Camoes, China and Macau.

In Macau, on a wooded hill, overlooking the Old Protestant Cemetery and the offices of the Fundacao Oriente, lie gardens that from the nineteenth century have been known as the gruta de Camoes. Westward there are sweeping views across the Inner Harbour towards the Chinese mainland. The gardens are regularly filled on fine days with local inhabitants practising their tai chi, playing Chinese chess, reading their newspapers or just strolling in the sunshine. Framed within a pi-shaped structure of three huge Stonehenge-like granite rocks stands a plinth, two metres high, on which in 1886 was mounted a life-size bronze bust of Portugal's national poet. This restrained representation contrasts sharply with the brash and outsize statue of the bard that was placed, with no little hubris, in the main square of Old Goa in 1960, only to be removed to the nearby museum after the Independence that followed a year later. It now stands, duly discarded, alongside statues of Afonso de Albuquerque and Lord Vishnu. But then it is known for certain that Camoes had lived for some years in Goa. By contrast, there is dissension among scholars concerning the issue of his ever having set foot in Macau.

Charles Boxer was prominent among those who remained to be convinced. Writing of the sea captain Leonel de Sousa, who in 1554 appears to have successfully negotiated with the local Chinese authorities for the future use of Macau as a commercial toehold for the Portuguese, he continues,

Another interesting point in connection with Leonel de Sousa is that many Portuguese writers claim that it was in his company that Luis de Camoes came to Macao as Provedor-Mor dos Defuntos e Auzentes, Custodian for the Property of the Dead and Absent. This has been strongly contested by others, and by the present writer in particular.

However, Boxer leaves the door slightly ajar, adding that

he feels bound in justice to point out that Leonel de Sousa specifically complains in his letter of 1556 that this post, which usually was one of the prerogatives of the Captain-Major, had been taken from him and given to another. He does not say to whom, nor to which of his voyages he is referring; but if he means the 1557/8 one, then it is just possible that Luis de Camoes was the recipient, and that he was numbered amongst the founders of Macao in 1557, and perhaps accompanied the Captain-Major later to Japan. (1)

In contrast to the foregoing, Father Pedro de Mariz, the poet's first biographer, makes the following assertion:

foy por Prouedor mor dos defunctos aas partes da China, de que o Visorey o proueo, para ver se o podia leuantar da pobreza em que sempre andaua enuolto. Mas nem a enchente dos bens que laa grangeou, o pode liurar, que em terra nao gastasse o seu liberalmente. E no mar perdesse o das partes em hum naufragio que padeceu terriuel, de que elle faz mencao na octaua 128 do Cato 10. E nao lhe valeo a excellencia de sua Poesia, para deyxar de ser prezo na India, pelo Gouernador Francisco Barreto, & de vir capitulado a este Reyno. (2)

At first sight the statement that Camoes went to China as 'Prouedor mor dos defunctos' seems conclusive, were it not for the allegation that the Governor of India (in Goa) Francisco Barreto, had him imprisoned on his return. This is plain nonsense, as Barreto no longer exercised that authority (by whatever date our poet may have been deemed to have returned to India). (3) We are left with the question of the extent to which Mariz's account may be seen as trustworthy, if at all.

In order to provide a reasoned context for the above viewpoints and statements it is important to review what is broadly known about the presence of Camoes in Goa up to 1556, the year of Sousa's letter. Camoes left Lisbon, for Goa, on three years' military service, on Palm Sunday, 26 March 1553, in a fleet of carracks under the command of Fernao Alvares Cabral, probably on board his flagship, the Sao Bento. Among contemporaneously published works of historical reference that he would need for his planned epic poem, he would certainly have taken on board ship the first book (1551) of Fernao Lopes de Castanheda's Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India pelos Portugueses and the first decada (1552) of the Asia of Joao de Barros. It was the practice for the India fleets to sail in late March or early April and to reach their destination in September or October. It seems probable that Camoes arrived in Goa in September 1553, since he writes in his celebrated letter from Goa of 'seis meses de ma vida por esse mar'. (4) Indeed, he describes the voyage also in his elegy 'O poeta Simonides, falando' (ll. 67-144).

