[In the following excerpt, Quint examines the figure of Adamastor in The Lusiads as “a demonic composite of the natural and human foes faced by the Portuguese imperial enterprise.”]

In the fifth canto of the Lusíadas, Vasco da Gama is the guest of the African king of Melinde on the east coast of Africa. He narrates the story up to this point of his voyage from Portugal: Camões' obvious models are Odysseus telling his adventures to Alcinous in Phaeacia and Aeneas recounting his wanderings to Dido in Carthage. Da Gama describes the moment when his fleet is about to approach the Cape of Good Hope. Suddenly, there appears a black cloud out of which, in turn, an enormous giant emerges, looming over them in the air. This menacing figure announces to the Portuguese the punishments that await them for their daring and presumption—“atrevimento” (5.42.6)—in opening up the new maritime route to the Indian Ocean. He briefly mentions (5.42.7-8) the arduous wars they will have to fight to subjugate the seas and lands of their empire. Then he foretells at length (5.43-48) the storms and mishaps that the cape itself has in store for future Portuguese fleets, culminating in the terrible Sepulveda shipwreck of 1552. The monster would continue this dire prophecy, but da Gama interrupts him to ask his identity. He replies that he is Adamastor, one of the earthborn Titans who, during their rebellion against the gods, led an assault against Neptune to gain control of the sea. He was stirred by his love for the sea nymph Thetis, who lured him out of battle only to deceive and spurn him. In his shame and disdain he fled to the Southern Hemisphere, where the gods punished him for his presumption—“atrevimento” (5.58.8)—by turning him into the landmass of the cape itself. There he is still erotically tantalized and frustrated, for Thetis still swims around him in the encircling sea (50-59). Having told his story, the giant disappears as the black cloud dissolves, and the Portuguese sail by the cape (61) without further incident and continue their voyage.

It is a much admired scene: the giant rising up at the midpoint of Camões' ten-canto epic, at the geographical midpoint and boundary of da Gama's journey. More than any other episode of the Lusíadas, it has given the poem its place in world literature, a place to which Camões and even his hero da Gama self-consciously lay claim. At the end of his narrative, da Gama favorably compares it to the maritime adventures recounted in the Odyssey and the Aeneid.

Cantem, louvem e escrevam sempre extremos
Dêsses seus semideuses e encareçam,
Fingindo magas Circes, Polifemos,
Sirenas que co'o canto os adormeçam;
Dem-lhe mais navegar a vela e remos
Os Cícones e a terra onde se esquecem
Os companheiros, em gostando o loto;
Dem-lhe perder nas águas o pilôto;
Ventos soltos lhe finjam e imaginem
Dos odres e Calipsos namoradas;
Harpias que o manjar lhe contaminem;
Descer às sombras nuas já passadas:
Que, por muito e por muito que se afinem
Nestas fábulas vãs, tão bem sonhadas,
A verdade que eu conto, nua e pura,
Vence tôda grandfloca escritura!

(5.88-89)

(Let them sing, praise, and write, always in the highest terms, of those demigods of theirs and let them exaggerate, feigning sorceress Circes, Polyphemuses, Sirens that put men asleep with their song; let them still voyage with sails and oars among the Ciconians and to the land where their companions, having tasted the lotus, become forgetful, let them lose their helmsman in the sea;

Let them feign and imagine winds released from wineskins and enamored Calypsos, Harpies that foul their food; let them descend to the naked souls of the dead: for as much, as greatly as they refine these empty fables, so well dreamed-up, the truth that I tell, naked and pure, outdoes all their grandiloquent writings.)

The claim to historical truth certainly appears odd after da Gama has narrated the apparition of a prophesying cloud-born giant. The mention of Polyphemuses, moreover, is a tip-off that discloses the literary descent of Adamastor from the fantastic inventions of Homer and Virgil. But the burden of Camões' episode—and the basis of its alleged superiority to classical epic—is to show how such poetic inventions can be historical.

