do homem he ocupada de dia, esses
se lhe rrepresemtam depois que o sono tem ocupado seus semtidos . . . (34)

for since their thoughts could never be freed from that image that was so
consistently before them it alleviated their doubts; so they took action and
persevered, so much so that they forgot everything else. They saw them-
selves in the middle of that city surrounded by Moors and rejoicing in the
spilling of their blood. Such a delight they took from these images that they
became irritated when anything distracted them from such images. And so
it is that, naturally, the things which occupy man’s imagination by day are
also present after sleep has taken over the senses . . .

Here, the image (maginaçom) of the princes amid the Moors spilling
blood is an image received directly from the divine sphere because the
vision of Ceuta and its Moors would not have entered the mind through
the bodily senses yet; the contemplation of this image affords pleasantness
or duçura. The image is so strong that it persists into the dream state and
96 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

overcomes the waking senses—much like Manuel’s prophetic dream in

Os Lusíadas. The resilience of the imagination in retaining the victorious
image over the Moors in Ceuta suggests its inevitable realization as actual
experience and divine approval of the invasion. In sleep, the intellect may
contemplate celestial things (Harvey, Inward Wits 49) and “[t]rue dreams
of the future come about through the soul’s kinship with the intelligences
of the spheres” (ibid.). The prophetic certainty of the princes’ imagina-
tions contrasts, some chapters later, with the imperfect entendimentos of
the Moors. Entendimento may be translated as “understanding,” though
in the idiom of faculty psychology it can also be a rough equivalent to
“intellect,” the power of the soul that creates abstractions and deliberates
on them. So it is that some Moors, after the capture of Ceuta, “comsi-
jraram sobre a uimda destas gallees, mal diziam a ssy e a fraqueza de seus
emtemdimentos” (reflected on the arrival of the galleys, and cursed them-
selves and the weakness of their intellect, 53). The power of Moorish re-
flection is faulty, a general deficit of the entendimento or intellect. Zurara
juxtaposes the Christian and Moorish powers of the soul in a predictably
derogatory fashion for the Ceutan Moors. He indicts the functioning of
the Moorish mind by ventriloquizing the Moors’ recognition of their own
deficient entendimentos since they failed to assess the image of the in-
vading fleet “correctly” as the certain sign of the city’s defeat. The Moor-
ish imagination fails because, while it possesses the ability to process and
store images, it lacks a properly functioning deliberative imagination or
power to form correct judgment.
In Guiné, Zurara remarks briefly, as we saw earlier, on the scorching heat
(“estranha quentura” or “strange heat”) of the Torrid Zone as the cause
for the black skin of Ethiopians. A plausible precursor to Zurara’s geo-
humoral formulation of African corporality is Alfonso X’s translation into
Castilian of an Arabic astrological treatise by ‘Ubayd Allâh al-Istiji, the
Libro de las cruzes (Book of Astrological Influences), completed in 1259. In
one passage the book postulates a correspondence between climate and
the specifics of regional character (in this case, the realms of India, Baby-
lon, and the Middle East) in that variations in climate produce such fac-
tors as a temperate complexion, certain physical characteristics, and the
“civilized” trait of the rule of law.36 The Libro de las cruzes notes apropos
of the Ethiopians who inhabit the “southern” region that
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 97

la gran calentura non se tempra en aquel logar, et pareçe en ellos, que an su

color et sos queros negros et crespos cabellos. Et por esto non se estienden
sus espiritos por la grant sequedat et por la grant calentura que los quema,
et por esto non an sotil entendemento, ni an sennorio, ni leyes, nin decre-
tos, nin se entremeten de sciencias nin de saberes . . . et esto es por que
semeian a las bestias en sus mannas. (8)

the immense heat is not tempered in that region and it is evident in them
[i.e., Ethiopians] in their color and their black skin and woolly hair. Because
of it their spirits do not circulate due to the great dryness and heat that
burns them, and that is why they do not possess a subtle intellect, and have
no state, or laws, or decrees, and do not pursue sciences or knowledge . . .
and this is why in their manners and customs they are like beasts.37

Zurara’s comment on the “strange heat” of the Torrid Zone as the cause
for blackness of skin stops short of the moralization of blackness as infe-
rior in the Libro de las cruzes, though in other passages of his chronicle
Zurara notes the bestial manners of Africans and thereby justifies enslave-
ment (Branche 42). The espiritos of Alfonso’s book refer to the physio-
logical basis of the inward wits and the effect on the “entendemento.” The
“spirits” here refer to the bodily spirits (Latin spiritus, Greek pneuma), the
form of refined blood thought to cause the body’s operation by emanat-
ing from the heart and communicating with all the body’s members. The
heat of Africa prevents the spirits from reaching all members of the body
(thus causing a slowness of movement) and adversely affects the intellect
(entendemento) so that Ethiopians—and indeed all black Africans—are like
beasts.38 Alfonso invokes medieval physiology and psychology to explain the
inferior nature of Ethiopians and in so doing makes Africanness an inte-
rior, physiological quality, an organic and therefore natural disposition that
is created and conditioned by the sun’s heat. The Learned Monarch also
addresses the intellectual inferiority of Africans in the first part of the Gen-
eral estoria in a discussion of Genesis and Noah’s son Ham, the primogen-
itor of Africans. For having scoffed at his father, Alfonso writes that “Cam
[era] de menor entendimiento que los otros [hermanos]” (Ham was not
as astute as his brothers, 85). The lesser intellectual capacity of Ham would
justify the presumed right of Europeans to invade and conquer Africa.
98 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

We are now in a position to understand better Zurara’s use of the

imaginaçom in Guiné as it relates to the chronicler and the hermeneutic
authority of the state and the monarch and to the perceptual/intellectual
capacities of Portuguese sailors and negros or mouros. Zurara establishes his
own position in an opening chapter by noting of Prince Henry’s histori-
cal example that “[t]ua glorya teus louuores tua fama eche assy as min-
has orelhas e ocupã minha vista que nõ sey a qual parte acuda primeiro”
(your glory, praises, and fame so fill my ears and eyes that I do not know
where it is best to begin, 19). The eyes and ears, in the hierarchy of the
senses in faculty psychology, are the highest senses. Zurara speaks of a
sensorial plenitude when faced with his subject matter and in so doing
tacitly privileges his imagination as that which will render this historical
matter into a collective, “authorized memory.” This authorized memory
is also, in part, a function of Zurara’s position as official chronicler of the
realm. In another passage of the chronicle Zurara praises the virtues of
Henry and appeals to the Portuguese monarchy by asking that these
virtues and worthy deeds be kept “enteiros e saãos em vossa maginaçom”
(whole and sound in your imagination, 41). The maginaçom refers to the
storage of the deeds of Henry in the mind of the chronicler’s first reader,
Afonso V, while the episodes and deeds of the chronicle itself might also
be an image to be contemplated by any of Zurara’s readers. There is a
moral responsibility imputed to these readers in that they are to contem-
plate Zurara’s chronicles as if they were images or concepts received by
the imagination to then be subjected to deliberation:

Todos estes segredos e marauilhas trouue o engenho do nosso principe ante

os olhos dos naturaaes do nosso Regno. Ca posto que todallas cousas de que
falley das marauilhas do nillo per seus olhos nõ podesse seer vistas o que
fora impossiuel grande cousa foe chegarem ally os seus nauyos onde nvca
he achado per scriptura que outro alguv nauyo destas partes chegasse . . .
(241)

All of these secrets and marvels did the genius of our prince bring before
the eyes of the subjects of his realm, for although all the marvels of the Nile
I spoke of could not be witnessed by him with his own eyes, because that
would be impossible, it was a great feat indeed that his ships arrived there,
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 99

since it is not recorded in any written source that any other ship from these
parts had ever come . . .

Zurara juxtaposes the sensory or physiological eye to interior sight, the

creation of an image that has not been witnessed by his readers’ bodily
eyes and is therefore a product of the imagination. His chronicle brings
the experiences of Prince Henry to the readerly eyes of the subjects of the
realm. In the absence of the sensory (or empirical) eye of direct experi-
ence, the chronicler creates images through his own imagination for con-
templation and judgment.
In narrating the many contacts and encounters between the Portuguese
and mouros or negros, Zurara frequently speculates about how any one
encounter might have been (mis)perceived. For example, in considering
the strategy for capturing Moors, the Portuguese mariners concur that a
retreat to their boats at night might be a way to deceive the Moorish
inhabitants of the coast:

Ca podera seer disserã elles que os mouros vista nossa tornada pensarom
que nos viemos como homees desesperados de os podermos cobrar E com
tal maginaçõ faram a uolta pera seu alloiamento. E nom soomente nos
aproueitara sua tornada ally mas ajnda a ssegurança com que se podem
lançar em repouso. (97)

For it is likely, they said, that the Moors, having witnessed our retreat,
will think we fled like men in despair of not being able to capture them,
and with such a sight before them, will return to their lodgings. And not
only would that retreat profit us, but also would their sense of security as
they rest.

The Moors are ascribed an imagination because one of the points of this
passage is the meaning the Moors will make of the sight of the Portu-
guese returning to the ships. That the Moors will interpret this image
incorrectly is assumed, and the weaker or more deficient Moorish imagi-
nation—that is, the incapacity of the Moors to apply a reliable faculty of
judgment and deliberation on the images received by their eyes—gives
the Portuguese the advantage. Zurara speculates about the visual capacity
100 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

of another population of Africans (now called negros) when narrating the

expedition of Dinis Dias to the terra dos negros for the purpose of cap-
turing slaves:

E hindo fazendo sua vyage ao longo daquelle mar virõ a carauella os que
estauã na terra da qual cousa forom muyto marauilhados. ca segundo parece
nunca viram ne ouuyrã fallar de semelhante ca huvs presumyã que era peixe
outros entendyã que era fãtasma. outros diziã que podya seer algva aue
que corrya assy andando por aquelle mar E rrazoandosse assy sobre esta
nouidade filharõ quatro daquelles atriuimento de sse certificar de tamanha
duuida . . . (127–28)

And as the caravel was tacking along that sea, those who were on land saw
it and marveled at the sight, because it seemed they had never seen or heard
of such a thing. Some thought it was a fish, while others believed it was a
phantom, and yet others said it could be a bird that traveled in that man-
ner across the water. After deliberating on this, four of them were captured
who were bold enough to investigate their considerable doubt . . .

Although Zurara does not use the term imaginaçom, the point of this
passage is nonetheless the capacity to deliberate reliably on the images
received by the eye. The chronicler ascribes a naive imaginative capacity
to the negros the Portuguese intend to capture—in fact, it is this capacity
that causes them to board boats and investigate the strange and unfamil-
iar caravels, an action that ends in their abduction. A similar instance
occurs in a reconnaissance expedition by two Portuguese horsemen away
from the coastal zone and of their consequent contact with the Africans:
“qual maginaçom serya no pensameto daquelles homees tal nouidade .s.
dous moços assy atreuidos de coor e feiçoões tã stranhas a elles” (what
would the image be in the minds of those men, seeing two brave youths
of a color and features so strange to them? 56). While Zurara interestingly
allows the African natives a capacity for marvel—as does Cadamosto, who
supposes that to black Africans whiteness must seem strange and mon-
strous—and in so doing makes the marvelous or the maravilha not exclu-
sively an experience of the European mind, it is a marvel that functions, in
the end, naturally to native detriment because it causes fear and therefore
subservience. It is feasible to posit that Zurara’s Moorish imagination
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 101

allows Africans a notional subjectivity, but one uninformed and stunted

by a lack of Christian faith. The powers of the soul, as medieval theorists
of the imagination such as Aquinas tell us, are geared toward the divine.
By bringing the imagination to the writing of history, and indeed by
claiming that perceptions of the empirical world through the workings
of the imagination are part of the history being narrated, Zurara recon-
textualizes the theory of the imagination from its medical and patristic
sources into historiography and the encounter with Africa. The conquest
of Africa enacts a cognitive process of experiencing and writing history,
and becomes a site for a renewed attention to the mechanisms of truth-
ful deliberation and judgment.
Zurara’s inscription of the imagination into the historiographic enter-
prise will be repeated by João de Barros and then by Camões. In the pro-
logue to his Décadas da Ásia, addressed to João III (reigned 1521–57),
Barros comments on the creation of letters and writing as the preserver
of national history. In summarizing his own historical writing, Barros
initially compares the task of the historian to that of the architect:

[o]s quais, primeiro que ponham mão na obra, a traçam e debuxam, e des-
i apresentam êstes diliniamentos de sua imaginação ao senhor de cujo há
de ser o edifício. Porque, como esta matéria de que eu queria tratar era dos
triunfos dêste reino, dos quais não se podia falar sem licença do autor dêles,
que naquele tempo dêste meu propósito era El-Rei vosso padre . . . lhe apre-
sentei um debuxo feito em nome de Vossa Alteza . . . O qual debuxo . . . foi
va pintura metafórica de exércitos e vitórias humanas . . . A qual pintura,
por ser em nome de Vossa Alteza, assi contentou a El-Rei vosso padre depois
que soube ser imagem desta que ora trato . . . (5)

such people [architects], before they begin building, first trace and make an
image and then present these designs of the imagination to the patron
whose building it is to be. And since the matter I wish to treat of here is the
triumphs of this realm, about which one cannot speak without the approval
of their maker, which in the era I speak of was your father the king . . . I
presented a sketch to him made in your own name . . . , and this sketch was
a metaphoric painting of armies and human victories . . . Said painting, by
having been done in Your Majesty’s name, pleased the king your father once
he found out it was the image of that which I now write . . .
102 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Barros compares the construction of buildings to the task of the histo-

rian through the vocabulary of images and the imagination. For him,
historiography is a process of creating (textual) images or paintings—
some of them “metaphoric” or “figural”—that are then approved of by
the monarch whose victories such images depict. Like Zurara, Barros’s
historiographic writing creates images for contemplation and deliberation
as part of what might be called an ethics of historiography. The mimetic
nature of the visual image as received through the senses and passed on
to the brain was often assumed in early modern contemplations on the
topic, but, as Stuart Clark argues in Vanities of the Eye, the imagination in
the early-modern period was also suspect and distrusted in its process-
ing of sensory images; its mimetic capacity was frequently brought into
question. Barros circumvents the problem of mimetic representation with
his “pintura metafórica,” a synecdochic reference to the entirety of his
Ásia and one that, because of its metaphoric qualities, does not challenge
the authority of the writer who composes at a temporal and spatial remove
from the events narrated. We might find a loose correspondence to both
this trust and distrust of the imagination between Barros and Zurara be-
cause both writers present their texts to readers for final judgment. The care
with which these chroniclers detail the presence of images and the imag-
ination in their histories suggests a certain skepticism about the imagi-
nation if not properly supervised or engaged; in fact, Zurara’s Moorish
imagination may be as much a caveat against, or a parable of, the “incor-
rect” contemplation of images as it may be suggestive of a Moorish percep-
tual capacity or subjectivity.
Camões also incorporates the concepts and vocabulary of the inward
wits into Os Lusíadas. The poet emphasizes the imaginação and the fan-
tasia (or phantasia, often synonymous with imagination as the image or
mental picture that was the final product of the process of sense percep-
tion to be viewed by the eye of the mind [Clark 11]), most likely because
of the primacy accorded to firsthand experience and sight in the empiri-
cally oriented world of the poem. Consider a first instance, the harangue
of the Velho do Restelo (Old Man of Restelo) in canto IV who censures
Gama’s enterprise at the moment of departure of the fleet, a harangue
that has often been interpreted as a warning against avarice in the heav-
ily mercantilist motives for expansion. The Old Man remarks “[j]á que
nesta gostosa vaïdade / Tanto enlevas a leve fantasia” (thou who now into
 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a 103

pleasant vanity / Are swept away by fantasy so light, IV.99.i–ii). Fantasia

suggests not so much a passing “fancy” but a conceptual image that the
intellect must consider and regulate with discipline. The Old Man accuses
the mariners of harboring memory images of wealth that are in danger
of steering their course irresponsibly if the mediating, ethical operation of
the intellect does not ponder them with sufficient gravity. This initial
admonition by the Old Man of Restelo prefigures the encounter with
Adamastor in canto V, another reckoning with the imagination, as we will
see in the next chapter. In both episodes, the imagination as the seat of an
ethical capacity of judgment is implicated into the imperialist venture.
Bacchus, one of the many gods of the classical pantheon populating the
stanzas of Os Lusíadas and enemy of the Portuguese, encarnates a Chris-
tian–Moorish divide in the workings of the imagination. In the episode
of the false Moorish pilot in canto I, Bacchus descends to Earth disguised
as a Moor in order to incite the Moors in Mozambique to sabotage the
Portuguese by providing them with a treacherous pilot in hopes of destroy-
ing the India voyage. The governor of Mozambique regards Gama and his
fleet suspiciously:

Porém disto que o Mouro aqui notou

E de tudo o que viu, com olho atento,
Um ódio certo na alma lhe ficou,
Hva vontade má de pensamento.
Nas mostras e no gesto não o mostrou,
Mas, com risonho e ledo fingimento,
Tratá-los brandamente determina,
Até que mostrar possa o que imagina.
....
Do claro Assento etéreo, o grão Tebano
....
No pensamento cuida um falso engano,
Com que seja de todo destruído.
E, enquanto isto só na alma imaginava,
Consigo estas palvras praticava (I.69, 73.i; v–viii)

Because of what he noted there displayed,

And the Moor watched everything with eye intent,
104 e x pa n s i o n a n d t h e c o n to u r s o f a f r i c a

Sincerest hatred in his spirit stayed,

And will toward us wholly on evil bent,
Which neither bearing nor his face betrayed.
Rather, with laughter and feigned merriment,
He had in mind gently to cheat us, till
He might at length unveil what he might will.
....
The mighty Theban from his ethereal seat
....
In thought he conjured up a treacherous cheat
By which he trusted that they all might die.
And the thing mulling in his soul the while,
Unto himself he spake after this style

Camões’s choice of words is revealing: the poet gestures to the idiom of

faculty psychology (alma [soul], pensamento [intellect], imagina [imag-
ines]) to narrate the attempted bacchic deception, brought about by cred-
ulous Moors who follow his ruse. This treachery is located in the soul, the
location of the interior wits. There is a twisted intellect (pensamento) that
“imagines” the treachery—that is, deliberates perniciously on a speculative
image of the destruction of the fleet. Bacchus’s malevolent use of the imag-
ination is actualized by Moors, who by association participate in the per-
verted use of the powers of the sensitive soul—this heretical antagonism
to Gama’s Christian protagonism is one of the battles enacted through
Bacchus, the dark god. Once the Portuguese are in India, the imagination
will again be misdirected by Moors in canto VIII. The Catual, or potentate
of Calicut, suspects a malicious plot on the part of the Portuguese and re-
fuses to meet them, and Gama senses this: “antes, revolvendo / Na fanta-
sia algum sutil e astuto / Engano, diabólico e estupendo” (rather he [the
Catual] designed / In fancy an ingenious subtle net, / A fearful trap of dia-
bolic kind, VIII.83.ii–iv). Gama perceives the danger here because he
deliberates on the words and actions of the Catual as they are presented
to his deliberative judgment by the fantasia. In so doing, he avoids an
ambush; his correct functioning of the inward wits has saved his crew
from destruction.
 3
/?
The Monster of
Melancholy

Halfway through Os Lusíadas and halfway through the voyage from

Portugal to India that serves as the historical basis of Camões’s poem,
Vasco da Gama and his fleet approach the southern tip of Africa. Known
initially by the Portuguese as the Cabo Tormentório (Cape of Storms) it
was later renamed the Cabo de Boa Esperança or Cape of Good Hope. As
Gama’s eastward-bound sailors draw near, a cloud appears and roils in the
darkening sky, out of which an apparition takes shape—suddenly, thun-
derously, and terrifyingly, like a storm at sea. This apparition, whose name
we soon learn is Adamastor, towers above the ships and berates the marin-
ers: how dare they violate the ancient geographic and nautical boundary
at which he stands guard, how dare they presume to uncover secrets of
nature and the sea. Adamastor, the “eclipsing menace” as Herman Mel-
ville would call him three centuries later in Billy Budd, delivers a series of
prophecies to Vasco da Gama about the fate of Portuguese explorers to
follow in his footsteps that are as historically true as they are disastrous.
On interrogation by Gama, Adamastor relates his own tragic story, one of
military and amorous defeat. A Titan of the earth, Adamastor rose in re-
bellion against Neptune and fell in love with the sea nymph Thetis, only
then to be deceived at the moment of a promised tryst with the nymph
and punitively transformed, eternally, into the inhospitable and rocky ter-
rain of the cape.
The Adamastor episode, at the center of Camões’s text (in the middle
of canto V of the ten-canto poem), comprises stanzas 37–60 and is part
of the long narrative delivered to the King of Melinde by Vasco da Gama

105
106 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

on the history of Portugal and its imperial enterprise during his stay in
East Africa. When Gama is recounting the episode of Adamastor, his fleet
has already rounded the Cape of Good Hope and has therefore conquered
the geographic danger and fear represented by the phantasmal giant.1 It
is Gama’s voice we hear in dialogue with Adamastor. Here is the episode:

Porém já cinco Sóis eram passados

Que dali nos partíramos, cortando
Os mares nunca de outrem navegados,
Prosperamente os ventos assoprando,
Quando hva noite, estando descuidados
Na cortadora proa vigiando,
Hva nuvem, que os ares escurece,
Sobre nossas cabeças aparece.

Tão temerosa vinha e carregada,

Que pôs nos corações um grande medo;
Bramindo, o negro mar de longe brada,
Como se desse em vão nalgum rochedo.
“Ó Potestade (disse) sublimada:
Que ameaço divino ou que segredo
Este clima e este mar nos apresenta,
Que mor cousa parece que tormenta?”

Não acabava, quando hva figura

Se nos mostra no ar, robusta e válida,
De disforme e grandíssima estatura;
O rosto carregado, a barba esquálida,
Os olhos encovados, e a postura
Medonha e má, e a cor terrena e pálida;
Cheios de terra e crespos os cabelos,
A boca negra, os dentes amarelos.

Tão grande era de membros, que bem posso

Certificar-te que este era o segundo
De Rodes estranhíssimo Colosso,
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 107

Que um dos sete milagres foi do mundo.

Cum tom de voz nos fala, horrendo e grosso,
Que pareceu sair do mar profundo.
Arrepiam-se as carnes e o cabelo,
A mi e a todos, só de ouvi-lo e vê-lo!

E disse: “Ó gente ousada, mais que quantas

No mundo cometeram grandes cousas,
Tu, que por guerras cruas, tais e tantas,
E por trabalhos vãos nunca repousas,
Pois os vedados términos quebrantas
E navegar meus longos mares ousas,
Que eu tanto tempo há já que guardo e tenho,
Nunca arados de estranho ou próprio lenho:

Pois vens ver os segredos escondidos

Da natureza e do húmido elemento,
A nenhum grande humano concedidos
De nobre ou de imortal merecimento,
Ouve os danos de mi que apercebidos
Estão a teu sobejo atrevimento,
Por todo o largo mar e pola terra
Que inda hás-de sojugar com dura guerra.

Sabe que quantas naus esta viagem

Que tu fazes, fizerem, de atrevidas,
Inimiga terão esta paragem,
Com ventos e tormentas desmedidas!
E da primeira armada, que passagem
Fizer por estas ondas insofridas,
Eu farei de improviso tal castigo,
Que seja mor o dano que o perigo!

