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Paper short abstract:

The shipwreck of the Nossa Senhora dos Milagres (1686), by the Jesuit priest Pierre Tachard, aloud an interesting gaze’s crossing and allows us to put into perspective the Eurocentric visions of the Other exhibited by the Portuguese shipwreck narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The epic masterpiece of the Portuguese literature, The Lusiads (1572), that describes a fundamental episode of maritime expansion, the discovery voyage of Vasco da Gama, includes a mise-en-abîme of the history of Portugal, and invites the reader to identify themselves with a collective hero, the Portuguese people. It is easy to recognize, in the author's strategy, an issue of exaltation and construction of an auto-image capable of overcoming the "sad, somber, and vile sadness" in which, according to Luís Vaz de Camões, the country had sunk. Nonetheless, even within this epic lies a tale of a shipwreck, the most famous of all the narratives generally known in Portugal as Shipwreck literature. Our view is that Shipwreck literature has had an enormous influence in the construction of a negative auto-image of the Portuguese nation, particularly at times of crisis such as the transition between the 19th and the 20th centuries, or towards the turn of the 21th. The corpus of this Shipwreck literature consists mainly of twelve accounts from The Tragic History of the Sea collection, all written by Portuguese authors. Thus, our aim is to amplify the perspective with the study of the narrative of the shipwreck of the Nossa Senhora dos Milagres (1686), written by the Jesuit priest Pierre Tachard. This shipwreck is experienced by a Siamese mandarin, whose perspective allows us to put into perspective the Eurocentric visions of the Other exhibited by the Portuguese shipwreck narratives.