Flags in the Oceans, Stars in the Heavens

The air was filled with excitement and fear in Belém, on the 8th of July, 1497. A light breeze flowed by the Tagus River, through the hope in the sailor’s eyes, the sorrow of the women saying goodbye to their husbands and sons, and the criticism of old men against the voyage about to begin. This is how the departure of Vasco da Gama and his fleet to India is literarily depicted by the Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões in his opus magnum The Lusiads (1578).

A major milestone in transoceanic travelling, Da Gama’s voyage produced one of the most famous Early Modern literary episodes. However proficiently this episode has been studied, a detail in this transfiguration of the ships São Gabriel, São Rafael and Bérrio departing Lisbon comes as a surprise, and one that history of science should not breeze over:

“On strong ships the soft winds
Undulate the aerial flags.
These vessels promise, while they observe the open seas,
To be stars in Olympus, like that of Argo.”

(Canto IV, stanza 85)

This image of the ships’ flags blowing in the wind while the crowd waved farewell establishes a fresh association of the technical, technological and scientific dominion over nature—inherent to the oceanic voyages—with fame and glory, as we briefly outlined in our previous post “A Shipyard of Science and Empire”.

A high point in the ships, these flags are made symbols of fame when combined with the amazing humanization of these vessels, which are capable of observing and promising, like a true character; they are also given prominence by the comparison between Da Gama’s fleet and Argo, the mythological ship of Jason and the Argonauts, which gave the name to the Argo navis constellation on the southern celestial hemisphere.

This humanization of technology is quite a remarkable trope for such a classical epic poem, displaying the newness that oceanic travelling brought to human thought over technological artifacts; and the comparison between the three Portuguese ships and Argo is very fitting. Both ascend symbolically to the heavenly spheres after their astonishing voyages: Argo shines in the southern sky that the Portuguese sailors saw beyond the Equator, as São Gabriel, São Rafael and Bérrio radiate a new synonymy between technology and fame in the glistening waters. [Joana Lima]