The commentators of the Lusíadas have noted that Adamastor is modeled upon Homer's and Virgil's depictions of the Cyclops Polyphemus.¹ His prophecy of future Portuguese hardships and disasters at the cape recalls the curse of the Cyclops in the Odyssey, while his monstrous body, “horrendo e grosso” (5.40.5), echoes Virgil's description of Polyphemus: “monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens” (3.658). Adamastor's name also seems to allude to Virgil's Cyclops episode, for Achaemenides, the companion of Odysseus whom Aeneas rescues from the Cyclopes' coast, tells us that he is the son of Adamastus (3.614).² But Adamastor's story of his passion for Thetis recalls still another Polyphemus, the one whose unrequited love for another sea nymph, Galatea, is recounted in Idyls 6 and 10 of Theocritus, in Virgil's Eclogue 9, and in the thirteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Following a typical Renaissance literary practice of imitative contaminatio, Camões has combined all the classical representations of Polyphemus into his mythical figure. In doing so he has also managed to capture something of Dido's spurned love and irrationality in Adamastor, for Virgil's queen is depicted as a kind of Cyclops in love. Ovid, in fact, remembering how the frenzied Dido became another Polyphemus, makes his enamored Polyphemus, as he turns upon Galatea's lover Acis (13.865-66), echo Dido's vindictive speech (4.600-601) seven lines before it turns into her great curse. Thus Dido and Polyphemus had achieved a kind of reciprocity—between monstrous passion and a passionate monster—in the classical literary tradition that informs Camões' fiction. Dido's presence can also be felt in the future orientation and historical concreteness of Adamastor's prophecy. Polyphemus cursed Odysseus alone, but, like Dido, Adamastor directs his words not so much against the epic hero as against his imperialist successors.

Da Gama's insistence upon the truth of his narrative is balanced by an earlier passage in canto 5, where he addresses those purely theoretical armchair scholars who deride the marvelous phenomena reported in sailors' tales, and insist that either the sailors have made them up or misunderstood what they have seen—“falsos ou mal entendidos” (17). Da Gama goes on to describe a waterspout, a prodigy of nature undreamt of by such scholars or by the ancient philosophers on whose works they rest their authority.³ It is one of the many marvels he has himself encountered at sea: all can be narrated, without lying, as pure truth—“E tudo, sem mentir, puras verdades” (23). There is a polemic of moderns against ancients here, one that prefigures the experimental attitudes of the New Science. But the passage has a curious relationship to the later Adamastor episode, for if the landlubber scholars are wrong to doubt the factual existence of waterspouts, they may still be skeptical about a sailor's story of a giant hovering in the air above his ship—all the more since the waterspout itself offers a naturalistic explanation for the giant. Both are described as “a nuvem negra” (21.8; 60.3), and the poem suggests that the encounter with Adamastor is a second version of da Gama's sighting of the waterspout. The episode is true in the sense that he did really see a waterspout, and that waterspouts really do exist.

But the episode that immediately follows the description of the waterspout offers a second, historical explanation for Adamastor. The Portuguese make a landfall on the southern tip of Africa and, at stanza 27, they encounter a Hottentot who is gathering wild honey. He shows no interest in the gold and silver they show him, but he is delighted by their trade goods: beads, bells, and a red cap. The next day he returns with his fellow tribesmen who are eager to see the same trinkets. They appear so tame (“Domésticos”:5.30.5) and friendly that one member of the crew, Fernão Veloso, dares (“atreva”:30.7) to go off with them to see the manner of their land and customs. The next thing that da Gama sees is Veloso running at full speed down the hill toward the ships with the Africans in hot pursuit. Da Gama leads a rescue party to pick him up from the shore, where the natives have prepared a further ambush. The Portuguese drive them off, though da Gama receives a wound in the leg in the process. The tone of the episode is nonetheless lighthearted, for the narrator da Gama makes a joke about giving red caps indeed to the bloodied Hottentots, and it ends when all hands have safely returned on board ship with a humorous bantering between the crew and Veloso who is teased about his hasty retreat. But this mood quickly changes, for the apparition of Adamastor immediately follows.

