Camoes: ambiguous imperialist.

Luis Vaz de Camoes depicted one of the first recorded meetings between Europe and southern Africa in his maritime epic about Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, Os Lusiadas. He presented Africa in a predictable enough way from a postcolonial point of view--we see the Portuguese complacently assuming their superior cultural positioning in the face of the extraordinary backwardness of the locals. That is, the only world-view presented is a European one, the African one cannot even be imagined, let alone credited with any value, being simply degenerate by European standards. It is interesting to turn to Camoes's most important surviving source, a diary written probably by A lvaro Velho, (1) a member of the crew of the Sao Rafael, one of Vasco da Gama's fleet. (2) Putting the source and Camoes side by side, one becomes aware of variances in attitude that might be ascribed, for instance, to the differing aims of the two writers in terms of both ends and means. One is a diarist, recording events in a factual, non-dramatic way. The other is an artist, adapting events in as dramatic a way as possible. The differences between the two works, though, also highlight the above-noted blind arrogance in Camoes, as a comparative analysis in the first section of this essay will show. The important point to bear in mind, however, is that Camoes was not an unreflecting patriot, and this fact needs to be emphasized to counterpoise any monodimensional conception of the poet initially suggested. I will therefore consider in the second part of this essay the implications attending the epistemological aesthetics underlying notions of empire, as suggested by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, while in the final section I will examine a strong current of thought in Camoes that is explicitly critical of aspects of imperialism.

Early in the Velho Diary there is a passage that pertains to da Gama's landing at St Helena Bay, on the south-west coast of Africa, some 160 kilometres north of what is now Cape Town:

On the next day after we had anchored, which was Thursday [9 November 1497], we went ashore with the Commander-in-Chief [Vasco da Gama] and took one of those men. He was small of body and looked like Sancho Mexia. He was going about gathering honey in the heath, for the bees of that land place it at the foot of the scrub. We took him to the Commander-in-Chief's ship, who placed him at his table, and he ate of everything that we ate. The next day the Commander-in-Chief clothed him very well and ordered him to be put ashore. On the following day fourteen or fifteen of them came to where we had the vessels. The Commander-in-Chief went ashore and showed them many trade-goods to learn if there were such goods in that land; and the goods were cinnamon and cloves, seed-pearls and gold, and other things as well. They did not know those trade-goods at all; it seemed they had never seen them. The Commander-in-Chief gave them little bells and rings of tin. This was on Friday, and the same on the following Saturday. On Saturday there came about forty or fifty of them, and we, after dining, went ashore. With ceitils that we carried with us we traded for shells which they wore in their ears, which looked as if they had been silvered over, and fox-tails they carry fastened to sticks with which they fan the face. Here I traded a sheath, which one of them wore on his genitals for a ceitil. (3)

The corresponding passage in Camoes reads as follows. Da Gama speaks:

   We went ashore at an open stretch,
   Where our men quickly scattered
   To reconnoitre this welcome land
   Where no one seemed to have ventured;
   But I, eager to know where I was,
   Stayed on the sandy beach with the pilots
   To measure the sun's height, and use our art
   To fix our bearing on the cosmic chart.

   We found we had long ago left behind
   The southern Tropic of Capricorn,
   Being between it and the Antarctic,
   That least-known region of the world.
   At this, my companions returning,
   I saw a stranger with a black skin
   They had captured, making his sweet harvest
   Of honey from the wild bees in the forest.

   He looked thunderstruck, like a man
   Never placed in such an extreme;
   He could not understand us, nor we him
   Who seemed wilder than Polyphemus.
   I began by showing him pure gold
   The supreme metal of civilisation,
   Then fine silverware and hot condiment:
   Nothing stirred in the brute the least excitement.

   I arranged to show him simpler things:
   Tiny beads of transparent crystal,
   Some little jingling bells and rattles,
   A red bonnet of a pleasing colour;
   I saw at once from nods and gestures
   That these had made him very happy.
   I freed him and let him take his pillage,
   Small as it was, to his nearby village.

   The next day his fellows, all of them
   Naked, and blacker than seemed possible,
   Trooped down the rugged hillside paths
   Hoping for what their friend had obtained. (V.26)

Thus, in the Diary the first event of importance after the Portuguese land is the 'taking' of one of the natives. In Camoes this moment of human contact is delayed by the details surrounding the navigational expertise of the Portuguese. If an immediate engagement with other humans is emphasized in the Diary, this business-like absorption in work is emphasized in Camoes. His details add veracity to the tale, and also tell us of the conscientiousness of da Gama, and are thus an important elaboration on the hero of this epic. (4) But something else is taking place here that has nothing to do with these narrative or aesthetic considerations. A sense of European rule and measurement is being established prior to the appearance of the 'brutish' local (and White's translation is exact in this instance; Camoes writes, 'A nada disto o bruto se movia'). (5) That is, European civilization is placed in the ascendant position, in what Edward Said calls an act of 'positional superiority'. (6) This is reinforced by the value judgements--the local people cannot appreciate the 'supreme metal of civilization'; they are happy with cheap trinkets, so backward are they, so brutish. There is also a racist emphasis (inscribed within a double darkness of skin in the original--'da cor da escura treva').