Aqui espero tomar, se não me engano,

De quem me descobriu suma vingança.
E não se acabará só nisto o dano
108 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

De vossa pertinace confiança:

Antes, em vossas naus vereis, cada ano,
Se é verdade o que meu juízo alcança,
Naufrágios, perdições de toda sorte,
Que o menor mal de todos seja a morte!

E do primeiro Ilustre, que a ventura

Com fama alta fizer tocar os Céus,
Serei eterna e nova sepultura,
Por juízos incógnitos de Deus.
Aqui porá da Turca armada dura
Os soberbos e prósperos troféus;
Comigo de seus danos o ameaça
A destruída Quíloa com Mombaça.

Outro também virá, de honrada fama,

Liberal, cavaleiro, enamorado,
E consigo trará a fermosa dama
Que Amor por grão mercê lhe terá dado.
Triste ventura e negro fado os chama
Neste terreno meu, que, duro e irado,
Os deixará dum cru naufrágio vivos,
Pera verem trabalhos excessivos.

Verão morrer com fome os filhos caros,

Em tanto amor gèrados e nacidos;
Verão os Cafres, ásperos e avaros,
Tirar à linda dama seus vestidos;
Os cristalinos membros e perclaros
À calma, ao frio, ao ar verão despidos,
Despois de ter pisada, longamente,
Cos delicados pés a areia ardente.

E verão mais os olhos que escaparem

De tanto mal, de tanta desventura,
Os dous amantes míseros ficarem
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 109

Na férvida e implacabil espessura.

Ali, despois que as pedras abrandarem
Com lágrimas de dor, de mágoa pura,
Abraçados, as almas soltarão
Da fermosa e misérrima prisão.”

Mais ia por diante o monstro horrendo,

Dizendo nossos Fados, quando, alçado,
Lhe disse eu: “Quem és tu? Que esse estupendo
Corpo, certo, me tem maravilhado!”
A boca e os olhos negros retorcendo
E, dando um espantoso e grande brado,
Me respondeu, com voz pesada e amara,
Como quem da pergunta lhe pesara:

“Eu sou aquele oculto e grande Cabo

A quem chamais vós outros Tormentório,
Que nunca a Ptolomeu, Pompónio, Estrabo,
Plínio, e quantos passaram, fui notório.
Aqui toda a Africana costa acabo
Neste meu nunca visto Promontório,
Que pera o Pólo Antárctico se estende,
A quem vossa ousadia tanto ofende!

Fui dos filhos aspérrimos da Terra,

Qual Encélado, Egeu e o Centimano;
Chamei-me Adamastor, e fui na guerra
Contra o que vibra os raios de Vulcano;
Não que pusesse serra sobre serra,
Mas, conquistando as ondas do Oceano,
Fui capitão do mar, por onde andava
A armada de Neptuno, que eu buscava.

Amores da alta esposa de Peleu

Me fizeram tomar tamanha empresa.
Todas as Deusas desprezei do Céu,
110 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

Só por amar das Águas a Princesa.

Um dia a vi, co as filhas de Nereu,
Sair nua na praia: e logo presa
A vontade sinti, de tal maneira,
Que inda não sinto cousa que mais queira.

Como fosse impossibil alcançá-la,

Pola grandeza feia de meu gesto,
Determinei por armas de tomá-la,
E a Dóris este caso manifesto.
De medo a Deusa então por mi lhe fala;
Mas ela, cum fermoso riso honesto,
Respondeu: “Qual será o amor bastante
De Ninfa, que sustente o dum Gigante?

Contudo, por livrarmos o Oceano

De tanta guerra, eu buscarei maneira
Com que, com minha honra, escuse o dano.”
Tal resposta me torna a mensageira.
Eu, que cair não pude neste engano
(Que é grande dos amantes a cegueira),
Encheram-me, com grandes abondanças,
O peito de desejos e esperanças.

Já néscio, já da guerra desistindo,

Hva noite, de Dóris prometida,
Me aparece de longe o gesto lindo
Da branca Thetis, única, despida.
Como doudo corri, de longe abrindo
Os braços pera aquela que era vida
Deste corpo, e começo os olhos belos
A lhe beijar, as faces e os cabelos.

Oh! Que não sei de nojo como o conte!

Que, crendo ter nos braços quem amava,
Abraçado me achei cum duro monte
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 111

De áspero mato e de espessura brava.

Estando cum penedo fronte a fronte,
Que eu polo rosto angélico apertava,
Não fiquei homem, não, mas mudo e quedo
E, junto dum penedo, outro penedo!

Ó Ninfa, a mais fermosa do Oceano,

Já que minha presença não te agrada,
Que te custava ter-me neste engano,
Ou fosse monte, nuvem, sonho ou nada?
Daqui me parto, irado e quase insano
Da mágoa e da desonra ali passada,
A buscar outro mundo, onde não visse
Quem de meu pranto e de meu mal se risse.

Eram já neste tempo meus Irmãos

Vencidos e em miséria extrema postos,
E, por mais segurar-se os Deuses vãos,
Alguns a vários montes sotopostos.
E, como contra o Céu não valem mãos,
Eu, que chorando andava meus desgostos,
Comecei a sentir do Fado immigo,
Por meus atrevimentos, o castigo.

Converte-se-me a carne em terra dura;

Em penedos os ossos se fizeram;
Estes membros, que vês, e esta figura
Por estas longas águas se estenderam.
Enfim, minha grandíssima estatura
Neste remoto Cabo converteram
Os Deuses; e, por mais dobradas mágoas,
Me anda Thetis cercando destas águas.”

Assi contava; e, cum medonho choro,

Súbito de ante os olhos se apartou.
Desfez-se a nuvem negra, e cum sonoro
112 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

Bramido muito longe o mar soou.

Eu, levantando as mãos ao santo coro
Dos Anjos, que tão longe nos guiou,
A Deus pedi que removesse os duros
Casos, que Adamastor contou futuros. (V.37–60)

But now five suns had gone upon their way

Since we had parted thence, those seas to plow,
None save our brethren sailed before our day.
And the winds for us blew prosperously now,
Until one night as at our ease we lay,
Keeping our watch above the cutting prow,
A cloud that darkened all the atmosphere
Above our heads did suddenly appear,

So terrible and with such darkness stored

That in our hearts woke terror overgrown.
And bellowing afar the black sea roared,
As if it broke in vain on reefs of stone.
“O Power,” I cried, “exalted and adored,
What divine menace, mystery unknown,
Will the new sea and region now make plain,
For it looms larger than the hurricane?”

I had not finished when a form appeared,

High in the air, filled with prevailing might.
The face was heavy, with a squalid beard.
Misshaped he was but of enormous height.
Hollow the eyes, and bad and to be feared
The gesture, and the color earthen-white,
And, thick with clay, the lank hair twisted hangs.
And the mouth was black and full of yellow fangs.

So huge of limb he was, I swear to thee,

That the thing’s equal only could be found
In the Rhodian’s colossal prodigy,
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 113

One of the Seven Wonders world-renowned.

And the voice seemed to thunder from the sea,
As he spoke thickly with a ghastly sound.
Our hair stood up on end, our flesh went cold,
Only to hear the monster, and behold.

“O braver race than all who undertake

Throughout the world whatever great affair,”
He cried, “Who from those cruel wars you make
Rest never, nor from travail, nor from care;
Since now through my forbidden bounds you break
And to sail through my vast oceans dare,
Which long while I have guarded nor allowed
By strange or native shipping to be plowed;

“Since you would pierce mystery inviolate

Of Mother Nature and the Ocean Sea,
Permitted unto none, however great,
Worthy of ageless fame though he may be,
The penalty of your inordinate
And arrogant insolence, now learn from me:
Everywhere, every sea and every shore,
You are to subjugate in desperate war.

“Know that henceforth whatever ships shall track

With reckless courage on the course you sail
Will deem this region the demoniac
Home of the tempest and unmeasured gale.
And for the first fleet standing on this tack,
That seeks o’er seas forbidden to prevail,
I’ll impose penalty foreseen by none,
Till grief looms greater than the risks they run.

“Here I shall take, if hope prove not a cheat,

From him who found me fearful recompense.
Nor even so will vengeance be complete,
114 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

That punishes your stubborn insolence.

If what I think be true, each year your fleet
Shall look on many a shipwreck, and immense
Variety of ruin shall befall,
Till death itself shall be least ill of all.

“As for that foremost great adventurer,

Whose fame and luck shall lift him to the sky,
In this my strange, eternal sepulchre
God’s viewless purposes will have him lie.
His Turkish naval spoils, proud though they were,
And prosperous, the conqueror shall lay by.
Nor I, for wrong done, threaten him, alone,
But Mombassa and Quilóa overthrown.

“Here will another come, of fairest fame,

A knight, a lover, and of liberal mind,
Bringing with him that most delicious dame,
Love, of his mercy, for his love designed,
Whom their sad fortune and dark fate shall claim
Here in my country, angry and unkind,
Which, though it let them through rough shipwreck live,
’Tis but the sight of greater ills to give.

“Starving to death, they shall see children dear,

Begot and born in love beyond compare,
And the fierce Caffirs, envious of her gear,
From the sweet lady all her vesture tear,
And limbs, so beautiful and crystal clear,
Naked in the sun and frost and windy air,
After the long march when her delicate feet
Have suffered the beach sands’ ferocious heat.

“Their eyes shall see, such as escape again

From so much misadventure and distress,
The lovers in their misery remain
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 115

Deep in the hot implacable wilderness.

There, when for bitter tears of grief and pain
The very stones seem not so merciless,
Those two, in close embrace, their souls shall free
From the fair prison of their agony.”

Yet more the ghastly monster would have said,

Touching our fate. But I rose up before
And asked him: “Who art thou, whose shape of dread
Has filled me with astonishment so sore?”
Twisting his mouth and the black eyes in his head,
With a bellow and a horrifying roar,
Heavily, harshly his reply he made,
As one on whom the answer gravely weighed:

“I am that vast cape locked in secrecy,

That Cape of Hurricanes your people call,
Of whom Pomponius, Strabo, Ptolemy,
Pliny, the whole Past, lacked memorial.
I round out Africa’s extremity
In my hid headland, where the shore lines fall
Away, toward the Antarctic Pole prolonged,
Which your audacity has deeply wronged.

“I was Earth’s child, like those of ruthless might,

Egeus, Enceladus, and Hundred Hands.
I am Adamastor, and I fought the fight
With him who rattles Vulcan’s thunder brands.
I piled not mountain height on mountain height,
But, to make Ocean bow to my commands,
Captain by sea was I, and thither went
To come to grips with Neptune’s armament.

“The love it was of Peleus’ consort high

That made me such a venture undertake,
Misprizing every goddess of the Sky
116 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

Only for the Lady of the Waves’ sweet sake.

Her, ’mid her Nereids, once I happed to spy
Coming naked up the beach, and felt awake
Desire within with such prevailing power
I know no greater yearning to this hour.

“And since there was no way to have her charms,

With my huge ugliness and look unmeet,
I thought to take her by main force of arms
And before Doris laid my case complete.
Doris spoke for me, troubled by alarms,
But my love answered with chaste laughter sweet:
‘How shall sufficient her affection prove,
A nymph who must sustain a giant’s love?

“‘But that we may deliver all the sea

From such a war, devices I shall find,
Mine honor saved, to ’scape the penalty.’
My go-between brought answer in this kind.
I, who could never fall by treachery,
For lovers are magnificently blind,
Now found my inmost heart filled up and thronging
With the abundance of my hope and longing.

“Like a poor fool the battle I gave o’er.

And lo! as Doris promised, on a night
Appeared to me a long, long way before,
Naked, alone, sweet grace of Thetis white.
From afar I ran, like one in madness sore,
With arms outstretched to clasp the life’s delight
Of this my body, and those eyes so fair
I fell a-kissing, and her cheek and hair.

“What grief do I not know, who this recount!

I deemed my love was in my arms, no less,
But found I had embraced a rugged mount,
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 117

Full of rough woods and thickset wilderness?

And with the high crag standing front to front,
When I thought that face angelical to press,
I was unmanned and, dumb, still as a stock,
Became a rock joined to another rock.

“O nymph, the loveliest in all the sea,

Although my presence ne’er thy pleasure wrought,
Why labor in that gin to capture me,
Whether it were mount or cloud or dream or naught?
Thence half-way mad in fury did I flee,
Because of hurt and shame upon me brought,
To seek another world she could not know,
Who made such mockery of my grief and woe.

“And in that hour, all of my brethren’s band

Sank beaten in the extremity of ill,
And the false gods, in safer state to stand,
Buried them, each under some mighty hill.
Against high Heaven can avail no hand.
And I, for my own sorrows weeping still,
Began to feel at last what punishments
The hateful Fates kept for my insolence.

“This flesh of mine was changed into hard clay.

My bones, of crags and rocks, took on the cast.
These limbs you see, this form and body, lay
Stretched out in the great waters. And at last
Into this promontory faraway
The gods transmuted all my stature vast.
And, that I might endure redoubled ill,
The seas of Thetis circle round me still.”

He told his tale, and, weeping wild, before us

In a twinkling he had vanished from our view.
The black cloud broke, and, moaning and sonorous,
118 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

Far-ranging sound over the ocean flew.

Raising my hands to the angelic chorus,
Who this long while had given guidance true,
I prayed God in his mercy to withhold
Those evils Adamastor had foretold.

Adamastor is arguably Camões’s most famous poetic creation, a feat of

literary invention rivaling the composition of Os Lusíadas itself. In a
dramatic exercise of imitatio, Camões supersedes the classical models
available to him in the startling immanence of Adamastor and in the
apparition’s pronounced and arresting proclamation of selfhood. Manuel
Correa, an early editor (1613) and commentator of the poem, remarked
apropos of the appearance of Adamastor that “[n]ão tenho palauras para
encarecer a linguage, propriedade, & eloquentia desta octaua, que real-
mente faz este fingimento & Metamorphosi que vay tratando deste Cabo
de Boa Esperança, vetagem as de Ouidio” (I have no words to do justice
to the language, decorum, and eloquence of this stanza; these qualities
here supersede anything in Ovid and so vividly portray this fabled cre-
ation and metamorphosis of the Cape of Good Hope, 153r). Two centu-
ries later, in a defense of Camões’s originality another editor of the poem
will go so far as to claim that “[in this episode] Camões had no model
to imitate” (Amorim 1:492). Voltaire includes Camões’s poem in his “Essay
on Epic Poetry,” published in London in 1727, and though the author
of Candide is harshly critical of Camões, he does say of Adamastor that
“I believe . . . such a Fiction would be thought noble and proper, in all
Ages, and in all Nations” (342).2 Over time, the Adamastor episode has
generated a mixture of awe and interpretive grappling that might be said
to reflect Adamastor’s own enigmatic nature. The giant at the ends of the
earth is polysemous, an exegetical conundrum. The specter is simultane-
ously many things. He is, for instance, the anthropomorphic manifesta-
tion of the Cape of Good Hope and a nebulous, airy phantom, a joining
of the empirical and phantasmal worlds; he is an earthbound body and
an end point of geographic and cartographic knowledge, a numinous
glimpse of the secrets of the earth and the Ocean, of “mystery inviolate /
Of Mother Nature and the Ocean Sea” (V.42.i–ii).3 The range of interpre-
tations Adamastor invites understandably prompted Lawrence Lipking to
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 119

observe that Adamastor “might be taken rhetorically for the figure of

undecidability” (217), and that

[g]eographically, Adamastor stands for the place where maps lose their
potency—here be monsters; historically, for an unknown part of the past,
a legend and reality concealed from the ancients and yet to be explored;
epistemologically, for a point beyond which human perceptions fail; theo-
logically, for the forbidden. (215)

Moreover, the interpretive possibilities attending Adamastor stem in part

from the dual nature of his voice.4 First he declaims prophecies in an
epic register, then relates autobiographically and lyrically his own story of
impossible love and enduring anguish. Adamastor’s characteristic tone of
speaking is an explosive rage and sorrow: he speaks to Gama “with a bel-
low and horrifying roar” (V.49.vi) that is “heavy and bitter” (V.49.vii); he
cries that his deception by Thetis left him “ireful” and “half-mad” (V.57.v).
The end of his encounter with the Portuguese is punctuated by a “weep-
ing wild,” a “moaning and sonorous” cry (V.60.i, iii).
Much of Adamastor’s poetic and critical appeal derives from the appar-
ently disparate aspects of his shape and comportment. I want to argue for
a reading that interlaces many of those aspects, a reading that is grounded
in the giant’s status as the emblematic, expansionist encounter with Africa
at the end of the sixteenth century. A constellation of attributes—Adamas-
tor’s Africanness, his monstrous body, his disposition that is fearful, ireful,
and vengeful, and his two distinctive modes of speech—form an integrated
whole if we consider Adamastor through the lens of medieval and early-
modern conceptualizations of melancholy. The culture of melancholy and
monsters invests the phantasmal giant with a wide-ranging hermeneutic
currency. In fashioning Adamastor as a melancholic, Camões shifts melan-
choly from its primarily lyrical and philosophical antecedents in medieval
and early Renaissance Portuguese culture to the imperialist imaginary and
the narrative of movement through spaces of expansion. Adamastor hence
emerges as a distinctly Camonian composite of the ideologies of maritime
empire in which Africa is initially and necessarily implicated.
Africa, therefore, must shape the understanding of Adamastor as a com-
ponent of the journey of knowledge and authority represented by Vasco
120 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

da Gama and his fleet. In Epic and Empire, David Quint studies Adamas-
tor in an analysis of the tradition of the epic curse in Os Lusíadas and finds
the origins of the spectral giant in Polyphemus in the Odyssey and the
Aeneid.5 For Quint, “the burden of Camões’ episode—and the basis of its
alleged superiority to classical epic—is to show how such poetic inventions
can be historical” (114). Quint argues that Camões chose the Portuguese
experience in Africa to demonstrate the conflation of poetic inventiveness
and historical experience. In this discussion, Quint considers the possibil-
ity of hearing in Adamastor’s curse an indigenous, African voice of rebel-
lion and resistance that becomes melded into a “blind fury of nature, a
resistance that is not particularly directed at [the Portuguese] or the result
of their own acts of violence” (118). Any such African voice of resistance is
ultimately silenced, whereby “the figure of Adamastor is both substituted
for the Africans and simultaneously emptied of their presence and made
to point instead to their Portuguese masters” (123).6 Van Wyk Smith builds
on Quint’s discussion of the Odyssey by finding in Polyphemus’s curse
on Ulysses a model of colonization: “his [Polyphemus’s] island and the
Greeks’ covetous view of it encapsulate a veritable paradigm of the colo-
nial process . . . it is . . . only one of many legitimising paradigms of the
colonial imperative that the Portuguese would have garnered from classi-
cal and biblical sources” (“Ptolemy, Paradise and Purgatory” 88–89). Yet
Adamastor as a possible “representation” of the indigenous—or, in post-
colonial terminology, “subaltern”—voice is not an easily resolved issue, nor
is the relationship between the African specter and Gama in the schema
of standard binaries that oppose Europeans and their Others. Camões
deliberately erodes the boundaries between Adamastor and his imperialist
onlookers; if Adamastor’s obstreperous body and vengeful speech are even-
tually subsumed and overcome by Portuguese expansion, we can also read
behind his rageful plaint a sober acknowledgment, from the perspective of
the indigene, of the sacrifice of African land and bodies to the machine of
conquest. André Brink proposes that Adamastor does not so much evoke
disgust as awe (which is, presumably, a more deferential attitude toward
Adamastor the African than a rote brutalization of the imperial Other), and
in so doing comes to the conclusion—correctly, in my view—that “even in
setting up the Other as hideous and terrifying, [Camões] suggests a sub-
jectivity which transcends easy categorisation” (“A Myth of Origin” 45).7
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 121

Adamastor, as Filgueira Valverde (339) points out, is not part of the

classical pantheon of gods. In a bold act of mythogenesis, Camões creates
Adamastor as on a par with Greco-Roman mythology.8 Camões’s Adamas-
tor myth may indeed have classical or Renaissance sources, but to consider
those sources exclusively is to ignore another, more local mythification of
giants and Africa in the pages of two major historiographic texts of the
Iberian Middle Ages, Alfonso X’s General estoria (General History) and
Primera crónica general de España (First General Chronicle of Spain).
The early pages of the Primera crónica general narrate Hercules’ arrival in
Spain from Africa as he crosses the sea with a fleet of ten ships and bring-
ing with him an Arabic astronomer, Allas, named after Mount Allant in
Ceuta (8). The mythic hero demarcates the beginning of the West by erect-
ing a tower, one of the Pillars of Hercules. In this brief story, the founding
of Spanish cities such as Cádiz and Seville occurs as a result of maritime
travel from Africa, linked to Ceuta through the Moorish astronomer. The
second part of the General estoria traces the lineages of biblical and classi-
cal giants (chapter 21) who are telluric figures because of their commem-
oration in the names of the world’s mountains. Of interest here is the
legend of Atlas, king of Africa (“Libya”) who “era gigant e uno de los may-
ores onbres de cuerpo que en aquella sazon eran en aquella tierra” (was
a giant and who had one of the largest bodies among men of the time in
that land, 280). A mountain was named for Atlas and the narrative tells
us that Atlas was the son of Japeth, who himself was son of Titan, “el
gigant” (the giant, 281); it is repeated that “era Athlas mayor de cuerpo que
todos los otros omnes que eran a aquella sazon” (Atlas had the largest
body of any man living during that time, 281). These two histories incor-
porate Africa and Ceuta into a foundational myth of Spain and Iberia,
dominated by two legendary figures of great size and strength. In the
Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta, as we noted earlier, Zurara dubs Ceuta the
“começo de formosura” (beginning of beauty), a beauty that is ethical in
nature because Ceuta adumbrates the Portuguese campaigns of explora-
tion and conquest that are part of a divine scheme that combats the insid-
ious “sect” of Muhammad.9 In Os Lusíadas, it can be argued that Camões
relocates Zurara’s ethical Ceuta southward to the Cape of Good Hope,
the locale where the eastern enterprise begins. In so doing, Camões makes
Adamastor, the earthbound giant and Titan (like Atlas), the guard of the
122 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

entrance to the Indian Ocean, which, in the history of nautical explora-

tion as Camões recounts it, had not been breached until the voyage of
Gama.10 Like the Pillars of Hercules, Adamastor represents the ne plus
ultra of knowledge and travel, now placed in southern, rather than north-
ern, Africa. Adamastor’s threats and rage echo the boundary of the oceanic
forbidden associated with the Pillars of Hercules as that which, in medi-
eval times, had “symbolized . . . the interdiction for man to penetrate into
the Atlantic” (Randles, “The Atlantic” 2).11
If Quint argues for Adamastor as a kind of literary exemplum through
which Camões demonstrates the historical basis of myth, then it can be
concluded that the relationship between Africa and Adamastor is not
much more than a convenience, a circumstantial appropriateness. On the
one hand, Africa is an apt historical stage on which to demonstrate a his-
toricizing underpinning to poetic invention, and, on the other, the para-
digm of colonization embodied in Polyphemus’s curse, and therefore in
Adamastor’s voice, could easily apply to any colonized peoples. Such ideas
situate Adamastor within the ideological frame of expansion and imperial-
ism suffusing the narrative of Os Lusíadas. However, the relation between
Africa and Adamastor moves beyond the apposite to the essential when
we consider the connection between expansion, monstrosity, and melan-
choly, between the imperialist imperative and the particular and meta-
phoric expression of it in the monster at the end of the world. Adamastor
the monstrous melancholic could never be anything but African—quite
apart from the fact that he is the very soil of Africa in his metamorphosed
limbs—because Africa gives birth to melancholy in Camões’s poem as
both an ethical and a worldly phenomenon.
Our own critical encounter with Adamastor begins by noting the meta-
morphosis of the apparition and his identities, which are variously navi-
gational, meteorological, mythological, and oneiric. In the relatively short
space of the twenty-three stanzas of the episode, Camões enlists a number
of descriptors: Adamastor emerges from the nocturnal storm cloud first
as a “figure” (figura), then as a strange, second Colossus of Rhodes that
causes a frisson of fear to ripple through the Portuguese onlookers, a
“horrifying monster” (monstro horrendo), a “stupendous body” (estupendo
corpo), a captain of the sea, a giant and Titan, and finally, the cape itself.
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 123

