Cloth, Shields, and Trumpets
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De panos de algodão vinham vestidos, De várias cores, brancos e listrados: Uns trazem derredor de si cingidos, Outros em modo airoso sobraçados: Da cinta para cima vêm despidos; Por armas têm adargas o terçados; Com toucas na cabeça; e navegando, Anafis sonoros vão tocando.
They came dressed in cotton cloths of various colors, white and striped. Some wear them wrapped around themselves; others sling them gracefully over one shoulder. From the waist up they go bare. For arms they carry leather shields and short swords; on their heads are caps; and as they sail, they go sounding their resonant trumpets.
Gama's fleet lies anchored off the East African coast near Mozambique, and the local islanders row out to meet the strange ships. This stanza is a close inventory of how they are dressed, armed, and how they announce themselves.
The stanza is a costume inventory. Camões slows the narrative to look hard at the islanders coming out to Gama's ships: the cloth and its colors, exactly how each man wears it, what he carries for weapons, what sits on his head, the noise he makes on the water. It reads almost like a painter's field-notes, detail stacked on detail with no comment.
What a first reader misses is that the details are not neutral. The adarga (a leather Moorish shield), the terçado (a curved cutlass), and above all the anafil (the Arab war-trumpet Camões's readers knew from the Reconquest of Iberia) are the standard kit of the Moor. Even the vocabulary carries it: adarga, algodão, and anafil are all Arabic-rooted words. Before the poem names these people, the catalog has already identified them, and the quiet point lands: the Portuguese have sailed to the far edge of Africa and found the same adversary they had been fighting at home.
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