In the Diary the local man is compared with one of the Portuguese, Sancho Mexia, indicating at once an innocent enough measuring of the unknown with the known (there are less innocent ways of doing this, as we see below), an underlying continuity of perception that ties in with Renaissance notions of resemblance, and a related sense of community with fellow human beings. The problem of understanding each other's language is not even raised, and this too reflects, to an extent, a sense of shared community free of positional superiority. The diarist, also, is not at all judgemental, and neither does he make any racially based discriminations.

Perceptual continuity is likewise apparent in Camoes (in keeping with the doctrine of resemblance), but where the original mariners turn to their own experience to bridge the gap between themselves and a new datum, he deliberately emphasizes differences in cultural experience by turning to the immense machinery of classical myth. Furthermore, he does so to the detriment of the local African. For the African is now compared to the giant Polyphemus. The artless comparison of the original sailors is wrought into a self-consciously learned (if standard) cultural referent, which is deeply imbedded in western culture (having its origin in Homer, the founding father), and which encodes brutish barbarism within the terms of this culture. If a translation of new experience and material into one's own terms is inevitable, the original instance of this in the Diary is far more spontaneous than the poetic one of Camoes. It is as if innocent, unconsidered translation is replaced by carefully considered, loaded translation, by translation with ulterior motives. The sinister translation of imperialism? (7)

There is a glaringly artificial aspect to Camoes's classicism that verges on the burlesque, to say nothing of the conceptually inauthentic. For example (and the fact stands, though readers of Camoes would not have been aware of it), is it not ridiculous that the diminutive and shy African of the Diary should be 'wilder' than the fierce one-eyed giant of Homer? (8) While the equation is consistent with the terms of the epic, it does not work if we have access to the Diary. And what of Camoes's gods and goddesses? How can we credit these obviously inauthentic figures? The debate around the supposedly flawed nature of the epic is an old one, well summarized by John de Oliveira e Silva, who puts the cases for and against (Voltaire, Thomas Greene, A. Bartlett Giamatti, and Jose Martins Garcia being among those belonging to the first camp; Tasso, Lope de Vega, Richard F. Burton, Schlegel and E. M. W. Tillyard being among those in the second). (9) Malvern van Wyk Smith (my own example of a critic from the first camp) writes in his introduction to Shades of Adamastor:

While Camoes claimed to have taken Virgil's austere Aeneid as his model, the poem is actually cast much more in the flamboyant baroque idiom of the propagandistic anti-Muslim romance epics of Ariosto and Tasso. Much of the supernatural machinery is merely fanciful, if not foolish. (10)

Frank Pierce, in his edition of Os Lusiadas, points out, however, that 'Camoes wrote before the period of Tasso's influence, and thus his supernatural machinery as well as his choice of a "modern" subject mark him out as an original poet'. (11) De Oliveira e Silva defends the epic from the point of view of its being a 'rhetorical petition', and makes the important observation: 'In my view, the challenge facing the reader of Renaissance epic is to interpret his texts by developing interpretive frameworks that take into account both the contexts of the times and the habits of mind prevalent at the time of composition'. (12) True, we must take into account the habits of mind of the time (as I attempt to do below), (13) but the age of Camoes bordered that of Cervantes, that skilled deconstructor of the inauthentic. (14) And if Camoes was considered a conceptual trailblazer, then his classicism cannot be regarded as innocuous, a clumsy burlesque that only we in latter times invest with any sociological significance. Taken seriously it can be seen in the present case as the successful vehicle of a type of perfidious contemporary propaganda that conveys the gulf between peoples for the sake of justifying the imperial enterprise. That is, what happened to Portuguese sensibility between the original account and Camoes's dramatization of that account is that the wide-eyed wonder of exploration was displaced by a hard-hearted subordination of fellow-feeling to factors reinforcing the profit motive, and literary production (Camoes was hoping for a reward from his king for his poetic enterprise) reflects this. (15)

What follows in the Roteiro is an account of a dire misunderstanding, which now certainly tells of the difference between Portuguese and locals, but not for the sake of propaganda. Indeed, the incident reflects poorly on the complacency of the Portuguese:

