‘Moorings’ in the title refers both to the Portuguese maritime voyages and to ‘Moors’ (Muslim Africans), whom the Portuguese regarded as their implacable enemies. The wordplay also signals two aspects of this study that historians will find troubling. First, the author – a specialist in Iberian literature at the University of Toronto – is concerned with how Portuguese maritime expansion produced ‘a sustained textual productivity on Africa as one of the characteristic practices of empire’ (p. 34) but not with the actual realities of these encounters. Second, having committed himself to a study of literary imagination, the author deals with the inconvenient fact that most Africans whom the Portuguese encountered south of the Sahara in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not Muslims by just ignoring them. Although the literary analysis seems intelligent within the parameters of literary analysis, readers of this journal will likely find this study narrowly Eurocentric and unbalanced.

Moorings opens with an account of the conquest of the Moroccan city of Ceuta in 1415, an event that Blackmore says may be interpreted ‘either as the beginning of a new era of expansion or as the culmination of a medieval, chivalric, and crusading mentality’ (p. 34). Despite a nuanced discussion of interpretative literature in the book's introductory chapter, the author's own interpretation seems inclined to favor continuity over change. Professor Blackmore bases his analysis on published works chronicling and celebrating early Portuguese exploration, notably the early chronicles by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, who had spent a year in Ceuta, and the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1573) by Luis de Camões, who had personal experience in South and East Asia. Besides these works by men with little or no personal experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Blackmore refers, to a lesser extent, to the writings of others who participated more meaningfully in some early encounters with sub-Saharan Africans, but assiduously avoids analysis of encounters south of the Muslims of Senegambia.

As historians have long argued, the early Portuguese were on the watch for non-Muslim Africans, whom they hoped to convert, as well as for existing communities of Christians. Such Africans were not seen as ‘Moors’ but as potential allies. Accordingly, Portuguese accounts of the relations with such Africans in western and eastern Africa often portray such potential allies as intelligent fellow humans rather than alien ‘others’. Blackmore's bibliography suggests that he is familiar with such accounts and their use by modern historians, but his book goes out of its way to disregard such Portuguese involvement with non-Muslim Africans. Aside from a few slight references to the kingdom of Kongo, sub-Saharan Africa is ignored. Mina (Elmina), the center of Portugal's considerable West African gold trade, gets one mention (p. 70), so casual that it is not recorded in the index. The extensive Portuguese involvement with the powerful kingdom of Benin in the Niger Delta and the sugar plantation colony of São Tomé merit no mentions. Blackmore similarly ignores the dramatic Portuguese military expedition to rescue the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. That such early encounters were already being compressed out of the picture by the new contacts with Asia by the time Camões was writing seems a subject that even a literary history ought to have thought worth investigating, especially since it is so drastically at odds with the thesis that this study puts forth. Not doing so distorts not just African history but that of Portugal also.