By November of that year he was already participating, as related by Diogo do Couto in his sixth Decada (Book 10, Chapters 15-17), in a punitive expedition, led by the Vice-Roy, (5) Dom Afonso de Noronha, against the 'pepper king', the ruler of Chembe, on the Malabar Coast. Camoes retails these events also in 'O poeta Simonides, falando' (ll.145-65), but with a marked lack of enthusiasm ('Vi quanta vaidade em no s se encerra', coupled with the laconic and dismissive 'sucedeu-nos bem'). Yet already, as a minor noble, he would have had the opportunity to forge a relationship with one of the leading officers of the expedition, Francisco Barreto, who two years later was to become Governor of the Estado da India.

Camoes also took part in a military expedition to the Red Sea and the Straits of Mecca, calling in on the way at Hormuz, the Portuguese base in the Persian Gulf, as was normal practice. This expedition is likely to have lasted roughly from February to October or November of 1554 or 1555. The reactions to it of the lovelorn Camoes are charted in the well-known cancao 'Junto de um fero, seco, esteril monte', written on the mountainside of Ras al Fil, close to Cape Gardafui, in what is now Somalia. As three or four expeditions are reported by Couto to have been dispatched to the Gulf of Aden in this period, other evidence is required to clarify in which year Camoes was present. If his military involvement had taken place in 1554, this would have prevented the poet from witnessing the arrival in Goa, on 2 April of that year, of the mortal remains of the 'Apostle of the Indies', the future saint, Francis Xavier. The corpse of the celebrated Jesuit had journeyed, via Melaka, from his initial place of burial, on an offshore Chinese island near the Pearl River estuary. We are given a strong clue that the relevant military expedition took effect in 1554 by the very fact that at no point in his extant works does Camoes make mention of Xavier. Only serving to reinforce that point is the poet's reference, in Os Lusiadas (X. 93), to a lesser (though not undistinguished) member of the Society of Jesus, Father Goncalo da Silveira, who was martyred by the Muslim advisers of the Monomotapa, the ruler of large tracts of what is now Zimbabwe. More conclusive evidence in favour of 1554, however, lies in the premiere performance of Camoes's Neo-Platonist comedia, the Auto de Filodemo. With reference to this auto, in the manuscript edition of the playwright's friend Luis Franco Correia we encounter the following note: 'Comedia feita de luis de Camois etc. representada na Yndia a [fr..sup.co] Barreto'. The Cancioneiro Luis Franco, according to its compiler, was assembled from 1557 to 1589 'per Luis Franco Correa companheiro em o Estado da India e muito amigo de Luis de Camoes'. (6) As previously mentioned, Francisco Barreto was Governor from 16 June 1555 to 3 September 1558. Elementary reason and logic demand that the premiere formed part of the celebrations to install Barreto in his high office, and that Camoes would be present for the occasion. Moreover, Luis Franco's testimony is clearly unassailable. The expedition to the Red Sea must therefore have taken place in 1554.

It is also possible for us to narrow down to a few weeks the period in which our poet composed his one extant letter from Goa, as becomes evident from its final paragraph. Here Camoes reacts with sorrow to the death of both Dom Antonio de Noronha and of the immediate heir to the throne, Dom Joao. News of their demise would not have reached Goa until the arrival of the India fleets in September or October 1554. The writing of the letter would therefore have followed, late that year, on the poet's return from the Red Sea expedition, or very early in 1555, in time for the imminent departure of the Lisbon-bound fleets. Indeed, as the letter's last paragraph reveals, its composition would have followed the penning of the sonnet 'Em flor vos arrancou', written on the death of Dom Antonio, and of the eclogue 'Que grande variedade vao fazendo', composed in memory of both young men. Sundry poems by Camoes reveal his great devotion to the distinguished Noronha family, and he may well have been tutor at one point to the young Dom Antonio. At all events, in Camoes, Francisco Barreto could see a minor noble of considerable learning and literacy, formerly well placed at court, a friend of the Noronhas and his own former brother in arms. Moreover, in his honour, the Governor had been favoured by a unique event, the first-ever production of a western play in the Orient. Barreto must have held Camoes in very high regard. The quite remarkable historical and cultural significance of this occurrence is underlined if we reflect that the famed Jesuit theatre did not begin in Goa until 26 December 1558 (with the production of Father Marcos Nunes's Auto do Desemparo da Cristandade, in Latin), and even that William Shakespeare was not born until 1564. (7) Barreto may well not have fully grasped the momentous nature of this premiere, but it was certainly a significant event in theatrical history.