This same day one Fernao Veloso, who went with the Commander-in-Chief, much desired to go with them to their houses to learn in what manner they lived and what they eat and what their life was like. He begged the Commander-in-Chief as a favour to give him permission to go with them to their houses. The Commander-in-Chief, seeing that he would not stop importuning him until he gave his permission, let him go with them. We returned to the Commander-in-Chief's vessel to sup; and he went with the said negroes. Soon after they left us they took a sea-wolf [seal], and went to the foot of a hill, a barren place, and roasted the sea-wolf and gave of it to Fernao Veloso who went with them, and roots of plants which they eat. When eating was finished, they told him he should return to the vessels and they did not wish him to go with them. The said Fernao Veloso, as soon as he came opposite the vessels, began to shout, and the men remained concealed in the bush. We were still at supper. As soon as we heard him the captains at once left of eating, and we with them, and threw ourselves into a sailboat. The negroes began to run along the beach and they came as close to the said Fernao Veloso as we were. As we were trying to pick him up they began to attack us with some assegais they carried with them, wounding the Commander-in-Chief and three or four men. This was because we trusted them, they appearing to be of so little courage who would not dare to attack us in the way they did, for which reason we had gone ashore scorning arms. We then took ourselves back to the vessels. As soon as we had set our vessels in order and careened them, and taken in firewood we departed from this land, on Thursday, the sixteenth day of November, in the morning. (16)

This is Camoes's version:

   They [the blacks] were so gentle and well disposed
   It caused our friend Fernao Veloso
   To try his hand as anthropologist
   And discover how such people could exist.

   Trusting to his strong arm, Veloso
   Was too confident he would be safe;
   But after much time had elapsed
   While I watched for some signal,
   I was scanning the horizon anxiously
   For the adventurer, when he appeared
   On the rough track scurrying to the shore
   A great deal faster than he went before.

   Coelho's boat was quick to take him
   Off, but before it could make a landing,
   A bold Ethiopian grappled with him
   To prevent him making an escape;
   More and more came after Veloso,
   By now surrounded and helpless;
   We sprang to the oars but, as we bent our backs,
   There sprang from ambush a battalion of blacks.

   Countless arrows and stones rained
   On the rest of us in a thick cloud,
   And not tossed to the wind aimlessly
   For it was there I got this leg wound;
   But we, as the aggrieved people,
   Returned so superadded a reply
   It was not just those bonnets that they wear
   Were crimson at the end of this affair! (V.30)

Camoes's dramatic adaptation is skilful and gripping. A series of minor incidents in the original, awkward, subject to confusion, and eventually humiliating, is transformed into streamlined and breath-taking action on a grand scale. And the action and the scale of things are to the advantage of the Portuguese, who successfully escape from the 'battalion of blacks' and the 'countless arrows and stones'. But we need to take into account another matter here, that surrounding the question of retaliation. Whether or not the Portuguese retaliated is unimportant to the writer of the Diary, who merely remarks on the mistaken assumptions of the Portuguese. For Camoes, however, Portuguese retaliation seems to be a matter of pride, and it is justified. We, 'as the aggrieved people', were entitled to retaliate, he implies. Why this need for justification? Did haughty imperialists really need to justify such actions? The matter seems almost legalistic, and this observation, indeed, provides us with a useful clue. The church had formulated specific laws regarding acts of aggression within an imperialist context:

If it is a question of infidels who occupy lands usurped from Christians, one may make war with the Pope's permission, and after giving due notice to the usurpers. If it is a question of pagans or idolaters, who have done injury to Christians, one may make war. But not otherwise; because water, air, land and all other elements are made for all men; and no man may be deprived of these without violating natural law and the law of nations. (17)

S. R. Welch, in Europe's Discovery of South Africa, cautions that these are the 'high views of the best opinions of the day', but this is no reason to underplay them, as doing so would result in an unnecessarily reductive (and inaccurate) generalization. (18)

If the laws of the church pertaining to aggression reflect another side to imperialistic attitudes, one traceable in Camoes even at a most rampantly imperialistic moment, so does the more fundamental level of the epistemological frame of the sixteenth century, a frame governed by 'similitude'. (19) What can we make of Camoes's version of the imperial enterprise from the point of view of similitude? Imperialism has a long history, and the subjugation and exploitation of others is inevitably the central burden of this history, but there might be another way of looking at early Western imperial expansion. (20) To be sure, human greed played a large role in it, and the Christianizing of the world, despite its sincere adherents, was more or less a front for this greed. But underlying this mere greed was a world-perception that viewed everything in terms of the same, and so sanctioned the inescapable spread of sameness, or similitude, with imperialism as its agent.

As an outcome of sameness, then, empire for Camoes was existentially inevitable. It included a constitutive and defining act of consciousness, whereby deep motive was not merely a function of mercantilism, but told also of the linking of perception with truth, and hence with a type of self-corroborating destiny. (21) The church laws quoted above, indeed, acknowledge a commonality governed by a perceived truth that rests on similitude: 'water, air, land and all other elements are made for all men; and no man may be deprived of these without violating natural law and the law of nations'. The matter needs to be carefully pondered, as it is not straightforward. Consider the fact that despite the blatant aspects of imperialism apparent in Camoes, the imperial project had distinct limitations in his eyes, and he criticized it keenly. But consider also that he never did so in a way that questioned the ubiquitous power of similitude or resemblance, a power that had, in a sense, colonized the European mind long before Europeans had colonized new worlds. This episteme (as Foucault calls it) provided the underlying logic for the initial imperial enterprise, where the continuities of existence supported the conversion of the world into a space that resembled 'home', whether materially or spiritually. (22) Thus, when Camoes criticized empire, he drew on this conception, pointing out, for instance, through the old man of Belem who chastises da Gama and his crew in the harbour at Lisbon prior to their setting sail, that resemblance made it unnecessary to squander wealth and lives abroad: in fact the same material and spiritual benefits to be derived from overseas expeditions were to be had on the very doorstep of Portugal (IV.94-104).

