“I am that hidden and mighty Cape / which you call the Cape of Storms.”
In Canto V of The Lusiads, as Vasco da Gama's fleet reaches the southern tip of Africa, a figure “of hideous and vast stature” rises from the sea. It is Adamastor: a titan condemned to stone, the Cape itself, for loving the nereid Thetis and being tricked by her.
He threatens. He promises shipwreck to whoever passes. But read carefully and the giant is no monster: he is a man trapped in rock, watching others do what he never could. He is the fear of the end of the known world, and the rage of the one left behind.
Why him
Because he is the only monster in Portuguese literature born of the sea who stayed there. Because he is ugly, huge, homesick and unapologetic. And because the Cape of Storms was renamed the Cape of Good Hope by those who managed to round it, and we prefer the old name.
Adamastor Clothing makes t-shirts as if they were sixteenth-century nautical charts: black and bone, engraved, the sea always in sight. Some tell of the giant, some of saudade, some of the bands we listen to while we draw. All are produced to order, here, one at a time.
See the collection