At this point it is useful to glance at the observations of Leonel de Sousa in his unavailing letter to the Infante Dom Luis, written from Cochin on 15 January 1556 (unaware as he was that the Infante had died in November of the previous year). Conscious of the Infante's very close interest in overseas developments, Sousa describes the three years he had devoted to negotiations to secure from the haidao (8) of Canton 'paz e direitos' in respect of the use of Macau and then launches into a very justifiable complaint, both because the exercise had left him impoverished and because the 'provedoria dos defuntos' had been awarded (by Barreto) to someone else:

Porque venho muito pobre e nao sei se me abastara para pagar o que trago, porque bem sabe Vossa Alteza quem sao os mercadores e o que gasto que haveria mister em tres anos para os negocios que tive, que so os de Malaca abastam para me destruirem. E eu nao levei mais que a licenca e os trabalhos de capitao, sem nenhuma ajuda nem favor de Sua Alteza [King Joao III], que ainda a provedoria dos defuntos, que os outros sempre levaram, me tiraram a mim, e somente a licenca me deram a quantos la querem ir, assim os governadores como [os] capitaes de Malaca. E a China, quem nao leva cabedal nao no traz, porque nao tem senao vender e comprar. (9)

In other words, Sousa reveals that he has the 'licenca' of a Captain-Major to undertake an eventual official and commercial voyage from Goa, via Melaka and Macau, to Japan. As he also makes plain, the 'provedoria dos defuntos' customarily went with that post until that occasion.

The annual appointment of a Captain-Major of the Japan voyage had been in effect since 1550 and was particularly associated with Dom Duarte da Gama, who had travelled to Japan six times, either as Captain-Major or otherwise. The round journey became extremely lucrative, most especially as trade between China and Japan was strictly and mutually outlawed at this time. In consequence, the Portuguese came to prosper increasingly as middlemen, by acquiring Chinese silks from merchants in the Pearl River estuary and trading these for Japanese silver, which they sold to the Chinese on the return leg of their voyage. With effect from 1557 the Captain-Major of the Japan voyage also became titular Governor of Macau (although this fact had to be concealed from the Cantonese authorities, who continued for many years to claim absolute jurisdiction over the Macau peninsula).

As Boxer reminds us, it is not entirely clear whether the first titular governor was one Francisco Martins, 'who reached Hirado in September [1557] and returned to China in November', or whether it was Leonel de Sousa. (10) The latter was the Captain-Major for 1558. In this context it is important to remember that the date refers essentially to the year of arrival in Japan. Accordingly, Sousa would have left Goa in April or May 1557 and made a trading call at Melaka, before sailing onward for Macau.

At Macao a ten to twelve months wait was usually necessary, since the Chinese raw and finished silks which formed the bulk of the cargo for Japan could only be obtained at the half-yearly sales at Canton in January and June, whilst the carrack generally reached port between June and August. These unwieldy monsters did not of course go upriver to Canton [...], but remained in Macao roads whilst the silks were brought down either the Pearl River or the West River in lighters. (11)

As Boxer and, before him, Jan Huygen van Linschoten have pointed out, the round journey from Goa to Japan and back could last up to three years. (12) With the establishment of Macau as a toehold and locally sanctioned trading post, it is not surprising that Governor Francisco Barreto saw fit to separate the roles of Captain-Major and Custodian for the Property of the Dead and Absent. This would be to ensure that there was some kind of 'colonial' administration in Macau while the Captain-Major was elsewhere. It is improbable, therefore, that whosoever travelled as 'Provedor' on the outward journey with Leonel de Sousa in 1557 actually continued the journey with him to Hirado in Japan. Rather, it is infinitely more likely that he stayed behind as, effectively, financial and judicial administrator in Macau. His separate appointment would otherwise have been totally bootless and meaningless. However, Boxer adds another significant factor for our present line of inquiry. The appointment of a separate official to act as 'Provedor' occurred only on this one occasion. We are left wondering whether the experiment of the late 1550s had been deemed in some way to have broken down. At all events, thereafter it reverted to being part of the Captain-Major's duties until 1589, when the 'Provedor' was chosen, as a municipal appointee, by the Portuguese residents of Macau. (13)