Camoes cannot have been blind to the pervasive play of similitude in his time, relegated by Foucault to a type of societal unconscious, whence its influences permeated conscious levels of society. What need to emphasize the unconscious nature of the play of similitude? It is precisely the unconscious deployment of the episteme that is at issue, for what is involved is not simply the formulaic application of figures of similitude such as convenientia and aemulatio. (23) These consciously applied figures are symptomatic of a deeply imbedded tendency to order the world in a particular way. (24) So the 'unconscious of knowledge' posited by Foucault broaches more of fundamental perception and the human constitution of the world than can an historical exegesis based on, say, a succession of events. (25)

The whole imperial enterprise of Portugal, dating from the 1386 Treaty of Westminster (basis of the longest established alliance in history), is linked with England and, indirectly, later British imperialism, through the marriage of Philippa of Lancaster to Joao I, of the House of Aviz: 'It was this Anglo-Portuguese line of Aviz that formally launched Portugal on the high seas and blazed the trail of empire'. (26) For Philippa's third son was, of course, Henry the Navigator. (27) This historical apercu sensitizes us to the cultural continuity of the imperial mission, from sixteenth-century Portugal to nineteenth-century Great Britain, whereby we can posit a European Empire, inheritor of the Roman Empire. For whatever period it operated in, and whoever took hold of the reins at a particular time, whether Portugal, Spain, Holland, Germany, Belgium, France or Britain, it defined its relation to the world in terms of the imperium; that is, in terms of an inescapable centre of cultural and material influence and power.

Important insights regarding the interfusion of the doctrine of resemblance within the ideal of imperialism are prompted by William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden's The Idea of the Renaissance. (28) Although the present-day polemical sense of 'imperialism' is indeed not irrelevant to the subject, originally imperialism reflected 'a millennial concern--judicial, intellectual, even metaphysical--with the fate and location of the ancient Roman Imperium'. At the heart of this ideal lies an act of resemblance, the notion of translatio, as the present order translates or adopts aspects of the much-admired past. Politically, this first happened in 330 ad, when Constantine transformed Byzantium into Constantinople, which he conceived of as a new Rome, and established the seat of imperial power there. Nearly five hundred years later, in 800 ad, Charlemagne engaged in another great act of translatio when he became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. On his lead signet was inscribed the legend Renovatio Romani Imperii. (29) Charlemagne's 'renovation' (seen in terms of a translatio) was to elicit Moduin's grand praise: 'Our times are transformed into the civilization of Antiquity. | Golden Rome is reborn and restored anew to the world!'. (30) In the eleventh century, Otto III, following Charlemagne, proclaimed on his seal, 'Renovatio Imperii Romanorum'. (31) Later, for the benefit of the Medicis, Florence was advanced as the inheritor of Rome on the basis of a previously unrecognized translatio: 'Poliziano argues [...] that the original arcane name of Rome was in fact Florentia'. (32) Even Henry VIII claimed imperial lineage, through the legend that Constantine was of British descent. (33)

In The Lusiads, Camoes's Portuguese, while being invested with the cognitive trappings of the Roman imperium, regularly outstrip the past. This is a doubly bold move, where the forces of resemblance are so strong that both time and space are no barrier in the attempt to establish not only continuity between past and present, but a capping of the past through the present, a capping of the past on its own terms, so to speak. The Portuguese tongue even bears a strong resemblance to Latin, according to Camoes's Venus ('an inventive mind | Could mistake [it] for Latin, passably declined' (I.33)), and with this in view we observe that in the fifteenth century Lorenzo Valla celebrated the Roman Empire as a linguistic one: 'Ibi namque Romanum imperium est, ubicumque Romana lingua dominatur' ('For the Roman imperium is wherever the Roman language rules'). (34) Beatrus Rhenanus writes in The Life of Erasmus, 'the age of Cicero was most pure and worthy of imitation [...] therefore it is a great felicity if anyone attains the genuine diction of that time during which the Latin language especially flourished'. (35)

This linguistic dimension to the imperium is an aspect of the 'translatio studii' which accompanied the 'translatio imperii'. (36) Already apparent in the Carolingian revival, the emphasis on a 'translatio studii' especially gripped Petrarch, that harbinger of the Renaissance. As Erwin Panofsky notes in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art:

In spite of his personal admiration for the great painters of his time, Petrarch may be said, not too unjustly, to have conceived of the new era for which he hoped largely in terms of a political regeneration and, above all, of 'a purification of Latin diction and grammar, a revival of Greek and a return from medieval compilers, commentators and originators to the old classical texts'. (37)