The episode historically took place. It is recorded in the log of da Gama's ship and in Camões' sources, the histories of João de Barros and Damião de Góis.⁴ It is an apparently trivial vignette of colonialist violence, but Camões evidently saw in it another version of the encounter between Odysseus and Polyphemus in the Odyssey. Veloso has an Odyssean curiosity to learn about the natives and their customs; as de Góis puts it, he wished “to go to see their dwellings, and the manner of life they kept in their homes.”⁵ But like Odysseus, the Portuguese explorer is forced to make a run for his ship. Camões invites us to note the analogy at the very beginning of the episode when he describes the honey-gathering Hottentot as “more savage than the brutish Polyphemus”—“Selvagem mais que o bruto Polifemo” (5.28.4)—and then directly follows the episode with the horrific spectral appearance of the Polyphemus-like Adamastor. The skirmish with the natives is paltry and one-sided enough; yet even so da Gama is wounded in the fray, and the giant Adamastor is a blown-up figure of the African natives and of the price that will be exacted by their resistance to Portuguese mastery and conquest. Adamastor's name means “the untamed one,” and he suggests the nature of the Africans who turned out to be less domesticated than they first appeared. In this light it is significant that the first foreign lands that da Gama passes as he sets out on his voyage at the beginning of canto 5 are those of Muslim Mauretania, “the land over which Antaeus once reigned”—“Terra que Anteu num tempo possuiu” (5.4.6.)—where the sixteenth-century Portuguese were involved in crusading and colonizing projects that would lead up to their disastrous defeat at Alcazar-kebir in 1578, six years after the publication of Camões' poem. Like Antaeus, Adamastor is an autochthonous son of Earth (5.51) and a figure for an Africa that cannot be definitively subdued by European arms.⁶

Canto 5 thus moves in sequence from da Gama's description of the waterspout to Veloso's encounter with the Hottentots, then to the apparition of Adamastor who is a demonic composite of the natural and human foes faced by the Portuguese imperial enterprise. The canto self-consciously discloses the historical basis of its own act of mythmaking, both on the part of the narrator da Gama and of the poet Camões. For the explorer, a native chasing—and hitting—you with a spear can turn into a giant, a waterspout can appear to be a supernatural power; for the poet an episode in the chronicles can suggest the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus and bring a whole literary tradition—Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, Ovid—into play. This self-consciousness allows the poet to assert a historicity and human truth for his fabulous classicizing invention. At the same time it can restore the original Polyphemus episode of the Odyssey to human dimensions: it suggests that Homer's story is itself a mythic retelling of a similar encounter of colonialist and native. The Lusíadas can indulge in a process of mythmaking by simultaneously exposing the mechanism of that process: the poem brings classical myth forward into the modern world by simultaneously subjecting it to a rationalizing, euhemerist critique. Camões' episode is thus able both to enter into and to exploit the imaginative power of a classical epic tradition, a power that in no small part accounts for the hold that the figure of Adamastor has had upon readers: what has made the episode a part of “world literature.”⁷

If Camões can both demystify his mythic fiction and have it too, the same may be said for its ideological content. The self-consciously constructed nature of the Adamastor episode does not diminish its capacity for ideological manipulation; it may, on the contrary, augment it. The Africans' resistance to Portuguese rule, the retribution due for the violence done to them—not only da Gama's skirmish with the Hottentots but the later destruction of Kilwa and Mombasa mentioned in the monster's prophecy (45)—are summoned up in the apparition of Adamastor. But Adamastor also embodies the raging elements that gave the cape its first name: the Cape of Storms. If the kinship of Homer's Polyphemus to Poseidon suggested a relationship between the barbarian native and the natural elements, here the two become inextricably conflated in a third figure: the cloud-born giant that is Camões' mythopoetic creation. This conflation is already suggested when da Gama describes the black band of Hottentots showering missiles at him as a thick cloud—“espessem nuvem” (33.1)—and it is nicely maintained in the series of historical disasters that Adamastor prophesies will befall the Portuguese: Dias, the discoverer of the cape, will be lost in a hurricane at sea in 1500 (44); the first viceroy Almeida will land to provision there in 1509 and be massacred along with fifty of his men by Hottentots more successful than those who attacked da Gama (45); and the Sepulvedas will suffer both from the stormy elements and at the hands of the natives when they are shipwrecked in 1552 (46-48). In this curse the natives remain nameless, and the specificity of the events it foretells is determined by their notable Portuguese victims; there is no prediction here of any avenging Hannibal. The Africans fade into the workings of an anonymous nature. Such nature does not have a history, and if Adamastor might seem to project a loser's narrative that would rival the Portuguese victors' own version of history, the events he predicts are no more connected than recurrent storms.

