The Swift Palm-Sail Boats
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As embarcações eram, na maneira, Mui veloces, estreitas e compridas: As velas, com que, vêm, eram de esteira Dumas folhas de palma, bem tecidas; A gente da cor era verdadeira, Que Faeton, nas terras acendidas, Ao mundo deu, de ousado, o não prudente: O Pado o sabe, o Lampetusa o sente.
The boats were, in their fashion, very swift, narrow and long; the sails they came under were of matting woven from palm leaves, well made. The people's color was that true hue which Phaethon gave the world when, bold and not prudent, he scorched the earth: the river Po knows it, Lampetie feels it still.
Off the East African coast, Gama's men watch the local craft approach and take in the dark skin of the people. Camões describes both boats and bodies, explaining skin color through the myth of Phaethon.
Gama's crew, anchored off the East African coast, watch the small local craft approach and take in the dark skin of the people. Camões describes the boats first, then the bodies, and instead of explaining skin color by sun or climate he reaches for a Greek myth: Phaethon, son of the Sun, borrowed his father's chariot, could not control it, and drove it so near the earth that he scorched whole lands and their peoples. The Po (the Eridanus of myth) is where he fell and drowned; Lampetusa, one of his weeping sisters, was turned to a poplar tree. So the line "the Po knows it, Lampetusa feels it" means the myth itself testifies to the burning.
What a first reader misses is the phrase "de ousado, o não prudente" — bold, not prudent. The color is blamed on a catastrophic recklessness, and that word sits oddly in this poem, which everywhere praises Portuguese ousadia, the daring to sail past the known world. Here boldness without prudence is the very fault that ruined a people. Camões, drawing straight from Ovid's Metamorphoses, lets the classical fable do the work of observation, and slips a quiet warning about audacity into a passage that looks like plain description.
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