SOURCE: “Camões' Shipwreck,” in Hispania, Vol. 57, 1974, pp. 213-19.

[In this essay, Moser analyzes the shipwreck episodes of The Lusiads, including Camões' references to his own experiences in surviving a sea disaster. The critic argues that Camões uses these episodes to symbolically demonstrate the rewards as well as the dangers associated with human striving.]

While exiled in England as a young man, Portugal's foremost Romantic João Baptista de Almeida Garrett wrote his long poem about Camões. To Garrett, Camões seemed another example of how badly society treats the man of genius. Garrett accorded him the poetic justice that he did not experience in reality: he had the most powerful King of Portugal pay homage to the singer, by picturing the ghost of King Manuel as he rose from his tomb to confess his royal ingratitude and hail the poet who had celebrated the voyage to India during his reign of “Manuel the Fortunate.” Then the ghost prophesied: “You will make for it (i.e. the Portuguese name) a single record to save the glory of Portugal from shipwreck … just as a sealed bottle floating on the waves suffices to bear to the river bank or shore the name and renown of the ship that was lost …”¹

Portugal's shame, the then impending loss of national independence, was thus compared by Garrett to a shipwreck from which only the poet was to save a precious possession, by preserving the record of Portugese accomplishments in the past. The symbolic metaphor was suggested by verses that are already to be found in the Lusiads, although the idea is expressed less explicitly there. Camões described two shipwrecks with some emphasis in his epic of 1572. One was that of Captain Manuel de Sousa de Sepúlveda on the coast of Southeast Africa, the other his own on shoals off the coasts of Indochina. Sepúlveda's disaster had been complete, ending with the wretched deaths first of his children, then of his wife, and finally his own madness and disappearance into the howling wilderness: “where the said Manuel de Sousa disappeared, entering the bush maddened with grief at seeing his wife and children dead, and where it seems that he was devoured by wild beasts” in the words of Camões' friend, the historian Diogo do Couto, who referred to Sepúlveda in his account of another shipwreck on the same coast.²

Sepúlveda's wreck was considered as Heaven's punishment for the nobleman's private sins. But in the epic and in later treatments of the same events, it also served as a frightening illustration of the consequences that had flowed from Portuguese, nay, human greed. Even the greed to discover the secrets of Nature was included in the condemnation, the “beautiful greed,” codicia hermosa, as the historian of the Spanish conquests called it.³ In Camões' poem, Sepúlveda's disaster fulfilled the prophetic threat hurled by the giant Adamastor against the first earthlings who dared to sail round the Cape of which he was the supernatural guardian. Readers of the Lusiads were prepared to accept further shipwrecks as inescapable, regardless of the success achieved by the dauntless Gama and his crew in rounding the Cape of Storms once more on their return voyage.

That the poet inserted his own disaster in the Lusiads seems surprising at first sight; one might have thought that it concerned only himself. Why should he have made this exception when, as is clear from his shorter poems, he had always been reluctant to tell about the events in his life in a straightforward fashion? Thus, he remarked in the “Letter written from India to Dom António de Noronha,” also known as “Elegy III,” that personal memories should better be forgotten lest they plunge you into greater gloom: “For if a man is forced to wander through the world, / seeking an honorable respite from such life, / which, partial Fortune, you award unfairly, / and if the hard knock, as is plain, / no matter how they hurt, must be endured / with a brave heart and with a face serene, / what does it profit manly souls to think / on what is past and gone, since all things pass, / except to sadden them and cause more grief?”⁴

Why then does he refer twice to his own shipwreck in the Lusiads, and both times with much bitterness? The first mention is made in Canto VII, where he complains of the misfortunes that had pursued him throughout life, as he is appealing for sympathy to his muses, the nymphs of his native Tagus river. The shipwreck, barely hinted at, is seen as merely one in a chain of disasters. But he gives us to understand that only a miracle could explain why he had escaped with his life: “I have escaped shipwreck, with my life hanging on a thread so slender that Hezekiah, King of Judah, did not cheat death more miraculously than I.”⁵

The second reference occurs in the last Canto, almost at the very end of the epic. Here the poet sees the same event through the objective eyes of the Goddess of the Sea. As she is describing the earth to Gama, she comes to the river Mekong, which stands for all of Indochina in the poet's mind, as the Tagus represents Portugal or the Thames England. She tells Gama: “It is here, on the gentle bosom of this same kindly river, that the soaking Cantos of this poem will make harbor after the misery and wretchedness of shipwreck, having survived storms and shallows, privations and perils in compliance with the unjust decree pronounced on one whose harmonious lyre is destined to bring him rather fame than fortune.⁶

We cannot tell what the words “unjust decree” exactly allude to. Perhaps they refer to fickle dame Fortune, of whom the poet complained constantly, perhaps to accusations of malfeasance in office, if it is true that he held office in Macao, or maybe to the loss of a favorite servant. Of all the stories which have been woven about the disaster, the most romantic and touching is surely that of Dinamene, the lovely Chinese maiden who, it is said, accompanied the poet on his voyage and perished in the waves. The romantic episode was first told by the apocryphal copyist of Diogo do Couto's Decade VIII, the one stolen from Camões' friend.