Petrarch celebrated the imperium with his Africa, an epic about Scipio Africanus. (38) It concludes with enthusiastic praise for the translatio studii, even for a 'duplication' of the emotional fibre of the past, so to speak:

Then perhaps, with the darkness dispersed, our descendants will be able to return to the pure and ancient light. Then you will see Helicon green again with new growth, then the sacred laurel will flourish; then great talents will arise again, and receptive spirits whose ardour for the honest study of the Muses will duplicate the ancient love. (39)

Linguistic renovation takes on a new strength with the aid of the printing press. Referring to the publisher Aldo Manuzio, Erasmus evokes a worldwide linguistic empire in explicit contrast to a merely 'worldly' one:

However loudly you may sing the praises of those men who by their valour protect or even extend the boundaries of their country, they are active at best in worldly things and constrained within narrow limits. But he who restores a literature in ruins (almost a harder task than to create one) is engaged in a thing sacred and immortal, and works for the benefit not of one province only but of all nations everywhere and of all succeeding ages. Last but not least, this was in old days the privilege of princes, among whom Ptolemy won special glory, although his library was contained within the narrow walls of his own palace. Aldus is building a library which knows no walls save those of the world itself. (40)

If the world is to be a vast library, writers such as Camoes must translate its contents into the appropriate terms, terms readily understood by others. Also, the limits of the world are being greatly extended by such figures as the Portuguese mariners depicted in the work of Camoes and, certainly, to take the notion of resemblance to the next degree, by the poet-adventurer himself (who in effect emulates the deeds of his subjects). The printing press spreads texts throughout the world; Camoes brings the world into his text. (41) Again, the process is inevitable; western imperialism, even in its textually encoded form, is not something to be questioned, it is part of the very fabric of existence itself, established by both centuries of similitude between past and present and the given continuity between word and world.

In an analysis of Camoes's great epic, we observe various thematic strands, most of which can be grouped under four broad headings: the unquestioned extending of Empire; opposition to Empire as embodied by the enemy; opposition to Empire as expressed through internal criticism (involving both practical concerns and moral concerns); and the importance of the act of writing, which involves Camoes's sense of encapsulating the imperium and preserving it, his anticipation of reward, the relation between writing and exploration, and the writer's awareness of a present philistinism regarding the arts. Each of these categories (too many adequately to examine in this essay) reflects the poet's utmost creative attention and commitment, and so alerts us to the multilayered nature of his relation to his material, thereby cautioning us against viewing Camoes in the light of any single category.

It is the morally based subcategory of the third category, which in general terms might be presented as the poet's criticism of imperial materialism and corruptness, that is at present of the greatest interest to me. Here the poet's tone changes from that of the overbearing European supremacist of the first section of this essay, to one closer in register to the author of the Velho Diary. Consider, for example, Camoes's depiction of da Gama's arrival in Calicut, where the Portuguese attain their goal. Camoes's encomium underlines enterprise, the driving force of empire indeed, but he contrasts it (in an oblique act of criticism) with a degeneracy obviously very evident to him:

   For indeed, it is through such perils,
   Such wearisome and fearful labours,
   That those for whom fame is the spur
   Achieve honour and lasting esteem;
   Not by depending on an ancient name
   Or a long lineage of ancestors,
   Nor sprawling on gold beds made comfortable
   By furs of the finest Russian sable,

   Nor with new and exquisite recipes,
   Nor relaxing, local excursions,
   Nor society's teeming pleasures
   Which emasculate noble hearts;
   Nor by surrendering to his appetites,
   Nor by allowing his sweet fortune
   So to pamper him that a man never
   Embarks upon some virtuous endeavour;

   But by seeking out, with a strong arm,
   Honours he can make truly his own,
   Vigilant, clothed in forged steel,
   Exposed to gales and tempestuous seas,
   Conquering the numbing cold
   Of the deep, inhospitable south,
   Eating corrupt rations day after day,
   Seasoned only by the hardships of the way;

   And by instructing the face, white with shock,
   To look resolute and cheerful
   As the hot cannon-ball whistles
   And takes the arm or leg of a comrade.
   So the heart develops a callous
   Honourable contempt for titles
   And wealth, rank, and money, which Destiny
   Counterfeits, but is never Virtue's way. (VI.95)

Imperial enterprise, then, should bear a close relation to the Senecan values of 'virtue and endurance'. (42) A high-minded transference or translatio of ancient values on the part of Camoes? Probably, and yet it is based on the sound enough practicalities of state-craft:

   So one's judgement grows enlightened,
   And experience brings serenity,
   Studying, as from a great height
   Mankind's pettiness and confusion;
   Such a person, if order and justice
   Prevail, and not self-interest,
   Will rise (as he must) to great position,
   But reluctantly, and not through ambition. (VI.99)

We cannot help but feel, though, that here the resemblance between the ideal and actual fails, and points to a fault-line in the human condition that the poet was always aware of, but to which he often turned his blind eye. Thus Canto 7, which follows the above verses, begins with a rationalization of Portuguese imperialism, by placing it in the context of the present state of affairs in Europe, where religious reformation pits Christian against Christian (VII.4-14), but where the small land of Portugal, not lacking in those who will do and dare for Christendom, forms a notable exception (VII.3). Portugal thereby, in explicit terms, as a true follower of Christ and a follower of 'Peter's successor' (VII.4), takes up the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire. The full extent of this arrogation is only to be appreciated in the final canto of the epic, where Portugal's future is 'prophesied' or, rather, filled in from the time of da Gama up until that of Camoes. Camoes's national pride is palpable, his patriotic sentiments of the highest intensity. Is he in the end a jingoist avant la lettre?

