Artigo George Monteiro - diagramado

101-108 - 2010
“From the point of view of the average man”:
John dos Passos on Gaspar Correa and The
Lendas da Índia
George Monteiro*
RESUMO: Em um artigo publicado no The New York Times,
em 1969, o famoso escritor norte-americano de ascendência
portuguesa, John Dos Passos, recomendou para os leitores uma
esquecida obra do século XVI, intitulada Lendas da Índia, de
autoria de Gaspar Correa. O escritor descobriu esta obra quando
pesquisava para sua narrativa histórica, The Portugal Story
(1969), recorrendo às Lendas para narrar as histórias de
Albuquerque, Gama e João de Castro.
Palavras-Chave: John Dos Passos, Lendas da Índia, Gaspar
Correa, Vasco da Gama, Alphonso de Albuquerque, João de
Castro, Índia do século XVI.
The Portugal Story: Three Centuries of
I nExploration
and Discovery (1969) John Dos Passos,
an American of Portuguese descent (his grandfather was born on
Madeira, calls Lendas da India “one of the vividest of the
chronicles which illuminate early Portuguese history.” It great
virtue, according to the author of the trilogy U.S.A. and a
number of other novels, as well as several books on United
*
Brown University.
George Monteiro
102
States history, is that “Gaspar Correa’s Legends of India detail
events so vividly from the point of view of the average man that
you feel you have talked with and rubbed shoulders with the
people he tells about.”1 So taken was Dos Passos with Gaspar
Correa’s work, in fact, that he published an enthusiastic article
extolling the author and the virtues of his work. This fugitive
article is reprinted from the New York Times “Book Review” for
February 9, 1969 (pages 2 and 37).
“Lendas da Índia”
During the last few years I've been putting in some work
on the period of the Portuguese navigators. This research
produced an unexpected dividend in the discovery of a set of
chronicles and personal narratives which seem to me
unsurpassed in any language. Eyewitness accounts have always
been my favorite reading, but for some reason it was a surprise
1
Dos Passos, Portugal Story, p. 384. Portuguese literary historians hold Gaspar
Correia’s voluminous record of his daily experiences and observations in high
regard. Here is what António José Saraiva and Oscar Lopes have to say: “As
Lendas da Índia, livro que não desinava à imprensa, a não ser depois da morte,
constituem um documento prodigiosamente minucioso em que os factos se ordenam
ano por ano, mês por mês, às vezes dia por dia, e em que as personagens se erguem
pouco a pouco da acumulação de actos, de gestos, de ditos, até se nos tornarem
familiares como visinhos. O autor não cura de elegância retórica, nem quase
gramatical; a frase apresenta uma incorrecção extreme; os seus capítulos são
informes; a ideia da composição equilibrada está inteiramente fora do seu espírito.”
(História da Literatura Portuguesa, 6th ed. [Porto: Porto Editora / Lisboa / Empresa
Lit. Fluminense, no date], p. 324). While António José Saraiva adds, elsewhere:
“Um lugar à parte deve ser atribuí às Lendas da Índia, de Gaspar Correia, que viveu
no Oriente a maior parte da sua vida, como funcionário e mercador. A sua obra,
prodigiosamente minuciosa, concreta, viva e isenta, tem um caráter memorialístico e
não só relata os acontecimentos como retrata as pessoas e descreve os costumes e a
mentalidade dos portugueses no Oriente. O autor é literàriamente um primitivo,
mas o seu estilo rude e medieval chega a ser poético pelo seu poder evocador e faz
pensar nos cantares de gesta peninsulares.” (História da Literatura Portuguese, vol.
I, Das Origens ao Romantismo [Lisboa: Estúdios Cor, 1976], p. 74).
“From the point of view of the average man”: John dos Passos on Gaspar Correa …
103
to me to find so many important events in the 15th and 16th
centuries reported firsthand in letters, diaries and narratives. As
Camões put it, the early Portuguese navigators traveled “with
the sword in one hand and the pen in the other.”
