[506] _Europa Portuguesa_, vol. iii, pt. 3. Portugal, he says, is a perpetual Spring, and he speaks of the women who earn their living by selling roses and other flowers in Lisbon, of the almonds of Algarve, the excellent honey, &c., &c. Vol. i covers the period from the Flood to the foundation of Portugal; vol. ii goes down to 1557; vol. iii to Philip II of Spain. § 6 _Quinhentista Prose_ Had latinization and the Renaissance come to Portugal in a quiet age it is not pleasant to think what havoc they might have wrought on Portuguese prose in the unreal atmosphere of the study. Fortunately they found Portugal in turmoil. Stirring incidents and adventures were continually occurring which needed no heightening of rhetoric or Latin pomp of polysyllables. A scientific spirit of accuracy was abroad, and the missionaries and adventurers, travellers, mariners, merchants, officials, and soldiers who recorded their experiences wrote as men of action, with life and directness. Few stories are more intense and affecting than those told by the Portuguese survivors of shipwreck in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Twelve of these appeared in the original collection edited by BERNARDO GOMES DE BRITO (born in 1688): _Historia Tragico-Maritima_ (2 vols., 1735, 6).[507] The earliest and most celebrated is the _Relaçam da mui notavel perda do galeão grande S. João_ [June 24, 1552], an anonymous narrative based on the account of a survivor, Alvaro Fernandez, probably the ship’s mate, which tells of the death of D. Lianor de Sepulveda and her husband with a simple pathos and dramatic power unattained by the many poets who later treated the same theme. But the accounts of the wreck of the _S. Bento_ (1554), the _Conceição_ (1555), the _S. Paulo_ (1561), of D. Jorge de Albuquerque (1565), and others, are scarcely less moving. The ships, of 1,000 tons, as the _Aguia_, ‘the largest vessel that had hitherto sailed to India’ (1558), and under, often with rotten rudder, or the whole ship rotten, _sepulturas dos homens_, with few boats, careless and ignorant pilots, badly careened, overloaded, overcrowded, ill-supplied with worm-eaten biscuit, ‘poisonous’ wine, and insufficient water, seemed to invite destruction. Between 1582 and 1602 alone thirty-eight ships were lost. The sea was not the only enemy: corsairs off the coast of Portugal, French, Dutch, and English, Lutheran heretics who threw overboard beads and missals, or a Turkish fleet ‘in sight of Ericeira’, exacted their toll when all other dangers had been successfully overcome. The story is told immediately after the event, sometimes almost in the form of a diary or log, or years later, by survivors or based on the account of survivors, and it varies according as the narrator is the captain of the ship, a landsman with a dislike of sailors, a plain soldier, a Jesuit priest, a Franciscan