Moreover, this assimilation of the native African resistance with the hostility of nature overlooks and suppresses the Portuguese aggression that kindled the resistance in the first place. Adamastor suggests that the storms of the cape rise out of some motive of retribution for the actions of the Portuguese, but, in fact, storms are impersonal and aimless; they are not even hostile, however much they may seem to be to those humans who happen to enter into their path. The natives' violence appears unmotivated. We do not know quite why the Hottentots should have turned on Veloso, whose sole crime is his explorer's curiosity and desire to penetrate into their territory, though their refusal to let him go any further (36) may be a miniature version of Adamastor's rage against the Portuguese for crossing the boundary of the cape and invading the seas that he has long guarded and controlled (41). Da Gama concludes that the Hottentots are simply bestial, brutal, and evil by nature—“gente bestial, bruta, e malvada” (34.4).⁸ And according to his own mythic story, Adamastor was already an angry, literally tempestuous monster before the Portuguese ever arrived.

The resistance that the Portuguese face is thus reduced to a kind of blind fury of nature, a resistance that is not particularly directed at them or the result of their own acts of violence; they have simply wandered into a region of storms. And because such storms are not consciously out to harm the Portuguese, they may even help them. This is the case of the great storm that strikes da Gama's fleet in the following canto (6.70-91), and that actually drives his ships toward their Indian destination of Calicut. This tempest is carefully balanced against the apparition of Adamastor, and together the two episodes constitute the center of the ten-canto Lusíadas. Camões signals the relationship between the two episodes by having each follow a scene involving Fernão Veloso; in canto 6 Veloso has been telling the story of the Twelve of England when the storm suddenly strikes (70) with a tell-tale black cloud—“nuvem negra” (70.8)—that recalls Adamastor himself. The poem's mythological machinery at first makes the storm seem to be an enactment of the monster's curse, for it has been sent by Neptune (35), and thus is a reminder of the storms that Poseidon unleashes in the Odyssey to avenge Polyphemus. But the storm is subsequently ended by Venus, who sends a band of sea nymphs to woo and calm the winds. The episode pointedly inverts the opening scene of the Aeneid, where it is Neptune (1.124f.) who must calm the storm that has risen from the sexual bribe, in the form of the nymph Deiopea (72) that Juno offered to Aeolus, god of the winds. In Camões' fiction, moreover, the nymph sent to tame the south wind, Notus, is none other than Galatea (90), the Galatea loved unsuccessfully by Polyphemus and the model for Adamastor's stormy romance with Thetis. As opposed to Adamastor's failure and continuing frustration, his desire for the tantalizingly close but unattainable Thetis, canto 6 features a second mythic story of storm demon and nymph that concludes with a promise of sexual consummation. As the storm at sea subsides, da Gama's lookouts catch sight of the coast of Calicut, the desired end and consummation of his voyage. The storm which has seemed to reverse the beginning sequence of Aeneid 1 thus also reverses the digressive movement of the Virgilian model: whereas Aeneas was blown away from the Italy he sought into the potential dead end of Carthage, da Gama is driven across the Indian Ocean from the hospitable, Carthage-like Melinde to his goal in southern India. In fact, the storm probably represents the violent monsoons of the Indian Ocean region. The historical da Gama took advantage of these winds, and their seasonal repetition was a vital part of the Portuguese trade route.

Furthermore, the marriage of winds and sea nymphs looks forward to the final two cantos of the Lusíadas where da Gama's crew are sexually rewarded for their successful labors. Venus sends an enchanted island floating into their path and populates it with enamored Nereids—willing native girls in a thin mythological disguise (9.18). Da Gama himself receives Tethys (85) as his consort. Her name (“Tétis”) closely resembles that of Thetis (“Tetis”), so much so that Renaissance mythographers were at pains to keep them apart.⁹ So, in the symbolic economy of the poem, Adamastor's loss looks very much like da Gama's gain. This final consummation, a reward to the Portuguese for their mission accomplished, becomes in the last canto of the epic an eschatological allegory of the pleasures of immortal fame and a prophecy of Portuguese empire without end.