Of all these accounts I found “Lendas da India” by
Gaspar Correa the most enthralling. It’s an enormous narrative
occupying in the latest edition four fat octavo volumes.2 Nobody
could read it all, but the parts you do read make you feel you’ve
lived through them. It’s a brutal experience, perhaps, though
Correa enlivens his stories with a good deal of humor, but when
you finish a chapter or a month or a year, you know what life
was like for the average Portuguese involved in the enterprise of
the Indies.
There has been a certain amount of discussion of what
Correa meant by lendas. The word is usually translated
“legends,” but Correa’s own explanations give you the
impression that he meant something between Heroic Stories and
Tall Tales. Tall tales they certainly are.
Correa, like so many of the great men of the period came
from the impoverished minor aristocracy. There must have been
good blood in his veins (some of it probably Jewish) because
when he was about 10 in 1506 he was enrolled as a page in the
household of King Manuel the Fortunate. At 16 or 17, having
picked up penmanship, rudiments of an education and a knack
for drawing, he embarked, like many another young fidalgo, to
seek his fortune in India. He must have been a likely lad
because that stern taskmaster, the great Alfonso de
Albuquerque, fonder of the Portuguese empire in the East,
snatched him up immediately for his staff of secretaries.
2
Gaspar Correia, Lendas da Índia, única edição, dirigida por Rodrigo Felner (Lisbon,
1858-1864), 4 vols. In 1869 the Hakluyt Society published a volume on the
voyages of Vasco da Gama as presented in Correia’s Lendas.
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George Monteiro
Being a secretary of Governor Albuquerque’s was no
sinecure. Though in his sixties, accounted an old man in his
time, Albuquerque was a whirlwind of energy. In the six years
of his governorship he subjected all India to the Portuguese rule,
neutralized the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and scattered
Portuguese trading posts through the Straits of Malacca to the
Spice Islands in the farthest East.
Correa describes how the Governor during the short
periods when he was in residence in his beloved capital at Goa
would rise before day, attend mass with a guard of halberdiers
and then with a cane in his hand and a wide straw hat on his
head ride around inspecting the works on the fortifications or on
the docks. Four secretaries with inkhorn and paper had to
follow him wherever he went to write out orders and dispatches,
which he signed right there without dismounting from his horse.
“And I Gaspar Correa, who am writing this story, worked like
this as his secretary.”
Every day, wrote Correa, Albuquerque dined 400
captains at his table. “The Governor always ate to the music of
trumpets and kettledrums. In front of the building where he
lodged there was a great court where the naïques, captains of the
native people, assembled. Every Sunday they came to be
reviewed by the Governor with their musical instruments and
their little trumpets which are very martial. In front of the
ranked soldiers stood a man who played on a great doublebarreled copper instrument which was heard above all the others
and made a startlingly warlike sound…. Dancing women come
to the great court with their instruments, because this is how
they make their living, dancing and singing at mealtimes; and
this at dinner or supper, with torches made of lint wicks set in
copper pipes which they replenish with oil they bring in little
copper kegs. Here they review the 24 elephants that work in the
“From the point of view of the average man”: John dos Passos on Gaspar Correa …
105
city—some were taken in Goa but others were captured on ships
from Ceylon. The elephants came to make their curtseys to the
Governor, until, the minute he was through dining, everybody
went away.
Correa draw a sketch of Albuquerque which served as a
model for native painters when John de Castro, Governor some
years later, ordered a full set of life-sized portraits of the former
Governors to be prepared for a great hall of his palace. The
drawing shows Albuquerque as a small dour man with very
large eyes and a very long nose and a beard that stretches to his
waist. The index finger of his right hand is raised as if in
admonition.
There's a certain crudity about Correa's prose as there is
about his drawing, but the root of the matter is always there.
The great Governor gave him his education. It was transcribing
Albuquerque's letters to King Manuel—pithy, down to earth,
vehement, full of telling detail—that Correa learned the art of
narrative. For the next 40 years be noted everything he saw,
everything he overheard, everything that was told him of the day
to day events of the enterprise of the Indies.
He described the heroism and the glory and the cruelty
and the greed.3 His pages form an endless portrait gallery of
human types. A naive Christian, he had an acute sense of right
and wrong.
