Encompassing the Universe

Shades of blue tinted everything that met the eyes of the crew of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India (8th of July 1497 – 20th of May 1498) while sailing South of Sierra Leone into the open Atlantic waters. During three full moons, the beholders of such caerulean desert crossed the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, searching for the westerlies to blow their ships to the African shore. By performing the volta do mar maneuver and arriving in Saint Helena Bay (4th of November 1497), the fleet completed the longest maritime voyage in open ocean made until then. One may wonder what the crew would do when setting foot on land. Luís Vaz de Camões gives us a hint in The Lusiads (Canto 5, stanza 26), in a Da Gama monologue that literarily recreates the Portuguese arrival to this South-African beach:

We came ashore on to wide open land,
Where our men quickly scattered,
Wishful to see the strange things of this land
Where no one seemed to have ventured before;
But I, willing to know where I was, stayed
Among the pilots on the sandy beach,
Pausing to measure the height of the Sun,
And to encompass the universal painting.

Despite the wonders of a new nature seducing the mariners towards its exploration, Da Gama’s first act when they arrive at the shore is a scientific one. Alongside the pilots, the captain is portrayed measuring the meridian height of the Sun with an astrolabe to calculate the latitude of Saint Helena Bay, to then “encompass the universal painting”. A rhetorical device worth noticing, which encapsulates an intricate metaphor and a surprising image. The very specialized usage of the verb “to encompass” (Port. compasso > compassar) and its double meaning –both for the magnetic needle and for the drawing tool used to mark out distances on maps– denotes the gesture of cartographically registering the latitude of this unknown location on a map carried on the ships. The image of doing so on a “universal painting”, a map portraying the entire world, attached to this gesture the idea of geographical expansion of the world, and a notion of globality, since it encompasses the known universe. While the globe had not yet been circum-navigated by the end of the fifteenth-century, the power to grasp the universe in the palm of one’s hand, by inscribing it, must have already felt palpable during the life of Camões (c.~1524–1580). [Joana Lima]