The kaleidoscopic forms and identities of Adamastor, not to mention the

pronounced affective response he generates, advocate for a Camonian ob-
jective of making the Adamastor a momentous episode in the voyage;
in Camões’s sources (such as Barros’s Décadas), the rounding of Good
Hope is accomplished easily and without hindrance, almost incidentally.
Terry Cochran has argued for Camões’s use of figura as an abstraction that
marks Adamastor as a decisive moment in the poem in which “the dis-
juncture between the historical and the figural, between experience and its
realization, comes to a head” (139).12 Cochran’s analysis helps us understand
the Adamastor episode in the broader context of discourse, figuration, and
“the relationship between culture and state that literary and national his-
tory presuppose” (121), yet we need to be wary about making Adamastor
too much of an abstraction, because there is such a pronounced, physical
imminence to Adamastor in his sudden, gigantic, and obstreperously fear-
inducing body. Adamastor’s corporality must therefore inform attempts
to come to exegetical terms with this key figure of Camonian poie-sis. And
it is this corporality that motivates an important lexical shift in the terms
used to describe Adamastor: after Adamastor has materialized as a defined
body (and once he has delivered his prophecies on the fate that will meet
Portuguese explorers after Gama in Africa), he is no longer a figura (stanza
39) but a monstro (stanza 49). Interestingly, this is only one of three times
that Camões uses monstro in a poem teeming with strange beings and
penned when the fascination with monstrous bodies, both remote and
domestic, was firmly part of the European imaginary. Vasco da Gama reg-
isters Adamastor’s monstrous nature as partly residing in his extraordinary
body. He remarks, “Yet more the ghastly monster [monstro horrendo]
would have said, / Touching our fate” (V.49.i–ii), an echo of Virgil’s de-
scription of Polyphemus as a “monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens” (a
monster, awful, shapeless, huge) (Aeneid, bk. III, 657); Gama then addresses
Adamastor directly and exclaims “that stupendous body, for certain, has
caused me great wonder!” (V.49.iii–iv).13 Gama’s pronouncement inter-
twines monstrousness, corporeality, and wonder (or marvel), and in so
doing establishes Adamastor as Os Lusíadas’s preeminent monster, which in
turn allows us to read him as a creation that is especially dense with sig-
nification. In his essay on monster culture, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that
124 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

[t]he monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the

monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which
reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on
the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a
displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that
created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again . . .
Monsters must be examined within the intricate mix of relations (social, cul-
tural, and literary-historical) that generate them. (“Monster Culture” 4–5)14

In Cohen’s formulation, a monster is always and necesssarily a metaphor,

a symbol, an allegory, a deflection away from literalness. Cohen proposes
that a monster’s meaning (or existence) cannot exist independently of a
reader or interpreter. The monster’s hermeneutic function hence lies at the
core of its nature and is its raison d’être. The monster enjoys a privileged
position as a marker and representative of the literary, philosophical, his-
torical, theological, or scientific values of the cultures and societies that
generate it. As heir to the monsters of classical epic, according to Quint,
Adamastor performs the literary function of the epic curse; others read
the giant as the voice of fate, a hostile force of nature, or the fear of the
unknown that Gama’s voyage finally and definitively dispels.15
Gama’s use of the verb maravilhar (to wonder or marvel [at]) places
Adamastor in the tradition of mirabilia that is a constant presence in
the genre of medieval and early-modern travel narrative and which took
shape in travel narratives such as the books of Marco Polo or John Man-
deville with their hosts of Plinian monsters. The marvel or wonder that
Gama records is that Adamastor occasions a momentary suspension of
the authority and epistemological certainty that otherwise define Gama’s
voyage and privileged position as explorer and knower of the world além-
mar (overseas). Adamastor shares the trait of geographic frontierdom typ-
ical of Plinian monsters who reside at the edges of the known world. Such
monsters, in their remarkable bodies, suggest new epistemologies or ways
of knowing the world, or the limit of knowledge. A number of Plinian
monsters appear throughout the poem’s stanzas, which attest to Camões’s
familiarity with this kind of liminal being.16 But unlike the earlier writers
who included Plinian monsters in their tales, usually located in “India” (a
generic term for eastern lands) or “Ethiopia,” Portuguese travelers revealed
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 125

that no such monsters existed in these places or in Africa, though occa-

sional references in Portuguese texts to sub-Saharan Africans as having
the faces of dogs (a vestige of the cynocephali or dog-headed people) can
be found.17
The kind of monster I would like to focus on, though, is the kind that
is created in the imagination as part of the psychosomatic theory of see-
ing and knowing, briefly explored in chapter 2. As opposed to the faraway,
legendary monsters of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance monster, while
still retaining its etyomological nature as something that is portentous or
that warns, exists more within the scientific realms of medicine and phys-
iology and the preoccupation with the teratological body. Such monsters
were seminally studied by French physician Ambroise Paré whose Des
monstres et prodiges appeared in 1573. As Huet’s Monstrous Imagination
lays out in considerable detail, one of Paré’s fundamental objectives was
to understand the etiology of monstrosity by seeking out the monster’s
biological causes. Paré locates monstrous causation in the imagination,
and monsters are born when, at the moment of conception, a woman
looks on, say, a dog or frog. This image transmits itself to the fetus, which
then bears traits of the animal. We find similar monsters in the Jardín
de flores curiosas (Garden of Curious Flowers) of Antonio de Torquemada,
a Spanish humanist. Torquemada’s book was published in 1570; the first
treatise is dedicated to nature and what is outside of nature. Monsters
appear here and, like Paré’s book three years later, are essentially mon-
strous births. The power of the imagination receives considerable discus-
sion by the interlocutors of the dialogue, since it is capable of changing
the external, sensory world. “[L]a imaginación intensa tiene tan gran
fuerça y poder que no solamente puede imprimir diversos efectos en aquél
que está ymaginando, pero también puede hazer efecto en las mesmas
cosas que ymagina” (the intense imagination has such a great force and
power that it can not only imprint numerous characteristics on he who
is imagining, but it can also affect the very things that it imagines, 533).
This formulation of the imagination attributes an agentive, transforma-
tive power of the imagination on the objects perceived by the eye in the
outside world, much like the rays that emanate from the eyes and could
potentially cause damage, such as the mal de ojo or evil eye.18 The inter-
locutors in the Jardín go on to note that once the Portuguese had arrived
126 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

in India, no monsters such as those contained in old books were encoun-

tered. The monsters, they reason, must have fled into the mountains.
Torquemada’s claim that the monsters of India flee to the mountains
and for that reason are unverifiable, and that monsters still exist in Africa,
suggests a migration that is not entirely geographic in nature or dependent
on the authority of eyewitnesses. Monsters by the mid-sixteenth century
have entered once more into the realm of the symbolic and the “psycho-
logical,” a realm supervised by the imagination. They not only live in the
mountains but also in the recesses of the mind and the working of the
senses. They are no longer allegories of the margin; monsters now pose a
relationship between the world and the perceiver, between empirical real-
ities and the mind’s eye of knowing and deliberation. They are, as we will
now see, products of the melancholic imagination.

Adamastor melancholicus
Adamastor’s gigantic body erupts into the middle of Camões’s regulated
progression of ottava rima stanzas with huge, misshaped limbs that offend
the Renaissance aesthetic value of proportion and harmony. Adamastor is
an aggregate of the legends and reports of monsters said to be dwelling
in Africa and at the outer limits of experience that accrued over the cen-
turies in the European mind; he is, in J. L. Hilton’s words, a “new para-
digm of the unknown” (“Adamastor”). Yet his monstrous form in the
details of Camões’s description manifests certain traits of melancholy, as
do his discursive registers that are first prophetic and historiographic,
then autobiographical. The reaction of Gama and his crew that is simul-
taneously fearful and darkly fascinated by the specter implicates the impe-
rial onlookers into Adamastor’s monstrous nature. Camões’s anatomical
itemization of the monster in the description of his mouth, hair, limbs,
face, and pallor construes the giant as a melancholic corporeality that
dominates the minds and affects of the India-bound travelers. Melancholy
is part of the terrain charted and traversed by Gama’s ships as it appears
in Adamastor’s affective repercussions on his onlookers and in his physi-
cality that is one and the same with the rocks and soil of the Cape of Good
Hope. As Jennifer Radden notes, “[f]or most of western European history,
melancholy was a central cultural idea, focusing, explaining, and organiz-
ing the way people saw the world and one another” (vii). Lyons likewise
The dramatic confrontation between Adamastor and Vasco da Gama. From Os
Lusiadas: poema epico (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1817), with engravings by Jean-Honoré
Fragonard.
128 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

attests to the general importance of melancholy by noting that “[the]

diverse traditions about melancholy expressed, implicitly, the idea of its
social importance—it was a physical and psychological condition that ex-
pressed an orientation towards the world and society—and this made it
particularly susceptible to literary treatment” (1), and studies such as the
one by Marion Wells advocates for melancholy as part of the formation
of the early-modern subject.
In the writings of its theorists, melancholy was always a relational prin-
ciple in that it codified a series of equivalences, parallels, and analogies
between the human body, the four elements, the cosmos, and the forces
of nature. Melancholy was, in short, a multivalent and constantly evolv-
ing way of seeing the multifarious dependences between the spheres of
human physicality, perception, action, and the cosmic and divine structur-
ing of existence. With its proposition of ineluctable connections between
the worldly and celestial realms, melancholy theory in some respects locks
tightly into place with the science of celestial navigation as a deliberate
reading of the heavens and the stars to direct the larger negotiation of the
human agents of maritime expansion. In this regard, navigation might
be considered the melancholic science par excellence, and its originating
practitioners, the Portuguese, as influential proponents of this negotiation
of the waterways of the world.19
Although Camões never uses the word melancholic to describe Adamas-
tor, traces of this theory of body, temperament, and intellect infuse the
episode and the dynamics of the giant’s personality and tense exchange
with Gama. The shudder of fear that creeps over the mariners unites them
to Adamastor, a connection of bodies to a body, an acute reminder of the
corporalities at the center of the episode. For this reason let us consider
Adamastor as a melancholic body first. Adamastor’s physicality bears the
marks of melancholy as it was explained in humoral physiology. This med-
ical understanding of melancholy, originating in classical antiquity and sur-
viving throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, was based on the work
of Greek physicians such as Galen and Hippocrates. It was developed and
elaborated by numerous authors over time.20 Humoral theory proposed
a direct cause-and-effect relation between somatic constitution and psy-
chology by seeking to explain behavioral types, called “temperaments” or
“complexions,” according to the qualities and quantities of the body’s four
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 129

constituent humors. These humors are blood, black bile (melancholy),

yellow bile (choler), and phlegm. An ideal proportion of the four humors
would dictate perfect health of body and mind (Babb 9), while a prepon-
derance or excess of one or another would create a characteristic temper-
ament. If the humor in abundance is blood (the most desirable humor),
the temperament would be sanguine; if black bile, melancholic; if yellow
bile, choleric; and if phlegm, phlegmatic. Each humor possessed greater
or lesser degrees of moisture and heat. If the humor in excess was black
bile, the resulting melancholic would usually favor solitude, night, and
darkness, and would be given to fits of sorrow and fear; the melancholic’s
characteristic color was black. “Of all the four complexions . . . the most
miserable is the melancholic,” Babb notes (10). Humoral doctrine also
presupposed a set of equivalences between the humors and the structure
of the world: each humor corresponded to one of the four basic elements
and to seasons of the year and the life span of humans. By nature cold and
dry, black bile is earthy and autumnal. Choler, on the other hand, is hot
and dry, an equivalent of fire and summer. The choleric’s natural dispo-
sition is angry, proud, revengeful, bold, or ambitious (Babb 9). At imme-
diate glance, Adamastor’s climatological situation, comportment, and body
suggest a correspondence to these precepts of humoralism. He emerges
at night from a black cloud, and his complexion is dark; his mouth is
black, and his teeth yellow—the colors, respectively, of black and yellow
bile.21 His body that is the land of the cape, washed by the ocean’s waters,
suggests the cold dryness typical of black bile. Adamastor’s rageful, venge-
ful, and hubristic behavior, tinctured by his overwhelming sorrow and
grief at the loss of Thetis, contains elements of both the melancholic and
choleric temperaments. We might also find in Adamastor’s dirt-encrusted
hair or in his limbs (“crags”) that stretch into the sea an allusion to the
earthy nature of black bile and, with his beard, of the choleric’s and
melancholic’s tendency to hirsuteness (Babb 9, 33). These basic traits of
the melancholic are stereotypical and do no more than suggest a general
shaping of Adamastor as a melancholic according to ideas that were in
wide circulation in the Renaissance.22 On their own, the physical charac-
teristics of the melancholic do not help us particularly in understanding
why Camões would have conflated Africanness and melancholy as part of
the poetic rendering of expansion or as part of the geographic landscape
130 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

traversed by Gama. To that end, we must consider other ideas about melan-
choly and its philosophical implications.
Adamastor spatializes melancholy through the connection between his
body and the landmass of Africa, and in his partial identification with the
sub-Saharan black African. That Camões means to associate Adamastor
with Africa is clear, though it is important to remember that the giant
does not have one, single identity—as a Titan, he originates elsewhere so
is a foreigner to the shore of Africa, but his love obsession with Thetis, in
the Ovidian metamorphoses that generate his shapes, has converted him
into the land of Africa. Much as he is the anthropomorphic conjuration
of the Cape of Good Hope, he is also a synecdoche for the entire African
coast: “Aqui toda a Africana costa acabo” (I round out Africa’s extremity,
V.50.v). Camões tacitly imbues Adamastor with blackness through the de-
scription of his hair as “crespos os cabelos” (woolly [or curly] hair, V.39.vii),
a trope so commonly used in expansionist writing to describe sub-Saharan
black Africans that, by Camões’s time, it has become a stereotype.23 The
association between melancholy and Africa is an old one, as Mary Floyd-
Wilson demonstrates in her study of geohumoralism. Floyd-Wilson notes
that one vein of geohumoral thought held that African heat burned the
humors and thus made African bodies cold and dry (2). In other geo-
humoral texts, the extreme heat of Africa is thought to cause madness,
sexual licentiousness, and effeminacy in men. Juan Huarte de San Juan
(1529?–88), a contemporary of Camões, is perhaps the most well known
Iberian theorist of (geo)humoralism and the psychological states and
intricacies of the mind associated with it; his Examen de ingenios para las
ciencias (Examination of Men’s Wits) was published in 1575. Huarte de
San Juan, as Floyd-Wilson points out, subscribes to the idea that “there
is a reliable correspondence between the external ‘complexion’ of one’s
skin and one’s humoral complexion” (Floyd-Wilson 69), so that black
skin could be an indicator of melancholia. The correlation between phys-
iognomy and disposition is not restricted to comparisons that juxtapose
peoples separated by large-scale geographic distances, such as that separat-
ing Spaniards from Africans; Huarte de San Juan finds differences between
the various inhabitants of Iberia itself—such as the Catalonians, Portu-
guese, Galicians, Andalusians, Valencians, or Aragonese—and asks “¿Quién
no ve y conoce lo que estos difieren entre sí, no sólo en la figura del rostro
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 131

y compostura del cuerpo, pero también en las virtudes y vicios del ánima?”
(Who does not see and recognize the differences these people exhibit,
not only in the shape of the face and the stature of the body, but also in
the virtues and vices of the soul itself? 247). If Adamastor’s body is melan-
cholically constituted and is therefore cool and dry (it is composed of soil
and bathed by the sea) and his rageful, sorrowful temperament is evidence
of black and yellow bile, his prophetic pronouncements suggest another
form of melancholy, genial melancholy, a widespread idea throughout
Renaissance Europe that began to dissociate melancholy from a purely
somatic condition.
Genial melancholy is based on Aristotle’s Problem XXX, 1, in which
melancholy no longer simply denotes a humoral disposition or disease
but is rather a state of being responsible for creativity, genius, or exalted
intellection. Aristotle combines humoral theory with the Platonic notion
of divine frenzy (furor) or inspiration, so that melancholy becomes a de-
sirable, rather than pathological, condition.24 The theory of genial melan-
choly was disseminated throughout Europe by the writings of Italian
humanist Marsilio Ficino, especially in his treatise De vita triplici (Three
Books on Life).25 It is a “unique and divine gift” in Ficino’s words, be-
stowed by Saturn (Silva, “Songs of Melancholy” 32). The genial melan-
cholic is noted for his gift of prophecy or soothsaying, often considered
typical of melancholics in southern regions. “[F]or Ficino . . . the melan-
cholic’s outstanding abilities are characterized by their orientation towards
the future” (Schleiner 26). So it is that the first half of Adamastor’s per-
oration in which he describes the future events of Portuguese explorers
can be understood as the gift of divination possessed by genial melan-
cholics. The epic curse hence meets Ficinan humanism and Aristotelian
melancholy, but it is important nonetheless to separate the epic curse
from the melancholic lament. For Camões, melancholic rage is prophecy.
Adamastor as a “genius of the shore,” then, is not only a guardian spirit
of a coastal locale, as Lipking calls him following the coinage in Milton’s
Lycidas, but is a genial prophet since “prophesying is part of the melan-
cholic experience” (Schleiner 319).26
The prophecies Adamastor delivers are, as we have been noting, the first
part of his discourse to Gama. Disturbed by such predictions, and by the
specter’s boastful claim that the tragedies to befall Portuguese explorers
132 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

are a vengeance for Gama’s audacity in entering into previously unknown

topographies of space and knowledge, Gama interrogates the apparition
with a terse “Quem és tu?” (Who art thou? V.49.iii). Adamastor writhes
under the weight of a question we sense he would prefer not to answer but
must, like the shades who reluctantly and in anguish respond to Dante’s
queries throughout the Inferno. With a moan and a bitter and heavy voice
Adamastor identifies himself as the cape and gives his name. Here the
second, autobiographical part of Adamastor’s discourse commences. We
learn of Adamastor’s passion for Thetis, ignited when he glimpsed the
nymph bathing nude. Adamastor’s will became imprisoned, and, because
of this desire for Peleu’s wife, he waged war on Neptune. Doris, Thetis’s
mother, tricks Adamastor into thinking he might possess Thetis in order
to end the war, and, as a result of his audacious desire, the giant is puni-
tively metamorphosed into the cape with the waters of Thetis forever and
agonizingly lapping against him. Adamastor, with his suffering and wail-
ing, “halfway mad in fury,” exhibits the acute symptoms of lovesickness or
passionate love as postulated by medical writers of the Middle Ages as one
of the deleterious states of affect caused by melancholy.27 This “morbid
love” (also known as amor hereos) is an unrequited love that causes suffer-
ing based on a fixation on the love object, originally apprehended through
sight and transformed into an image or phantasm in the imagination.
Lovesickness becomes a significant presence in the medical tradition for
the first time in the writings of the humoralist Galen (Wack 7). Babb
notes that although lovesickness is not a melancholic affliction per se it
can become so if love remains unsatisfied (134) because the phantasm in
the imaginative faculty has become unhealthily tenacious (Wells 10). The
lover’s skin can manifest a discoloration or pallor (Babb 136), and this may
well explain Camões’s description of Adamastor’s appearance as, improb-
ably, both “earthy” and “pallid” (V.39.vi).28 Central to the dissemination of
ideas on lovesickness throughout the European Middle Ages was the work
of Constantinus Africanus or Constantine the African (d. 1087), a native
of Carthage who traveled to Italy, converted to Christianity, entered the
abbey of Montecassino, and worked in the shadow of the medical school
at Salerno. Constantine introduced much Arabic learning into Europe
through his translations of Arabic medical texts into Latin.29 The chapter
devoted to lovesickness in his Viaticum became one of the authoritative
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 133

treatments of the malady in its many editions, translations, and com-

mentaries, in addition to other works such as the Canon medicinae of Ibn
Sina (Avicenna). In the Viaticum, as Wack (40) informs us, love is a fore-
runner of melancholy while in another Constantinian translation, love
is a type of melancholy. Portuguese translations of Constantine’s Viaticum
and the works of Avicenna appear in catalogs of royal library holdings in
Portugal prior to Camões’s time.30 Of interest here is the Constantinian
assertion that love is caused by the sight or contemplation of a beautiful
form, which itself can spark a Platonic furor (Folger 36).31 Once the beauti-
ful form is glimpsed, the phantasy (a faculty of the mind that stores sense
impressions) retains it (Folger 30), and the lover may cogitate obsessively
over the absent form itself and thus enter into a state of “morbid” love and
melancholy.32 Such a state is pathological, in need of a cure. In Adamas-
tor, Camões has mythified the lover who suffers from love-melancholy by
transforming him eternally into the landscape of the cape surrounded by
Thetis’s waters.33 Adamastor’s embodiment as earth and rock symbolizes
an eternal, restless, and morbid contemplation of the seen and lost Thetis,
maddeningly close and forever distant. Perhaps Adamastor’s lovesick lament
and petrified form echo the plaint of the lover in Petrarch’s poem 23, “il
suon de’miei gravi sospiri, / ch’acquistan fede a la penosa vita” (the sound
of my heavy sighs which prove how painful my life is, 60), who feels as
if transformed into “un quasi vivo et sbigottito sasso” (an almost living
and terrified stone, 62).34 The natural elements of Camões’s world, of geog-
raphy itself, become invested with a melancholic memory of the past.
Adamastor’s bifurcated address to the explorers, then, reveals the giant’s
melancholia as both humoral temperament and mantic ability. Yet such
melancholy would be little more than a literary topos were it not impli-
cated into Vasco da Gama’s journey as a defining moment in the voyage
to India. It is this aspect of the presence of melancholy in Camões’s text
that makes the Portuguese reaction to Adamastor in the form of fear or
medo so central to melancholy’s valuation as a concept imbricated into the
expansionist imagination. The boundary separating European explorer
from a dark, threatening, and monstrous African Other becomes blurred
because Gama, as the representative of an itinerant Portuguese culture,
not only confronts Adamastor but becomes problematically identified
with him. Adamastor is a figure of melancholy because the Portuguese
134 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