I would say not, and this on the basis of three considerations. In the first instance, his reactions to imperialism (whether favourable or not) are determined by human attributes extrinsic to it, not by the actual fact of imperialism as an institution (taken for granted, after all, in a context of epistemic resemblance). In the second instance, even his positive reactions tend to be based on a high ideal best relegated to a now inviolate past inhabited by da Gama and his gallant crew, and not easily traced in the present. Finally, as in Canto 7 (and related to his idealization of da Gama), his generalized idealization of Portugal makes of it a country that stands apart from and above the follies and foibles of its inhabitants. As a consequence of these three factors, the actual involvement of Camoes in imperialism seems of a curiously suspended quality. It is not possible, then, to confine him within any one term of the usual simplistic binary. Though he was a supremacist, a religious bigot, a racist, and a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, he was also highly critical of the human limitations invariably attached to imperialism, limitations that we today have come to equate with imperialism itself: greed, covetousness, self-interest, and moral turpitude, for example.

The eighteenth-century translator of Os Lusiadas, William Mickle, recounts that Camoes, on leaving Portugal in a state of disillusionment, vented his pique with an appropriate borrowing from Scipio Africanus: 'Ingratia patria, non possidebis ossa mea!'('Ungrateful country, thou shalt not possess my bones!'). (43) Whether true or not, this story of the literary deployment of a perceived biographical resemblance accords with our understanding of Camoes as critic of his world. Camoes's own experiences in the empire (as opposed to his idealized version of da Gama's experiences) inform not only certain passages in Os Lusiadas, but various minor poems, through which he exposes its pretensions, its lack of resemblance to an ideal, its lack of harmonious interaction. Thus, in Roy Campbell's translation of Cancao IX ('Junto d'hum secco, duro, estril monte') we find these lines concerning Cape Guardafui: (44)

   There is a mountain, sterile, stark and dry,
   Useless, abandoned, hideous, bare and bald,
   From whose cursed precincts nature shrinks appalled,
   Where no beast ever sleeps, where no birds fly,
   No river runs, nor bubbling sources spring,
   Nor one green bough with pleasant sighs to sing.

   In common speech the name they call it by
   Is Felix (unfelicitously given!)
   By Nature it was placed
   Just where a strait has riven
   The Arabian from the Abyssinian waste ... (45)

The cancao in its entirety is a meditation on having to do service in dreary reaches of the empire, with nothing to amuse one apart from one's own inner resources. In such a context, fiercely tempered by present reality, the ringingly classical name 'Felix' is rejected as wholly inappropriate, a fact that has some bearing on the otherwise desirable continuity of imperial elements. Conceptual disenchantment here broaches existential disenchantment, and a hollow centre within the poet becomes apparent. Clearly, in verses such as these, which look into the minds of the people involved in the imperial project, all is not a question of wealth and glory, an impression which is also conveyed by the sonnet, 'On a Shipmate, Pero Moniz, Dying at Sea' ('No mundo poucos annos e cansados'), where the unspoken acknowledgement of resemblance underpins the spontaneous identification with another human being:

   My years on earth were short, but not for me,
   And full of bitter hardship at the best:
   My light of day sinks early in the sea:
   Five lustres from my birth I took my rest.
   Through distant lands and seas I was a ranger
   Seeking some cure or remedy for life,
   Which he whom Fortune loves not as a wife,
   Will seek in vain through strife, and toil, and danger.
   Portugal reared me in my green, my darling
   Alanguer, but the dank, corrupted air
   That festers in the marshes around there
   Has made me food for fish here in the snarling,
   Fierce seas that dark the Abyssinian shore,
   Far from the happy homeland I adore. (46)

The above verses are, it seems to me, timeless formulations of the general human predicament, where man is not constrained or conditioned by particular ways of ordering the world. They suggest, then, individual responses to the imperial enterprise, far removed from a simple subscribing to the ideal of the imperium, as reflected in the more public verse (though that verse, as shown, also has its highly critical moments). This is a tone, once more, closer to that of the writer of the Velho Diary, the tone of the ordinary man who empathizes with other ordinary men, and so practises a type of spontaneous application of resemblance, as opposed to one who constructs the ideologically freighted, official machinery of resemblance of the imperium.

