Going with the flow
This is a wonderfully entertaining and intelligent account of two loosely connected lives that, like streams, meander until they converge to form something larger. Both were 16th-century Portuguese men, and both died in obscurity, though one acquired international fame soon after his death.
Damião de Góis was a scholar, traveller, translator, royal archivist and author of a history of the reign of Portuguese king Manuel I. His later years were plagued by accusations of heresy, and the Inquisition sentenced him to RerRetual confinement in a monastery. +n
he died in a fire, clutching a half Durned piece of paper; he had apparently been released from confinement, though one reRort suggests he was strangled Defore the fire. Luis de Camões, meanwhile, was a hapless sailor and adventurer, Portugal’s national poet and author of epic poem The Lusiads.
Wilson-Lee traces the travels of Góis in northern Europe, from the Netherlands through Poland to Muscovy, and of Camões across the #tlantic and +ndian Oceans and along the shores of #frica and +ndia. Their experiences furnish opportunities for a rich diet of incidental details about 16th-century religions, societies, dinner tables, conversations and art. This is a colourful depiction of encounters between cultures in an era of international traXel, trade and conʚict.
Why a history of water? Because Camões’ experiences were very much at sea, and because his epic celebrates the Portuguese Xoyages of discoXery s sRecifically 8asco da Gama’s expeditions – which he imagined as heroic encounters with the unknown (though his own experiences along the same route showed how well-travelled these trade routes were by non-European cultures . #nd Decause )Ïis’ exReriences were metaRhorically liSuid s a ʚow of encounters Detween different ReoRles, and of conversations that led to wonder and understanding of otherness.
Góis was suppressed by the Inquisition and more or less forgotten, whereas Camões’s imperial, colonialist epic achieved posthumous fame. These are two visions of European experiences in the
th|century, two kinds of history, made of similar materials and worlds apart. Wilson-Lee follows the two men around the globe, showing how one vision of European experiences of travel and encounters dominated while the other was forgotten.