SOURCE: “The Epic Curse and Camões' Adamastor,” in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 99-130.

In the following excerpt, Quint examines the figure of Adamastor in The Lusiads as “a demonic composite of the natural and human foes faced by the Portuguese imperial enterprise.”

In the fifth canto of the Lusíadas, Vasco da Gama is the guest of the African king of Melinde on the east coast of Africa. He narrates the story up to this point of his voyage from Portugal: Camões' obvious models are Odysseus telling his adventures to Alcinous in Phaeacia and Aeneas recounting his wanderings to Dido in Carthage. Da Gama describes the moment when his fleet is about to approach the Cape of Good Hope. Suddenly, there appears a black cloud out of which, in turn, an enormous giant emerges, looming...