University of Zululand 

(1) Vasco da Gama: The Diary of His Travels Through African Waters 1497-1499, trans. by Eric Axelson (SomersetWest: Stephen Phillips, 1998), p. 19.

(2) A sixteenth-century copy of the diary came to light in the convent of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, after which it was taken to the Biblioteca Publica of Porto. It was published in Lisbon in 1838 under the misleading title Roteiro da Viagem que em Descobrimento da India pelo Cabo da Boa Esperanca fez Dom Vasco da Gama. The title is misleading because the book is not a roteiro or rutter, that is, a work that gives sea-routes. In 1998 the South African historian Eric Axelson brought out a new translation of the work, Vasco da Gama: The Diary of His Travels Through African Waters 1497-1499. I draw on this version in the present essay rather than on E. G. Ravenstein's better known Hackluyt Society translation of 1898. In the case of Camoes I use the highly readable The Lusyads, trans. by Landeg White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

(3) Vasco da Gama, pp. 23-24.

(4) Jerry Brotton underlines the influential mystique attending the contemporary geographer-navigators: 'Often pilots with experience of long-distance seaborne travel, they took on the mantle of learned cosmographical savants': Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early ModernWorld (London: Reaktion, 1997), p. 49.

(5) White, of course, cannot always be constrained by word-for-word exactitude, but sometimes this is to the detriment of the meaning. For example, see IX.91, where White's 'clay' for the original carne misses something of the necessary feebleness of the human condition emphasized at this point. The Portuguese is taken from Luys Vaz de Camoes, Os Lusiadas, ed. by Emanuel Paulo Ramos (Porto: Porto Editora, 1975).

(6) Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978; repr. 1995), p. 7.

(7) 'Following this pattern of transfiguring the domestic and the foreign in terms of one another, so that, ironically, the diCerential connections between them are repressed in a particular ideological representation of the foreign, the romance of racial, or national, identity that has dominated U.S. foreign policy (toward other than European peoples) throughout its history is inevitably a romance of translation, in which [...] the other is translated into the terms of the self in order to be alienated from those terms': Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 15. The observation might surely be applied to Camoes's classical encoding of the local African.

(8) Apart from the fact that 'wildness' is hardly the distinguishing feature of Polyphemus. A sense of monstrousness, rather, is being deliberately suggested. See Cheyfitz concerning Columbus's first use of the term canybal: 'For in the journal entry, Columbus claims that the Arawaks described not only human-eating humans to him, but also "people who had one eye in the forehead". Thus, we gather that Columbus' source was not the Arawaks but certain classical, or Mediterranean, stories, in which barbarian lands are peopled by monsters such as the Cyclops, anthropophagi, and dog-headed men' (p. 43).

(9) John de Oliveira e Silva, 'Moving the Monarch: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Camoes's Lusiadas', Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 735-68 (p. 736).

(10) Shades of Adamastor: An Anthology of Poetry, ed. by Malvern van Wyk Smith (Grahamstown: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 1988), p. 15.

(11) Camoes, Os Lusiadas, ed. by Frank Pierce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. xxiv.

(12) de Oliveira e Silva, pp. 736-37.

(13) It would be quite consistent with the translatio studii (to be discussed in the next section) to include the mythological machinery of the imperium, as this machinery is part of the significatory basis of the translation; to question its value is to question the value of the very fabric at the substructure of the construction of a world view, and, from an aesthetic perspective, an epic. In terms of a tacit inverse mirroring, if the old imperium can incorporate Christianity, the new imperium can incorporate the pagan divinities, in a hierarchy with the Christian God, of course, at its apex. Appreciating the conceptual value of these divinities 'we see the double significance of the old gods to the men of the Renaissance. On the one hand they replace abstract terms in poetry, and render allegorical figures superfluous; and, on the other, they serve as free and independent elements in art, as forms of beauty which can be turned to some account in any and every poem': Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S. G. C. Middlemore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 169.

Writers mentioned by Burckhardt in this connection are Boccaccio, Pietro Bembo and Sannazaro, in whose verse 'Christian and pagan elements are mingled without scruple'. Of course, Milton is to carry this type of 'mingling' to its supreme heights, but we should not forget Battista Mantovano who, like Milton, though long before him, sets the gods and demigods in opposition to sacred history (p. 170). Near the conclusion of The Lusiads, however, Camoes, anticipating the new neoclassical episteme, lays bare the representative value of his pagan trappings, and so, to an extent, consciously undermines the relation between language and truth (IX.90-92).

(14) Cervantes himself, though (thereby aligning himself with Tasso and Lope de Vega), refers to the 'most excellent Camoes'. Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. by J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 842.

(15) de Oliveira e Silva, p. 738.

(16) Vasco da Gama, pp. 24-26.

(17) Joachim Chaumeil De Stella and Auguste de Santeul, Essai sur l'histoire du Portugal depuis la Fondation de la Monarchie jusqu'a la mort de Pedre IV, quoted in S. R. Welch, Europe's Discovery of South Africa (Cape Town and Johannesburg: Juta, 1935), pp. 261-62.