It is this sense of ending—both of the completed narrative action of the poem and of the finality of an imperial conquest that claims to remain permanent throughout history—that we have seen unsettled by the topos of the epic curse, by the promise of the defeated to return, in some form, to disturb the victor's achievement and rule. Adamastor and his dire prophecy are indeed symbolically connected to the ending of the Lusíadas and the celebration on Venus's island of love. But the relationship between these two most famous episodes of the epic is one of inversion: the Portuguese get the girls, and consummate fame and power, while the enemy monster is consumed with frustration. The diametrical contrast suggests how completely the epic, by its end, has overcome the resistance, including the resistance to its own closure, that Adamastor represents. But, in fact, this resistance has already been overcome and left behind well before the celebratory ending of the poem. The first of the two middle cantos of the Lusíadas raises the specter of storms and disasters that might stop or sidetrack the Portuguese progress to India—that might halt Portuguese history as it is in the making. But the second immediately dispels this specter: one such storm rises, merely to turn to the advantage of the Portuguese, propelling them toward their destination and imperial destiny. The prophecy of Camões' Jupiter in Book 2 (44-55) describes Portuguese history as an undeviating line of conquest across world geography: the center of Camões' epic narrative turns potential deviation into linearity. By confining Adamastor to its narrative center, the poem turns the prophecy into a question of means—the costs that empire will incur along its way—rather than final ends. And because those imperial ends are assured and untouched by the prophecy, the costs, while they may be more considerable than a mere scar on da Gama's leg, are no less incidental.

What is particularly remarkable is the way in which the monsoon of Book 6—a seasonally recurring storm that crosses the Indian Ocean from west to east—manages to combine the aimless repetition of Adamastor's squalls with the narrative direction and teleology of da Gama's voyage, and how it manages to transform the former into the latter. In terms of literary structure, the middle of Camões' poem enacts the twofold dynamics of what we saw in the last chapter to be the typical narrative middle, that indeterminate space described by Brooks where the repetition that constitutes narrative either may become purely, compulsively repetitive, and hence collapse back upon itself, or may move forward, repeating with difference, toward a predetermined goal. In epic this moment of narrative suspension is characteristically dramatized in the suspense of battle, where the power of the emergent victor ensures the possibility of narrative, what epic identifies with its own teleological plot; the losers come to embody a principle of nonnarratable repetition.

And epic, we have also seen, identifies this latter principle generically with romance: that random and finally endless wandering that finds its prototype in the storm-tossed vessel of Odysseus. The losers threaten to reduce their conquerors to their own condition, and we might say that the curse of Polyphemus condemns Odysseus to an all but perpetual romance, requiring the hero, according to Tieresias, to set out again from Ithaca on his voyage to the ends of the earth: a kind of Flying Dutchman.

Camões self-consciously aligns the storm of Book 6 with the literary genre of romance by causing it to strike during Fernão Veloso's narration of the legend of the Twelve of England, a dozen late-fourteenth-century Portuguese knights who, led by the paladin Magriço, performed feats of chivalry and derring-do at the English court. Veloso, like da Gama, proclaims the historical truth of his story and pointedly opposes it to the dreamed-up fables—“fábulas sonhadas” (6.66.4)—of romancers who waste the reader's time with their tedious decriptions of tournaments and duels. He has Ariosto in mind, the modern poet whom he seeks to overgo in this episode just as da Gama claimed superiority to the classical fictions of Homer and Virgil at the end of the preceding canto. At the opening of the Lusíadas, Camões had referred to the fabled dreams—“as sonhadas, fabulosas” (1.11.6)—of the Orlando furioso and its heroes, Rodamonte, Ruggiero, and Orlando; and in this same passage he had explicitly promised to present the story of Magriço and the Twelve of England as a rival and better version of Ariosto's twelve peers of France (1.12). Veloso's tale is thus self-consciously labeled as romance, and as a digression from the epic narrative, recounted as a means to keep his fellow sailors awake: this is literature as pastime. His story itself seems to digress. His listeners protest as he is about to drop the exploits of Magriço in order to tell about another of the Twelve whose knighterrantry took him to Germany. Their complaints about this deviation—“tal desvio” (6.69.6)—is a sly reference on the part of Camões to the sixteenth-century critical debates over the multiple, digressive, and deliberately confusing plot threads of Ariosto's poem: these were the debates that first identified the Furioso as a separate genre called “romance.”¹⁰ It is at this precise moment of romance deviation within an episode that is itself a romance deviation from the epic plot of the Lusíadas that the storm of Book 6 strikes, the storm that we might now expect to set the whole epic enterprise of da Gama's voyage adrift and wandering into an aimless romance. But this monsoon, instead, puts an end to romance digression and hastens the Portuguese on their way to India.