Though it is beginning to appear obvious that Camoes was in fact selected by Barreto to act as 'Provedor', the water is somewhat muddied by Rodrigues in his Fontes dos Lusiadas. Pointing out that, in the section of Canto X (stanzas 97-138) that is devoted to Portuguese encounters with Asia, no mention whatsoever is made of Macau, Rodrigues attributes this to the poet's close adherence to Barros's Asia. The chronicler's survey of the East is to be found in the first two chapters of Book 9 of the first decada. Macau was beyond Barros's ken at the time of the composition of that decada, whence, argues Rodrigues, the poet's failure to name or even to allude to Macau. (14) However, any comparison of the chronicler's and the epicist's respective texts reveals that there is no close correspondence, though doubtless the latter was broadly acquainted with the chapters in question. Barros's description of the maritime coast from the Red Sea to China and the Moluccas is an atypically ungainly switchback account with an abundance, indeed, one might urge, a bewildering superabundance, of toponyms, a catalogue that detracts from its readability. Camoes's presentation is a linear voyage that confines itself to the essential place-names but which supplies details in stanza 99 concerning the Red Sea area that are not to be found in Barros. (15) Linkage in other stanzas is at best sporadic. It could be argued that stanzas 100, 101, 102 and 124 owe their wording, in part, to Barros's text. On the other hand, the description, offered in stanzas 108-19, of the events leading to Saint Thomas's martyrdom at Mylapore, near Madras, is quite unrelated to the 350 words that Barros devotes to the apostle in Chapter 1. This latter text is concerned with inscriptions on a stone betokening the saint's former presence (and death) in Mylapore. Moreover, Barros mentions Melaka nine times in Chapters 1 and 2, whereas Camoes refers to that city elsewhere only in X.44 and 57. Any suggestion, therefore, that Camoes's account of the Orient is rigidly or solely dependent on Barros's text, either for its inclusions or for its omissions, must be vigorously rejected. Quite different reasons will be entertained later in an attempt to explain the bard's failure to refer to Macau.

At this stage of the investigation it is very important to revert to the statements of Father Pedro de Mariz. Also highly relevant (and arguably more so) is the work of the scholar Father Manuel Correia (Montenegro), who compiled the commentary to the text of the 1613 edition of Camoes's epic poem (to which Mariz's biography of Camoes provides the introduction). Mariz was born around 1550, spending his early career in Coimbra, working in the book trade at the University. He later transferred to Lisbon, becoming an escrivao at the Torre do Tombo, in which capacity he is likely to have had some acquaintance with Camoes in the late 1570s. He compiled sundry historical works, chief among which were the Dialogos de Varia Historia (1594), a study printed at his father's press in Coimbra and which was noteworthy for its textual illustrations of the kings of Portugal. Apart from the six pages of biography that he provides at the beginning of the 1613 edition of Os Lusiadas, it is clear from his comments on the last two pages of the biographical introduction that he also put the finishing editorial touches to Correia's commentary. He died in 1615.

Probably slightly older than Mariz, Manuel Correia was notably erudite in Latin, Greek and Hebrew and is of immense significance to this investigation by virtue of his friendship with Camoes. (16) Indeed, he often took queries to the poet about issues of interpretation. This becomes clear from observations in his commentary that contain such formulae as 'como elle me disse' (or similar), for all that there are occasions when Correia seems to have misconstrued what he was told. It is certainly clear that he devoted many years to the production of his commentary, having begun it in the poet's lifetime.

In turning to the declarations of these two clerics it will be useful to bear in mind the methodology adopted in 1985 by the Brazilian scholar Leodegario de Azevedo Filho in order to establish a rigorous canon of the lyrics of Camoes, shorn of sentimental aesthetic hunches. His method is based on the necessary personal witness borne by those of the poet's friends and acquaintances who lived beyond his death in 1580. In consequence, Leodegario insisted that all canonical poems needed the backing of appearances in both the 1595 and 1598 printed editions of the lyrics, plus at least one appearance in an extant sixteenth-century manuscript; as an alternative, appearance in one of the two printed editions, plus the backing of two extant sixteenth-century manuscripts, also conferred canonicity. (17) A similar approach is relevant to the present line of inquiry: except where misinterpretation or clear confusion can be objectively demonstrated, the assertions of the friends of Camoes, such as Luis Franco or Manuel Correia, must be taken as highly reliable.

