The Portuguese Answer
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Uns vão nas almadias carregadas, Um corta o mar a nado diligente, Quem se afoga nas ondas encurvadas, Quem bebe o mar, e o deita juntamente. Arrombam as miúdas bombardadas Os pangaios subtis da bruta gente: Desta arte o Português enfim castiga A vil malícia, pérfida, inimiga.
Some flee in the laden canoes; one cuts across the sea swimming hard; another drowns in the curling waves; another gulps the sea and spews it up all at once. The small cannon-shots smash the flimsy sewn boats of the savage people. In this way the Portuguese at last punishes the vile malice, treacherous and hostile.
The people of Mozambique, having attacked Gama's fleet by treachery, are routed. Their small boats are smashed by cannon-fire and the survivors flounder in the water.
This is the payoff stanza of the Mozambique episode: after the Muslim pilot and townsmen tried to trap Gama, the fleet's guns answer, and Camões gives us the rout in four quick freeze-frames. The verbs pile up in the present tense so the chaos happens in front of you: some flee, one swims, one drowns, one drinks and vomits the sea. Only in the final couplet does the camera pull back to name the moral: the Portuguese "castiga" the malice of the enemy.
What a first reader misses is how loaded that closing word "castiga" (punishes, chastises) is. It reframes cannon-fire as justice, not mere victory. The three adjectives at the end, vil, pérfida, inimiga, all fall on the enemy, so the slaughter is presented as deserved. It is a small, honest window onto the epic's imperial logic: the poem needs the Africans to have struck first, so that Portuguese gunpowder can be righteous rather than aggressive.
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