Dear B.Boyd and List,
 

Brits and Brazilians?

1. Peter and Margaret/ Pedro and Inês/ Camões
2. Wellington/ A. M.Cabral da Gama &C./ Camões 
and, of course, among them, Van/Mascodagama/Vasco da Gama in the epic of Camões.

detailing:

The unhappy Portuguese lovers Pedro and Inês (  whose sufferings  were extensively described by Vasco da Gama - our Mascodagama link here - in the epic of Camões ) have a connection with another Pedro  who is not the actor who went to Rio in Ada.


It is the famous old British pair of lovers( I don´t mean Charles and Camilla!), Princess Margaret and the photographer Peter Townsend.

They are alluded to in connection to the poem Lucette was deceitfuly given to learn by heart. The entire scenery that sorrrounded Peter and Margaret was created by Nabokov as a parody of the Romantic and the"Arcady" theme with milkmaids and cows and laureate Browns or century-old lithographs by a certain Peter de Rast "an old swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak (which appeared — oh, I remember, Van! — in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus protecting four cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare)";

The poem Peter and Margaret had been "composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called "Peter and Margaret."
This poem "Van (...)was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston(...)’ wrote: ‘I kept for years — it must be in my Ardis nursery — the anthology you once gave me ; and the little poem (...) Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now read on:
‘Here, said the guide, was the field,/There, he said, was the wood./This is where Peter kneeled,/That’s where the Princess stood/ No, the visitor said,/You are the ghost, old guide.Oats and oaks may be dead,/But she is by my side.’
There is also another Peter, Count Peter de Prey who with King Victor ( in disguise as Mr. Ritcov ) and Demon’s father (...) and a certain "Mire de Mire" ( the "Mironton Mirontaine" observation and the poem given to Lucette? ) who were the members of the first Venus Club Council ( a dream???); 
 
The Duke of Wellington ( also mentioned in Ada  as the name of a mountain the Wellington Mountain and the second cane of vengeful Van )   commanded the expedicionary forces against the Napoleonic invasions ( at the time when Dom João VI moved the Portuguese court to Brazil )
His field-valet (?) António Maria Osório Cabral da Gama e Castro  owned the bucolic park and fields which Wellington visited in Portugal where the unhappy lovers and cousins Inês and Pedro  found refuge. Wellington planted two trees known as " Wellington´s sequoias" during his stay.  The Duke of Wellington also had a memorial inscribed with a sonnet by Camões ( canto III, verse 135) telling the story of the romantic pair Pedro and Inês.
(The son of Pedro and Inês was made into  the First Duke of Valência, named D.João and who was born in the fourteenth century).

When D. João VI in 1815 came to Brazil he established "The United Kingdom of Portugal, Brasil and Algarves which comprised the:  Reino de Portugal (Europe),  Reino do Brasil ( America), Ilhas no Atlantico, Angola, Guiné, Moçambique, (Africa), Goa and Macau, (Asia), and Timor ( Oceania). Acording to my google source it had a "planetary extension" and served as a model for the "United Kingdom of Britain", organized half a century later, in 1867.