In offering accounts of the past it is possible for writers to state some facts accurately, yet to present further details at variance with other accounts, to misinterpret their sequence, to identify wrongly the authors of certain actions and even to misconstrue the true nature of events. Yet while the four Gospels are greatly at variance in their details and in the sequence of events, there are some central elements that cannot be misconstrued or gainsaid, for instance the crucifixion of Jesus. Similarly, the accounts of Correia and Mariz, whatever their shortcomings (and these will emerge in this discussion), both state one central detail that cannot be misconstrued, namely that Camoes went to China, and therefore to Macau, as Custodian for the Property of the Dead and Absent. Camoes must have imparted this information to Correia. He may also have mentioned it to Mariz or, alternatively, Mariz's source could have been Correia (not to mention Luis Franco, Diogo do Couto and others who circulated in Lisbon in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and who had known the poet in the Orient). The assertion that Camoes held this obce is not something that admits of invention; so particular is it that it cannot be confused with any other appointment, nor with the holding of the obce by any other person, nor of its being exercised anywhere else than in Macau.

To reinforce the argument of the preceding paragraph we need at this point to look at Camoes's own words in stanzas 127 and 128 of his tenth Canto and then at Correia's comments.

   Ves: passa por Camboja Mecon rio
   que capitao das aguas se interpreta;
   tantas recebe doutros, so no Estio,
   que alaga os campos largos e inquieta;
   tem as enchentes quais o Nilo frio;
   a gente dele cre, como indiscreta,
   que pena e gloria tem, despois de morte,
   os brutos animais de toda sorte.

   Este recebera, placido e brando,
   no seu regaco o canto que molhado
   vem do naufragio triste e miserando,
   dos procelosos baxos escapado,
   das fomes, dos perigos grandes, quando
   sera o injusto mando executado
   naquele cuja lira sonorosa
   sera mais afamada que ditosa.

As we shall see, Correia's commentary on these two stanzas contains two errors of confusion, where he misconstrues the evidence:

Mostra o Poeta como veyo ter a este reyno de Cambaya, vindo da China, onde esteue alguns dias tomado algum alento dos grades trabalhos, que naquella viagem da China passara, e dos naufragios e baxos de que escapara, de que naquelles mares ha muytos, pela qual razao se nao pode chegar a algumas partes daquella regiao. Chegando a India foy preso por madado do Gouernador Francisco Barreto, pela fazenda dos defunctos, que elle trazia a seu cargo, porque foy a China por Prouedor mor dos defuntos: & isto lhe fizerao mexericado por alguns amigos, donde elle esperaua fauor. Diz que a sua lyra sera mais afamada, que ditosa, porque sendo tao grande Poeta, teue na vida muyto pouco fauor. (18)

Correia confuses Cambay ('Cambaia'), in northwest India, with Cambodia (in Portuguese, Camboja), now Kampuchea, in the Indo-Chinese peninsula. (19) Along with Mariz (who, in all likelihood, used Correia as his source), he has also clearly misconstrued the issue of Camoes's imprisonment, allegedly at the hands of Francisco Barreto. But his assertion about Camoes travelling to China, i.e. Macau, could not be clearer; there could be no reason for Correia to invent this, nor can such information be considered a misinterpretation of something else. The question of the poet's imprisonment is, however, a misinterpretation and will be disentangled later in this essay. But at this stage in the argument the irreducible minimum must be that Camoes sailed from Goa to Macau with Leonel de Sousa in 1557, accompanying him as Custodian for the Property of the Dead and Absent. As reasoned earlier, while Sousa was in Hirado, Japan, in 1558, Camoes would have stayed behind in Macau in a low-profile administrative role. The logic of the foregoing also requires that the shipwreck off the Mekong Delta could not have occurred on the outward voyage to China, otherwise Sousa's mission to Hirado would not have been completed (which in fact it was).

Let us turn to the issue of incarceration, to which the poet was not a stranger. He had first dwelt in a prison cell in 1552, when confined in Lisbon's medieval dungeon, the Tronco, for his alleged part, along with two masked horsemen, in wounding an eminent courtier, one Gaspar Borges. The subsequent royal Carta de Perdao of 1553, enabling Camoes's release, was dependent on his payment of a heavy donation to charity and a commitment to three years of military service in the East. While in Goa, and prior to his departure for China, it is claimed by his second biographer, Father Manuel Severim de Faria, and by his third biographer, Manuel de Faria e Sousa, that the poet was imprisoned by Francisco Barreto for writing satirical poetry concerning the nature of society in Goa under the latter's governorship.

