The Red Sea Turns Yellow with Dread
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E vereis o mar Roxo, tão famoso, Tornar-se-lhe amarelo, de enfiado; Vereis de Ormuz o Reino poderoso Duas vezes tomado e sojugado. Ali vereis o Mouro furioso De suas mesmas setas traspassado: Que quem vai contra os vossos, claro veja Que, se resiste, contra si peleja.
And you will see the famous Red Sea turn yellow for it, out of dread; you will see the powerful Kingdom of Hormuz twice taken and subjugated. There you will see the furious Moor pierced through by his own arrows: for whoever goes against your people, let him see clearly that, if he resists, he is fighting against himself.
Jupiter keeps unrolling his prophecy of Portuguese conquest in the East for Venus. He foretells the terror of the Red Sea, the double fall of Hormuz, and the strange death of the Moor, then seals it with a moral couplet.
Jupiter keeps forecasting the eastern conquests, and here the prophecy turns almost bodily. The Red Sea, whose very name is a color, drains from red to yellow in fright; Hormuz falls twice; the Moor is killed by his own arrows. The closing couplet lifts these three images into a rule: to raise a hand against the Portuguese is to strike yourself.
A first reader can miss that "amarelo, de enfiado" personifies the sea as a face. Enfiado is the look of someone gone pale and mortified, so the red sea blanching yellow is a blush turning to the pallor of dread. The Moor "pierced by his own arrows" points to Albuquerque's 1507 assault on Hormuz, where the wind was said to blow the defenders' arrows back into their own ranks, an omen Camões reads as heaven fighting on Portugal's side.
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