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| History of Portuguese Literature | Origins of Portuguese Literature | The Portuguese Language | Oral Literature | Fiction | Lyricism |
| Travel Literature | Cantigas de amigo | Historiography | Doctrinal Prose | ||
Travel Literature
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Portuguese
travel literature is deeply rooted in its maritime discoveries and the pragmatic
need to record the different routes, atmospheric conditions, coastal
irregularities and all the other features that might help seafarers to repeat
and continue along paths that had already been travelled.
So,
sailing directions and ships’ log-books were born, technical documents that
aided navigational orientation, and these were the direct ancestors of this form
of literature. In fact, such literature had already begun to emerge in these
same texts in the form of comments that expanded the purely descriptive notes
into picturesque embellishments of the voyagers’ surprise and admiration, or
narrative segments that provided an account of their engagement in the
relationship between the perceptive subject and the world being revealed thereto.
 Livro das Armadas (Fleet Book) Packet Boat to India |
Examples
of such texts in the sixteenth century were Esmeraldo
de Situ Orbis, by Duarte Pacheco
Pereira and
Roteiro do Mar Roxo by D. João
de Castro. The first important work of major interest in this area was,
however, Roteiro da Primeira Viagem de
Vasco da Gama (Report of Vasco da Gama’s First Voyage to India),
attributed to Álvaro Velho, which
has remained as one of the fundamental texts of all travel literature, followed
by Carta a D. Manuel sobre o Descobrimento
do Brasil (Letter to King Manuel I on the discovery of Brazil) by Pero
Vaz de Caminha.
As a result of these works, or, perhaps better, as a result of the regular and
multiple nature of voyages (given that these works had a limited audience and
frequently, as appears to have been the case with Caminha’s text, actually became confidential because of the policy
of secrecy in relation to the discoveries) genuine reports were to appear of
itineraries and routes, by sea or overland, born out of overseas voyages and
sometimes combining documentary interest with narrative processes that,
particularly for today’s reader, already smacked of literature. Amongst
such a vast series of works, many examples abound: A Verdadeira Informação do Preste João das Índias (1540), by Padre
Francisco Álvares, Tratado das Cousas
da China (1570), by Frei Gaspar da
Cruz, Itinerário da Terra Santa
(1593), by Frei Pantaleão de Aveiro,
Etiópia Oriental (1609), by Frei
João dos Santos, or Itinerário da Índia
por Terra (1611), by Frei Gaspar de São
Bernardino.
On the other hand,
the “canonical” writers (those writing with a decidedly literary intention)
centred many of their works on the problematics of the voyages of the
discoveries. This is the case, for example with Gil Vicente’s Auto
da Índia and, in particular, with Luís
de Camões, who made such a voyage the basic plot of his epic poem Os
Lusíadas. Nor could the chroniclers avoid reworking this material,
sometimes in works that are amongst the most important in this area, even from
the aesthetic point of view: Gomes Eanes
de Zurara in Crónica da Guiné
and João de Barros in Ásia.
A
particularly interesting feature of this literature is the proliferation of what
was to become a specific Portuguese genre during the second half of the
sixteenth century and would in fact continue until much later: the reports of
shipwrecks. These consisted of a specific narrative that was exclusive to the
ships that were wrecked, with a detailed description of the human reactions
caused by the shipwreck and the tragic and sometimes vain efforts to survive.
The oldest known work of this nature is that of the Galeão Grande São João,
from 1554, which is known as the Naufrágio
de Sepúlveda, written by an anonymous author. Others, however, are equally
worthy of the attention of literary analysts in view of their extremely rare
capacity for writing about the pathetic, for their parallel descriptions of
physical and psychological movements, as well as for the way in which they
combine an unshakeable belief in the military and religious mission of the
spirit of conquest with an air of pessimism and disillusion that suggests a
clear reaction to the Lusiad epic adventure: Relação do Naufrágio da Nau Santiago, by Manuel Godinho Cardoso, Relação
do Naufrágio da Nau São Bento, by Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo, Relação
do Naufrágio da Nau Conceição, by Manuel Rangel. Published in loose,
unbound form, they were collected together in the eighteenth century by Bernardo
Gomes de Brito in his two volumes of História
Trágico-Marítima (1735-36).
Amongst all of this literature, however, there is one truly exceptional work, Peregrinação
by Fernão Mendes Pinto, published in 1614, although it was actually
written earlier in 1580.
And nor must we forget the great influence of this literature on later
Portuguese literary works, both in the establishment of sundry “topoi” (as
is the case with the “maritime novel”, first begun amongst us by Francisco Maria Bordalo, with Eugénio,
written in 1846, and a fairly popular formula in the second half of the
nineteenth century) and in thematic developments that cut across the various
genres. There were also the particular developments that had to do not only with
the individual choices made by authors, but also with specific periods of
culture, either paying homage to, or deploring, the period of the discoveries.
These were the reports of the travels of nineteenth-century explorers or of
writers from all periods, or else reworkings of ideas, now written from the
point of view of ideological congruity (Afonso
Lopes Vieira, Onde a Terra se Acaba e
o Mar Começa, 1940), with a nostalgic feeling (Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Navegações, 1988) or as
parodies (António
Lobo Antunes, As Naus,
1988).
© Instituto Camões, 2001
