The Bitter Aloe of Socotra
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Verás defronte estar do Roxo Estreito Socotorá, co amaro aloé famosa; Outras ilhas, no mar também sujeito A vós, na costa de África arenosa, Onde sai do cheiro mais perfeito A massa, ao mundo oculta e preciosa. De São Lourenço vê a Ilha afamada, Que Madagáscar é dalguns chamada.
Facing the Red Sea Strait you will see Socotra, famous for its bitter aloe; and other islands too, in a sea likewise subject to you, off the sandy coast of Africa, where the most perfect of scents issues — the mass called ambergris, hidden from the world and precious. Behold the renowned Isle of Saint Lawrence, which by some is called Madagascar.
Near the epic's close, the sea-goddess Tethys shows Vasco da Gama a model of the globe and names the eastern lands Portugal will reach; here she points out Socotra, the perfumed African coast, and the great island of Saint Lawrence.
Tethys, showing Gama a working model of the globe, sweeps down the East African approaches: Socotra bitter with aloe, the sandy African coast that breathes out the finest perfume, and the great island the Portuguese named for Saint Lawrence. It reads as a list because that is the point — the world laid out as inventory for the crown that will come to hold it.
What a first reader slides past is "a massa": not an abstract "mass" but ambergris, the waxy, whale-born substance that drifts onto these shores and sells dearer than gold to perfumers — Camões calls it hidden from the world and precious. And the Ilha de São Lourenço is Madagascar, named for the saint on whose feast day the Portuguese first sighted it. The catalogue is a trade map dressed as cosmography.
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