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The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama. By SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxiii, 400 pp. $59.95 (cloth).
"Few figures in world history," writes Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "are at once so well known and so obscure as Vasco da Gama." By juxtaposing a study of the Portuguese navigator's legend with that of his career, the author seeks to unravel this apparent paradox. The book opens with an introductory "Overture," which contains a witty analysis of Meyerbeer's opera "l'Africaine" (1865) featuring da Gama as hero and lead tenor, and ends with a concluding "Finale," which explores the various literary and artistic constructions of the da Gama legend as they evolved over the past five centuries. Not surprisingly, the Portuguese state has been centrally implicated in elaborating this legend, as in 1880, when it sponsored extravagant celebrations surrounding the reinterment in Lisbon of the bones of the "Great Argonaut." One sign of the ultimate triumph of the da Gama legend is its acceptance by modern Indian historians like K. M. Panikkar, who invented the notion of "the Vasco da Gama epoch." But Subrahmanyam stresses that the legend was launched already in the navigator's lifetime, and by da Gama himself, whose "career trajectory" lifted him from a relatively obscure...