Severim de Faria included his life of Camoes in his Discursos Varios Politicos, published by Manuel de Carvalho in 1624 in Evora, where Severim de Faria was canon and precentor of the cathedral. A second edition of the life appeared with the 1720 edition of Os Lusiadas. He bases his case for imprisonment on the flimsy evidence of a poem entitled 'A Satira do Torneio', which purportedly was to be found in some 'third' edition of the Rimas, and of which we do not possess the text. The torneio in question was allegedly part of the celebrations held in recognition of Barreto's installation in obce, while the poem was allegedly critical of certain prominent Goan moradores. The consequence, argues Severim de Faria, was the poet's jailing and subsequent exile to Macau, where he became Custodian for the Property of the Dead and Absent. Severim de Faria even mentions that the poet complained in verse about being imprisoned and exiled on this occasion. (20) This improbable farrago is compounded by Faria e Sousa. Unable to locate the poems alluded to by Severim de Faria, the latter biographer bases his allegation on the roundel 'Este mundo es el camino', sometimes made to bear the title 'Disparates da India'. These 'Disparates', purportedly, were the likely origin of 'la prision, i destierro a que le condeno Francisco Barreto'. (21) However, as Hernani Cidade reminds us in his notes to the first of the bard's two letters from Lisbon (written before he went to India), three lines from that poem are quoted within the letter. (22) We are bound to acknowledge that the poem was composed well before Camoes had any direct experience of India. Furthermore, any analysis of the roundel's seventeen decimas and final quatrain rapidly reveals that there is not a single reference to any identifiable aspect of India and that the composition abounds in topoi of the most general and banal kind with which social types had been lampooned and lambasted from at least the time of the Goliards onwards. Moreover, there is strong evidence that the latter nine decimas are the work of another author, by way of counterpoise. (23) The fifteenth so-called decima even has eleven lines. Though the final decima suggests that the king should take care not to be flattered by self-seeking advisers, there are no grounds here for any kind of retribution, even were we to suppose that Camoes issued the poem in some kind of folha volante while in Goa. If our poet was jailed prior to departure for China, there is not a single scrap of evidence to affirm such an assertion. Moreover, it is incomprehensible that Barreto would commute imprisonment to the award of a post in colonial administration, as Faria e Sousa himself admits.

Faria e Sousa offers the above scenario as one of two interpretations of the expression 'injusto mando' to which the poet felt himself to be subjected. (24) His second interpretation is that the expression refers to 'la otra prision en que le pusieron despues de buelto de la China, i deste naufragio, governando la India el Conde de Redondo'. (25) There seems, therefore, to be agreement between Correia, Mariz, Severim de Faria and Faria e Sousa that Camoes was imprisoned in Goa, once he had been rescued from shipwreck on the return from Macau. The cause of his incarceration, they agree, was mismanagement of the financial affairs entrusted to him in Macau. But whereas Correia and Mariz are clearly wrong in affirming that Camoes was imprisoned by order of Francisco Barreto, Severim de Faria asserts that Camoes came back to Goa during the viceroyalty (1558-61) of Dom Constantino de Braganca but was imprisoned during the following viceroyalty (1561-64) of Dom Francisco Coutinho, Count of Redondo. By contrast, Faria e Sousa specifically places the return of the poet in Coutinho's viceroyalty. In order to resolve these inconsistencies it is necessary to consider the Chinese dimension pertinent to this equation.