In the uncertainty whether the storm of Book 6 will carry out Adamastor's curse and drive da Gama off course to destruction or will blow his ships to their epic goal, alternative forms of narrative repetition—and the alternate genres of romance and epic—are as clearly politicized as they are in the undecided epic battle. And here, in addition, they are sexualized. The monsoon winds move in a fixed direction and therefore arrive at a destination that Camões' poem characterizes as a union with the nymphs of the sea: similarly, the Portuguese conquest of the waves and lands of the East will turn into a sexual conquest. By contrast, the aimless storms of Adamastor, rising only to subside just as the risen giant himself dissolves along with his cloud, mirror his unconsummated passion for Thetis, and his sexual frustration itself perpetuates the original failure of his rebellion against the gods. The storms and disasters that Adamastor foretells are the product of an impotent fury, the rage of those powerless to stop, hardly able even to slow, an inevitable Portuguese triumph.

In Adamastor the human identity of the Africans has begun to disappear as they are merged with the storms of the cape. We have already seen how epic can dehumanize foreign and subject peoples in order to characterize imperial conquest as the triumph of culture over nature. The continuing resistance of these peoples turns into a cyclical repetition that seems to be a version of nature's repeated regenerative cycles, but one that has been unnaturally thwarted and has become demonic: like Dido's barrenness, Adamastor's frustration begets a monstrous future. But quite beyond this familiar ideological trick, the Lusíadas makes available a further reading of the figure of Adamastor that would displace the natives altogether. Or perhaps, it suggests, they were never quite present in the figure in the first place.

The readings of Adamastor advanced so far have depended on an implicit relationship between the apparition of the giant and the two episodes that precede it—the description of the waterspout and the encounter with the Hottentots. The poem offers clues to this relationship and invites the reader to draw it out of its text, especially by its self-conscious assertion of its historical truth. But in a literal reading of the poem that simply follows its narrative sequence, Adamastor's apparition and prophecy constitute a discrete episode, unconnected to what has gone before. Adamastor makes no mention of Veloso and the natives. Rather, he tells the Portuguese that they will be punished for their daring, their “atrevimento”—the word suggests pride and presumption—in going into seas where no (European) men have gone before. In fact, this also glosses the curiosity of Veloso, who dares—“atreva”—to go off to visit the Hottentots, as a kind of overweening pride.

But it so happens that it was for Adamastor's own “atrevimento,” the proverbial pride of the rebellious giants, that the gods transformed him into the cape. In this context, Adamastor's love for Thetis is another version of his presumptuous rebellion, for according to myth, the nymph was prophesied to give birth to a son destined to be greater than his father, one who might therefore pose a threat to the rule of Zeus. Thus Adamastor becomes an image of the transgressive pride and daring of the Portuguese themselves.¹¹ By venturing into uncharted seas, the Portuguese had been earlier compared to the proud, aspiring giants (2.112), and the monsoon that assails da Gama's ships in Book 6 is likened to the destruction wrought by heaven upon the warring giants (78) and upon their biblical counterparts, the builders of the Tower of Babel (74).¹² The Portuguese transgress not only geographical limits but a whole vision of the world that had endured since antiquity and that the voyages of discovery were to change forever. Adamastor's presumption mirrors the pride of the modern, no longer content to be a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants, but claiming to be a giant himself—the modern who claims to be mightier than the classical fathers he dislodges. We are brought back to da Gama's reference to the “antigos filósofos” (5.23), who had no knowledge of the lands and marvels he has seen at first hand, and to the end of his narrative and his assertion that his story surpasses the poems of Homer and Virgil: Camões' own presumptuous claim to overgo his ancient models.