(18) Welch, p. 20.

(19) Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge/Tavistock, 1970), p. 17.

(20) A. J. P. Taylor notes: 'Imperialism is as old as civilization. It had some constant features. Though some national states (Napoleon III's French Empire, William II's German Empire) called themselves Empires for show, Empires have always meant rule over others. Here they differ from colonization where the "others" did not exist or were exterminated. The Imperial Power possessed superior strength and also superior civilization--or thought it did. The Imperial people exploited those over whom it ruled and yet at the same time thought it was doing them good. No Empire without a mission and no Empire without a profit, in reality or in imagination': 'The Meanings of Imperialism', in Imperialism, ed. by Wm Roger Louis (NY: New Viewpoints, 1976), pp. 197-99 (p. 197).

(21) Van Wyk Smith writes: 'Mickle pronounced the Lusiads the "Epic of Commerce", and because his poem is an unabashed paean of the advantages of European trade extended to the third world, first and rather ineffectively by the Portuguese and then much more efficiently by the British, his da Gama becomes a heroic merchant venturer' (p. 15).

(22) Foucault, p. xxii.

(23) Foucault, pp. 18-21.

(24) Heinrich Wolfflin, writing in 1888, anticipated Foucault with this passage from Renaissance and Baroque: 'What, first of all, determines the artist's creative attitude to form? It has been said to be the character of the age he lives in; for the Gothic period, for instance, feudalism, scholasticism, the life of the spirit. But, we still have to find the path that leads from the cell of the scholar to the mason's yard. In fact little is gained by enumerating such general cultural forces, even if we may with delicate perceptiveness discover some tendencies similar to the current style in retrospect. What matter are not the individual products of an age, but the fundamental temper which produced them. This in turn, cannot be contained in a particular idea or system; if it were, it would not be what it is, a temper or a mood. Ideas can only be explicitly stated, but moods can also be conveyed with architectural forms; at any rate, every style imparts a more or less definite mood': Renaissance and Baroque, trans. by Kathrin Simon (London: Fontana/Collins, 1964), pp. 76-77. Wolfflin's notion of 'temper' relates to the unconscious' aspect of knowledge, it seems to me.

(25) Foucault, p. xi.

(26) Camoes, The Lusyads, trans. by William C. Atkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), p. 8.

(27) Portuguese Africa: A Handbook, ed. by D. M. Abshire and M. A. Samuels (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), p. 34.

(28) William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 5.

(29) Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 30.

(30) In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. by Peter Godman (London: Duckworth, 1985), pp. 192-93.

(31) Kermode, p. 31.

(32) Kerrigan and Braden, p. 6.

(33) Kerrigan and Braden.

(34) In Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 48.

(35) In Desiderius Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus: Christian Humanism and The Reformation--Selected Writings, ed. by John C. Olin (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 50.

(36) Kermode, p. 30.

(37) Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 11.

(38) Jacob Burckhardt writes: 'The purpose and origin of the poem [Africa] are not without interest. The fourteenth century recognized with sound historical tact the time of the second Punic war as the noonday of Roman greatness; and Petrarch could not resist writing of this time [...]. If any justification were needed for the Africa, it lies in the fact that in Petrarch's time and afterwards Scipio was as much an object of public interest as if he were then alive, and that he was held by many to be a greater man than Alexander, Pompey and Caesar' (p. 16). Hence the strong link, in the fourteenth-century mind, between Scipio and other imperial figures. Petrarch also wrote La Vita di Scipione l'Africano.

(39) Petrarch, l'Africa, ed. by Nicola Festa (Florence: Sansoni, 1926), p. 278. This translation is taken from Kerrigan and Braden, p. 8.

(40) Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. by A. H. Levi and others (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969-), xxxiii (1991), 10: Adages, trans. by R. A. B. Mynors, p. 10.

(41) Consider, also, the 'process of global mapping where the interpenetration of print, travel and commerce with mapmaking come together to define the dynamics of geographical representation within this period [...]. An abiding fascination with maps, charts and globes comes from the extent to which such objects, as both texts and visual images, provide their owners with a promise of gain of some sort, be it financial, political or intellectual. The fascination with the geographical artefacts of the early modern period is the extent to which the language of possession which characterizes ownership of the map is so often fused across all three fronts: financial gain, political gain and intellectual gain': Broton, p. 43.

(42) Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. by Robin Campbell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 15.

(43) Camoes, The Lusiad, trans. by William Julius Mickle (Oxford: Jackson and Lister, 1778), pp. viii-ix.

(44) The cancao is actually numbered X in Camoes, Obras de Luis de Camoes, 7 vols, ed. by the Visconde de Juromenha and others (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1861-1924), ii (1861), 206-09.

(45) Roy Campbell, Collected Works, ed. by P. Alexander, M. Chapman and M. Leveson, 4 vols (Johannesburg: Donker, 1988), iv, 114.

(46) Roy Campbell, p. 120. This is numbered sonnet 100 (C) in the 1861 Obras, ii, 51.