ABSTRACT

Camoes begins the main narrative of his poem in medias res by describing one of Gamas ships at sail on the high seas: The image is iconic, both in Camoes's narrative and in the seafaring culture that generated it. This chapter explores maritime depth in Os Lusiadas and in a slightly earlier Portuguese shipwreck narrative by Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo, a contemporary of Camoes, who was shipwrecked in southeast Africa in 1554. In these two important texts, the authors create alliances between oceanic depth, submersion, and narrative, and this narrative expression of depth can be considered a dimension of the expansionist literary or writing subject as it emerged in Portugal in the early modern period. The shipwrecks which produced the tales anthologized in the eighteenth-century Historia tragico-maritima were a result of the carreira da India.