Returning from China [Couto wrote, according to the surviving copy of the manuscript] he was shipwrecked on the coast of Siam. Everybody saved his life but nothing else. Camões luckily escaped with his Lusiads, as he says in his poem. A very beautiful Chinese girl whom he had with him drowned there. He had embarked with her and was much obliged to her. Back on land, he composed sonnets about her death, one of which is the one that begins ‘My gentle Soul, who passed away / so early discontented with this life.’ She it was whom he called Dinamene in his works. He also wrote that serious and learned song which begins thus: ‘Along the rivers that flow …’⁷

One sees a mental picture—actually drawn by many illustrators—of the poet swimming to shore through the billowing seas, while holding aloft the sodden manuscript of his Lusiads in one hand, until at last he reached some rocky Vietnamese shore or the banks of the Mekong river. Again, later readers have let their imaginations embroider on the sparse details given by the earliest biographers. The latter tell us that “the Song,” though drenched with salt water, was rescued from the ship that had run aground on the shoals. One thing cannot be doubted. The poet felt certain of the fame which his “Song” was going to give him. Aside from bare life, he had saved a large part of the first draft of the epic. One could easily conceive of his situation as fraught with symbolic meaning. He may have given it that meaning if the commentators are right in assuming that he wrote his moving adaptation of the psalm Super flumina, “Along the rivers that flow,” then and there. Garrett saw the symbolism, perhaps in a flash of intuition, when he identified the sinking ship from which the Lusiads were saved with the Portuguese ship of state. Against a symnbolic interpretation one could argue that the poet Camões was a realist who stayed within the confines of actual events, at least in the two clear allusions to his shipwreck that the Lusiads contain.

No documents have been located that mention Camões as a passenger on any shipwrecked vessel. However, it could be that the shipwreck in which the poet found himself is the one referred to in no fewer than three letters written in the Orient during the sixteenth century. A Portuguese librarian, Sr. Jordão de Freitas, has suggested that the captain who in two of the letters requested compensation for the ship he lost on the Parcel Reefs (Baixos de Parcel or Parcel) in the latitude of Hué and Da-Nang, could have taken the poet aboard in Macao, his ship being bound from Nagasaki, Japan, to Goa in India. The Librarian contended that another contemporary, the Jesuit Baltasar Gago, mentioned the same event, though more briefly, in a letter he sent from Japan on November 1st, 1559.⁸

From the three letters, respectively dated 1559, 1561 (anonymous, sent from Cochim, India, but probably written by the same captain Leonel de Sousa who wrote the third), and 1563 (Sousa's, addressed to the Queen-Regent Catherine from Goa), it would appear that the ship was wrecked in the South China Sea. Father Gago had written that “before it passed beyond the coasts of China, it was lost.”⁹ And the anonymous writer stated that it had been lost “in the midst of the great Bay of China, in a mean, unfortunate wreckage.”¹⁰ In that case, Camões would have been stranded in the winter of 1558/59. This in turn would agree with one of the few established facts in the poet's life, his having written certain octaves about his “undeserved hardships” in Goa to Viceroy Constantino de Bragança, shortly before the latter's term of office came to an end in September 1561.¹¹

Whether or not the details of the shipwreck are ascertained, we cannot help but notice that the poet magnified the event. He gave it the significance of a climax by singling out one circumstance the salvage of his “Song” and implicitly of him self as its author. Astute readers were expected to understand the transcendental importance from the allusion to a miracle in the Biblical sense of the term when he drew the parallel between his own rescue and the Old Testament miracle of how God lengthened King Hezekiah's life. But the hint at the “soaked Song” that reached harbor safely was the learned poet's subtle way to recall the similar salvage of another great piece of writing from the waters of the sea. The inference was drawn by the erudite Portuguese cleric Manuel Severim de Faria, who commented on the passage in his Discursos of 1624 as follows: “Luís de Camões saved himself on a plank, and while he was being threatened with the loss of his own life, he thought of nothing else but of carrying with him the cantos of his Lusiads, heedless of all other belongings. He deserves no less praise for this than Julius Caesar, who escaped from Alexandria while using one hand to swim and carrying in the other his Commentaries on the Gallic War.”¹² Faria, and probably Camões before him, had in mind a passage from Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. In his biography of Julius Caesar, Plutarch relates as an anecdote how during the battle of Alexandria, Egypt, Caesar had jumped from a sinking boat into the sea and had swum to safety, all the while clutching “a number of manuscripts” with one hand raised above the water to keep them from getting wet. Plutarch did not say what those papers contained.¹³

