Abstract
Josiah Blackmore's work focuses on the presence and significance of the sea within early modern Portuguese maritime literary culture. He argues that seafaring in sixteenth-century Portugal was both a historical practice and a literary principle, a forma mentis that shaped how writers and readers conceived of the world. The book demonstrates how literary works forged a ‘maritime subject’ – a mode of identity born of oceanic travel and imagination. Overall, Blackmore reminds readers that literature did not simply mirror seafaring culture but actively participated in its creation.
He anchors his analysis in Luís de Camões, whom he presents as the epicentre of early modern Europe's maritime imagination. Os Lusíadas is indispensable to any serious account of seafaring as a cultural phenomenon in this period, and Blackmore shows that Camões's lyric poetry is also steeped in nautical language and imagery. Yet the book does not confine itself to Camões. Each chapter situates him within an evolving maritime writing tradition, from medieval cantigas de amigo, which connect women's voices with the rhythms of tide and absence, to Iberian roteiros, which combine navigational record, proto-ethnography and chronicle. By setting Camões alongside Virgil, Petrarch and Garcilaso, among others, Blackmore demonstrates how the Portuguese poet inherited, transformed and ultimately consolidated Portugal's identity as a seafaring nation.
The introduction establishes the sea as a place and an idea, a principle of both expansiveness and possibility. Blackmore insists that ships and boats do not merely feature in narrative but perform an epistemological function, carrying with them new forms of knowledge and authority. For historians used to treating ships as material artefacts or logistical instruments, this reframing may be surprising. Yet it is here that the study offers the greatest value: literature appears as an archive of knowledge in its own right, revealing how contemporaries understood navigation not only as physical movement but also as a way of knowing.
The first chapter, on ‘saltwater poetics’, makes this point vividly. It reminds readers that seafaring was never the exclusive preserve of those aboard the ship. The voices of women in the cantigas de amigo, waiting on shorelines for absent lovers, articulate loneliness and longing through aquatic imagery that anticipates later Camonian lyric. What matters here is less whether the poems reflect literal experience than how they demonstrate the pervasive embedding of maritime imagery in communal life. Two poems by Camões are drawn in at the close of the chapter to connect him with these traditions; their placement feels slightly premature, but the point – that Camões's lyric continues medieval currents – is well taken.
The second chapter moves to the epic scale of Os Lusíadas, which Blackmore reads as ‘the most preeminent and extensive expression of the Iberian maritime imaginary’ (16). He highlights how Camões structures his poem not around a single hero but around a collective protagonist of seafarers. Navigation here becomes narration: ship routes plot the course of history itself. The Portuguese roteiro emerges as a crucial intermediary genre, turning nautical movement into historical agency. For maritime historians, the significance is clear. The rhetoric of Portuguese exceptionalism at sea, which underpins so many contemporary chronicles, appears here not simply as ideology but as poetic logic. Literature and imperial expansion are shown to be mutually constitutive, each authorizing the other through the language of the sea.
The third chapter shifts to lyric, where Camões's personal experience at sea, where he spent a third of his life, inflects maritime poetics with exile, loss and shipwreck. These are some of Blackmore's most affecting readings. The shipwreck, literal and figurative, becomes a metaphor for the instability of love, fortune and life itself. More importantly, Camões transforms Petrarchan metaphors of navigium amoris into historically grounded expressions of a lived seafaring culture. His personal voyages infuse his sonnets, songs and elegies with an acute awareness of the dangers and epistemologies of the ocean. For maritime history, these poems expand the archive of seafaring experience into the realm of poetic subjectivity, showing how individuals conceptualized risk, displacement and saudade through the sea.
The final chapter, ‘The Sunken Voice’, returns to epic and to depth. Here, Blackmore traces how sinking and abyssal sound shape the acoustics of maritime imagination. The Camonian sea, noisy with divine contest and human despair, articulates a nautical poetics of depth that is at once spatial, psychological and emotional. The argument is compelling, although the book ends somewhat abruptly. Without a dedicated conclusion, readers are left without a final synthesis of the study's findings or a clear indication of its wider implications. A closing reflection could have tied the work together and gestured towards future research. Still, the absence does not overshadow the force of the preceding chapters.
What, then, should maritime historians take from this book? First, that Camões is indispensable. Os Lusíadas is not merely a national epic but a global maritime poem, one that deserves a place in the maritime historian's library. Second, that literature is not ancillary to maritime history but integral to it, shaping the categories through which seafarers and their audiences understood oceanic travel, empire and selfhood. Blackmore's insistence that seafaring created new forms of knowledge, authority and subjectivity should resonate with anyone interested in the cultural dimensions of exploration.
In the end, The Inner Sea confirms that seafaring was never only a matter of charts and compasses. It was also a matter of words and imagination. With prose that is richly metaphorical, often enacting the maritime poetics it analyses, Blackmore's work is a pleasure to read. Throughout the text, he invites readers to recognize the sea not just as a stage or setting but as a distinct form of thought that produced both historical reality and literary vision. His book will reward historians and literary scholars who wish to understand how Portugal, and early modern Europe more broadly, came to think with the sea.