travelers themselves have experienced a precipitous fall into melancholy—

the darkness of the cape with its night phantom reflects a traumatic and
troubling experience of melancholy that dramatizes the authoritative rela-
tionship between Gama and the empirical world, an authority based on
the primacy of the eye and sight, as we noted earlier. This melancholic or
humorally inflected trip is reflected in the language of other texts that
document Gama’s voyage. Álvaro Velho, for example, fleetingly establishes
a distinction between Gama who experiences “merencoria” (melancholy, 62)
and the disrespectful, inattentive attitudes of the natives who are “homens
fleumáticos” (phlegmatic men, 63). In the memorialist-style history of Gas-
par Correia (ca. 1495–ca. 1565), the Lendas da Índia (Legends of India),
Correia makes the observation that Gama was an “homem colérico” (chol-
eric man, 17). In this humoral landscape, Adamastor is a reification of a
troubled, melancholic state of mind that provides an opportunity for a
determined, heroic act of will. To round the cape successfully is to con-
quer the fear of Adamastor, to conquer the danger to Gama’s authority as
a reliable seer and interpreter of the world. Adamastor, then, in his status
as a fear-inducing African, may, to some degree, be a “figure of radical
otherness” (Cochran 147), but he is also, as a melancholic, a figure of a
problematic and uncanny familiarity. Navigating the turning point of Africa
triggers a kind of psychomachia in which fear and phantasms threaten to
disrupt the imperialist venture; melancholy, as Judith Butler reminds us,
“returns us to the figure of the ‘turn’ as a founding trope in the discourse
of the psyche” (168). Camões scripts the passing of the cape as a deliber-
ate act of daring when confronted with a psychological underworld, a cata-
basis that Gama and his company must undergo. Adamastor occasions a
passage through a troubling interiority.
The Portuguese approach to the cape rehearses some generally accepted
postulates about the melancholic state. Nocturnal hours are typically
potent hours for melancholy and thoughts of fear and evil, evident in the
Portuguese encounter with Adamastor at night.35 Closely associated with
night is the wakefulness of the sailors (“vigiando,” V.37.vi) which corrob-
orates the Aristotelian notion that “melancholics were not lovers of sleep”
(Agamben 14n2).36 Such a melancholic insomnia, notes Babb (31), could
produce hallucinations, and indeed we may well consider the specter of
Adamastor as a kind of oneiric, nightmarish phantasm. The passage of the
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 135

cape in the autumn coincides with the commonly held notion that fall is
the melancholic time of year, not to mention the association of the melan-
cholic with long sea journeys or the susceptibility to stellar influences.
In faculty psychology and theories of melancholy, the imagination is
often adversely affected by melancholy—recall that the imagination is
where images received by the eye are stored after they pass through the
common sense. The imaginatio (sometimes called phantasia) receives
images in the form of impressions, but, unlike the common sense, the
imagination can recall impressions of objects to the mind even in the
absence of the object itself (Wells 41). The imagination wields the power
to create combinations of previously received and stored images never
actually seen by the eye. The imagination, then, is the locus where mon-
sters and chimeras are born; the combinatory power of the imagination
can create composite images. For this reason, the imagination is unreliable
and prone to error (Clark 45) and can be afflicted by melancholy. In a dis-
cussion of this process, Pedro Mexía in his Silva de varia lección (Forest
of Many Lessons, 1540) notes the “estrañas ymaginaciones” (strange imag-
inations, 586) produced by this creative and often uncontrollable ventri-
cle of the mind. Adamastor is a monster created in the melancholically
afflicted imaginations of Gama and his crew, and as such stands as a crit-
ical moment when the European gaze as the basis for epistemological
authority falters. The monster represents a lapse in Gama’s ability to relate
to the world authoritatively as the bearer and guarantor of cognitive supe-
riority.37 Adamastor as an experience of marvel (“esse estupendo / Corpo,
certo, me tem maravilhado!” V.49.iii–iv) recalls more Wells’s proposi-
tion, apropos of Italian epic, that the marvelous might be thought of as
a “phantasm-effect” as a moment of ontological ambiguity (144). This
understanding of the marvelous coincides more with the tenor of the
encounter with Adamastor than does, say, Greenblatt’s discussion of the
imagination and the marvelous or wonder in New World colonial tex-
tuality in which it is argued that “Renaisssance wonder [is] an agent of
appropriation” (24). If anything, at this moment in Os Lusíadas Gama is
momentarily disempowered as an agent of imperial appropriation; he
enters Africa as much as Africa enters him.
The fear of Gama and his company that results from Adamastor’s fatal
prophecies and his monstrous form does not, then, signal a distancing
136 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

between the explorers and the spectral-telluric African, but rather an

approximation, a vexed rapprochement. Camões further establishes this
equivalence through the concept of daring or boldness (ousadia or atre-
vimento), so central to Camonian, heroic voyaging and the pursuit of
conquest. The positive, heroic quality of boldness is mirrored darkly in
Adamastor, who is punished for his own intrepid pursuit of Thetis and for
waging war on the Olympians. It is the Portuguese incarnation of bold-
ness or daring that Adamastor initially identifies in his locution “gente
ousada” as that which offends him and the boundary he both guards and
instantiates. That there exists a slippage between practices of boldness—
it can be either positive or negative, as in the Portuguese exercise of it or
in Adamastor’s version of the same trait—inflects this crucial requisite to
epic action with an ethically murky undercurrent.38 Adamastor’s narrative
of his failed quest for Thetis functions as an imperialist parable embed-
ded into the heart of Os Lusíadas, a negative exemplum in that Adamas-
tor’s story as a “captain of the sea” is a story of attempted conquest and
failure. The failure of his boldness is the basis for his melancholy, and this
implicates him into the epic logic of the poem. Gama and Adamastor are
two sides of a Portuguese seafaring identity, the positive and negative in-
flections of heroic passion. If, as Philip Fisher argues in The Vehement Pas-
sions, “passionate” connotes a positive state of being (a legacy of Homeric
epic) and is “the very essence of an aroused and dynamic spirit” (5), and
if anger and fear are themselves virtues in the classical formulations of
these affects, then Gama’s fear of Adamastor and his indignation at the
monster’s audacity on one level manifest his epic exemplarity.39 Although
Gama does not exhibit an overt anger—there is no rage of Achilles driv-
ing the imperialist’s voyage—his spirit of ousadia might be understood
as the expansionist equivalent of this classical, passionate state. Camon-
ian boldness or daring is a principle of movement, of iteration and expan-
siveness; it is geographic, epistemological, spiritual, and cultural; it is
what propels Camonian ships through the seas as they fertilize the world
with culture and Christianity. As a fearless, outward-projecting state of
spirit and mind, ousadia in Adamastor metamorphoses into a perpetual,
melancholic inwardness that confronts the Portuguese sailors as a sym-
bolic death, a stasis.40 Surely this is one reason Camões’s giant grieves so
fiercely, confronted with a form of ousadia that is familiar yet ultimately
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 137

antithetical to his own. Adamastor’s melancholy is the opposite of adven-

turous daring.41 Perhaps Adamastor’s melancholia reflects the distinction
Silva finds between Ficinan and Mannerist melancholy—this latter form,
“unlike the ‘generous’ and ‘heroic’ melancholy of Renaissance Humanism,
is a disease, a pathology of the body and soul, a morbid state of mind
in which genius and the exceptionality of the creative faculties are allied
to suffering, anguish and insanity” (“Songs of Melancholy” 34). In Vasco
da Gama, the passion of ousadia, of atrevimento, permits itinerancy, con-
quest, accomplishment, and the sensual delights (themselves an allegory
of fame and ethical plenitude) on the Isle of Love. Adamastor’s thwarted
and ill-fated daring locks him in one place, a counterpoint to the Portu-
guese success that comes with its own inevitable and disturbing conse-
quences. “[Adamastor’s] situation is in fact a perpetual mocking of him
for his abortive efforts to conquer the sea by force and to conquer the
Nereid by love. [The sea is] both the realm he tried to conquer and the
abode of his beloved, but in his immobile state he is unable to reach out
and attempt another conquest of either,” Ronald de Sousa observes (544).
The double nature of daring or boldness that is both positive and
negative underlies the dilemma that confronts Gama at the cape: does he
push past Adamastor or succumb to the fear of the monster’s prophecies
and return home? There is, of course, only one possible answer to this
question, but the fact that Camões makes the passage of Good Hope a
fearful and dangerous undertaking in his narrative is significant. Gama’s
dilemma is an ethical one because he must make a choice to heed (or not)
Adamastor’s fatalistic words. There is an ontological charge to the confron-
tation between monster and mariner since, notionally speaking, Adamastor
is Gama’s equal. The giant exercises the right of extended historiographic
narrative, a form of discourse that is elsewhere in the poem reserved for
Camões, Gama, or deities.42 Adding to the drama of the encounter and
to the equivalence between Adamastor and Gama is Adamastor’s response
to Gama’s question “Quem és tu?” (Who are you?) with “Eu sou aquele
oculto e grande Cabo” (I am that vast cape locked in secrecy, V.50.i). At
first the response may seem expected enough, but it gains critical weight
when we realize that it is one of only three instances in Camões’s poem
in which the verb ser (to be) is conjugated in the first-person singular,
“sou.” At one level, the use of the first-person singular marks a significant
138 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

departure from the narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as one of the

structural models of the episode. The Latin poet presents his metamor-
phosing world through third-person narratives; Adamastor narrates his
own metamorphosis, and on his own initiative, unlike, for example, the
passive combination of voice and rock in Echo who must wait for another
to speak before being able to respond—and even then Echo can only
repeat words already spoken. For Camões, then, speaking itself is a form
of metamorphosis because the rocks of the cape become vocal and then
revert, at the break of day, to their former muteness. Adamastor’s self-
initiated speech invests Africans with a subjectivity in epic narrative.
The simple, primordial verb of existence “Eu sou” also and more impor-
tantly marks Adamastor’s speech as a deliberate act of self-constitution.
Adamastor speaks to Gama as Gama speaks to the world. Gama wields
the power and privilege of being. “I am” is a locution that defines an
essence of self and acts as a performative in that it conjures and makes
immanent an identity and a consciousness. One of the dangers Adamas-
tor presents is that his melancholic lament might become the future
lament of a nation if the imperial enterprise is not pursued in the face
of, and despite, the certainty of occasional tragedy and defeat. If we allow,
as some scholars maintain, that Camões mourns the loss of empire in Os
Lusíadas, it is also possible to argue that the poem issues a call to arms (or
at least to consciousness) for the rejuvenation of an epic past.43 Adamas-
tor, then, would stand as a negative exemplum, or, as Ronald de Sousa
observes, “a counter-example to the effort upon which the Portuguese are
embarked . . . The Portuguese effort will be a new Promethean act” (545).
Adamastor is the failed “captain of the sea” whose unrequited desire and
enduring grief leaves nothing but a ruins of the self, a spectral simulacrum
of titanic greatness and strength.
Yet even if we do not subscribe to the antiepic hypothesis, Gama’s
response to Adamastor in the form of doubling the cape constitutes a
moment of decision in that it overcomes the melancholic state of mind.
It is Gama’s choice not to submit to melancholy because it will stall the
providential plan of imperialism. Gama’s deliberate act of rounding Good
Hope despite Adamastor’s presence is the consequence of not giving in
to fear and reaffirming his own ousadia. If Gama and his crew inhabit,
albeit temporarily, a melancholic space that is both geographic (Africa)
King Manuel I of Portugal rounds the Cape of Good Hope on a sea monster.
The rounding of Good Hope has here become part of navigational legend and lore.
From Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina, 1516. Courtesy of The James Ford Bell
Library, University of Minnesota, panel 11 of Bell facsimile 1959mWa.
140 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

and internal, this duality reflects the double nature of ousadia and the in-
evitability of deliberate acts of choice. In a discussion of scholars and the
pursuit of truth in his De vita libri tres, Marsilio Ficino employs the meta-
phor of a traveler on land and sea (terrimarique) to denote the dilemma
of ethical choice as a product of melancholy. Ficino writes:

longissima via est quae ad veritatem sapientiamque perducit, gravibus ter-

raeque marisque plena laboribus. Quicunque igitur hoc iter aggrediuntur,
ut poeta quispiam diceret, saepe terra marique periclitantur. Sive enim mare
navigent continue inter fluctus, id est humores duos, pituitam scilicet et
noxiam illam melancholiam, quasi inter Scyllam Charybdimque iactantur.

the road is very long which leads to truth and wisdom, full of heavy labors
on land and sea. Hence people who undertake this journey are often at
danger, as some poet might say, on land and sea. For if they sail on the
sea, they are constantly tossed among the waves, that is, the two humors,
namely phlegm and that noxious form of melancholy, as if between Scylla
and Charybdis. (123)

Of significance also in this context is the long-standing connection between

Saturn and melancholy. Saturn was thought to preside over long sea jour-
neys (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 132) so that one of the typically Sat-
urnine occupations is sailor or mariner.44
The internal or psychomachic conflict Gama confronts at Good Hope
as the negotiation of fear and melancholy recalls passages in the medieval
Leal Conselheiro of D. Duarte, the “philosopher king.” Two of Duarte’s
chapters discuss melancholy as an impediment to the correct exercise of
intellect, spirit, and will in Duarte’s rigidly ethical universe. In chapters
19 and 20, Duarte presents an autobiographical account of his affliction
with melancholy and his eventual recuperation from it. Duarte’s bout
with melancholy, he tells us, was a result of the onerous duties imposed
on him as a young man of twenty-two to see to the bureaucratic matters
of state while his father João I was occupied with the capture of Ceuta.
Duarte’s melancholy manifested itself in an abiding moroseness, an un-
shakable preoccupation with sadness, fear, and death. None of the reme-
dies typically prescribed by physicians for curing melancholy alleviated
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 141

his condition. In the end, Duarte recalls, he was restored to perfect health
only by his faith and “good hope” (boa sperança), which suggests that ulti-
mately the brand of melancholy Duarte describes is spiritual in nature,
akin to acedia or religious melancholy, though Duarte himself is not a
religious. The king contextualizes the discussion of melancholy in a dis-
cussion of tristeza (despair), the Portuguese rendering of tristitia.45 Duarte
conflates the humoral or somatic theory of melancholy (he refers to his
malady as the “humor menencorico” [melancholic humor] and describes
the symptoms of his “distempered” body as indicative of his unhealthy
state) with the spiritual affliction of despair. So it is that in this Portuguese
treatment of melancholy the somatic, melancholic self is inextricable from
the ethical exercise of viver bem or “living well.”
Duarte’s melancholy, as he initially observes, originated in the circum-
stances attending the incipient African enterprise, and the Leal Conselheiro
reveals the triumph over melancholy as a choice, a willed act. Duarte’s
vanquishing of melancholy adumbrates Gama’s disavowal of fear in the
face of Adamastor, a crucial moment in the voyage and expansionist ethos
of Os Lusíadas. Gama’s rounding of the cape is no accident—unlike his
immediate historiographic sources, which describe the passage of Good
Hope as an unremarkable, even felicitous event, Camões opts to shape
this occurrence into an experience of danger and choice that marks the
triumph of ousadia. The descent into a melancholic state of fear and
apprehension, prompted by and mirrored in Adamastor’s melancholy,
parallels Duarte’s melancholy as a direct result of the circumstances of
expansion that is banished only by a concerted act of will and moral rec-
titude. The dissipation of the black cloud as Gama and crew steer past
Good Hope—“Súbito de ante os olhos se apartou. / Desfez-se a nuvem
negra . . .” (before us / In a twinkling he had vanished from our view. /
The black cloud broke . . . V.60.i–iii)—might be read as symbolic of the
victory over melancholy, as well as a reminder that Adamastor’s own melan-
cholic demeanor stands as an obverse to the spirit of ousadia embodied
in Gama. Indeed, Adamastor’s ire is tantamount to a faulty will and con-
trol of the sentiments. For Duarte, ire is born of a “fervor do coraçom”
(upheaval in the heart, 56) that will seek to assuage itself with vengeance,
a sentiment we find in Adamastor’s threat to take vengeance on those who
discovered him (V.44.i–ii).46
142 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

Crucial to the formulation of melancholy as part of the literary and cul-

tural imaginary of medieval and Renaissance Portugal is saudade, a senti-
ment discussed by Duarte that shares some characteristics with melancholy
as an expression of sadness, memory, and unfulfilled longing. Saudade
means, roughly, “nostalgic yearning” or “bittersweet memory,” an aching
desire for someone or something lost or not present, and is discussed by
Duarte in chapter 25, which is devoted to negative states of mind or affect.
Duarte notes that saudade, unlike the other phenomena under analysis,
originates in “senssualidade” or the sentimental affect as opposed to
“rrazom” or reason. Duarte further isolates saudade from the other parts
of his discussion with the claim that this sentiment cannot be found in
“other books” and that “me parece este nome de ssuydade tam proprio,
que o latym nem outro linguagem que eu saibha nom he pera tal sentido
semelhante” (this word seems to me unique, since neither Latin nor any
other language I know of has a similar sentiment, 95). This claim famously
renders saudade as an untranslatable and therefore uniquely Portuguese
sentiment—the “supreme icon of Portuguese culture,” as Eduardo Lourenço
puts it (107)—that is emblematic of the Portuguese temperament itself in
cultural and literary history and which finds expression in a number of
forms over the centuries.47 Frequently, Duarte notes that saudade mani-
fests itself through weeping (chorar) and sighing (sospirar). In Galician-
Portuguese medieval lyric poetry (twelfth to fourteenth centuries), most
notably in the cantigas de amigo (lover’s songs) or poems in the voice of
women who lament the absence of their lovers, we find melancholic aching
prevalently incorporated into the sentimental universe of this poetry. The
single young woman characteristically voices a plaint about her anguish
and the uncertainty of the return of her amigo, who is frequently além
mar (overseas). In Adamastor’s voice we can hear an echo of these plaints,
and it is perhaps with no little irony that Camões re-genders as masculine
the voices of the cantigas de amigo whose beloved is not only “overseas”
but is the very sea itself in the form of Thetis. Adamastor’s sorrowful ire
resonates as a transgeneric lament that conflates Duarte’s and Camões’s
formulations of melancholy and saudade with the plangent medieval songs
of abandoned lovers at water’s edge.
We may, in this light, read Adamastor as a monstrous incarnation of
saudade, a uniquely Portuguese version of melancholy, in addition to the
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 143

more standard understandings of melancholy we have been discussing.

What Freud and his interpreters such as Giorgio Agamben argue is that
melancholy is a reaction to a lost object of love (in Adamastor’s case, this
would be Thetis), while Duarte identifies saudade as the sentiment, located
in the heart, resulting from the affectionate “remembrance” of someone or
from separation from that person.48 Melancholy is inherently linked to the
past and is “the first and most acute expression of temporality” (Lourenço
92), and saudade as well boasts this link with time (106). Saudade is a
melancholically inflected form of memory and history, an affective rela-
tionship with the past. The suffering and anguish that saudade connotes
and that is present in Adamastor’s plaint also establishes a link to the world
of Arabic thought. José Pedro Machado (Dicionário 165) derives saudade
from Latin solitate (solitude), presumably implying that this emotional
distress is a form of isolation or loneliness, or is caused by such isolation.
Before Machado, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos likewise found the
etymological origin in Latin in the feminine plural solitates (55), and con-
siders salutate (health) as a possibility also. Against the perceived neces-
sity of identifying a Latin root, Leo Pap turns to the Arabic saudá, which
means “black bile,” an etymon related to the adjective aswad (black) (99).
Arabic saudá “literally refers to the ‘blackened’ or ‘bruised’ blood within
the heart, and, figuratively, to a feeling of profound sadness. In (Arabic)
medicine . . . saudá is a liver ailment which has as its symptom a bitter
and melancholy sadness” (99).49 So it is that saudade, if we accept the Ara-
bic hypothesis, also boasts a link to humoral theory and melancholy and
imputes an Arabic origin to this Portuguese form of suffering and anguish.

The Masculine Ship

The erotic connotations of lament suffusing Adamastor’s autobiographi-
cal voice suggest that imperial pursuits can occasion loss and longing,
and that therefore empire is a form of desire in the melancholic imagi-
nation. Os Lusíadas as such is Camões’s greatest and most elaborate love
poem, and Adamastor’s loss constitutes part of its amatory universe. As a
force of nature allegorized by the classical gods, desire pervades Camões’s
oikoumene. Adamastor’s desire for Thetis is framed as both an erotic and
(failed) imperial parable since the giant is unable to conquer the ocean and
win the love of the Nereid. Adamastor’s defeat in this respect is didactic,
144 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

a warning against unmeasured and irrational desire. In this world of

competing desires, the means by which Gama reaffirms his ousadia in the
face of the Adamastorian menace participates in a gendered, sexualized
metaphor of imperialism. Expansion is a masculine enterprise, an expres-
sion of male power and plenitude carried out under Venus’s guidance.
Juliana Schiesari argues that there is a “phallic essence of melancholia”
(106), that it is an “empowering form of male eros” (110). It is possible to
find a dramatization of this eros in the Adamastor episode because there
is a confrontation between European and African desiring masculinities.
Adamastor’s exhortations and threats to the Portuguese explorers fail to
deter them from braving the treacherous waters of the cape and tacking
safely into the Indian Ocean. Camões fashions Adamastor’s eros as a neg-
ative exemplum on the basis of his “choro” or weeping. Gama’s masculine
resolve trumps Adamastor’s perpetually plaintive condition. If melancholy
or melancholic suffering is a male prerogative, there is, according to
Schiesari, a form of feminine grieving or suffering. Such grieving includes
“inarticulate weeping, or other signs of ritualistic (but intellectually and
artistically unaccredited) mourning” (12). Adamastor’s grief, while not in-
articulate, borders dangerously on a feminine or nonphallic expression
of affect because it is an impotence.50 Adamastor melancholicus threatens
the exercise of imperial masculinity by degrading the prerogative of male
melancholy into a feminized passivity. Camões, in line with many early-
modern gendered formulations of the East, establishes a contrast between
the masculine West and the feminine non-West, perhaps most clearly evi-
denced in canto VI as Gama’s fleet comes within sight of Calicut. Here,
“Easternness” mollifies Western masculine, bellicose passion, or, as David
Quint observes, “the otherness of the Easterner becomes the otherness of
the second sex” (28). As an African, Adamastor is subjected to an emascu-
lating gaze that is realized in the symbolic interaction of ships and the nat-
ural elements as part of a gendered and sexualized worldscape.
Camões establishes the alliance between ships and the natural elements
at the outset. In canto I, following several introductory stanzas, the action
proper begins:

Já no largo Oceano navegavam,

As inquietas ondas apartando;
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 145

Os ventos brandamente respiravam,

Das naus as velas côncavas inchando;
Da branca escuma os mares se mostravam
Cobertos, onde as proas vão cortando
As marítimas águas consagradas,
Que do gado de Próteu são cortadas (I.19)

Already through the open sea they sailed,

Thrusting unquiet waves to either side.
And ’twas a gentle breath the winds exhaled,
That made the vessels’ hollow sails spread wide.
White wakes all over the great seas they trailed,
Where through the deep the sharp cutwaters plied,
Cleaving the sacred wave where to and fro
The rushing cattle herds of Proteus go

Scholars generally identify here the epic convention of in medias res

because the voyage to India is already under way when readers first enter
the poem’s linear sequence of events. The poet’s choice of the ship at full
sail on the high seas as the image that initiates the action freights the
elements of this stanza with significations that will be repeated through-
out the text. As we might expect from a poem so thoroughly saturated
with the history and ideologies of maritime empire, Os Lusíadas favors
ships, water, and travel as structuring devices of its various narratives. For
Camões, ships (or boats) carry an important charge because they are the
principal means through which worlds come into contact and through
which knowledge of those worlds is acquired and exchanged. This pri-
macy expresses itself in a metaphoric language of gender and eros. In
the stanza above, the winds completely fill the sails and push the ship’s
prow through water in a manner that is both violent (the ship “cuts” the
sea) and sexual. Helder Macedo argues that the winds that propel Camon-
ian ships are symbolic of phallic power (“O braço e a mente” 66). In fact,
the ship itself is a phallic icon as it cleaves the oceanic water and leaves
a foamy residue (“branca escuma”). The sexualized energy symbolized
by these winds, then, transforms the ships into agents of masculine impe-
rialism and its phallic prerogative. The gods who represent the natural
146 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

forces of the cosmos and who supervise the actions of the Portuguese
implicate this sexual world force into the divine ordering of the universe.
It is no accident that the patron goddess of the Portuguese enterprise is
Venus, the goddess of erotic love who invests oceanic voyaging with decid-
edly erotic overtones.51 The ship at full sail enters into a sexualized union
with the sea and transports a fecundity of civilization to the world. Camon-
ian water is feminine and the ships that move over it, navigate it, and in-
scribe it into an imperial oikoumene do so in a penetrative fashion. The
natural elements in Camões’s water-filled poem hence participate in a
pervasive, restless eros where “woman drives the masculinist discourse of
empire even in her absence” (Cohen, “The Discourse” 272). In this sym-
bolic erotics of navigation, the ships and their occupants overcome the
passive Adamastor and thus render him (and Africans generally) impo-
tent.52 Even so, the successful doubling of the cape leaves in its wake a
testimony of the Portuguese/European preoccupation with the potent,
African male body with its ability to block or impede imperial ambitions.
This preoccupation is quasi-fetishistic because Camões expresses it ini-
tially as a heightened attention to, and awareness of, Adamastor’s body
parts, and then to the giant’s potential (but unrealized) ability to hinder
the voyage.

