Abstract
Few readers would describe the 1572 maritime epic Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) by Luís Vaz de Camões as centrally concerned with piracy. Taking the form of a long and highly stylized eulogy on Vasco da Gama’s first voyage into the Indian Ocean (lasting from 1497 to 1499), the poem applies the epic formula of Virgil’s Aeneid to the modern experience of deep-sea navigation, making da Gama the new Aeneas, and Portugal the new Rome. Its crowded cast includes heroic Lusitanian seafarers, hostile Muslim rulers, rowdy pagan deities, a whole array of indigenous characters met en route from Lisbon to Calicut — but not a single pirate. This is no accidental omission. Da Gama sails not only as a self-conscious explorer but also as a Christian missionary, whose poetic persona has fully absorbed the heroic code of honest and honourable seafaring. But while pirates are ostensibly alien to the moral economy of The Lusiads, the poem is at the same time so deeply immersed in contemporary maritime culture (written as it is by an experienced seafarer) that the very idea of piracy cannot be eliminated altogether from its imaginative world.
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Notes
On the maritime origins of early capitalism see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Alan Villiers, The Indian Ocean (London: Museum Press Limited, 1952), p. 176.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), p. 162.
See also Rediker’s more recent study, Villains of all Nations. Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon, 2004).
See K. V. Krishna Ayyar, The Zamorins of Calicut (Calicut: Norman Printing Bureau, 1938), p. 146.
For surveys of the social, cultural and economic history of the Indian Ocean (including the early modern period), see Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean [1961], trans. June Guicharnaud (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966);
K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean. An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean. A History of People and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993);
and most recently Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003).
See also Sanjay Subrahmanyam (ed.) Maritime India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)
a reprint of Holden Furber’s Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (1976);
Sinnapah Arasaratnam’s Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century (1994); and McPherson’s The Indian Ocean.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 112.
Ayyar, The Zamorins of Calicut, pp. 153–7; R. P. Anand, Origin and Development of the Law of the Sea. History of International Law Revisited (The Hague et al.: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), p. 49.
O. K. Nambiar, The Kunjalis. Admirals of Calicut (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), pp. 33–4; Subrahmanyam, Vasco da Gama, p. 183.
The Book of Ser Marco Polo, trans. and ed. Sir Henry Yule, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1903), vol. 2, p. 389.
See G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese, being a translation of Kitab al-Fawa’id fi usul al-bahr wa’lqawa’id of Ahmad b. Majid al-Najdi (London: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971), p. 202.
See James Warren, Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding, and the Birth of Ethnicity (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002).
On the concept of a ship’s ‘sufficiency’, see David W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Stuart Times, 3 vols (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, sec. ed. 1978), vol. 1, pp. 40–1.
Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 14.
Roger C. Smith, Vanguard of Empire. Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 174.
John Dee, Mathematicall Preaface to The Elements of Geometrie of the most auncient Philosopher Evclide of Megara (London: John Daye, 1570), sig. d.iiijv.
Iohn Minsheu, A Dictionarie in Spanish and English [London, 1599], facs. ed. (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2000), entry ‘Sutiléza, or Subtiléza’.
See Die topographischen Capitel des indischen Seespiegels Mohît, trans. Maximilian Bitter, intr. Wilhelm Tomaschek (Vienna: K. K. Geographische Gesellschaft, 1897).
Nabil Matar calls the poem ‘one of the most anti-Muslim epics in the national literature of Renaissance Europe’. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 164.
Martin Cortes, The Arte of Nauigation, trans. Richard Eden (London: Richard Jugge, 1561), sig. CC.i.r. My italics.
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© 2007 Bernhard Klein
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Klein, B. (2007). ‘We are not pirates’: Piracy and Navigation in The Lusiads. In: Jowitt, C. (eds) Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627642_7
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