Bacchus Resolves to Sabotage the Voyage
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Não será assim, porque antes que chegado Seja este Capitão, astutamente Lhe será tanto engano fabricados Que nunca veja as partes do Oriente. Eu descerei à Terra, e o indignado Peito revolverei da Maura gente; Porque sempre por via irá direita Quem do oportuno tempo se aproveita.
It will not be so, for before this Captain has arrived, so much deceit will be cunningly contrived against him that he never sees the regions of the East. I myself will go down to Earth and stir up the indignant heart of the Moorish people; for the straight road always belongs to whoever seizes the opportune moment.
Still in the council of the gods, Bacchus rejects the idea that Gama's fleet is safe. He vows to slip down to Earth himself and turn the Moors against the Portuguese before they can ever reach the East.
Bacchus, patron of the East and jealous of his old glory there, refuses to accept that Gama's fleet is beyond harm. He lays out a plan in two moves: first the fleet will be trapped in fabricated treachery, and then he will descend in person to inflame the Moors against it. The stanza is pure scheming, all future-tense verbs (sera, descerei, revolverei) piling up like a to-do list of sabotage.
What a first reader misses is the closing couplet, which is a proverb, not a threat. "The straight road belongs to whoever takes the opportune moment" is Bacchus talking himself into acting now rather than later. Camoes lets the villain voice a maxim any prudent Renaissance captain would nod at, so that even the enemy of the Portuguese sounds shrewd rather than merely wicked, and the reader senses that the coming ambush at Mombasa and Mombasa's waters is being set in motion by a god who thinks of himself as simply timely.
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