In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out from Lisbon with the mission of finding a maritime route to what I shall call actual India—Columbus having just a few years earlier convinced himself and a good deal of the European learned world that he had reached India in the Caribbean. He spent a long time on the trip, which included numerous European “firsts”, or at least “first recordeds”. He navigated the treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa, the continent’s southern tip. He spent a certain amount of time investigating some of the lands on both the western and eastern flanks of the continent. These landings were the origins of Portugal’s African empire in Angola and Mozambique, among other places. Most important of all he did make it to “real” India, where he raised a good deal of hell and scouted out the the possibilities of a Portuguese colonial presence destined, in Goa, to create one of the teeming multicultural cities of the Renaissance. In economic and cultural terms he challenged the Muslim maritime monopoly in the Indian Ocean and “opened up” the East for the lucrative commerce of Europeans. Vasco’s voyage was epoch-making and epic in its statistics, taking roughly three hundred days at sea, travelling roughly twenty-four thousand miles, and losing most of his crew (including his brother) before landing once again on Portuguese land in 1499. Fifty years or more later—we really are not sure when--a somewhat mysterious countryman of Vasco’s, an erudite Latinist, a soldier, an adventurer, a disappointed lover, but above all a magnificent poet wrote (in an elevated form of the Portuguese vernacular) an epic poem about the voyage.
The poet’s name was Luis de Camões. His poem is called the Lusiadas (Lusiads in English), which means roughly “the adventures of the sons of Lusus”) as Æneid means roughly “the adventures of Æneas.” The connection with Virgil’s Æneid is crucial. Camões lived, breathed, and presumably bathed in the poems of Virgil, which he appears to have more or less memorized. Lusus is a highly iffy mythological character, probably the son of the god Bacchus, and the legendary founder of the nation of Portugal, the Latin name of which is Lusitania. Most people have heard of Lusitania, or at least the Lusitania, for a somber reason. It was the sinking of a British passenger liner of that name by the Germans in 1915 that was the immediate “cause” of America’s entry into the First World War. But if you think any poem that requires this much explanation just to understand its name is a pretty fancy poem, you are right. It is. It is also very long. Nonetheless it did find a publisher, who brought it out in Lisbon in 1572. The rest is history, and as historians love anniversaries, it has not gone unnoticed that 2022 is the 450th anniversary of publication. Under these circumstances, a group of enterprising young scholars at Harvard decided to put together an academic conference to celebrate the occasion.
As Chaucer’s Friar said after listening to the Wife of Bath’s extensive remarks introducing the actual story she is preparing to tell, “This is a long preamble to a tale!” That is not the sole resemblance between the Wife’s introductory remarks and my own. In both instances the prologues are more interesting than the tales themselves. Nonetheless, I must continue with my own tale. I am quite interested in Camões, and I published a short book about one of his poems a few years ago. The proposed “Camões at Harvard” conference was a chance to take a shot at his greatest work, the epic Lusiads. So I sent in a proposal to the organizers, and more or less forgot about it.
During the time the idea for the conference was being hatched, the pandemic was raging. Covid has had a major dispiriting effect on all of education, including higher education. Many institutions felt they had to abandon “in person” teaching in favor of various more or less unsatisfactory on-line techniques. The Age of Zoom had arrived. Even in normal times conventions, conferences, and group meetings were known as possible spreaders of infectious diseases. You will recall the infamous Legionnaires Disease, so named because of its first identification in relation to a meeting of the American Legion. I once left a scholarly conference sick as a dog. During the height of Covid many long-scheduled meetings were cancelled or indefinitely postponed. But with the reasonable hope that things were improving, the planners of the Camões conference came up with an innovative plan. The conference would be “hybrid”, part on-line, part in person, depending on circumstances and the preferences of individual participants at the time, which is—now.
The best part of academic meetings, from my personal perspective, has always been the informal conversations among participants. Having signed up, I was willing to give my talk by Zoom from my home library but without much enthusiasm. I was greatly relieved when Covid conditions improved sufficiently to move forward. What sealed the deal for us was an invitation from a delightful friend on the Harvard faculty, once a graduate student at Princeton and now a rising scholarly star, to stay for a couple of nights with her and her husband in their house in Cambridge. So later today Joan and I will be at the Trenton station to catch an Amtrak train scheduled to be in Boston South Station in the late afternoon. This is a big deal for us. We have become timid fuddy-duddies when it comes to serious travel. I doubt that any of Vasco da Gama’s crew could have felt more edgy. I am hoping to travel little more than five hundred miles in the semi-luxury of “distanced” business class, spend no more than three days doing so, and lose none of my crew. But you never know. It is embarrassing to be timorous in anticipation of a short and comfortable trip to hear about the memorials of one of the longer and most dangerous trips documented in world history; but travel mishaps do occur. The extraordinary maritime empire of tiny Portugal spread across the world. One of the established genres of the nation’s rich Renaissance literature is the history of maritime disasters. To be fair, the Portuguese had so many disasters only because they always had so many ships at sea undertaking so many ambitious and dangerous voyages. Wooden ships but iron men. So I’m looking forward especially to hearing a scholar give a talk entitled: “The Lusiads: Flipside of 15th Century Maritime Disaster Literature.” I find the word flipside in the title particularly intriguing, and possibly disconcerting.