The Devil’s Map

In 1639, a two-volume commentary and translation into Castilian of Os
Lusíadas was published in Madrid, a book that stands as a decisive
moment in the history of Camonian criticism. The author of this edition,
the Lusíadas . . . comentadas, is Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1590–1649), a
prolific literary critic, historian, philologist, poet, and moralist whom
the bibliographer Innocencio Francisco da Silva regarded as one of the
most erudite men of his times.53 By birth Portuguese, Faria e Sousa spent
most of his life living and working in Madrid and writing in Castilian
during the years of the dual monarchy (1580–1640) when Philip II of Spain
also occupied the Portuguese throne as Philip I following the death of
D. Sebastião in the battle of El-Ksar el-Kebir in 1578. Posterity has, to a
great degree, ignored Faria e Sousa and his scholarly work, a fact no doubt
due in part to his straddling of cultures that prompted his disavowal by
critics in both Portugal and Spain.54
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 147

Faria e Sousa’s edition of Os Lusíadas stands as a milestone in the crit-

icism of Camões’s poem in part because of its methodology and critical
apparatus. The scholar provides a line-by-line commentary in addition
to his translations of each stanza, and marshals a vast corpus of primary
and secondary sources into interpretive service. Frank Pierce concludes
that “Faria took the whole poem and presented a commentary which . . .
explained everything and drew together the rich variety of Camões’ imag-
ination into a satisfying rational statement” (“The Place of Mythology”
100).55 Although the extent to which Faria e Sousa “explained everything”
may be debated, as well as the nature of the overall “rational statement”
Pierce claims is present in the commentator’s work, Pierce is correct in
finding here the first systematic interpretation of the Lusíadas that seeks
to integrate the various episodes, historical and mythological actors, sym-
bolic and metaphoric allusions, and the poet’s own erudition. The critic
accomplishes this by positing an underlying allegorical structure to the
poem; for him, Os Lusíadas is a Christian allegory that trumpets the vic-
tory of the church militant in foreign lands. This interpretive gambit is in
itself reductionist and glosses over many of the poem’s contradictions and
complexities. Yet although it is possible to disagree with Faria e Sousa’s
assumption, it is much more difficult to assail his methodology, for he
“was not taken up only with gathering documentation, but with design-
ing a method suitable for allegorizing the pagan elements in the poem”
(Glaser, “Manuel de Faria e Sousa” 137). Furthermore, Faria e Sousa’s alle-
gorizing readings are elaborated through an episode-based approach to
interpreting Camões’s text, in itself a lasting contribution to Camonian
scholarship. The two volumes of dense commentary establish the study
of Camões as a discipline in and of itself in Iberian letters and launch
critical ideas that many scholars repeat, sometimes unknowingly, to the
present day.56
One of the episodes Faria e Sousa examines closely is the Adamastor
episode, and indeed his comments on it constitute one of his lengthiest
disquisitions. Adamastor emerges as something of an icon of the process
of Camonian interpretation and as a bona fide topos in all subsequent
criticism of the poem. Arguably, no other writing has established the
domineering presence of Adamastor more than Faria e Sousa’s interpre-
tation. Faria e Sousa’s reading finds in Adamastor a cartographic precept
148 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

that is part of the allegorical structure of the text. Early in his discus-
sion, the critic provisionally designates Adamastor as the “frons Africae”
(the head of Africa) and claims that this is how readers generally under-
stand the apparition’s geographic symbolism, but the designation quickly
cedes to the postulation that lies at the core of Faria e Sousa’s argument:
Adamastor is solely and unilaterally the representation of Muhammad
and Islam, and therefore the Devil, the antagonist of the Catholic church
represented by Vasco da Gama’s fleet. Throughout the presentation of his
arguments Faria e Sousa takes recourse to the language of melancholy.
The critic recognizes the melancholic nature of Adamastor, though this
recognition does not explicitly connect the phantasm to the traditions of
melancholy we have been exploring in this chapter. The adjectives initially
used to describe Adamastor are “melancholic,” “choleric,” or “passionate,”
and there is a repeated insistence that “este Gigante representa al demo-
nio” (this Giant represents the Devil, for example, cols. 522 and 525) and
that he is the head of “la torpeza Mauritana” (Moorish turpitude, col. 541).
As Faria e Sousa inscribes Muhammad into the spiritual universe of Os
Lusíadas through Adamastor, he invests the apparition with a theoretical
importance as an expansionist negativity, a dark embodiment of the tenets
of imperialism. Adamastor issues forth from the pages of the Lusíadas . . .
comentadas as a body that impedes the smooth mapping of the world
according to a Christian cosmography which is the final epic achievement
of imperial Portugal. Adamastor’s latent danger is that he threatens to un-
map the world into diabolical chaos. He looms ominously as a counter-
map to Christian imperialism, a devil’s map. His phantasmal body bursts
into Camões’s poem as the cartographic principle, demonically inflected,
underlying expansionist movement.
Faria e Sousa builds this reading of Adamastor by construing Africa
as solely and exclusively the seat of Islam, a gesture that wipes Africa clean
of its non-Islamic cultures with which Portuguese colonists had been famil-
iar for more than two centuries by the time the Lusíadas . . . comentadas
appeared. The equation of African Moorishness with Islam in demon-
izing terms in part resuscitates a conception of the Saracen as foe to a mil-
itant Latin Christianity elaborated throughout the Middle Ages. With the
apocalyptic identification of Adamastor/Muhammad who was “el segundo
Lucifer, porque muchos dixeron, que Mahoma era el Antechristo” (the
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 149

second Lucifer, because many have said that Muhammad was the Anti-
christ, col. 541), Faria e Sousa fuses a long-standing, Christian ideological
practice with a more immediate anxiety—the threat of Islamic imperial-
ism, especially in the form of the Ottoman Turks, to Portuguese expansion
and conquest.57
The reading of Adamastor as an “estupenda fábula” (stupendous fiction,
col. 539) overlays the giant’s allegorical imperative with a melancholic
nature: Adamastor is a “representación tristísima” (extremely sad figure,
col. 516) who expresses himself in a “passión colérica” (choleric passion,
col. 514). In commenting on the word figura in stanza 39 of canto V (recall
that this stanza introduces Adamastor to the vision of the Portuguese
onlookers), Faria e Sousa remarks on the sounds of the word itself, the
“consonãtes que eligiò el P. para descrivir un monstruo grãde de cuerpo,
i cargado de semblante” (consonants that the Poet chose to describe a
monster, huge of body and heavy of countenance, col. 515). The ura of
figura, phonetically, “infunde malãcolia . . . porque la ur, es triste diccion,
que no en vano cupo en fuerte al nõbre de Saturno, patrõ de los tristes”
(inspires melancholy because ur is a sad sound, which not by accident
appears in the name of Saturn, god of the sad, col. 515). In this analysis,
onomatopoeia infixes melancholy into the structure of Camões’s words.
Faria e Sousa then announces that Adamastor is the rhetorical figure of
parascreve, also known as praeparatio, the “dissimulated preparation of a
thought which is to become known/revealed” (Lausberg 247). The giant
is thus an interpretive key to something else, an enigma that will only
be revealed through hermeneutic labor. The critic continues the rhetori-
cal vein of his analysis by remarking on the correlation between Adamas-
tor’s gigantic, disproportionate stature, his “vozes agigantadas” (gigantic
words, col. 517), and his monstrosity. Rhetorically, such a correlation is
known as decorum, or the appropriate relation between form, purpose,
and discourse.58 Faria e Sousa ascribes to Camões a judicious use of poetic
mesura, absent in Virgil, when the poet calls Adamastor the second Colos-
sus of Rhodes:

El P . . . aborreciô siempre las fabulas, por los hiperboles desmesurados . . .

Descrive, pues, una cosa tan grande como aquel Promontorio, i dandole
forma humana monstruosa, no solo por miembros, sino por grandeza se
150 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

contenta con hazerle segundo al Colosso . . . al contrario de Virgilio, que

descriviendo un Gigante . . . le haze . . . diziendo que llegava a las estrellas.
(Cols. 518–19)

the Poet . . . always abhorred fictions marred by unmeasured hyperbole . . .

He describes . . . something as large as that promontory, and giving it a
human, monstrous form, not only in its members but also in its greatness,
is content with making it the second Colossus . . . [this is] contrary to
Virgil, who in describing a giant . . . does so without restraint by saying that
it reached the stars.

As the embodiment of Muhammad and “toda la Morisma” (all Moorish-

ness, col. 573), this demonized, infernal, monstrous, and rhetorically deco-
rous body contravenes Portuguese navegación, a word in Faria e Sousa’s pen
that means not only nautical science but Portuguese itinerancy through
the collective movement of ships as a coherent and sustained exercise
of Christian evangelism. Adamastor realizes his danger by mobilizing a
“Moorish navigation,” the inimical, nautical practice that imbues Moors
with a cartographic capacity in that they are equally capable of traveling
across water and plotting and conquering parcels of space into which they
will write their infernal belief.
The cartographic power Adamastor darkly wields relies primarily on his
body that is partitioned and dispersed (but not disempowered) through-
out the globe, a kind of anatomization that recalls the giant’s physiologi-
cal and melancholic body. This stretching of the partitioned body across
the space of the world mirrors the ancient Roman imperialist practice of
using the body as the organizing figure in designing cities, with the par-
titions or grid of the city corresponding to individual body parts.59 The
key to the monster’s exegesis, then, is his corporeality. The head of Africa
as a manifest danger to the pure and uncontaminated presence of the
verbum dei across the globe appears as a monstrously dispersed and con-
cealed body in the commentary on Adamastor’s monstrous limbs:

la gente Mahometana . . . possee . . . grandissimos miembros de todas las

partes del mundo a la sazon descubiertas, no solo en toda la Africa, i en las
dos Asias, sinò que en Europa posseyeron mucho . . . (Col. 541)
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 151

the Muhammadan people possess . . . extremely large members in all parts

of the world which may, in turn, each be discovered, not only in all of Africa
and in the two Asias, but also in Europe . . .

Faria e Sousa then explains Gama’s use of the word monster:

[L]e llama monstruo el Gama a este Gigãte. Esso cõviene mucho a Mahoma
. . . de que tocava en mõstruosidad lo grande de su cabeça, como porque
instituyô una seta mõstruosissima, tãto por su deformidad, como por cõs-
tar de creencias contrarias, como tomada de Legisladores diferetes; i por
esso mismo le llamã mõstruo todos los Autores Catolicos. (Col. 543)

Gama calls this giant a monster. This is fitting for Muhammad . . . whose
large head verged on monstrosity, as did his instituting a most monstrous
sect, monstrous for its deformity, for its including contradictory beliefs, for
being patched together from different authorities. That is why all Catholic
writers call him a monster.

Adamastor’s brand of monstrosity is a symbolic extension of a corpore-

ality that Faria e Sousa likens to Jayán, a synonym for “giant.”60 Indeed,
Adamastor’s very name contains within it a genealogy of monstrosity.61
Adamastor’s limbs stretch to the four corners of the globe in a totalizing
attitude and touch all points of the orbis terrarum. Since, as Faria e Sousa
explains, a monster is “aquello que en la forma de su genero es despro-
porcionada, irregular, o sin medida” (that which, in its characteristic shape,
is disproportionate, irregular, or without measure, col. 535), Adamastor’s
limbs enable him to act as a diabolical mapmaker because he insidiously
reaches the ends of the earth and emplots the coordinates of his sacrilege
across the globe. His body parts throw the spiritual cosmos out of order.
They are a deforming presence across the world’s spaces and obstruct
the cosmic harmony that is negotiated by the gods and instantiated by
Portuguese imperialist action in every canto of the poem. Faria e Sousa’s
Adamastor, therefore, suggests the mutability of the geographic body and
the imperative of imperial travelers and conquerors to delimit that body.
Camões, in ignoring the history of Portuguese colonization in the centur-
ies preceding his poem, returns Africa to a purely ideological existence,
152 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

a tabula rasa ripe for colonization. Faria e Sousa realizes this and con-
scripts this African blankness for the purposes of his allegorical reading.
As a body that takes on various shapes, Adamastor represents Africans
while also absenting them from the poem.
Adamastor, Muhammad, or Satan the imperialist rises up in Faria e
Sousa’s analysis harboring an acquisitional avarice, an “ambicion de tierra,
i mas tierra” (ambition for land, and more land, col. 545), a desire that lies
at the heart of any imperialist enterprise. Adamastor is a monster of un-
enlightened earthiness, and his telluric metamorphosis is an appropriate
punishment for the false prophet blind to the sea of grace. In the expla-
nation of Adamastor’s transformation we hear something of a Dantesque
contrapasso:

dize el Gigante que fue convertido en aquella tierra: i esto es, que por la
providencia divina, tiene para los malos el castigo muy conforme a la culpa
(de cuyo exemplo estan llenas las historias divinas, i profanas) no amando
el Moro, sino tierra, i mas tierra, segun provamos arriba, fuè convertido en
ella: i cvpliose la Filosofia de amor, que es transformar el amante en la cosa
amada: i esso singularmente amo Mahoma: porque todas sus astucias no
atedieron màs de a hazerse poderoso terrenamente; i por esso fuè conver-
tido en tierra hedionda. (Cols. 558–59)

The Giant says that he was converted into that land, that is, that divine prov-
idence reserves for the wicked a punishment in keeping with the crime
(sacred and profane histories are full of such stories); in the Moor’s loving
only land and more land, as we demonstrated above, he was converted into
it, and in this the philosophy of love is fulfilled which says that the lover is
transformed into the beloved. This is what Muhammad singularly loved,
because all of his skill was directed solely to making himself more power-
ful in terrestrial terms, and for that reason was converted into this cursed
land . . .62

This observation appears in the context of a larger argument in which

Muhammad’s predilection for land accompanies the rejection of water as
sacred. Adamastor’s desire for Thetis is sacrilegious because in her he does
not glimpse a power higher than himself. There is a warning here against
 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly 153

the dangers of improvident desire and misdirected spiritual questing. For

Faria e Sousa, only Christianity allows for an understanding of water as
sacred, and thus Portuguese navegación conflates sacramental water and
imperial expansion.
For Faria e Sousa, Adamastor and monsters relate to his own exegeti-
cal enterprise. At the outset of his comments on the episode he writes:

Pondrème aqui a componer una monstruosa nota de monstruos, para que

me tegan por monstro de erudicion? Hagalo quien tuviere essa codicia,
que yo con actos vio[l]entos no quiero mostrarme ciente . . . (Col. 535)

Shall I set myself to composing a monstrous note on monsters here, so that

my readers will take me for a monster of erudition? Let whoever might wish
to understand it in this way do so, because I do not wish to show myself
knowledgeable by violent acts . . .

The monster and the monstrous may turn the critic into a monster, as
Faria e Sousa humorously suggests but in doing so acknowledges an inbuilt
reciprocity between monsters and exegesis. Perhaps not a little disingen-
uously does Faria e Sousa disavow an overly ambitious erudition as a “vio-
lent act,” only then to posit an apologia of monsters, backed by numerous
auctoritates, that embraces the four corners of Camões’s poem in meto-
nymic efficiency. Faria e Sousa stands as one of Camões’s most influential
mythographers because he establishes Os Lusíadas itself as a mythos, a
decisive, foundational moment in the Iberian cultural archive. Within the
critic’s “alegoría líquida” (liquid allegory), Adamastor functions as an appeal
to the pleasure of reading: “Con aver pintado un monstruo fiero, fabrica
en el un caso apetecible al gusto del leer” (having depicted a fearsome
monster, [Camões] creates with him an appealing case for the pleasure of
reading, col. 580).63 The complex hermeneutic dimension of Adamastor is
perhaps one of the greatest discoveries recorded by the critic.

/?
Melancholy in the maritime world, as Ulrich Kinzel suggests, is an oceanic
dislocation of the self (37). It is also an experience of alienation, and per-
haps that is why Adamastor is so unsettling, so disturbing to Camões’s
154 t h e m o n st e r o f m e l a n c h o ly

travelers as they make their way east. The startling appearance of Adamas-
tor in the middle of this journey marks a moment of mythmaking that
remains vital to this day. In the literatures and intellectual culture of South
Africa, Adamastor lives on in critical debates and in the memories of a
society once divided by apartheid; he has surfaced in André Brink’s novel
The First Life of Adamastor, and in the painting by Cyril Coetzee based on
Brink’s novel that now hangs in the Cullen Library of the University of
the Witwatersrand.64 However we choose to interpret Adamaster, within
whatever cultural or historical moment, Camões’s giant remains one of
the poet’s most strident calls to the interpretive endeavor, to an awareness
of human connectivity through time that any myth promotes. By read-
ing Adamastor as a melancholic and as a dark reflection of the expan-
sionist subject that travels the seas of the world, we are able to appreciate
the specter’s link to the classical world at the same time as we are able to
glimpse something new, something different that exceeds the Renaissance
practice of imitatio. Like the turbulent currents of water that meet and
clash at the Cape of Good Hope, Adamastor’s fearful voice disturbs his
hearers because it brings together, dissonantly, strands of time. His voice
is at once alive and dead, a ghost of the past that speaks in the present of
the future. Adamastor, it seems, will never rest, will never find calm. He
will always provoke. Perhaps that is why he laments so fiercely, locked in
his storm-tossed prison at the end of the world.
 Notes

Introduction
1. For a study of the capture of Ceuta and its early years of Portuguese occu-
pation and rule, see Livermore, “On the Conquest of Ceuta,” and Russell, Prince
Henry, chapters 2 and 3.
2. On the possible chivalric motives for the capture of Ceuta, see Goodman,
chapter 5. Goodman argues for the central role of João I’s queen, Filipa of Lan-
caster, in the formulation of such motives.
3. Beginning in the eleventh century, Spain’s incursions into North Africa for
political and mercantile gain also prolonged the impulses of reconquista, accord-
ing to García-Arenal and Bunes (22–24).
4. Emily C. Bartels, also writing on the culture of Renaissance England, notes
that “Renaissance representations of the Moor were vague, varied, inconsistent,
and contradictory” (“Making More of the Moor” 434). The Moor is a boundary
marker of shifting signification.
5. Of Zurara’s chronicles, only the Crónica de Guiné has been translated in its
entirety into English; see Beazley and Prestage. Extracts in English from Zurara’s
other texts can be found in the anthologies by Prestage and Miall, though Miall’s
collection must be treated with caution because the English translations are based
not on the original Portuguese texts but on a French translation. Lomax and
Oakley provide English translations of selected parts of the chronicles of Fernão
Lopes. Pedro de Meneses was the first captain-governor of Ceuta (see Russell,
Prince Henry 59–60), and Zurara’s chronicle of him details the period between
the capture of Ceuta in 1415 to Pedro’s death in 1437. Pedro’s son was Duarte
de Meneses and a governor of Alácer-Ceguer; Zurara’s chronicle of his rule ex-
tends the history of Portuguese presence in Africa to 1464. The chronicles of the
Meneses are only of secondary interest to this study because they deal primarily
with the histories of the two colonies in northern Africa, especially their military

155
156 n ot e s to i n t ro d u c t i o n

histories, and less with the initial Portuguese encounters with Africa. For the
printing history of Zurara’s chronicles, see Dinis 171–254. A decade after Zurara
completed Ceuta, the Italian scholar Mateus de Pisano, tutor to Afonso V, pro-
duced a condensation in Latin of Zurara’s chronicle titled De Bello Septensi in
order for knowledge of the expedition to be more widely disseminated abroad
(Rogers, The Travels 69). This Latin text, also given the Portuguese title Livro da
guerra de Ceuta (Book of the Ceuta War) in the eighteenth-century collection in
which it is printed, appears to be the only surviving work of Pisano (for a Por-
tuguese translation of Pisano’s text, see Pinto). Serra, the editor of this collection,
speculates that Pisano was the son of Christine de Pisan (3–4).
6. Hess studies the Ottoman imperial enterprises that were contemporaneous
with Portugal’s in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Hess notes that “[t]he his-
torical importance . . . of this simultaneity is not that Ottoman imperialism
caused Portuguese expansion but that the Indian Ocean contact brought together
the most militant representatives of the two cultures” (“The Evolution of the
Ottoman Seaborne Empire” 1915).
7. For English translations of some of these narratives, see Boxer, Tragic His-
tory; also see Blackmore, Manifest Perdition.
8. For some case studies that seek to “unsettle old simplifications about the
political, social, and economic character” of Portuguese empire, see Curto, “Por-
tuguese Imperial and Colonial Culture.”
9. Of note here is the Portuguese/Castilian rivalry during the early years
of expansion: “The nationalistic element was a crucial addition to the religious
identity because since the late Middle Ages the Portuguese did not simply define
themselves as Christians against Moors or, secondarily, as missionaries amongst
the blacks whom they enslaved; they were also, within Christianity, Portuguese
as opposed to Castilians. In fact the explorations of the fifteenth century gave
expression to the idea of a separate providential history against the Castilian
threat of a Spanish Christian empire that would include the whole of the Iberian
Peninsula once lost to the Moors” (Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology 177n29).
10. Washburn also studies other terms related to discovery, such as “continent,”
“terra firma,” and “Indies.”
11. “A concrete example which shows there was already some knowledge [of
Africa] is the melancholy matter of da Gama’s contacts with Muslims in east Africa.
Pero da Covilham found that the east African coast as far south as Sofala was
Islamic, and that Muslim traders linked these areas with the Muslim heartland
further north, and indeed with other areas all over the Indian Ocean. The first
Muslim ruler da Gama met was the sultan of Mozambique Island. Immediately
age-old prejudice appeared on both sides, fuelled by remembrances of the Cru-
sades, endemic warfare for decades in north Africa, and the Portuguese recon-
quest of their homeland from Muslims. When they met Muslims, the Portuguese
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1 157

knew exactly what they thought: they hated them and were hated in return. This
certainly was not a new and unfamiliar world” (Pearson 147).
12. In terms of scholarly work on Africa during the Renaissance, Bartels ques-
tions the model that postcolonial studies assumes as underlying its own practice
by arguing that “[postcolonial critiques] continue . . . to recreate the history
of silenced voices through only one model of cultural exchange: one in which
European domination is both the motivating force and the inevitable outcome”
(“Othello and Africa” 46).
13. Mills, it should be noted, argues that it is possible to conceive of the kind
of discourse produced by empire as “colonial” even if there is no explicit presence
of colonies as part of that discourse: “[c]olonial discourse does not . . . simply
refer to a body of texts with similar subject-matter, but rather refers to a set of
practices and rules which produced those texts and the methodological organisa-
tion of the thinking underlying those texts” (107).

