The Pilot's Lie
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E diz-lhe mais, com o falso pensamento Com que Sinon os Frígios enganou: Que perto está uma ilha, cujo assento Povo antigo cristão sempre habitou. O Capitão, que a tudo estava atento, Tanto com estas novas se alegrou, Que com dádivas grandes lhe rogava, Que o leve à terra onde esta gente estava.
And he tells him more, with the same false design with which Sinon deceived the Phrygians: that an island lies nearby, whose seat an ancient Christian people has always inhabited. The Captain, who was attentive to everything, so rejoiced at this news that with great gifts he kept begging him to take him to the land where these people dwelt.
Off Mozambique, the treacherous Moorish pilot keeps deceiving Gama, inventing a nearby island of ancient Christians to lure the fleet into a trap. Gama, longing for fellow Christians, gladly takes the bait.
The treacherous pilot keeps spinning his lie, and Camões pins it to a name every reader of Virgil knows: Sinon, the Greek who talked Troy into hauling the wooden horse inside its walls. The bait here is an island of old Christians nearby. That is exactly what Gama most wants to hear, so the Captain, alert to everything else, drops his guard and heaps gifts on the man to be carried straight to the trap.
What a first reader misses is that the Sinon comparison is not ornament but a verdict. By the Aeneid the horse gutted a city, so the stanza's word for the Captain's mood, joy, is really dramatic irony: Gama's one soft spot, his longing to find fellow Christians on this coast, is precisely the hook the enemy baits. His virtue, not any failing, is what nearly undoes him.
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