Although a few critics explore ultramarine exploration in Lusophone literature not as mere context or background, but as a way of writing and engaging with the world, Blackmore sounds the depths of Portugal's literary connection to maritime voyages in his insightful study The Inner Sea. His linguistic, contextual, textual, and historical analyses treat several texts from the early modern period. In the introduction, “Immense and Possible Oceans,” the author asserts that “the sea is both a place and an idea, a capaciousness, a principle of expansiveness, possibility, literary imagination” (1). This ambitious statement lays the groundwork for an examination of what Blackmore titles “maritime imagination” (2) in Portuguese literature, found in shipwreck literature, epic and lyric poetry, hagiography, and even historical and informational documents.
The first chapter, “Saltwater Poetics,” investigates medieval hagiography and cantigas. Here, Blackmore looks to the medieval Voyage of Saint Brendan to discover a connection between physical and spiritual peregrination, with the sea as “a specific place of human itinerancy and not merely as a symbol or allegory” (20). The author also shows how cantigas, particularly cantigas de amigo, establish bodies of water as “repositories of sentiment” (25), revealing “a link between maritime and emotional realms” (31), particularly female sexual desire. Blackmore recognizes that although men penned these poems, these cantigas allow female protagonists agency with which to control their romantic entanglements, situating them as “sexual pilots” (46).
In “Epic Seas,” the second chapter, Blackmore turns his attention to the epic poem Os Lusíadas. The author perceives of “water and seafaring” not as mere historical realities, but as “organizing principles of poetic creativity” (47) and explains that Camões's work solidifies seafaring as a principal marker of Portuguese identity. The study then turns to roteiros, which portray the ship as a “stylus” that “writes history onto maritime space and the terrestrial landscapes that maritime space reaches” (57), connecting sea exploration with the creation of knowledge itself. The ability of discoverers to transcribe themselves into the annals of history solidifies their place as protagonists in the age of exploration, while the ocean is the vehicle for both exploration and storytelling.
Chapter 3, “Lyric Seas,” situates Camões in the broader literary traditions, particularly the Petrarchan concept of “emotional interiority as a sea” (93). In the Camonian epic, the ship itself alludes to shipwreck, which carries with it a dual signification of literal disaster and amorous suffering. The author subsequently investigates the role of exile, which, not unlike shipwreck, is both political and personal. Camões's sonnets connect exile to his own “existential despair” (122), caused by his disenfranchised wanderings. Blackmore then links saudade, a slippery and largely untranslatable term often tied to longing or nostalgia, to estrangement from a community and from the past. Thus, seafaring provokes an “an inner voyage of contemplation and reckoning” (126) while the ocean functions as a “library of human experience” (129), cataloging time (the present and the past), action (expansion and exile), and place (home and abroad).
In the final chapter, “The Sunken Voice,” Blackmore explores sonority in physical and emotional shipwreck, beginning with the wreck of the São Bento, a tale found in the collection História trágico-marítima. He identifies the spatial, psychological, and affective depths of shipwreck as it creates a soundscape in which the voices of doomed sailors and the psychological echoes of these cries mix, situating both the victims and the survivors in an “unbound or unplotted space” (150). Turning once more to Os Lusíadas, Blackmore explores how the sounds in the poem (Tritan's conch, a storm, the boatswain's whistle, shouts, and the Indian Ocean) indicate movement away from the past and toward the future, from the unknown to the known.
This comprehensive study is a must-read for scholars of early modern Iberian literature. Graduate students would also greatly benefit from this study, which could complement courses on early modern Portuguese literature, principally a seminar on Camões. The argument for the exceptionality of maritime themes, motifs, and conceits in Lusophone texts is especially convincing as Blackmore deftly illustrates how seafaring infused Portuguese literary works with a unique sense of maritime meaning. The texts are about both physical exploration and emotional investigation, and the journeys depicted provided not only knowledge, riches, and political power to the Portuguese but also a sense of identity, as well, for the nation, its people, and its literature.