1. Encountering the African

1. For historical summaries of Portugal in Africa during this time, see Boxer,
Portuguese Seaborne Empire (chapter 1), Brooks (chapters 7–9), the relevant chap-
ters of Diffie and Winius, Duffy (chapter 1), Newitt, Portuguese Overseas Expansion
(chapters 1 and 2), Parry (chapter 8), Penrose (chapter 3), Russell-Wood (chap-
ter 1), Santos, Viagens de exploração, Thornton, “The Portuguese in Africa,” or van
Wyk Smith, “Introduction.” For Portuguese presidios in North Africa, see Coates
56–64. For a recent overview that includes the Americas, see Hart, chapter 2. Val-
ladares considers Portuguese expansion in the modern historiography of Atlantic
studies. For early cartography on Africa, see La Roncière and Relaño.
2. See Snowden’s chapter 1 for a discussion of the several terms used by
Greco-Roman writers to describe Ethiopians and Africans in general and the
physical attributes indexed by this vocabulary. Throughout the Middle Ages and
into the early-modern period “Ethiopia” referred to a much larger and impre-
cise geographic space than its modern counterpart, much like “India.” Ethiopia
could designate vast stretches of East African land, the Indian Ocean, Asia, or the
southern regions of the world. Relaño notes that Ethiopia was “conceived of
in the late Middle Ages as a sort of sociological space signifying all territories
beyond the Islamic world. It was the land south of the Sahara and Egypt. . . .
More than a real space, it was a symbolical one where legends like that of Prester
John were the only means at hand to organize and attain geographical knowl-
edge” (58).
3. Throughout the Middle Ages and even into the early decades of the fif-
teenth century following the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, Isidoro remained an
authority on Africa. A good example of this authority appears in the Portuguese/
Castilian dispute regarding rights to the Canary Islands in the 1430s. Alfonso de
158 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1

Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, drafted a series of Allegationes (Allegations) in 1435

in defense of Castile’s right to the islands. The document registers prevalent ideas
about Africa and Isidoro’s “indisputable authority” on the topic. Among these
ideas is the division of Mauritania into two provinces (pace classical geographers),
Caesariense and Tingitania; the Canaries are part of this latter province, which,
according to the bishop, belongs to Spain. For the Latin text of the Allegationes
and a translation into Portuguese, see documents 281 and 282 in Marques, Desco-
brimentos portugueses.
4. In another book, Harvey discusses the “insidious ideological bias inherent
in this use of [morisco]” (Muslims in Spain 4). For a summary of the mouro as
muçulmano from the early Middle Ages through the initial centuries of overseas
expansion from a Portuguese perspective, see Thomaz, “Muçulmanos.” Barletta,
in a study of the literature of the moriscos in Spain, notes that morisco was the
common early-modern term for the Muslims of Spain before their expulsion in
1492 (ix).
5. I cite Scott’s translation of the Partidas. “Moor” and “Saracen” in Alfonso’s
laws are synonymous: “Sarracenus en latín tanto quiere decir en romance como
moro: et tomaron este nombre de Sarra que fue muger libre de Abraham”
(Sarracenus, in Latin, means Moor in the vernacular, and this name is derived
from Sarah, the free wife of Abraham, 5:1438). One glimpses here the confla-
tion of Moor and Saracen that reappears two centuries later in the papal bulls
authorizing Portuguese appropriation of African lands and resources, including
its inhabitants.
6. Partida 6, title 7, law 7, for example, stipulates that a son can be disinher-
ited if he becomes a Moor.
7. “And the Lord said . . . ‘And now you are cursed from the ground . . . If
any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the Lord
put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him” (Genesis
4:10–11, 15).
8. See the seventh Partida for these regulations, and Liu’s analysis of them in
the context of religious mixing and poetry in chapter 5 of his Medieval Joke Poetry.
9. I use Mettmann’s numbering of the CSM.
10. For the CEM that incorporate same-sex imagery and innuendo, see Black-
more, “Poets of Sodom.” Gregory S. Hutcheson’s analysis of the sodomitic Moor
as a product of historiographic discourse in medieval Spain provides an interest-
ing case study in the politics of sodomy as impinging on Moorishness.
11. The numbers of the cantigas follow Lapa’s edition.
12. See Pedro’s Livro de linhagens 204–11.
13. The traditional view of Reconquest presumes a clear distinction between
Christian (re)conquerors and Moorish infidels. The realities of medieval Iberia,
however, were quite different and not as clean as this mainstay of historiographic
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1 159

thought would suppose, because the separation of Christian and Moorish elements
in the cultures of Iberia was difficult. For further analysis of this topic in a slightly
later time period, see the relevant portions of Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire.
14. See documents 286, 287, and 288 in Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses
352–65. In an opinion written ca. 1433, Prince João states: “Ajnda guerra dos
mouros nõ somos çertos se he serujço de deus; por que eu nõ vy nem ouuy que
noso senhor nem algum dos seus apostolos nem doctores da Jgreja mandassem
que guerreasem jnfieis mas antes per pregação e mjlagres os mandou conuerter”
(We are yet unsure if the war on the Moors is in God’s service, for I have not
heard or read that Our Lord, or any of his apostles or doctors of the holy church,
mandate that we should enter into battle with the infidels. Rather, preaching and
miracles should be the manner of their conversion, Marques, Descobrimentos por-
tugueses 354). This document is also reproduced in Livro dos conselhos de El-Rei
D. Duarte 43–49. Prince Henry’s response to this question is definitive: “E da
guerra dos mouros ser serujço de deus nõ ha que duujdar” (And the war on the
Moors as a service to God is beyond doubt, Marques 361).
15. On the various understandings and metaphors of “India” and the “East”
in early modern colonialism, see Raman, who dedicates a chapter of his book to
Camões and Os Lusíadas.
16. See Cass for a summary of criticism on Saidian Orientalism.
17. Irwin reconfirms this gap by leaving Portugal out altogether in his rebut-
tal of Said, which he considers to be a work of “malignant charlatanry” (4), a
charge based in part on Said’s narrow selection of sources.
18. Strandes notes that “India” embraced southern Arabia, Ethiopia, East Africa,
and the East Indies, but that it would be more accurate to say that “India” meant
the lands that produced spices, aromatics, and precious stones (3).
19. In the sixteenth century, João de Barros follows Zurara’s partitioning of
Africa by identifying the Senegal River (and the Sahara generally) as the dividing
line between the lighter-skinned Arabic Moors and the first “negros da Guiné”
(blacks of Guinea) or the jalofos (Wolofs). In writing of this region, Barros refers
to the Torrid Zone: “Ora onde o Infante manda descobrir, é já dentro no fervor
do sol, que de brancos que os homens são, se lá fôr algum de nós, ficará (se
escapar) tam negro como são os guinéus, vezinhos a esta quentura” (Now where
the Prince [Henry] has ordered expeditions of discovery is so subjected to the
intensity of the sun, that however white a man might be, if any of us were to go
there, he would become [if he indeed is able to escape] as black as Guineans, who
are neighbors to this heat, Ásia 24–25). The comment echoes commonly held
beliefs about geohumoralism or the climatologically influenced body, and pro-
poses that the body may be changed in the course of one lifetime, a slight recast-
ing of the geohumoral tenet that physical traits were shaped by environmental
factors over time and through the generations.
160 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1

20. For Zurara’s use of the historiography of Alfonso X, also see Carvalho,
Estudos 166–67, 227–39, and Fonseca, “A Crónica de Guiné” 155.
21. For a transcription of this Latin document and further comments on the
Portuguese understanding of India, see Randles, “Notes.”
22. See Bourdon 47n1 for a summary of this hypothesis.
23. Although “Europe” is a standard term in debates on Orientalism, it should
be noted that it is uncommonly used as a Western qualifier for “us” in the Portu-
guese writings studied here. Zurara, for instance, does not use the term; when the
chronicler refers to a collectivity against which the inhabitants of Africa are com-
pared, it is usually cristãos (Christians) or, less frequently, Portugal.
24. Curto makes his observations in the context of the work of Charles Boxer
on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese historiography. In an essay
published in 1948 (“Three Historians”), thirty years before the appearance of Ori-
entalism, Boxer makes the case for João de Barros as a “pioneer Orientalist” (18).
25. Américo Castro proposed a peaceful model of convivencia in España en su
historia, one that has been revised by historians such as David Nirenberg in Com-
munities of Violence, who advocates for a conflictual, violent tenor of “living
together” in the Spanish Middle Ages.
26. See chapter 6 of Medieval Identity Machines.
27. Moors as one kind of African would thus be “agents of empire,” in McClin-
tock’s expression (5).
28. Werner Sollors (446–47n50) offers further etymological documentation
and finds earlier uses of the word that adumbrate modern use predating those
cited by Hannaford.
29. Sollors notes the “importance of ‘conversos’ for the rise of the concept of
‘race’” (447n55).
30. See chapters 16, 17, and 30.
31. In a comment on Castilian negro (black), Casares lists several groups of
people who might fall under this designation in early-modern Spain and notes
that there were internal differences in “black” Africa as well as in “white” Europe
(248).
32. For a study of sexual/nuptial unions between Portuguese and Africans,
see Elbl.
33. Horta’s study documents the many kinds of Africans reported in Zurara’s
chronicle and in subsequent, mostly Portuguese texts, and provides a chart of the
descriptions of the physical attributes of Africans that are culled from numerous
sources.
34. Unlike Spanish guineo, which denotes any person of black skin, including
Ethiopians (Grubb 72), Portuguese guinéu is generally restricted to western Africa
as opposed to the etíope (Ethiopian). Zurara’s irregular use of mouro as a label
applicable to Africans outside of Mauritania contrasts with later, early-modern
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2 161

Spanish historiography in which Moors are defined by where they reside (Bunes
Ibarra 111).
35. I cite Kimble’s translation.
36. For other comments on lançados, see Haydara 34–36 and Voigt.
37. In the sixteenth century, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, the Granadan
Moor who converted to Christianity and became known as Leo Africanus, pub-
lished his Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) in volume 1 of
Ramusio’s collection of travel narratives which appeared in 1550. Here, too, Africa
is divided into regions that are defined, in part, by the skin color of inhabitants.
Two decades after Leo’s book, Luis del Mármol Carvajal published the Descrip-
ción General de África (General Description of Africa) in 1573, one year after Os
Lusíadas. Mármol Carvajal’s book was the only global study of the practitioners
of Islam (Bunes Ibarra 3); its mapping of Islam onto Africa predates the kinds of
arguments to be made by Faria e Sousa (see chapter 3, below). For the influence
of Leo Africanus and the Portuguese chronicler Damião de Góis on Mármol Car-
vajal, see Bunes Ibarra 9–10. On Leo Africanus, see Davis, Trickster Travels.
38. The idea of uninhabitable regions of the globe such as the Torrid Zone is
formulated in Macrobius’s climatic map, where the sphere is divided into climatic
zones “whose placements determine the habitable and uninhabitable regions”
(Jacob 296). Fonseca’s correlation between bodies and space that we noted above
would, in the case of the Torrid Zone, mean that since no bodies inhabited it, it
was a non-space or an aspatial swath across Africa. The expeditions recorded by
Zurara quickly disproved the legend of an uninhabitable Torrid Zone.

2. Expansion and the Contours of Africa

1. Perhaps the most extensive bibliography of mainly Portuguese primary
sources on early-modern Africa (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) is the one
compiled by Horta (“O Africano”). This list is arranged according to geographic
region. Also see Winius, “Bibliographical Essay.” Newitt (East Africa) presents a
selection of translations into English of documents relating to the Portuguese
presence on the eastern littoral.
2. There are also collections of bureaucratic documents from this time relat-
ing to the details of imperial administration, such as trading rights, duties levied
on imported goods, or royal grants and privileges. For these, consult the volumes
compiled by Brásio, and Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses.
3. “Espanha” (Spain) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was often syn-
onymous with “Iberia,” which is the sense of the word here.
4. Arguim was the first European slave station in Africa.
5. For an analysis of two treatises on Guinea from the late-sixteenth and
early-seventeenth centuries, see Saive.
6. See Branche 32–48.
162 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

7. Barreto similarly finds in Zurara the first historiographic foundations for

an official imperialist ideology that construes the discoveries as a civilizing mis-
sion (108–9).
8. Of note here is an observation made by António Martins, secretary to
D. João I and representative at the Council of Constanza (1415): “O nome do infiel
Maomé foi apagado e retirado e Cristo é hoje aí [em Ceuta] honrado e ador-
ado . . . pela tomada da cidade, poderosa por terra e mar, porto e chave de toda
a África, o Altíssimo abriu o caminho ao povo cristão para que a partir daí
prossigam na salvação das suas almas realizando venturosas operações contra os
sarracenos” (The name of the infidel Muhammad was extinguished and removed
and Christ today is revered and worshipped [in Ceuta] . . . with the seizure of this
city that wields power both on land and sea and is the port and key to all of Africa,
the One Most High opened the way to Christians so that, following in Ceuta’s
wake, they may continue the fortuitous work of saving their souls by fighting the
Saracens; quoted in Horta, “A imagem do Africano” 50).
9. See, for example, chapter 138 of Pina’s chronicle. Afonso V (1438–81),
because of his interest in maintaining Portugal’s interest in Africa, came to be
known as “o Africano” (the African).
10. João II was the first to add “Senhor de Guiné” to the crown’s title. Manuel I,
under whose orders Vasco da Gama made his voyages to India, expands the title
to “Senhor da Navegação, Conquista, e Comércio da Etiópia, Arábia, Pérsia, e
Índia” (Lord of the Navigation, Conquest, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia,
Persia, and India).
11. For a summary of these conflicts, see Davenport 9–12.
12. Boxer notes that “Indies” was a shifting term that often included Ethi-
opia and East Africa, as well as the known parts of Asia (Portuguese Seaborne
Empire 19).
13. I cite Davenport’s Latin text and translation.
14. Lahon states that Zurara’s Crónica dos feitos de Guiné was sent to Rome as
a Portuguese strategy in obtaining the Romanus Pontifex (Os negros 98n15).
15. See Machado’s etymological study (227–37) for further comments and tex-
tual attestations; also see Domingues (215–16).
16. The conquest of Lisbon in 1147 by Alfonso Henriques, first king of Portu-
gal, traditionally marks the final, decisive action of Reconquest in Portugal, much
as the fall of Granada in 1492 does for Spain. Thus Reconquest and the formation
of the nation of Portugal are intertwined. See Marques, History of Portugal 41–45,
76–77, and Read 152–62.
17. Cadamosto’s account first appeared in print in 1507 in Montalboddo’s Paesi
nouamente retrovati & Novo mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato, and
then again in Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s famous collection of travel narratives,
Navigationi et viaggi (1550).
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2 163

18. Quotations of Cadamosto’s Italian are from the Italian-Portuguese edition

of his text, Viagens.
19. The other ships and their captains were the São Gabriel (Vasco da Gama),
the Bérrio (Nicolau Coelho), and a supply vessel (Gonçalo Nunes) that did not
reach India. On the doubts surrounding the authorship of the Relação, see Sub-
rahmanyam 80–83.
20. Such practical texts do exist in the world of nautical writing—they are
known as regimentos or sailing instructions. Regimentos do not exhibit the same en-
gagement with narrative episodes as the texts being studied here. For an example
of regimentos (with English translations) and other documents on the materiali-
ties of expansionist voyages, see Documentos sobre os portugueses em Moçambique.
Other information about life on board expansionist ships may be found in Boxer,
Tragic History of the Sea, Pérez-Mallaína, and Smith.
21. Also see Madureira’s discussion for reading the nautical charts of Arab
pilot Ahmad Ibn-Madjid against the Portuguese roteiros.
22. Translations of Velho’s text are mine. A full English translation by E. G.
Ravenstein was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1898; part of that translation
is reprinted in Ley 3–38.
23. The padrões or pillars were carried on board ships and were implanted on
foreign soil both as a marker of Portuguese passage and as a symbolic possession
of lands.
24. The fourth and fifth Décadas were published posthumously. Barros’s suc-
cessor, Diogo do Couto (1542–1616) endeavored to continue the Décadas, but only
his fourth, fifth, and seventh Décadas were published.
25. According to the time line Barros sets out for his history in chapter 1 of
the first Década da Ásia, África begins with the capture of Ceuta (13).
26. In the obedience oration delivered to Pope Innocent VIII in 1485 by Vasco
Fernandes on behalf of João II of Portugal (reigned 1481–95 and oversaw the
consolidation of the Guinea trade), “[the kings of Lusitania] never considered as
foreign anything that pertains either to the defense or to the propagation of the
Christian religion” (Rogers, The Obedience of a King of Portugal 42).
27. The panegyric (panegírico) was a favored genre among Renaissance human-
ists (Boxer, João de Barros 63) and allowed the writer to display classical learning.
28. “vieram a estes Regnos muitos homes letrados, & curiosos . . . cõ tenção
de ir ver estas terras . . . ou pera tambe ajudare a descobrir outras, cõ sperança
do proueito que se lhes disso podia seguir” (many curious and learned men came
to these realms, with the intention of traveling to see these lands . . . or also,
to help in their discovery, with hopes of the benefits to be derived from these
trips . . . , 11).
29. “‘Africa’ has no native source and so did not exist before its definition as
an other in relation to Europe and Asia” (Miller 13).
164 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

30. Miller also posits an acephalic vision of Africa: “Africanist discourse in the
West is one in which the head, the voice—the logos, if you will—is missing” (27).
Camões imaginatively gives the continent a head and a voice in the figure of
Adamastor by construing him as the speaking culmination of the African land-
mass, an idea explored in chapter 3.
31. All English translations of Os Lusíadas are from Bacon. Portuguese cita-
tions are from Ramos.
32. Islam is the presence that makes Gama’s voyage not one of discovery of a
new world but of a preexisting competitor empire, according to Jacqueline Kaye’s
argument: “What we see in The Lusiads is da Gama’s discovery not of a new world
of unknown territories but of the precedence of Islam everywhere” (67). On the
coexistence of the Portuguese and Ottoman maritime empires in the Indian Ocean,
see Hess, “The Evolution.”
33. The bibliography on this topic is considerable. For explanations of the
interior wits and the workings of faculty psychology, begin with Babb (chapter
1), Burke (chapter 1), Carruthers (47–60), Folger (27–33), and Harvey (Inward
Wits).
34. Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) also summarizes this process in his Tratado del
alma (1170–72) in the Obras completas. For further explanation of the workings of
the imaginatio, see Carruthers 51–54.
35. Alfonso’s discussion of the interior wits is in the second Partida, title 13,
laws 6–11. For Alfonso, imagination has greater power than phantasy because the
imagination causes the mind to portray matters relating to past, present, and
future.
36. Vaughan and Vaughan note that the climatic explanation of the African’s—
and here, Ethiopian’s—pigmentation was commonplace in Europe in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries (23).
37. Geohumoral descriptions of non-European natives will survive into the
sixteenth century and the conquest of the Americas. In 1574 Juan López de Velasco
describes the physical traits of American indigenes according to the heat and char-
acteristics of the land. But unlike Alfonso’s and Zurara’s sun-scorched Ethiopians,
López de Velasco’s natives of the Equator and highlands of Quito exhibit varying
hues of whiteness, distinct from the “negro atezados” (sunburned blacks) of the
Cape of Good Hope (14; also see 20). This challenges the idea that proximity to
the sun causes black skin. For further comments, see Floyd-Wilson 78–86.
38. In a discussion of the spirits as adversely affected by the body’s humors,
Burke notes that “[w]ithin the body once the vital spirit is corrupted the correct
functioning of the faculties of the sensitive soul in concert with those of the
higher powers is no longer possible” (60–61). The physician Galen, one of the
main proponents of humoral physiology, also proposed “bodily sources of cogni-
tive error” (Clark 48), which may include the vital spirits.
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 165

3. The Monster of Melancholy

1. For José Benoliel, the episode runs to stanza 70; Benoliel gives no reason
for extending the limits of the episode beyond stanza 60. To my knowledge, Beno-
liel is the only scholar to argue for a possible Arabic source of the Adamastor
episode, which he finds in the “Conto do Pescador” (Fisherman’s story) of the
Thousand and One Nights (the Bible and Greek mythology are the other sources
identified by Benoliel). Castro rejects this hypothesis (O episódio do Adamastor
6n6); Ramalho classifies Benoliel’s suggestion as “fantastic” (11n1) and that one
possible source of Adamastor’s name is the Hebrew word Adamah, “earth” (“Sobre
o nome de Adamastor” 29). We should be cautious, however, to dismiss too
quickly the possibility of cross-fertilization of Hebrew and Arabic literature into
Portuguese texts of the Renaissance (and earlier), given the presence of Hebrew
and Arabic scholars and learning in the Portuguese court and in the science of
navigation.
2. Voltaire’s pronouncement was influential because he was the sole authority
on Camões in England for most of the eighteenth century, until the appearance
of William Julius Mickle’s translation with accompanying introductory essay in
1776 (Williams, “Introduction” 250). Mickle vigorously criticized Voltaire’s com-
ments on Camões’s poem. For this polemic, see Williams, “Introduction” 251–54,
and Pierce, “The Place of Mythology” 100–105; for a general study of the neoclas-
sical criticsm of Os Lusíadas, see Willis. Voltaire also criticized Spanish epic; Eliz-
abeth R. Davis argues that Voltaire’s judgments “were influential in swerving the
European epic canon away from Spanish epic” (8). The same would hold true for
Portuguese epic.
3. In Adamastor’s fearful form as the protector of secrets we might glimpse a
possibility of the epic uncanny as Elizabeth J. Bellamy argues for it: “Freud, quot-
ing Schelling, offers the Unheimliche as ‘the name for everything that ought to have
remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light ’ . . . The supernatural spirit
of Virgil’s Polydorus, staining the ground with his own gore, ought to have
remained buried in its obscure Thracian mound. But his ululating moans and
mangled roots persist in making their ghostly returns to constitute epic history’s
privileged mise-en-scène of dread and ontological uncertainty” (208–9, emphasis
in original). Adamastor is a terrifying return of the fabled dread surrounding the
southern threshold and the secrets of nature he guards, dramatically presented
by his outrage at being surpassed. Gama and his mariners may well experience
a frisson of ontological uncertainty when faced with such a strange yet familiar
apparition.
4. This dual nature of Adamastor’s voice prompts Vieira to interpret Adamas-
tor as two separate monsters (30). However, as I argue here, the two registers
of Adamastor’s discourse can be reconciled into one speaking subject through
melancholy.
166 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