The Portuguese and their poet may see themselves in the hubris of Adamastor and stand back in awe of their own achievements. This specular gaze seems to involve as much self-satisfaction as dread at having gone too far. For when the gigantomachy is read as an allegory of the moderns' attempt to outdo the ancients and overthrow their authority, the Portuguese may claim victory where the mythical giants met defeat. The continuing contrast in the poem between Adamastor's failure and da Gama's success can be reinterpreted to suggest just how successful the revolutionary accomplishments of the Portuguese have been.

But what is most striking in this potential moment of self-knowledge—as the Portuguese find their daring mirrored in Adamastor—is that the African natives have vanished from sight. The “other” in which the Portuguese are reflected is the monstrous mythopoetic figure, not the natives whose historical encounter with da Gama's fleet might seem to have generated the black giant in the first place. Indeed, if that historical episode still stands behind Adamastor's apparition, the giant now seems to have grown out of Veloso's overconfident daring rather than from the wrath of the natives. The poem avoids a mutual recognition between colonialist and native, and in this reading of Adamastor as the projection of a (justifiable) Portuguese pride, the Africans are virtually canceled out. The production of self-knowledge that might be held to be laudable in itself is here involved with a twofold suppression of the other, one by which the figure of Adamastor is both substituted for the Africans and simultaneously emptied of their presence and made to point instead to their Portuguese masters. This suppression repeats the original act of violence against the Hottentots, a violence that was doubled in Camões' text by da Gama's joke about the wounded natives and the comic dismissal of the whole episode.

This self-reflection that takes place at the expense of the natives can be linked to the remarkable self-consciousness of the Adamastor episode as a whole: the way in which the epic announces and points to its own act of creating a new myth out of the stuff of history. We are accustomed, I think, to see such self-consciousness as an undoing of ideology. Insofar as it insists upon the historicity of Adamastor, Camões' poem may indeed allow us to glimpse the violence and victims that lie behind its own and other epic fictions. But its calling attention to the constructed nature of the giant figure does not necessarily question the ideological operation that the figure effects: an assimilation of the African natives with the storms of nature that deprives them once again of an historical identity and of an identity as victims. Moreover, in his very self-consciousness, the poet seems to become complicit with a reading that still further erases the historical natives by turning Adamastor into an image of Portuguese pride and achievement. For Camões stakes his own claim to excel Homer and Virgil upon the figure of the giant who not only lends a proper heroic awe and epic magnitude to da Gama's relatively uneventful journey but also presents the poet with an occasion to demonstrate his powers in a kind of epideictic display. The figure of Adamastor can be read to be what it literally declares itself to be: the poet's daring and aggrandizing figure of his own daring and greatness and that of his Portuguese heroes. When the figures of poetic language are read as self-reflexive figures, history and human beings begin to disappear.

The African natives have indeed disappeared for readers of the poem, in which the textual strategies may work only too well: the relationship between Adamastor and da Gama's encounter with the Hottentots has virtually escaped previous commentary on the episode. And equally submerged in the implicit symbolic relations of the text and its web of poetic and historical sources is the topos of the epic curse, the classical model that informs the fiction of the giant, but which the ideology of the Lusíadas deforms in turn. We have seen that the curse typically lends the epic loser something of an autonomous voice and identity. But here it issues from a giant cloud rather than a human agent. Its characteristic prophecy of a future history of resistance that may unsettle the political dominance and closed histories of the victors turns into a weather forecast. And even the storms it predicts as obstacles to the Portuguese have the capacity to turn into their opposites and facilitate the building of a Lusitanian empire without end. This deformation of the topos suggests even more forcefully than our earlier examples that epic's representation of its losers—its attempt to adopt their perspective—may not be able to escape appropriation by the victors' ideology. And such appropriation would become complete when the representation, the giant Adamastor, is read no longer as a figure of the native loser but as a mirror image of the Portuguese victor himself.