When Camões placed the remark about his shipwreck among the list of lands yet to be reached in the Farthest East, almost at the end of the whole epic, he underlined its importance further, since the description of the terrestrial globe was part of the scientific knowledge granted by the Gods to Vasco da Gama as a reward for his daring voyage and, in a wider sense, to Man for his striving. At the same time, he adds a warning: the shipwreck is an omen of destruction. Hope is sustained, nevertheless. While much will be lost, the great written record will be secure and with it, the memory of noble deeds, the glory of the nation, and the fame of the poet.

The direct significance, as well as the symbolic interpretation, which two shipwrecks are endowed with in the Lusiads correspond to the actual impact shipwrecks had on the lives and thoughts of men during the age of the first transoceanic voyages. Ship disasters were the frequent and ultimate catastrophies which could befall people in their travels. They involved more loss of property or life proportionately than the worst accidents do today, whether in the air or by land. The terror which the shipwrecks struck in men's hearts, the horror and the pity aroused by human behavior under stress, the conclusions drawn from the experience for similar situations in the future, the reflections on the human condition—all of these were recorded in the literature of the age to which Camões belonged. A few examples will convey the impact. They are taken from the literatures of the Iberian Peninsula, although other literatures could furnish examples also.

Whoever is slightly familiar with Portuguese literature will recall a curious collection of eighteen shipwreck stories, known as The Tragic History of the Sea, in Captain Charles Boxer's apt translation, or A História Trágico-Marítima, which was the title invented for it by a pioneer journalist, who compiled them in the XVIIIth century. Among these stories one finds the classic account of Sepúlveda's wreck on the African coast, with which Camões was familiar, and the two accounts of other disasters that had occurred off Africa in the XVIth century which had been composed by Camões' good friend, the historian Diogo do Couto. One of these involved no other than Francisco Barreto, former Viceroy of India, a brave and generous man under whom Camões had served. The loss of Barreto's ships, the Eagle (Águia) and the Heron (Garça), occurred in 1559, at about the time when Camões suffered a similar misfortune. A third ship, the St. Paul (São Paulo), was lost off the shores of Sumatra, being the subject of another story in the collection. It can be placed in the same general neighborhood as Camões' disaster, i.e., the Far Eastern seas, where it occurred in 1560, that is to say, in about the same period. The aggregate effect of three costly shipwrecks in addition to his own was bound to impress the poet. To these should be added the storm Camões experienced near the Cape of Good Hope on his own outwardbound voyage from Lisbon to India in 1553 and the dismal knowledge that the same fleet of three sails had been wrecked on the homeward journey. It was enough to make any person reflect on the risks that had to be faced on sea.

The Portuguese collection had a fore-runner in another remarkable series that had been published in Spain as early as 1535. The first of the great historians of the Spanish empire in the Americas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, compiled ten chapters, eventually increased to twenty-nine, from similar shipwreck stories in his widely unread General and Natural History of the Indies (Historia general y natural de las Indias). The extraordinary thing about his dismal compilation is that he placed it at the very end of the first part of his History when he published it as the first instalment in 1535. The chronicle, whose chief subject matter was the glorious discoveries and conquests made up to that time in the New World, thus culminated in a melancholy reflection on how even the greatest conquistador and his earthly possessions could be reduced to nothing in a day. When Fernández de Oviedo completed his History many years later in 1548, he again moved those stories of naval disasters back to the end. He gave them the title “Book of Shipwrecks” (Libro de los naufragios), making them the fiftieth and last book of the entire work, as if to underline the moral lesson once more.