5. See Quint, chapter 3.

6. Jared Banks, in comments relating to historiography, notes that the Por-
tuguese chronicles of discovery “act as master narratives which subsume all resist-
ance within an imperialist telos” (3).
7. Brink continues: “That this is no fanciful postcolonial reading of the text
is borne out by the way in which Camões describes the continuation of Da Gama’s
voyage after the unsettling encounter at the Cape: when next the Portuguese ven-
ture ashore . . . the Africans they meet on the beach are described as ‘the people
who owned the country here’. There is no hint of the would-be coloniser’s greedy
gaze in this passage (stanza 62), which confirms the impression of Adamastor as
the legitimate protector of the subcontinent who has every reason to hold his ter-
ritory against any threat of foreign invasion and appropriation” (45).
8. Saraiva points out that Adamastor does not belong to the circle of
Olympian gods but to the giants of earth who were defeated by the gods (“Função
e significado” 49). Other precedents to Adamastor include Claudiano’s Gigan-
tomachia, the Officina of Joannes Ravisius Textor, Orlando Furioso, and Panta-
gruel. For an inventory and discussion of these precursors, see the studies by
Ramalho (“Aspectos clássicos”) and Santos (“A denominação”).
9. In referring to Ceuta as a place of beauty, Zurara may be thinking of the
precepts set out by Cicero in the De Officiis, translated into Portuguese as the
Livro dos ofícios by D. Pedro, duke of Coimbra, sometime before 1438. In this text,
a chapter on the destruction of cities (chapter 23, “Que cousas se devem guardar
na destroyçom das cidades” [What matters should be observed in the destruction
of cities]) notes that this feat is reserved for great men (grandes barõoes, 49). Some
pages later, a pair of chapters considers honesty and the beauty of deeds (fremo-
sura das obras) or decorum, and defines decorum as that which distinguishes
humans from other creatures and that which is in accordance with nature (57–59).
Zurara fashions the capture of Ceuta as “natural” in an early chapter of his chron-
icle since it is an action allowed by the order of nature and the turning of the
celestial wheels; by referring to Ceuta as the commencement of beauty, the chron-
icler may be fashioning the destruction of Ceuta according to Ciceronian precepts.
10. Recall that Bartolomeu Dias had successfully doubled the cape nine years
before Gama’s trip, in 1488.
11. The location of the Pillars of Hercules would move south as exploration
progressed. In the Códice Valentim Fernandes, we find a reference to the legend of
Hercules at Cape Non: “quando chegou a este cabo achou as correntes muy fortes
que nom podia passar E pos neste cabo hva colunna em que estaua esprito em
letras gregas que quem pasasse este cabo tornaria ou nom” (when [Hercules]
arrived at this cape he found the currents so strong that he could not pass; and
he placed a column on this cape with Greek letters on it that said whoever passed
this cape would return, or not, 14).
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 167

12. See Cochran, chapters 4 and 5. Cochran builds his argument on the
nineteenth-century polemic on Adamastor in José Agostinho de Macedo’s attack
on Camões (Reflexões críticas, portions of which also appear in Macedo’s Censura
dos Lusíadas). In addition to Cochran’s analysis of figura as a confluence of figu-
ration, discourse, and history, it should be noted that figura might also be under-
stood as “map,” as Ricardo Padrón notes (93) in his discussion of Hernán Cortés.
A spirited response to Macedo was published by Francisco de S. Luiz in 1819, who
takes Macedo to task on many of his “factual” accusations by presenting what is
essentially an antipositivistic reading of Camões’s text and a defense of Camões’s
use of sources.
13. I depart from Bacon and provide a different translation here of “esse estu-
pendo / Corpo, certo, me tem maravilhado!” in order to remain closer to Camões’s
Portuguese and to emphasize the sense of wonder that Adamastor’s physicality
clearly occasions.
14. In my view, Cohen’s essay is one of the best theoretical treatments to date
of monsters and monster culture, since it accounts for monsters across the
chronological spectrum of Western culture without abandoning historical speci-
fics, and provides a number of monstrous modi legendi.
15. Some studies that advance these ideas are Cidade (126–29), Santos (“A
denominação” 627), Pierce (“Camões’ Adamastor”; “The Place of Mythology”), or
Bowra (123–26). For a discussion of Adamastor and prosopopeia, see Cochran,
chapter 5. António José Saraiva (“Função e significado”; “Lugar do Adamastor”)
argues that Adamastor is not a figure of allegory (allegory is reserved only for the
Olympian gods) but of human subjectivity in the form of a “hallucination,” an
idea that borders on the place of Adamastor in the imagination, as I argue below.
Neves concurs with Saraiva’s argument and postulates that Adamastor’s sphere of
existence is the human, not the supernatural. Hardie (chapters 3 and 4) studies
gigantomachic allegory in Virgil and the association of giants and monsters with
elemental forces of nature, including storms.
16. Some of these monsters appear in other Iberian texts, such as the Libro del
infante D. Pedro, written in Castilian by Gómez de Santisteban about the real and
imagined travels of D. Pedro, brother of Prince Henry, the Navigator; see Rogers,
The Travels. The Book of Marco Polo was translated into Portuguese as the Livro
de Marco Paulo and printed by Valentim Fernandes in 1502. Mandeville was trans-
lated into Castilian as the Libro de las maravillas del mundo. Camões’s knowledge
of Pliny was probably based on the Commentum in Plinii Naturalis Historiae by
the humanist Martinho de Figueiredo. According to Artur Anselmo, Figueiredo’s
commentary was “one of the most important books at the dawn of humanism in
Portugal” (20). For a catalog of this kind of monster in Os Lusíadas, see Lima.
Also see the studies by Friedman, Gil (Monstros), and Río Parra.
17. “[W]ell-settled myths had a life of their own, and this was difficult to
168 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

eradicate even with perceptual knowledge” (Relaño 37). Since the Portuguese
exploration of Africa was almost entirely a coastal enterprise, the old legends of
monsters could be maintained by pushing the monster’s dwelling place inland.
18. See Burke 13–14, 65.
19. Perhaps the most famous representation of the intersections between
melancholy and the sciences is Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. For com-
ments, see Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 284–402, and Yates, chapter 6.
20. Overviews of the details of humoralism as it relates to melancholy may be
found in Babb (chapters 1–3), Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl (passim), and Lyons
(chapter 1). Radden provides a selection of primary texts documenting the devel-
opment of the concept of melancholy over the centuries. For a brief recapitula-
tion of theories of melancholy in the context of Camões’s lyric, see Silva, Camões
209–28 and “The Songs of Melancholy.” Earle also addresses the question of melan-
choly in Camões’s Petrarchan lyrics.
21. The yellow of Adamastor’s teeth is significant in this humoral explanation
of melancholy. It is therefore not an arbitrary color choice. Letzring notes some
of the changes made by English translators of Camões in the eighteenth century,
among them the color of Adamastor’s teeth. Some translators avoid mention of
the teeth altogether, while William Julius Mickle made the teeth blue (Letzring
423). Letzring posits that “[a] possible explanation for the changes is that ‘yellow
teeth’ is too ‘low’ an image for the dignity required for the epic genre . . . Yellow
teeth may be repulsive, even disgusting, but they are not particularly terrifying”
(ibid.). Henry Hallam, a nineteenth-century scholar, believes that “[t]he formida-
ble Adamastor is rendered mean by particularity of description, descending even
to yellow teeth” (quoted in Letzring 424). Adamstor’s choleric temperament may
best explain Camões’s choice of yellow.
22. Camões did, however, have a direct connection with melancholy “exposi-
tion books” (to use Lyons’s term) through his involvement in Garcia de Orta’s
Colóquio dos simples e drogas da Índia (1563). Camões composed an introductory
poem for this book which, in its scientific treatment of simples, drugs, diseases,
and cures, mentions both melancholy and choler. Boxer notes that Garcia de
Orta’s book brings Asiatic cholera (cholera morbus) to the attention of the West-
ern world (Two Pioneers 17).
23. Horta (“A representação do Africano” 221–32) culls numerous descriptions
of the physical attributes of Africans in texts to 1508, among which is the regular
occurrence of “crespos cabelos.” Other texts closer to Camões’s time attest to the
same link between “crespos cabelos” (or “revoltos”) and blackness: João de Bar-
ros refers to the inhabitants of Good Hope (which he terms “outra fábula de peri-
gos” [another legend of dangers, Década da Ásia 130]) as being “negros de cabelo
revolto” (blacks with curly hair, 138); Damião de Góis describes the same inhab-
itants as “gente de cabelo revolto” (people with curly hair, Crónica do felicíssimo
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 169

rei D. Manuel 78) and as “homens pretos” (black men, 74); and Lopes de Castan-
heda describes Good Hope inhabitants as “gente baça” (dark people, 12). In 1563,
António Galvão writes that Good Hope is a storied locale of sorcerers and
enchanters who are “negros” (black, 63).
24. Both Portuguese and Latin versions of Aristotle’s works were in circulation
in sixteenth-century Portugal. See, for example, the entries for Os Problemas de
Aristóteles and Aristoteles de animalibus in Carvalho, “A livraria” 165, 171.
25. Schiesari notes that Ficino was responsible for melancholy’s “reevaluation as
a cultural value” (110). Floyd-Wilson observes that “it was the legacy of Aristotle’s
Problem XXX . . . together with Marsilio Ficino’s reorientation of melancholic
genius within both the pragmatics of humoral medicine and the transcendent
framework of Neoplatonism that succeeded in imbuing melancholia with a power
and agency that outstripped the other humors” (67), so that “Ficino’s work may
be more important for initiating the concept that melancholy is a humor to be
cultivated” (70). Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl explain that “[r]eally ‘outstanding’
talent, as shown in objective achievement, presupposes a double limitation of the
effects emanating from black bile . . . the amount of melancholy humour must
be great enough to raise the character above the average, but not so great as to
generate a melancholy ‘all too deep’, and that it must maintain an average tem-
perature, between ‘too hot’ and ‘too cold’. Then and only then is the melancholic
not a freak but a genius” (32).
26. The idea of the melancholic genius as a spirit will reappear in Robert Bur-
ton’s widely influential The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621 just decades
after Camões’s poem. Burton speaks of “those Genii, Spirits, Angels, which rule
and domineer in several places; they cause storms, thunder, lightning, earthquakes,
ruins, tempests, great winds, floods” (418), some elements of which are present in
Adamastor’s meteorological turbulence and his threat to cause shipwrecks and
ruination of all kinds.
27. Although not specifically referring to lovesickness, Silva argues that the
melancholic man, “in his anxiety and agitation, often exhibits an almost patho-
logical verbosity” (“Songs of Melancholy” 47), a fact reflected in Adamastor’s
loquaciousness.
28. In a study of Luis de Góngora’s Polifemo y Galatea (Polyphemus and Galatea,
1612), Parker remarks on the use of pálido to describe the Cyclops Polifemo’s cave.
Polifemo is one of the Iberian heirs of Adamastor. Parker notes that the word
carried associations with death and that it is part of the first image-complex of
Góngora’s poem in which darkness, night, blackness, and death are linked (61, 63).
The same associations could be posited for Adamastor with his nocturnal and
deathly abode at the cape as a netherworld of the spirit.
29. The Iberian Peninsula, and in particular Spain, functioned as one of the
ports of entry of Arabic notions of passionate love (Wack 38).
170 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

30. Braga (História da Universidade de Coimbra 211) lists a manuscript copy of

the Viatico as part of the library of D. Duarte (reigned 1433–38). Braga remarks:
“This book is also titled ‘Breviarium Constantini, dictum Viaticum’ . . . The pref-
erence for the Viatico in Portugal can be explained because of the presence of Ara-
bic learning, which also bears on philosophical inquiries; medicine was practiced
by the Mudjares [sic], and their books, though written in Portuguese, were aljami-
ados, that is, written in the Arabic alphabet” (211–12). Avicenna also shows up in
the libraries that Braga inventories, though it is not clear if the Canon is part of
these holdings (there is a copy of the Dialectica in Duarte’s library, and the Con-
stable Pedro’s library contains a simple entry “Evicenna” [232]).
31. Constantine notes: “Sometimes the cause of eros is also the contemplation
of beauty. For if the soul observes a form similar to itself it goes mad, as it were,
over it in order to achieve the fulfillment of its pleasure” (trans. in Wack 189).
32. Freud famously reflects on the lost or absent object as a cause of melan-
choly in “Mourning and Melancholia.” For discussions of the Freudian formulation
of melancholy and erotic love situated within the context of medieval literature
and culture, see Agamben and Wells. For comments relating this loss to the lyric
poetry of Camões, see Silva, “Songs of Melancholy” 40–52.
33. In a symbolic linking of earthiness, landscape, and melancholy, Lyons
argues that “[t]he heart that was oppressed by gross and heavy melancholy
humours was imprisoned . . . [t]here was no clear line of distinction . . . between
the state of the melancholic’s mind and the landscape that he inhabited or pro-
jected” (14–15). Similarly, Susan Stewart’s remarks on giants as telluric and dis-
proportionate in The Faerie Queene recall Adamastor’s ancestral claim that “Fui
dos filhos aspérrimos da Terra” (I was Earth’s child, like those of ruthless might;
V.51.i) as they do his corporeality: “the giant is linked to the earth in its most
primitive, or natural, state . . . the gigantic presents a physical world of disorder
and disproportion” (74).
34. The Italian text and translation are from Durling.
35. Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, in a discussion of Aristotle’s Problemata
XXX, note that “effects of the sinister substance [black bile] . . . conjured up the
idea of all that was evil and nocturnal” (15–16) and that for some classical heroes
melancholy imbued them with a “nimbus of sinister sublimity” (16). As an incar-
nation of that which is “evil and nocturnal,” Adamastor’s darkness is both a sign
of imminent danger at the end of the day and a symbolic darkness of Africa and
its natives—a land and people blind to the true faith.
36. According to Avicenna, other afflictions caused by melancholy (in addition
to insomnia) are sleepiness, amnesia, and hydrophobia (David-Peyre 194).
37. Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl note that an afflicted imagination can result
in seeing black men (93). In stanza 36 of canto V, the stanza immediately preced-
ing the beginning of the Adamastor episode, the episode of Fernão Veloso ends.
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 171

Veloso went ashore and was chased by a group of black men (to the bemusement
of his shipmates) who shot at him with bows: “Por que, saindo nós pera tomá-lo,
/ Nos pudessem mandar ao reino oscuro” (As he returned, their ambush they pre-
pare, / In hope to send us all to darkest Hell, V.36.vi–vii). There is a dramatic,
transitional swing from the comic to the menacing in the expression “reino
oscuro” (literally, “dark realm”). Camões clearly plays on understanding sub-
Saharan Africa as a “reino oscuro”; these lines also announce the dark realm of
Adamastor and the terrifying recesses of the mind.
38. The ambivalent nature of ousadia is apparent in canto II when, as Gama’s
fleet endeavors to make port in East Africa, Bacchus disguises himself as a priest
and delivers false information to two Portuguese envoys in an attempt to ambush
the Portuguese: “Neles ousadamente se subissem; / E nesta treïção determinavam
/ Que os de Luso de todo destruíssem” (In fury they [the Moors] might fall on
them straightway. / And by this treachery they were well assured / The Portuguese
to the last man to slay, II.17.iv–vi, emphasis mine).
39. See Fisher’s discussion, 4–16.
40. The obstacle to expansionist daring incarnated by Adamastor may also be
a symbolic representation of the Khoikhoi herders of southern Africa, according
to Madureira, who are hostile and “the very negation of discovery” (54).
41. Fisher argues that “the . . . passion that has closest links in all analysis to
either anger or fear [is] the passion of grief or mourning” (14). Fisher proposes
melancholy as a kind of lack or negativity, the absence of high-spiritedness typi-
cal of the passions (229–30) and links this understanding to Greek medicine:
“the details of the state of melancholia were closely modeled on the symptoms of
malaria—low energy, indifference, dispiritedness” (229). Fisher’s notion of melan-
choly contrasts with Adamastor’s more choleric and confrontational demeanor.
42. André Brink observes: “Most significantly, in narrative terms, by allowing
Adamastor to speak for himself, to tell his own story, his presence demands from
the reader an effort to understand” (“A Myth of Origin” 45, emphasis in original).
43. Dorothy Figueira, for example, argues that “The Lusiads is really an anti-
epic, concluding with a prophetic vision suggesting the demise of the Portuguese
Indian empire. Although the Portuguese achievement is presented as part of prov-
idential design to win the world for the faith and Camoens presents it as part
of God’s purpose for the universe as a whole, the tenth canto clearly shows how
the Portuguese fight for the faith is determined by the spiritual values of Europe.
Camoens’ need for a new myth suggests that these values are bankrupt and that
the forces of error and darkness will, in fact, prevail” (396).
44. Walter Benjamin also notes the “melancholic’s inclination for long jour-
neys” (149).
45. Although acedia and tristitia are technically different states of spirit and
mind, they were often conflated in the Middle Ages (Soufas 39). Duarte dedicates
172 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

a separate chapter to the discussion of the sin of occiosidade or sloth, but there
are elements of this sin in his discussion of tristeza as well.
46. In his Panegíricos, João de Barros opines that nothing is more contrary to
knowledge of the truth than ire, and notes that frequently “menencoria . . . vence
os sabedores, e os olhos d’alma” (melancholy triumphs over wise men, and the
eyes of the soul, 150).
47. Lourenço does not find in Duarte’s book the origin of the “mythification”
of saudade as a mainstay of Portuguese culture and argues against identifying the
Leal Conselheiro as its origin (Mitologia 103); for Lourenço, the birth of saudade
as a (national) “mythology” is Camões’s “Christianized Neoplatonic vision” (110).
Although the plausibility of identifying only a single origin of the mythification
of saudade is open to question, it cannot be denied that, though Duarte’s objec-
tive may have been more “modest” (Lourenço 103), the subsequent effect of his
proclamation about the untranslatability of saudade, in conjunction with the
work of Camões, was substantial.
48. See especially Agamben, chapter 4. According to Aristotle, the passions are
part of the sensitive soul and are located in the heart (Babb 3–4). But “passion”
also carries a physiological meaning as “a muscular expansion or contraction of
the heart” (Babb 12). This physiological phenomenon may be what Duarte is
referring to at the outset of his chapter on saudade when he observes that “a tris-
teza, per qual quer parte que venha, assy embarga sempre contynuadamente o
coraçom” (sadness, wherever it comes from, always and continuously constricts
the heart, 93).
49. Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl also note the Arabic expression saudawi al-
mizag¢, “black by admixture, melancholy” (36n81); “the Arabic expression for ‘black’
or ‘melancholic’ became synonymous with ‘passion’” (36).
50. Moira Richards reads Adamastor as the would-be rapist of Thetis, arguing
that the Lusíadas in this episode contains a “delightful feminist revenge parable”
(73). I agree with Richards’s underlying assumption that the dynamics of colo-
nial/sexual aggression are often frequently intertwined throughout the poem, but
stop short of applying “feminism” in its contemporary understandings to Camões
and his poetic constructions of women and female sexuality.
51. René P. Garay, in fact, finds the eros of the poem to be supervised by a
woman and argues that “the Portuguese venture in Os Lusíadas, for all the chau-
vinistic bravado that the enterprise entails, still falls clearly within the controlled
domain of a well-defined feminine principle. It is the archetypal woman (i.e.,
Venus), after all, who not only inspires, but at times commandeers the epic enter-
prise” (87).
52. Bethlehem studies the possible associations between Adamastor’s stoni-
ness and his phallic nature, and suggests that he calls up the threat of castration
(53).
 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 173

53. For a catalog of Faria e Sousa’s works, see Silva, Diccionario bibliographico
414–18.
54. “[B]y choosing to write most of his works in Spanish, Faria e Sousa placed
himself in a no-man’s land of literary history. Students of Portuguese culture tend
to leave aside an author who willfully neglected to cultivate the national language
at a moment when its very existence as a tool of artistic expression was at stake.
Students of Spanish civilization are not particularly attracted to a writer who
betrays in his work a marked Portuguese bias, even when he does not openly glo-
rify his countrymen” (Glaser, The “Fortuna” 5). For a summary of some of the
conflicting critical views on Faria e Sousa, see Silva, “Exile under Fire” 61–63. Sena
traces Faria e Sousa’s genealogy and provides notes on the historical/political con-
texts of his work.
55. For Pierce, Camões is a humanist poet working within a rhetorical tradi-
tion; for a rebuttal of this view, see Glaser, “Manuel de Faria e Sousa” 135–36.
56. Faria e Sousa took cognizance of the fact that the vicissitudes of the phys-
ical book necessarily impinge on the acts of reading and interpretation, and so it
was that he presented the first formal treatment of the two putative “first edi-
tions” of Os Lusíadas. For a comprehensive study of the problems surrounding
the editio princeps along with a reproduction of twenty-nine of its exemplars on
CD-ROM, see Jackson, Camões and the First Edition.
57. Shankar Raman notes, “The Portuguese colonial empire began and ended
. . . with its military struggles against the Islamic powers of the Mediterranean . . .
It is at the hands of the deliberately erased colonial power that preceded and
shaped Portugal’s own outward expansion that King Sebastian meets his death”
(155–56).
58. Part of Adamastor’s decorum is that his words reflect his monstrous body
and his temperament: “Rõpe el Gigãte su furor en razones, i palabras con gran
estudio, proporcionadas a su estatura, colera, pasion, i bravosidad, i vengança”
(the Giant’s furor comes out in speech and proper words, proportionate to his
stature, choler, passion, arrogance, and vengefulness, col. 520).
59. See Sennett 106–8.
60. Covarrubias, in his renowned dictionary of 1611 and one of the many
textual authorities Faria e Sousa cites, defines “Jayán” as a “hombre de estatura
grande, que por otro término decimos gigante” (a man of large stature, whom by
another word we call giant, 680).
61. Faria e Sousa is the first critic to posit the etymological origins of “Adamas-
tor”: “Adamastor: nõbre que tiene mucho del de Duma, ascendiente de Mahoma,
como hijo de Ismael . . . Pudo tambien cõponerlo el P. de adamas, por la con-
sideraciõ que veremos luego . . . el P. formò este nõbre de Adamastos, que segv los
Gramaticos, vale indomito, qual fue Mahoma, i es ingente en sus errores, i ambi-
ciõ: i tãbien del verbo adamo, que vale enamorar, pues el P. le finge luego muy
174 n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

perdido de amores por Tetis: i Mahoma fue primero enamorado de muger agena
. . . I es de creer, que el P. con este nombre quiso de alguna manera alumbrarnos,
para que viessemos a Mahoma en lo recondito desta fabula, pues teniendo en los
Poetas anteriores el nõbre de Damastor, dado a uno de los Gigantes, no avia para
que alterar en el quando pintava un Gigante, si no quisiera con el pintar a
Mahoma en essa parte. Dize màs aì, que de la guerra de los Gigantes le tocò la
parte de conquistar el Oceano, siendo Capitan de aquella armada: esso puntual-
mente toca a los Mahometanos, que fueron Capitanes desta navegacion, i la con-
quistarõ primero, i en virtud della estavan muy poderosos agora en aquellos
mares” (Adamastor [is a] name that has Duma in it, related to Muhammad as the
son of Ishmael . . . The poet could also have composed the name from adamas,
which we will presently consider . . . the poet created this name from Adamastos,
meaning indomitable according to the Grammarians, which Muhammad was in
the magnitude of his erroneous ways and ambition; the name also comes from
adamo, meaning to fall in love, evident when the poet makes him hopelessly in
love with Thetis as Muhammad also was in love with a foreign woman . . . And
it is to be believed that, with this name, the poet wished in some manner to
enlighten us so that we could see Muhammad lying hidden in this fiction. For
since the name Damastor appears in earlier poets as one of the giants, no change
was necessary here in order to create and describe a giant, even if, in using the
name, Muhammad was not described in this passage. Furthermore, in the war
of the giants, it fell to him [Adamastor] to conquer the ocean since he was the
captain of the fleet. This immediately points to the Muhammadans, who were
captains of navigation and conquered the ocean first, and because of that they
were very powerful in those waters, col. 545). For a recent study of possible clas-
sical sources of Adamastor’s name, see Hilton “‘Chamei-me Adamastor.’”
62. The locution “transformar el amante en la cosa amada” is a reference to
the first verse of Camões’s sonnet “Transforma-se o amador na cousa amada.” The
Platonic-Aristotelian undertones of this emblematically Camonian “philosophy of
love” are redirected here to indict Muhammad as intrinsically unable to rise above
an earthly desire to behold the one, true Beauty.
63. See Figueiredo, A autocomplacência da mimese, chapter 4, for an analysis of
how the Adamastor episode relates to Camões’s mimetic art and how it may be
read as a “lesson” in literary criticism and the practice of narrative.
64. For studies of Adamastor in South African literature, see Gray, Bethlehem,
Graham, and Hanzimanolis. Also see van Wyk Smith, Shades of Adamastor. Mon-
teiro (chapter 9) comments on the Adamastor legacy in English-language litera-
ture. Coetzee’s painting T’Kama-Adamastor is the focal point of a collection of
essays by South African scholars, edited by Vladislavić.
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 Index

