Two Sails on the Horizon
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Tinha uma volta dado o Sol ardente E noutro começava, quando viram Ao longe dous navios, brandamente Co'os ventos navegando, que respiram Porque haviam de ser da Maura gente, Para eles arribando, as velas viram: Um, de temor do mal que arreceava Por se salvar a gente à costa dava
The burning Sun had made one full turn and was beginning another when, far off, they saw two ships sailing gently with the winds that breathe. Because these had to belong to the Moorish people, the fleet bore down toward them and turned its sails to close: one of the two ships, in fear of the harm it dreaded, drove its crew toward the coast to save itself.
As the fleet works up the East African coast, a full day has turned; at dawn they sight two ships and, guessing them Moorish, swing their own sails to close.
A time-marker opens the stanza: one full solar circuit has passed and a new day is starting when the lookouts sight two sails. The rest is a small chase in miniature — the Portuguese swing their sails to intercept, guessing the strangers are Moors, and one stranger promptly runs for the shore in fright. Nothing heroic happens; it is a plain sea-encounter reported in the clean, forward motion of Camões' narrative Portuguese.
What a first reader misses is that the fear is the mirror image of the poem's own suspicions. This whole East African stretch runs on mutual mistrust — after the ambushes at Mozambique and Mombasa, the Portuguese assume any Moorish ship means threat, and here the Moorish ship assumes the same of them and flees. The verb 'respiram' (the winds "breathe") quietly personifies the sea breeze, a small classical touch of the animate world that Camões borrows from Virgil, set against the very human, unpoetic reflex of a captain running his people aground rather than be caught.
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