The pious Spanish historian differed from the eighteenth-century compiler of the Portuguese disasters when he stressed one point throughout his accounts of some thirty shipwrecks. In almost all of them people had been providentially saved whenever they had not lost their faith in God's mercy, but had called on Him and especially on His Virgin Mother, usually under the invocations of Santa María la Antigua of Seville or Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura. As a climax, he told the story of Licentiate Zuazo's repeated wrecks of 1523 in the Caribbean in the greatest detail, concluding as follows: “Let the patience and virtue with which this gentleman withstood so many troubles serve as an example. Our Lord, who is always merciful, remembered him and rescued him from his spiritual and temporal enemies. (…) And from everything that I have told you about this shipwreck, you will have gathered how hard and inconstant this life of ours is.”¹⁴

I shall merely allude to a third example of how widespread the terror of shipwreck was in the “Golden Age” of the Iberian literatures. We find it in that baroque masterpiece of lyric poetry, the Solitudes (Soledades) of Luis de Góngora. The Solitudes, it will be recalled, begin with a young man seeing himself, like Ulysses, naked and forsaken on an unknown, empty beach, cast away after a fearsome storm, “into the sea first sucked, and then cast out” (Del océano, pues, antes sorbido, / y luego vomitado).

After the disaster, a new beginning. The human spirit remains undaunted. The lesson, not melancholy after all, was drawn at the time, in 1559, by Pieter Brueghel in an emblematic woodcut, which the artist called “Hope.” It was one of a set of the cardinal virtues. The drawing for the woodcut shows a ship sinking close to shore, where a city is burning. All the while, two men can be seen swimming past monstrous fishes that are opening wide their voracious mouths. The men are literally clinging to saving planks. With a little imagination, one could identify them with the poet Camões.

It gives one a strange feeling to reflect on the unlikelihood and thus the unpredictability of Camões' success in rescuing his work, and not only from the sea, whether we take his account literally or symbolically. The extraordinary nature of the rescue from the dangers and misfortunes that Camões underwent throughout life was grasped by another great writer in the Portuguese language. This writer furthermore perceived the irony that lay in the fact of mere words—poetry!—having had the power to galvanize a whole nation, making it yearn to regain its lost independence. It was the Brazilian poet and novelist Machado de Assis who cast into verse these feelings of astonishment and delight. In 1880, when as in 1972, the Portuguese-speaking countries celebrated Camões as the author of their national epic, Machado de Assis wrote a series of four sonnets for the occasion. The last of the four concludes with the lines:

And thus one man alone, one day
In a small corner of the universe,
Has saved the nation's tongue, deeds, valor, song,
From the cold grip of hostile fates.
And he defies them even now.
Such is the excellence that lies in verse.(15)

Notes

1. Camões, Canto IIII, stanza 21, in Edgar C. Knowlton's free English translation. (Macao, 1972), pp. 42-43.

2. Diogo do Couto wrote in 1611: “to the north lies the kingdom of Rumo (= Mpfumo), which was where Manuel de Sousa de Sepulveda, when he passed that way with his wife, delivered up his arms, as we wrote in our sixth Decade (book 9, chaps. 21-22), and where she and her children died, and where the said Manuel de Sousa disappeared, entering the bush maddened with grief at seeing his wife and children dead, and where it seems that he was devoured by wild beasts.” (From Charles Boxer's English translation in vol. 112 of the Hakluyt Society's second series [London, 1959], p. 73.) Couto ended the account of the shipwreck of the Great Ship São Thomé, in which the reference to Sepúlveda's fate was made, with a warning against greed: “These disasters, and others which occur every day in this India voyage, might serve as warnings to men, especially to the fidalgos who are captains of fortresses, to moderate themselves and be content with what the good Lord gives them, and allow the poor to live; for God has not made the sun in the heaven and the water in the spring for the great ones of the earth alone” (ibid., p. 94).

3. Mentioned by Edmundo O'Gorman, in his preface to G. Fernández de Oviedo, Sucesos y diálogo de la Nueva España (Mexico, 1946), p. xxii.

4. Camões wrote: Que, se é forçado andar por várias partes Buscando à vida algum descanso honesto, Que tu, Fortuna injusta, mal repartes; E se o duro trabalho, é manifesto, Que por grave que seja, há de passar-se Com animoso esprito e ledo gesto: De que serve às pessoas o lembrarse Do que se passou já, pois tudo passa, Senão de entristecer-se e magoar-se? (Odes, Eglogas, Elegias e Canções, ed. Antóñio Sérgio, vol. II [Paris, n.d.], p. 33).

5. From William C. Atkinson's English translation of The Lusiads (Harmondsworth, 1952), p. 176 (Canto 7, stanza 80).

6. Ibid., p. 243 (Canto 10, stanza 128).

7. Quoted in Aubrey F. G. Bell, Luis de Camões (London, 1923), note 85, pp. 133-134: “vindo de lá se foi perder na Costa de Sião, onde se saluarão todos despidos e o Camões por dita escapou com as suas Lusiadas como elle diz nellas e aly se lhe afogou hũa moça China que trasia mto. fermosa com q. vinha embarcado e muyto obrigado, e em terra fez sonetos a sua morte em que entrou aquelle q. diz:

   Alma minha gentil que te partiste
   tam cedo desta vida descontente,
   repousa tu no ceu eternamente
   e viva eu qua na terra sempre triste.