His judgments were uncompromising and
incorruptible. He let the blame fall on the great captains as
much as on their underlings. Reading his long sentences, made
up of often disparate clauses strung together with conjunctions
like some passages in the Bible, you get such a vivid sense of
3
For instance, as has been pointed out, while Camões later describes the crew of
Vasco da Gama’s ships as heroes, Gaspar Corrêa “takes the view” that Gama’s crew
were “poltroons” (Edward Salmon, “1497-1897: East and West,” The Eclectic
Magazine of Foreign Literature, 65 [June 1897], 751).
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George Monteiro
the rough virtues and the quirks and failings of the men who
accomplished these miracles that it is as if you had brushed
shoulders with them yourself.
Though he got up the whole history of the conquest of
India month by month from Vasco da Gama's first excursion in
1497, out of survivors' tales and documents he found among
Albuquerque's papers, Correa is at his best describing events be
saw with his own eyes: the bloody failure of the Portuguese
assault on Aden because the scaling ladders were too short; or
the capture of the island fortress of Hormuz a few years later
and the extraordinary stratagems by which Albuquerque managed the assassination of the vizier who was trying to
assassinate him. The trade of Hormuz, set right in the entrance
to the Persian Gulf, was fabulously profitable. This vizier was
so richly dressed that several members of the Governor's staff
returned home wealthy from the mere despoiling of his body
when it was thrown out on the beach. “I myself," confessed
Correa, “took a kerchief off him that he carried in his hand,
embroidered in gold, which brought 20 xarafims.”
Lives were short in India. The taking of Hormuz was
Albuquerque's last grand achievement. The heat of the Persian
Gulf wore him out. He sickened of some disease which sounds
like dysentery, and on the urgent plea of his doctors took ship
for Goa. His condition was not improved by news that reached
him of the King’s having appointed his worst enemies to
succeed him. Correa describes how the tough old man fought to
keep alive until he could get a last look at Goa, the capital he
had wrested from the infidel and rebuilt for the imperial glory of
the Portuguese crown. As the ship crossed the harbor bar in the
early dawn be had himself lifted out of his bunk and stood
leaning on the jamb of the cabin door looking out on the city and
the chapel he had built for Our lady of the Island. As the ship
“From the point of view of the average man”: John dos Passos on Gaspar Correa …
107
came to anchor ha bowed his head, muttered a last prayer, and
died.
Before Albuquerque’s final illness he had appointed
Correa to the profitable job of Inspector of the Works. By 1531
Correa was well enough off to equip a ship of his own in the
fleet that sailed to assault the Moslem fortress of Diu. He
accompanied the famous John de Castro when he raised the
second siege by Indians and Turks of that embattled fortress a
few years later.
After Castro's death Correa's fortunes failed. His
bitterness against the speculation and arrogance of those in
authority increased year by year. ". . . their robberies, insults,
murders, violence and adulteries being notorious; and without
fear of God or the King, they wrong in every way Christians,
Moslems, gentiles, natives and foreigners.”
Gaspar Correa was set upon one night and murdered in
Malacca, possibly in reprisal for his courageous writings and
rash words. The leader of the gang was a retainer of the
powerful da Gama family. After it the man was seen dining at
the table of Vasco da Gama's grandson. One of the great clan
brought the manuscript of Correa's "Lendas" home with him
some 20 years after the author's death. Tucked away in the da
Gama family archives the manuscript was considered much too
outspoken to see the light. An edition was at last brought out in
the middle 19th century. To make it available in English
selections would have to be culled from the whole and a
translator would have to be found with the verve and the gusto
to do justice to the realism of the great narrative.4
4
To the best of my knowledge, Lendas da India has not yet found and English
translator or publisher.
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George Monteiro
ABSTRACT: In a piece in The New York Times in 1969, the
famous and well-regarded North-american novelist of
Portuguese descent, John Dos Passos, recommended to readers
the neglected sixteenth-century work known as Lendas da Índia,
by Gaspar Correa. Having discovered it when doing research for
his own historical account, The Portugal Story (1969), he now
drew on the Lendas to tell the stories of Albuquerque, Gama and
João de Castro.
Key words: John Dos Passos, Lendas da Índia, Gaspar Correa,
Vasco da Gama, Alphonso de Albuquerque, João de Castro,
sixteenth-century India.