Paper short abstract:

This paper traces several classical motifs and their reception in an age of overseas expansion—the Underworld, a southern Paradise, Ulysses, Jason and the Argonauts, sea monsters, Cyclops, a Great Outer Sea and the Eternal Return—revealing continuities between Antiquity and the seafaring Portuguese.

Paper long abstract:

Like Jason, Henry the Navigator is renown for sending his seafarers to the end of the world and making the promise of return a reality. Nicknamed "Captain of the End", Dias' voyage was also likened to the Argo's descent into the Underworld, a world of initiation, and his treacherous passage from Tormentoso to Esperança seen as a transition from suffering to salvation. There could be no Cape of Good Hope without a Cape of Storms, no Paradise without a Purgatory.

It was Dante who invoked this motif by placing his Paradiso on a mountain above a watery transit. Centuries earlier, sailing under the southern stars, Ulysses encountered "a mountain obscured by distance and of a height never seen before". This inspired Camões' mythopoetic one-eyed Adamastor to challenge Gama on entering Cape waters. Their confrontation serves as a metaphor for the struggle between modern man and the classical gods.

Inspired by the gods, Nearchus of Crete, Alexander's admiral, believed his ships had found the Great Outer Sea in the East. Two millennia later, Viceroy D'Almeida compares himself to Nearchus and sets out to fulfill Alexander's dream of rounding Africa to expand an empire on new-found shores. In turn, his successor Albuquerque becomes "Caesar of the East". These examples echo Virgil's description of how "the great line of centuries begins anew as a second Argo carries its chosen heroes to another war, to another shore". It's not only history that repeats itself but we who do. We return to fight another day.

Paper Download (3.1 MB)