   A esta chama elle em suas obras dignamte., em suas obras
   dinamente. Aly fez çambem aquella grave e
   docta Cancão q. começa:
                                           Sobre os rios que vão …”

   There is doubt about whether Camões was shipwrecked when coming from China or when going there. Thus, a note was added to the heading of “Sobre os rios que vão” in the XVIth century Cancionero 12-268/D 199, of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, fol. 112:

   “O Psalmo super flumina, do mesmo Poeta (Camões) o qual compos, indo para a China, no qual caminho fez hum grande naufragio.” Quoted from M.I.S. Ferreira da Cruz, Novos subsídios … (Porto, 1971), p. 56.

8. See Jordão de Freitas, O naufragio de Camões e dos Lusiadas (Lisbon, 1915). Freitas attempts the identification of the shipwreck, its date and location. In particular, he attacks Teófilo Braga's theory that Camões suffered two shipwrecks in succession.

9. “Antes que passasse as costas da China se perdeu em hũs baixos.” Ibid., p. 5.

10. “No meio do golfão da China numa baixa, e desastrada perdição.” Ibid., p. 10.

11. See Bell, Luis de Camões, p. 51.

12. As quoted by Jordão de Freitas, p. 23, Manuel Severim de Faria had written in his Discursos (Evora, 1624, pp. 100v - 101): “Luis de Câmões se salvou em hũa taboa, & em tão apertado & manifesto perigo só teve lembrança dos seus Lusiadas para os levar consigo esquecendo-se de tudo o mais que trasia no que não merece menor louvor, que o que se dâ a Cesar, quando escapou de Alexandria, nadando com hũa mão, & levando os Commentarios na outra.”

13. John Dryden's translation reads as follows, in A. H. Clough's revision: “A third (difficulty Ceasar met with) was when in an engagement near Pharos, he leaped from the mole into a small boat to assist his soldiers who were in danger, and when the Egyptians pressed him on every side, he threw himself into the sea, and with much difficulty swam off. This was the time when, according to the story, he had a number of manuscripts in his hand, which, though he was continually darted at, and forced to keep his head often under water, yet he did not let go, but held them up safe from wetting in one hand, whilst he swam with the other. His boat, in the meantime, was quickly sunk” (Chicago, 1952, p. 596).

    Suetonius tells as extravagant a tale in The History of Twelve Caesars. In Philemon Holland's translation of 1606, we read; “At Alexandria being busie about the assault and winning of a bridge where by a sodaine sallie of the enemies he was driven to take a boat, and many besides made haste to get into the same, he lept into the sea, and by swimming almost a quarter of a mile recovered cleare the next ship: bearing up his left hand all the while, for feare his writings which he held therein should take wet, and drawing his rich coate armour after him by the teeth, because the enemie should not have it as a spoyle” (ed. Charles Whitley, vol. I, [London, 1899], p. 61).

14. Fernández de Oviedo wrote in chapter 10 of his Libro de los naufragios, the concluding chapter in 1535: “Aquesto baste cuanto a los infortunios e naufragios de la vida de este caballero, para que se tome ejemplo en su paciencia e virtud con que resistió a tantos e tan dificultosos acaescimientos (…) por donde Nuestro Señor, piadoso siempre, tuvo memoria de él, e le libró de sus enemigos espirituales e temporales (…) Y por todo lo que tengo dicho de este naufragio, habréis entendido cuan trabajada e de poca firmeza es aquesta vida de los hombres” (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 121, [Madrid, 1959], pp. 356-57).

15. Machado de Assis' entire sonnet is worth quoting:

    Um dia, junto à foz de brando e amigo
    Rio de estranhas gentes habitado,
    Pelos mares aspérrimos levado,
    Salvaste o livro que viveu contigo.

    E êsse que foi às ondas arrancado,
    Já livre agora do mortal perigo,
    Serve de arca imortal, de eterno abrigo,
    Não só a ti, mas ao teu berço amado.

    Assim, um homem só, naquele dia,
    Naquele escasso ponto do universo,
    Língua, história, nação, armas, poesia,

    Salva das frias mãos do tempo adverso.
    E tudo aquilo agora o desafia.
    E tão sublime preço cabe em verso.

    (Obra completa, ed. A. Coutinho, vol. III [Rio de Janeiro, 1962], p. 165)