American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.
She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade, with the following results:
This page focuses on the Portuguese explorer of Africa’s Atlantic coast, Diogo Cão. Despite being little known outside of Portugal his contemporaries viewed his voyages as a far more important than Barthlomew Dias’s because Cão was the first European to successfully sail south of the Equator, that is, without the help of a pole star. Furthermore, the page illustrates the common Portuguese tactic of ingratiating themselves with leaders of very wealthy African kingdoms, in this example, with the Congo. Their goals were twofold: to convert the leadership to Christianity and to establish an ongoing commercial relationship including cooperation with the slave trade.Learn more about Sails and Shadows at the University of California Press website.
Page 99 may surprise readers, who expected that any Portuguese encounter with Africans would result in the latter being deliberately harmed. Yet nothing of the sort happened in Congo. Far from altruism, Diogo Cão’s politeness sought to entice Congo elites into an orbit in which they would exploit or enslave other Africans in return for wealth the Portuguese could supply. Readers might view this information as creation of a web of complicity.
Much of the book explains how the Portuguese finally managed to cross the mid-Atlantic and return, a feat that had eluded sailors for thousands of years. Although Norsemen had briefly island-hopped across the northern rim, knowledge of the Americas remained hidden from Europeans and Africans until the breakthrough Portuguese voyages of the 1400s.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