And yet the episode of Adamastor has not failed to produce an uncanny frisson in subsequent readers. This may be due precisely to the way in which the not-so-hidden presence of the natives—and with it the topos of the curse and the earlier literary voices of Polyphemus and Dido—are displaced and swallowed up in Camões' giant, the way they are covered over, as it were, by alternative readings: a textual suppression that creates the effect of a return of the repressed. In Billy Budd, Melville writes of the “wars which like a flight of harpies rose shrieking from the din and dust of the fallen Bastille,” and then shifts epic figures to remark of the Napoleonic period: “the genius of it presented an aspect like that of Camoens' ‘Spirit of the Cape,’ an eclipsing menace mysterious and prodigious.”¹³ Melville suggests a genealogical posterity for Adamastor and his curse, of oppressed voices and insurgent ghosts heard at last, that is no less distinguished than their Homeric and Virgilian ancestry. Camões' monster, born of the initial encounter of Portuguese imperialism and its native subjects, is the first in a line of specters haunting Europe.

Notes

1. The classical models of the Adamastor episode have been excellently traced by Américo da Costa Ramalho in his Estudios Camonianos (Coimbra, 1975), 33-53.

2. Ibid., 35.

3. Frank Pierce notes parenthetically that the waterspout is “a kind of natural Adamastor” in his essay, “Camoes' Adamastor,” in Hispanic Studies in Honour of Joesph Manson (Oxford, 1972), 207-15. There are helpful remarks on the Adamastor episode in C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London and Basingstoke, 1945), 123-25.

4. Cf. Decade 1, Book 3, Chapters 3-4, of the Asia de Joam de Barros, ed. António Baiao (Coimbra, 1932), 127-29; Part 1, Chapter 35, of Damião de Góis, Cronica do Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel, ed. David Lopes Gagean (Coimbra, 1949) 1:74-75. For the log of da Gama's voyage, see Portuguese Voyages 1498-1663, ed. Charles David Ley (London and New York, 1947), 5-6.

5. De Góis, Cronica, 1:75.

6. Ramalho, Estudios, 44-45, sees a connection between the allusion to Antaeus and the giant Adamastor.

7. For a description of the “dialectical” literary imitation at work here in Camoes' rewriting of Homer, see the heuristic model proposed by Thomas M. Greene in The Light in Troy (New Haven and London, 1982), 45-47.

8. This was a not untypical expression of Portuguese attitudes toward the natives of black Africa, although these attitudes could vary considerably with respect to different African peoples and in different regions. See C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825 (Oxford, 1963).

9. See for example Giovanni Boccaccio in Book 3 of the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, ed. Vincenzo Romano, 2 vols. (Bari, 1951), 1:122-23; and Natalis Comes in Book 8, Chapter 2, of Natalis Comitis mythologiae (Padua, 1616), 428-30.

10. On the critical debates over narrative discontinuity in the Orlando Furioso, see Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic (Princeton, 1991), 86-105.

11. This conclusion is briefly considered by Cleonice Berardinelli in her Estudios camonianos (Rio de Janeiro, 1973), 40.

12. The comparison of daring seafarers to rebellious giants has a classical model in the Silvae of Statius (3.2).

    Quis rude et abscissum miseris animantibus aequor fecit iter solidaeque pios telluris alumnos expulit in fluctus pelagoque immisit hianti audax ingenii? nec enim temeraria virtus illa magis, summae gelidum quae Pelion Ossae iunxit anhelantemque iugis bis pressit Olympum. (61-66)

    (Who made the rough and sundered sea a path for miserable mortals, and, daring of character, cast the devoted children of the firm earth out onto the waves and threw them into the yawning ocean? For not more presumptuous was the valor that joined frozen Pelion to the top of Ossa and pressed upon panting Olympus with the double mountains.)

    See Statius, trans. J. H. Mozely, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 1:160. For Rabelais's treatment of this topos, see the Tiers Livre, Chapter 51.

13. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, chap. 7, in Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, ed. Raymond Weaver (New York, 1928), 255.