It is a curious fact, well worthy of repetition, that among all the toponyms associated with the Portuguese outreach into Asia, dwelt on in such an expansive survey in stanzas 97-138 of the tenth canto of his epic, Camoes never once mentions Macau, even by periphrasis, despite the fact that it lay at the very heart of the most lucrative aspect of Oriental trade to which the Portuguese found access, in its role as the base of the middlemen whose carracks plied between China and Japan. Anyone who had not been to Macau would certainly have mentioned it in such a survey, just as Camoes mentions places that he had not visited, for example Timor. Resentment, bitter resentment, can be the only explanation for the stifling of the name of Macau. As Storck asks, who was the 'Unbekannte', the 'desconhecido', who dispensed with Camoes's services while he was in Macau? (26) Could it be Leonel de Sousa, on his return from Hirado, still irked that Camoes, and not he, had won the coveted post of Custodian for the Property of the Dead and Absent? On the other hand, there is no reason to regard the appointments of Camoes and Sousa as co-terminous. As none other than Boxer indicates, Sousa's successor in 1559 as Captain-Major of the Japan voyage and Governor of Macau was one Rui Barreto. (27) Suddenly, as in the discovery of a lost jewel, the truth shines forth, translucent. Camoes's account of the 'injusto mando', as related to Correia (and, conceivably, to Mariz), was applicable to events in Macau, not Goa, and referred not to Francisco Barreto but to Rui Barreto. This Captain-Major must have felt that Camoes had mishandled the finances. He was conveying him back to Goa, 'capitulado' (duly indicted), when the ship was wrecked off the Mekong Delta. (28) There is no archival record of this wreck, nor of who (if any) survived other than Camoes. We can assume, however, that Barreto went down with his ship. Rather, as Correia reveals, it was not he but so-called friends, whose tittle-tattle led to the poet's eventual jailing in Goa for mismanagement or misappropriation of funds:

os mayores amigos que tinha o mexericarao com o Viso Rey da India, como elle me disse, contando os enfadamentos que na India tiuera, que foy causa de o prenderem, e emfadarem. (29)

It is plainly of relatively trivial importance whether it was Braganca or Coutinho who eventually issued the order for Camoes to be jailed. We certainly have no idea whether the term was nominal or more protracted. Certainly the poet worked hard at flattering both vice-roys in turn, with compositions that could be (and have been) construed to curry favour. To Dom Constantino he wrote the oitavas 'Como nos vossos ombros tao constantes', in excessive and lick-spittle praise of his definitive capture of the citadel of Daman, in Cambay, in February 1559. (30) To the Count of Redondo was dedicated the ode 'Aquele unico exemplo' contained in Garcia de Orta's celebrated Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas, first published in Goa in 1563. In this latter instance the blandishments, though briefer, are almost as grandiose. Four roundels, 'Muito sou meu inimigo', 'Conde, cujo ilustre peito', 'Nos livros doutos se trata' and 'Que diabo ha tao danado', though not meeting Leodegario de Azevedo's stern criteria for canonicity, were also addressed to Coutinho. Indeed, the last-named poem (if in fact it was written by Camoes) reveals that at one point during Coutinho's vice-royalty the poet was imprisoned for debt. But his reputation for being free-spending and over-generous is a recurrent feature cited by his early biographers. It is easy to imagine how money must have run like water through his hands in Macau.

In earlier cantos of his epic Camoes had referred, in passing, to China (VII.41.8) and to the Chinese (II.54.6), but it is in Canto X, in strophes 129-31, that his admiration for China truly shines forth.

   Aqui o soberbo imperio, que se afama
   com terras e riqueza nao cuidada,
   da China corre, e ocupa o senhorio
   desde o Tropico ardente ao Cinto frio. (X.129.5-8)

China was enviable, not just because of the Great Wall, but also (as Camoes mistakenly thought) because the Chinese of the Ming dynasty presented an enviable political example:

   Olha o muro e edificio nunca crido,
   que entre um Imperio e o outro se edifica,
   certissimo sinal, e conhecido,
   da potencia real, soberba e rica.
   Estes o rei que tem nao foi nascido
   principe, nem dos pais aos filhos fica,
   mas elegem a quele que e famoso
   por cavaleiro, sabio e virtuoso. (X.130)

It should, however, be noted that this statement that the Ming emperors were elected was a common but erroneous view first expressed in the first quarter of the sixteenth century by Tome Pires in the manuscript of his Suma Oriental. (31) The fact that the occupation of the Dragon Throne was passed down from father to eldest son was not made clear until the publication in 1569 of the Tractado da China by the Dominican Frei Gaspar da Cruz. (32) Finally, in stanza 131, Camoes refers to the (indirect) trade between China and Japan and to its major outcome, the availability of Japanese silver.

   Inda outra muita terra se te esconde,
   ate que venha o tempo de mostrar-se;
   mas nao deixes no mar as ilhas onde
   a Natureza quis mais afamar-se;
   de longe a China, donde vem buscar-se,
   e Japao, onde nasce a prata fina,
   que ilustrada sera co a lei divina. (X.131)

Here, of course, there lies embedded an implicit allusion to the role of Macau in that trade, the closest that Camoes would allow himself to go in his displeasure at the 'injusto mando' of which he considered himself to be a victim. That he lived in Macau in the late 1550s I consider to be beyond doubt. Whether he composed his verses in the gruta de Camoes it is impossible to judge.

