The Fall of Repelim
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Destruirá a cidade Repelim, Pondo o seu Rei, com muitos, em fugida; E despois, junto ao Cabo Comorim, üa façanha faz esclarecida: A frota principal do Samorim, Que destruir o mundo não duvida, Vencerá co furor do ferro e fogo; Em si verá Beadala o Márcio jogo.
He will destroy the city of Repelim, putting its King—and many with him—to flight; and afterwards, near Cape Comorin, he performs a glorious feat: the main fleet of the Samorin, which does not hesitate to destroy the world, he will vanquish with the fury of iron and fire; Beadala will see the game of Mars played out within its own waters.
In Canto 10 the sea-nymph Tethys sings Gama the future of Portuguese arms in India. Here she prophesies a captain who storms Repelim, routs the Samorin's fleet off Cape Comorin, and turns Beadala into a field of war.
Tethys keeps the prophecy moving from one Malabar coast landmark to the next: Repelim sacked and its king put to flight, a glorious feat off Cape Comorin, the Samorin's great fleet burned with iron and fire, and finally Beadala turned into a war-ground. The verbs are all future tense (Destruirá, Vencerá, verá), so a still-unborn captain's victories are already spoken as settled fact.
The line a first reader skims past is the last one. The "game of Mars" (Márcio jogo) is Camões' cool euphemism for slaughter—war as a sport the Romans named for their war-god—and the grammar makes Beadala itself the spectator, watching the killing happen "em si," in its own harbor. The obscure place-names are real: Comorim is Cape Comorin, India's southern tip, and the Samorin is the Zamorin of Calicut, the recurring Portuguese enemy in the Indian cantos.
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