Adamastor, xxiv, 1, 47, 82, 88, 89, 103, 157n12, 158n3, 159n19, 160n23, 162n9,
105–38, 147–54, 165n1, 165n3, 165n4, 162n12, 164n30, 168n17, 171n38; and
166n7, 166n8, 167n15, 169n27, blackness, 4, 15, 19, 22–24, 27–29, 89,
169n28, 170–71n37, 171n42, 172n50, 97, 100, 130, 159n19, 160n31, 160n34,
172n52, 173–74n61, 174n63, 174n64; 161n1, 161n37, 168–69n23, 170n35,
and Africa, 119, 120, 122, 129, 130, 171n37; discovery of, xxi; etymology
144, 146, 164n30, 170n35, 171n40; and of, 75, 163n29; as geographic idea,
embodiedness, 123–24, 126, 128–29, 14, 15–18, 30, 45, 52; as historio-
130, 131, 133, 146, 150, 151, 152, 167n13, graphic home, 84; as “new world,”
170n33, 173n58; as figura (figure), xxii, 157n11; and papal bulls, 48–49;
122, 123, 149, 167n12; and melancholy, and “race,” 22–24, 29–30, 160n28,
119, 122, 126–44, 148, 149, 150, 168n21, 160n29; regions/colors of, 29–32, 51,
171n41; as monster, 119, 122–24, 133, 52, 61–62, 161n37; and space, 30–32,
135, 136, 149–53. See also Africa; 52, 54, 61, 74, 75, 161n38; and
Camões, Luís de; imaginatio; strangeness, 77. See also Adamastor;
melancholy; monsters; monstrosity; Alfonso X of Castile; Bojador, Cape;
Sousa, Manuel de Faria e Ceuta; Ethiopia; geohumoralism;
Afonso V, King, 44, 55, 94, 98, 156n5, Good Hope, Cape of; Guinea;
162n9 melancholy; Morocco; Nile River;
Africa, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, Sahara; Senegal River; Zurara,
xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 13, 14, Gomes Eanes de
18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 45, Africans. See Ethiopia; Guinea;
47, 50, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, Moors
66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 80, 83, Alfonso X of Castile, 5, 8, 160n20,
91, 92, 93, 94, 101, 105, 106, 119, 121, 164n37; Cantigas de Santa Maria, 4,
122, 125, 126, 130, 135, 148, 150, 151, 5, 6, 158n9; and definition of moro
155n3, 155n5, 156n5, 156n11, 157n1, (Moor), 5; General estoria, 4, 16, 32,

197
198 index

97, 121; Libro de las cruzes, 96–97; Cadamosto, Alvise, 11, 33, 57, 60, 68,
Primera crónica general de España, 72, 100; Navigazioni, 50–54, 162n17,
121; Siete partidas, 5, 6, 94, 158n5, 163n18
158n6, 158n8, 164n35 Cain (Genesis), 5, 158n7
Alighieri, Dante, 47, 132, 152 Camões, Luís de, xvi, xviii, xxi, xxii,
alterity (otherness), xvi, 1, 3, 14, 18, xxiii, xxiv, 21, 22, 34, 47, 50, 55, 63,
19, 20, 21, 30, 32, 43, 51, 77, 78, 120, 64, 66, 70, 72, 74, 77, 94, 101, 137, 141,
134 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 153, 154, 166n7,
Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 167n12, 167n13, 167n16, 168n20,
169n26 168n21, 168n22, 168n23, 172n50,
Aquinas, Thomas, 93, 94, 101 173n55, 174n62; Os Lusíadas, xv, xvi,
Aristotle, 35, 131, 134, 169n24, 169n25, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiv, 1, 33, 49, 50, 57,
170n35, 172n48, 174n62 65, 74, 78, 81–92, 93, 96, 102–4, 105–
Asia, xix, xx, xxi, 17, 18, 23, 60, 63, 64, 38, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 135, 136, 137,
65, 67, 74, 151, 162n12 138, 141, 143, 145, 147, 153, 159n15,
Atlas, 121 161n37, 164n31, 164n32, 165n2, 167n16,
Avicenna, 94, 133, 170n36 169n26, 170–71n37, 171n38, 171n43,
172n51, 173n56. See also Adamastor;
Bacchus, 82, 103, 171n38 Africa; Barros, João de; cartogra-
barbarians, xxii, 19, 22, 52, 54 phy; Castanheda, Christianity/
Barletta, Vincent, 158n4 Christians; empire; expansion;
Barros, João de, xxi, 18, 33, 44, 69, 70, Gama, Vasco da; Good Hope, Cape
94, 123, 160n24, 163n24, 163n25, of; India; imaginatio; Lopes, Fernão;
168n23, 172n46; Década da Ásia, 63– melancholy; monsters; monstrosity;
68, 101–2, 159n19; and imaginatio, Moors; Sousa, Manuel de Faria e;
101–2 Virgil; vision
Behaim, Martin, 55 cantigas de escarnho e mal dizer, 6–8,
Benjamin, Walter, 171n44 158n10, 158n11
Bhabha, Homi, 21 Carruthers, Mary, 93, 94, 164n33,
Bojador, Cape, 24, 32, 41, 42, 46, 48; 164n34
and epistemological boundaries, cartography, xxiv, 60, 87, 88, 90, 91,
26–27, 44–45, 47 147, 148, 150, 151, 157n1
Boxer, C. R., 15, 24, 29, 67, 156n7, Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de, xxi,
157n1, 160n24, 162n12, 163n20, 33, 63, 169n23; História do
163n27, 168n22 descobrimento e da conquista da
Brazil, xviii, 63 Índia pelos Portugueses, 57, 68–70
bulls, papal, xxii, 40, 48–49, 56, 65, Ceuta, xiii–xv, xvii, 1, 9, 10, 33, 34, 35,
158n5, 162n13, 162n14 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46, 56, 63, 65,
Burke, James, xii, 164n33, 164n38, 66, 68, 70, 72, 77, 79, 80, 81, 95, 96,
168n18 121, 140, 155n1, 155n2, 155n5, 157n3,
Butler, Judith, 134 162n8, 163n25, 166n9
 index 199

Christianity/Christians, xv, xvii, xx, 3, 85, 88, 105, 119, 122, 134, 138, 143, 144,
4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 27, 31, 146, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156n8, 156n9,
37, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 61, 160n27, 161n2, 162n7, 164n32,
65, 66, 67, 69, 78, 80, 83, 88, 89, 95, 171n43; definition of, xix–xxi; and
96, 101, 103, 132, 136, 147, 148, 150, textuality, xx, xxi, 14, 56
153, 156n9, 158n13, 160n23 Erasmus, 70
Cicero (De Officiis), 166n9 Ethiopia, 2, 4, 11, 17, 18, 19, 24, 26, 27,
Coetzee, Cyril, 154, 174n64 32, 51, 70, 80, 96, 97, 124, 160n34,
Cohen, Jeffrey J., 20, 123–24, 160n26, 164n36, 164n37; definition of, 157n2,
167n14 162n12
colonialism, xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, 20, 21, Europeans, xvi, xx, 14, 20, 22, 28, 29,
22, 24, 30, 34, 48, 54, 67, 75, 76, 80, 34, 42, 52, 54, 88, 97, 100, 120, 133,
88, 120, 148, 151, 152, 155n5, 159n15, 135, 144; “Portuguese” and “African,”
166n7, 172n50, 173n57 24, 27, 75
conquest (conquista), xix, xxii, 10, 11, expansion, xiv, xvii, xx, xxi, xxiii, 1, 2,
19, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 48, 49, 52, 4, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32, 35, 37, 41, 43,
66, 67, 74, 75, 78, 79, 97, 136, 137, 143, 45, 47, 48, 63, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73,
149 74, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 102,
Constantinus Africanus (Constantine 120, 122, 136, 144, 148, 149, 153, 154,
the African), 132–33, 170n30, 170n31 157n1, 158n4; definition of, xix
Correia, Gaspar (Lendas da Índia), 134
Covilhã, Pero da, 70, 156n11 faculty psychology, 92–93, 96, 99, 104,
crusades, xiv, xv, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 133, 135, 164n33. See also imaginatio;
56, 65, 66 intellect; vision
Fernandes, Valentim, 25, 55, 166n11,
Dias, Bartolomeu, 70, 166n10 167n16
discourse, imperial, xvi, xvii, xix, xxii, Ficino, Marsilio, 131, 137, 140, 169n25
xxiii, xxiv, 1, 13, 14, 24, 30, 33, 34, 49, Figueiredo, João R., xii, 174n63
51, 52, 54, 55, 72, 73, 74, 77, 135, 146; Folger, Robert, 93, 133, 164n33
opposed to colonial discourse, xxiii, Freud, Sigmund, 170n32
157n13 Fuchs, Barbara, xxii, xxiii, 13, 159n13
discovery (descobrimento, descoberta),
xiv, xx, 31, 41, 58, 59, 67, 72, 156n10, Galen, 128, 132, 164n38
162n7, 164n32, 166n6, 171n40; Gama, Vasco da, xvi, 11, 15, 25, 50, 58,
definition of, xxii 59, 61, 62, 63, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90,
Dürer, Albrecht, 168n19 91, 92, 102, 104, 106, 119, 120, 123,
124, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 137,
Eanes, Gil, 41, 44, 45, 46. See also 138, 144, 148, 151, 156n11, 165n3; and
Bojador, Cape melancholy, 134–36, 138, 140, 141;
empire, xix, xxii, xxiv, 11, 13, 20, 21, 48, and voyage to India, xviii, 56, 57, 64,
54, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 76, 78, 83, 68, 69, 71, 103, 105, 124, 133, 162n10,
200 index

164n32, 166n7, 166n10. See also 157n2, 159n15; definition of, 15, 16,
Camões, Luís de: Os Lusíadas; Good 17, 18, 124, 159n18, 160n21
Hope, Cape of; India Indian Ocean, 1, 21, 34, 83, 122, 144,
geohumoralism, 26, 96–97, 130–31, 156n6, 156n11, 157n2, 164n32
159n19, 164n36, 164n37 intellect (faculty psychology), 94, 96,
Gibraltar (Strait of), 2, 41, 51 97, 101
Gil, Fernando, 86, 90 Isidoro de Sevilla (Isidore of Seville),
Góis, Damião de, 63, 161n37, 168n23; 2, 23, 157–58n3
Crónica do Príncipe Dom João, Islam, xviii, 4, 67, 78, 89, 148, 157n2,
70–73 161n37, 164n32, 173n57
Góngora, Luis de, 169n28 itinerary, 60–61, 72
Good Hope, Cape of, 1, 15, 64, 70, 83,
84, 88, 105, 106, 118, 121, 123, 126, 130, Jackson, K. David, xii, 173n56; and
132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141, 154, Orientalness, 14, 17, 20, 68
164n37, 166n7, 166n10, 169n23 Jews, 5, 6, 19
Guinea (Guiné), xvii, xx, 11, 15, 16, 25, João I, King, xiii, xvii, 1, 35, 37, 39, 40,
26, 31, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 41, 65, 78, 79, 95, 140, 155n2, 162n8
62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 81, João II, King, 69, 70, 72, 162n10,
159n19, 161n5, 163n26; definition of, 163n26
30, 45–46 João III, King, 63, 67, 101

Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 19 Kongo, xx, 20, 70

Henry, Prince (Infante D. Henrique), Kristeva, Julia, 75–76
xvii, 1, 10, 16, 17, 25, 42, 43, 46, 48,
50, 55, 56, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, lançados, 29, 76, 161n36
98, 99, 159n14, 159n19, 167n16 Leal Conselheiro (D. Duarte), 9–10,
Hippocrates, 128 140–42, 171–72n45, 172n47. See also
Horta, José da Silva, 4, 24, 25, 27, 45, melancholy
160n33, 161n1, 162n8, 168n23 Leo Africanus, 31, 161n37
Hulme, Peter, 27, 51, 73 Lev, Leora, xi
Hutcheson, Gregory, xii, 158n10 Liu, Benjamin, 7, 158n8
livros de linhagens (genealogy books),
imaginatio (imagination), xxiv, 90–96, 8–9
98–104, 125–26, 164n34, 164n35, Lopes, Fernão, xvii, 35, 41, 70, 155n5
167n15, 170n37; definition of, 93–94; Lusíadas, Os. See Camões, Luís de
and melancholy, 135; in Zurara, Lycidas (Milton), 131
95–101. See also faculty psychology;
intellect; vision Macedo, Helder, 145
India, xviii, xxiv, 11, 15, 26, 33, 50, 56, Macedo, José Agostinho de, 167n12
58, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 82, 85, Manuel I, King, 58, 63, 67, 85, 86, 88,
86, 89, 92, 96, 104, 105, 126, 144, 145, 96, 162n10
 index 201

Mármol Carvajal, Luis del, 31, 161n37 44, 45, 46, 56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 76,
marvel, 36, 40, 86, 123, 124, 135 78, 79, 80, 81, 89, 95, 96, 99, 103,
Mauritania, 2, 3, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 30, 104, 150, 152, 156n9, 158n5, 158n6,
45, 65, 158n3, 160n34; and blackness 158n13, 160n27, 160n33, 161n34,
of skin, 3; as imprecise term, 3. See 171n30; and birds, xiii–xiv; and
also Africa; Moors Christians, 5–6, 7, 8–9; classical/
maurophilia, 9 medieval definitions of, 2–3, 5; in
Maurus, 2, 3. See also Moors England and Portugal, xvii, 155n4;
Mbembe, Achille, 77 and imaginatio, 95, 96, 99–100, 102;
McClintock, Anne, 22, 54, 160n27 loss of Spain to, 39; and papal bulls,
melancholy, xxiv, 82, 119, 122, 126–43, 49; and sex, 7, 22, 26, 130; war
148, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156n11, 165n4, against, xv, 9–11, 39, 40, 41, 44, 61,
168n19, 168n22, 169n26, 170n32, 66, 159n14, 162n8. See also Africa;
170n33, 170n36, 171n41, 171n44, Alfonso X of Castile; alterity;
172n46; and Africa, 129–30, 134, 138; Camões, Luís de; Ethiopia; Guinea;
and amor hereos (lovesickness), Islam; Muslims; Saracens; Zurara,
132–33, 169n27, 169n29, 170n31; and Gomes Eanes de
eros, 144; and humoral theory, 128– moro, 2, 3, 4. See also Moors
29, 131, 132, 133, 134, 164n38, 168n20, Morocco, xiii, xv, xvii, xxi, 3, 9, 10, 41,
168n21, 169n25; in Leal conselheiro, 64, 67, 70, 79
140–42; and maritime expansion, mouro, 2, 3, 4, 11, 25, 31, 42, 45, 49, 50,
128, 135, 153; and Saturn, 140, 149; 62, 89, 98, 99, 158n4, 160n34. See also
and saudade, 142–43. See also Moors
Adamastor; Africa; imaginatio; Mudimbe, V. Y., xvi, xxi, 49, 74
monsters; saudade Muhammad, 5, 37, 44, 64, 65, 80, 121,
Melinde (Malindi), xvi, 50, 83, 84, 105 148, 149, 150, 152, 162n8, 173–74n61,
Melville, Herman, 105 174n62. See also Islam; Sousa,
Mexía, Pedro (Silva de varia lección), Manuel de Faria e
135 mulatto, 29
monsters, xxiv, 1, 26, 62, 122, 123, Muslims, xvi, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 19, 50, 78,
124–26, 135, 136, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156n11, 158n4. See also Moors
165n4, 167n14, 167n15, 167n16, 168n17.
See also Adamastor nautical voyaging, xvi, xxiv, 11, 33,
monstrosity, xxiv, 89, 119, 122, 123, 125, 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 57, 73, 122, 150,
126, 149, 150, 151 153; erotics of, xxiv, 146; and
mooring, xvi orientation, 59–60
Moorishness, xvii, xxiii, 2, 5, 6, 148, Niger River, 17
150, 158n10; and dark skin, 5, 6, 8; Nile River, 15, 16, 17, 18, 65
and sex, 7–8. See also Moor
Moors, xvi, xxiii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, Orient, xix, xxiv, 13, 17, 18, 20, 63, 68,
15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 26, 31, 41, 42, 159n15
202 index

orientalism, 13, 17, 19, 67, 160n23, Saracens, 3, 20, 40, 48, 49, 56, 148,
160n24; and Edward Said, xxiii, 162n8; etymological origin of, 50,
13–15, 18, 20, 68, 159n16, 159n17. See 158n5. See also Moors
also Jackson, K. David saudade, 142–43, 172n47, 172n48,
Orta, Garcia de, 168n22 172n49
Ovid, 118, 130, 138 Sebastião, King, 146, 173n57
Senegal River, 15, 16, 18, 24, 26, 30, 42,
padrões, 62, 163n23 51, 159n19
Padrón, Ricardo, 51, 59, 60, 73, 167n12 Shakespeare, William, 30
Paiva, Afonso de, 70 ship: image of, xiv, 50, 52, 53, 58, 60,
Paré, Ambroise, 125 63, 78, 79, 90, 99, 126, 136, 143–46
passion, 9, 82, 171n41, 172n48; heroic, Sintra, Diogo Gomes de, 25, 54;
136–38, 141 Descobrimento primeiro da Guiné,
Pedro, Count of Barcelos, 8 55–56
Pereira, Duarte Pacheco, 25, 26 slavery, xx, xxi, 1, 11, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28,
Petrarch, 133, 168n20 29, 30, 31, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 69, 100,
Pillars of Hercules, 2, 121, 122, 166n11 161n4. See also bulls, papal
Pina, Rui de, 44, 70, 162n9 Sousa, Manuel de Faria e, xxiv, 161n37,
Pisano, Mateus de (De Bello Septensi), 173n53, 173n54, 173n56, 173n60,
156n5 173n61; interpreter of Adamastor,
Polyphemus, 89, 90, 120, 122, 123, 146–53. See also Adamastor; Camões,
169n28 Luís de; melancholy; Muhammad
Portugal, xiv, xvi, xviii, xix, xxiii, 1, 2, Spain, xiv, xix, xxii, 1, 2, 3, 8, 17, 19,
3, 11, 17, 20, 21, 30, 34, 35, 44, 46, 48, 20, 35, 39, 48, 121, 130, 146, 155n3,
49, 55, 56, 57, 65, 67, 70, 71, 74, 78, 156n9, 157–58n3, 158n4, 158n10,
80, 82, 90, 105, 133, 146, 148, 156n6, 160n25, 160n31, 161n3, 162n16,
157n1, 160n23, 162n9, 162n16, 167n16. 169n29. See also Portugal
See also Africa; Camões, Luís de; strangeness, xxiv, 1, 65, 73–90; and
empire; expansion; Spain epistemology, 83, 86; and maps, 85
postcolonialism, xxii, xxiii, 157n12,
166n7 Tethys, 86, 87, 88
Prester John, 16, 62, 64, 69, 70, 157n2 Thetis, 105, 110, 111, 116, 117, 119, 129, 130,
132, 136, 137, 143, 152, 172n50, 174n61
Reconquest (reconquista), xiv, 9, 19, 50, Torquemada, Antonio de (Jardín de
65, 66, 155n3, 158–59n13, 162n16 flores curiosas), 125–26
Rodrigo, King, 38 Torrid Zone, 19, 32, 96, 97, 159n19,
roteiro (rutter), 33, 35, 53, 54, 57, 163n21 161n38
Tragic History of the Sea (História
Sahara, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 45, trágico–marítima), xviii, 156n7,
48, 50, 61, 62, 69, 71, 89, 125, 130, 163n20
157n2, 159n19, 171n37 Tristão, Nuno, 23, 41
 index 203

Velho, Álvaro, xvi, 54, 68, 134; Relação 95, 102, 159n19, 160n20, 160n23,
da Viagem de Vasco da Gama, 160n33, 160n34, 161n38, 164n37,
56–63, 65, 163n19, 163n22. See also 166n9; and blackness, 27–28, 43; and
Gama, Vasco da; roteiro brownness, 29–30; Crónica da
Verde, Cape, 59, 60, 64 Tomada de Ceuta, xiii, xv, xvii, 9,
Virgil, 149, 165n3, 167n15; Aeneid, 120, 34, 35–41, 78–81, 94, 95–96, 121,
123 156n5; Crónica de D. Duarte de
vision, 85–92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 134, 135; Meneses, xviii, 61, 155n5; Crónica de
and journeys in Os Lusíadas, 92. See D. João I, xvii, 35; Crónica de D.
also faculty psychology; imaginatio Pedro de Meneses, xviii, 61, 155n5;
Vives, Juan Luis, 164n34 Crónica de Guiné, xviii, 15, 16, 23,
Voigt, Lisa, xi, 161n36 24, 25, 27, 29, 41, 42–47, 49, 56, 62,
Voltaire, 118, 165n2 65, 81, 94, 96, 98–101, 155n5, 162n14;
and imperial discourse, 34; and
Witwatersrand, University of the, 154 “race,” 22–23, 27; and spatialization
of skin pigmentation, 29–32. See
Zurara, Gomes Eanes de, ix, xv, xvii, also Africa; bulls, papal; discourse,
xviii, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, imperial; empire; Ethiopia;
18, 26, 34, 36, 50, 51, 52, 63, 64, 66, expansion; Guinea; Moors; mouro;
68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77, 78, 83, 86, 94, Nile River; Sahara; Senegal River
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Josiah Blackmore is professor in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese at the University of Toronto. He is author of Manifest Perdition:
Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minnesota, 2002) and
editor of C. R. Boxer’s Tragic History of the Sea (Minnesota, 2001).