A mythical giant, a Malagasy slave, a song, an accomplished baritone, an outraged critic; these seemingly incompatible figures are bound together in the Paris premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Africaine in 1865. They are the fundamental elements of my story of the opera's third act, a narrative web binding together early modern nautical history, epic poetry, grand-opera dramaturgy, and the nineteenth-century politics of operatic performance and listening in an exploration of how the opera's rather fictionalised account of Vasco da Gama's first sea voyage to India five centuries ago bears witness to the strength of the historicist project in grand opera.