Portuguese Portraits
9781465673244
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s great men. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of Portuguese history. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before him—the epic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and Spaniard, and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas and the ever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be impaired unless he can follow the events in detail in the chronicles and histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a knowledge of Portuguese is requisite, since there are few satisfactory translations. But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Portuguese to read it with pleasure as it is difficult to write or speak it. There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than in subject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and sieges, recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the seas. Of the battle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have loved to tell how the Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000 were an exaggeration) and how, heavy rain having fallen after the battle, the streams that flowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red with blood. But there were scrupulous and moderate chroniclers like Fernam Lopez and Azurara, and many of the historians of India were sober writers whose narratives (those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Gaspar Correa) bear the stamp of truth while they delight the reader by their wealth of detail and personal anecdote. They may be pardoned for declaring that their heroes’ achievements outshone those of Greek and Roman. For indeed the half-century (1498-1548) between the voyage of Vasco da Gama and the death of Dom João de Castro is thick with names; the great men tread on one another’s heels in the halls of fame, worthily continuing the work of their predecessors during four centuries in Portugal. Sousa, Mello, Meneses, Cunha, Castro, Noronha, Mascarenhas, Coutinho, Pereira, Pacheco, Almeida, Azevedo, Sá, Silva, Silveira—these are names the very catalogue of which must be music to a Portuguese, and which would require a large volume to chronicle in detail.