TOCKHOLES, LANCASHIRE

(1) C. R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550-1770 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1948), p. 32.

(2) Pedro de Mariz, biographical introduction to Luis de Camoens, Os Lusiadas (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1613), p. iv.

(3) Barreto was Governor of the Estado da India from 16 June 1555 to 3 September 1558.

(4) Luis de Camoes, Obras Completas, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Sa da Costa, 1956), III, 247.

(5) Strictly speaking, as in the case of Dom Afonso, the title of 'Viso-Rei' was applicable only to those who were of the higher nobility. Otherwise, as in the case of Afonso de Albuquerque or of Francisco Barreto, the correct title was 'Governador'. In practice the distinction was often blurred.

(6) Wilhelm Storck, Vida e Obras de Luis de Camoes, primeira parte (Lisbon: Academia Real das Ciencias, 1897), pp. 16 and 534.

(7) Mario Martins, S. J., 'Teatro sagrado nas cristandades da India portuguesa (Sec XVI)', Didaskalia, 5 (1975), 155-90 (p. 158).

(8) The haidao was a kind of commodore in charge of coastal defence.

(9) Rui Manuel Loureiro, Em Busca das Origens de Macau (Lisbon: Ministerio da Educacao, 1996), p. 95.

(10) Boxer, p. 31.

(11) Boxer, p. 15.

(12) Boxer, p. 16; Linschoten's Itinerario,Voyage ofte Schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien of 1596 is extensively quoted on this point in Storck, pp. 582-84.

(13) Boxer, p. 18.

(14) Jose Maria Rodrigues, Fontes dos Lusiadas, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Academia das Ciencias de Lisboa, 1979), pp. 81-84.

(15) Specifically, Camoes mentions the town of Tur, Saint Catharine of Alexandria, Jiddah and Aden.

(16) The entry on Correia in the Grande Enciclopedia Portuguesa e Brasileira, VII, 754-55, actually quotes from Diogo Barbosa Machado, Biblioteca Lusitana (1741-58), wherein Correia is described as a 'grande amigo de Camoes'. Storck (p. 20) thinks that Correia had died by 1611, whereas the Enciclopedia offers the improbable date of 1643.

(17) Leodegario de Azevedo Filho, Lirica de Camoes, I. Historia, Metodologia, Corpus (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1985), pp. 186-90.

(18) Os Lusiadas (1613), p. 300v.

(19) Strictly speaking, the Mekong Delta, where the shipwreck took place, is in Cochin-China, which is located not in Kampuchea but in Vietnam.

(20) See Storck, pp. 542-44.

(21) Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Lusiadas de Luis de Camoes comentadas, 4 vols (Madrid: Ivan Sanchez, 1639), IV, col. 546; see also I (Vida), paras. 18-19.

(22) Camoes, III, 257. It was, however, Aquilino Ribeiro (in Camoes, Eca e Alguns Mais) who first raised this point.

(23) For a very useful exegesis of the 'Disparates' see the notes of Maria de Lurdes Saraiva in Luis de Camoes, Lirica Completa, 3 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional- Casa da Moeda, 1980-81), I, 269-72.

(24) Os Lusiadas, X.128.6.

(25) Faria e Sousa, IV, col. 546.

(26) Storck, p. 592.

(27) Boxer, pp. 269 and 272.

(28) When, as quoted above, Mariz writes of Camoes coming 'capitulado a este Reyno', he evidently was referring to the vice-royalty (with its seat at Goa) and not to Portugal.

(29) Os Lusiadas (1613), pp. 210v-11r, being a comment on Canto VII, stanza 81.

(30) In consolidation of the initial capture of Daman in 1534 by Martim Afonso de Sousa.

(31) Armando Zuzarte Cortesao (ed.), A Suma Oriental de Tome Pires e o Livro de Francisco Rodrigues (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1978), p. 359.

(32) Gaspar da Cruz, Tractado em que se contam por estenso as cousas da China (Evora, 1569), Ch. XXII. Correia, in his note on stanza 130, also clarifies that the poet was wrong on this point.