Face-to-face with Adamastor

DR LUIS DIAS

Each time I visit the Institute Menezes Braganza and walk past the stunning blue-and-white azulejo panels set in ornate gold frames, I hear the voice of my father dramatically recite the stanzas beneath each illustration taken from the epic poem (epipoiea) ‘Os Lusíadas’ (The Lusiads) by Portugal’s greatest poet Luís Vás de Camões
(c.1525-1580).

Of the five panels painted by Jorge Colaço (1868-1942), the ‘Adamastor’ panel accompanying the first four lines from Canto V, Stanza 39 caught my imagination the most. Adamastor, the mythological figment of Camões’s vivid imagination, the personification of the Cape of Good Hope (earlier the ‘Cape of Storms’, the rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa) literally became the stuff of my childhood nightmares: the immense shape emerging from the night air, of “grotesque and enormous stature with heavy jowls, and an unkempt beard.” The rest of stanza 39 elaborates further: “Scowling from shrunken, hollow eyes; Its complexion earthy and pale, its hair grizzled and matted with clay, Its mouth coal black, teeth yellow with decay.” (I use the Landeg White
translation here).

The thought of actually setting foot on that rocky headland would have filled me with dreadback then. I hadn’t planned it, but I ended up doing just that last year, in Camões’s 500th birth anniversary year.

Before I set out on my first ever trip to Africa, I read Canto V in the original and the Landeg White (1997) and William C. Atkinson (1952) translations.

Adamastor lies at “the epic’s very heart” according to White in his introduction. “He stands not only as a sentinel over the most dangerous part of the voyage [of Vasco da Gama’s fleet to India in 1497]. He marks the boundary between different visions of Africa, corresponding to two different divisions of the world.”

The giant Adamastor prophesies three future disasters to the Portuguese: 1) The loss of the first Portuguese fleet to pass the Cape, in 1500; 2) The death of the first Viceroy of India, D. Francisco de Almeida, in 1510; 3) The shipwreck of the galleon São João captained by Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda off the coast of modern-day Natal, South Africa in 1552.

Camões’s ‘Os Lusíadas’ was published in 1572, so Adamastor’s ‘prophecies’ had already come to pass.

I’ll never forget the gale-force winds we encountered at the Cape, making it difficult to even stand, while being photographed with the signs that marked the spot. One didn’t need Adamastor’s clairvoyance to guess it must have been the site of countless shipwrecks. Indeed, the fable of ‘The Flying Dutchman’, a legendary ghost ship allegedly never able to make port and doomed to sail the seas forever, (and that lent the name to Richard Wagner’s 1843 opera ‘Der fliegende Holländer’, although he changed the location to Norway) originated here in the 17th century the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) when Dutch maritime power was at
its zenith.

Adamastor’s second prophecy is contained in stanza 45: ‘As for your first Viceroy, whose fame Fortune will bring to the heavens, Here will be his far-flung tomb by God’s inscrutable judgment. Here he will surrender the opulent trophies wrung from the Turkish fleet, and atone for his bloody crimes, the massacre of Kilwa, the levelling of Mombasa.’

Most of the English translations I’ve encountered are understandably imperfect, and sometimes add layers that don’t exist in the original. For instance, “bloody crimes”, “massacre” and levelling” are not in the original Portuguese, but White adds these for context. He explains the difficulties he encountered in his
‘Translator’s Note.’

Stanza 45 pithily encapsulates in eight lines the life and death of Dom Francisco de Almeida (c. 1450-1510), first viceroy (1505-1509) of Estado da India.

In 1505, Almeida besieged and overran Kilwa and Mombasa, on Africa’s east coast (in modern-day Tanzania and Kenya respectively), strategically important in consolidating the sea route to India.

The “opulent trophies wrung from the Turkish fleet” are a reference to the 1509 naval battle of Diu, in which Almeida’s ‘Armada da Índia’, (with technical naval support from the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), which feared for their eastern trade links), defeated the combined forces of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan of Gujarat, Mamluk Burj Sultanate of Egypt, and Zamorin of Calicut.

This victory has been rather grandiosely compared by Portuguese naval officer Saturnino Monteiro to the 1571 Battle of Lepanto and the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar in terms of its importance in “world naval history”, as it marked “the beginning of European dominance over Asian seas that would last until the Second World War.” (‘Portuguese Sea Battles Volume I – The First World Sea Power’, 2011, p. 273).

He isn’t alone. Military historian William Weir in his 2001 book ‘50 Battles That Changed the World’, ranks the 1509 Battle of Diu as the sixth most important in history, trailing only behind the Battles of Marathon (490 BC), Nika Rebellion (532 AD), Bunker Hill (1775 AD), Arbela (331 BC) and Hattin (1187 AD). Interestingly, he ranks Lepanto at 36. Rankings and comparisons are subjective.

The 1509 Battle of Diu was decisive, a “battle of annihilation” in which the opposing force was routed, and Almeida infamously was merciless with enemy captives, brutally torturing and murdering them in apparent retaliation for his son’s death the previous year in the Battle of Chaul.

But in accordance with Adamastor’s prophecy, Almeida’s ‘far-flung tomb’ would be the Cape. He set sail for Lisbon in December 1509 after the victory at Diu. His ships dropped anchor in late February 1510 at the Cape to replenish water. It is unclear how an initially ‘friendly’ encounter with the local indigenous people, the Uriaekua Khoikhoi aba Thwa/Khwe nation turned hostile. But it escalated into the Battle of Salt River, “the first military encounter between Europeans and indigenous people” where the Portuguese suffered an embarrassing defeat that is underplayed and apparently not taught in
Portuguese schools.

Accused of stealing cattle for meat, the Portuguese were chased back to their ships, whereupon they entreated Almeida to exact revenge. On the morning of March 1, 1510, he and around 150 men armed with swords, crossbows, and spears raided the village. But the villagers were lying in wait, and counterattacked with stones, fire-hardened wood-tipped spears and poisoned arrows. They also deployed especially trained cattle which would respond to specific whistles and whoops, and which they used as “moving shields.”

The Portuguese were compelled to retreat, but their escape was thwarted as the landing boats had been moved. Almeida, the ‘hero of the Battle of Diu’ and 64 of his men including 11 of his captains perished on the beach. Almeida’s body was later buried nearby.

The trauma of that debacle led to the Portuguese policy not to land ships in the region, putting them at a long-term disadvantage with the Dutch, English, and French, when competing for trade and influence in the Indian Ocean, as their competitors did land on the coast for replenishment. The Battle of Salt River altered the history of southern Africa.

So here’s another historical irony: Superior naval technology spectacularly won the 1509 Battle of Diu, but Almeida’s ‘heroes’ were vanquished by the most ‘primitive’ weapons but used to deadly advantage.