The Eloquent Envoy
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Manda mais um, na prática elegante, Que co'o Rei nobre as pazes concertasse, E que de não sair naquele instante De suas naus em terra o desculpasse Partido assim o embaixador prestante, Como na terra ao Rei se apresentasse, Com estilo que Palas lhe ensinava, Estas palavras tais falando orava:
He sends one more envoy, in elegant speech, to arrange peace with the noble King, and to excuse him for not going ashore from his ships at that moment. The excellent ambassador, dispatched in this way, once he had presented himself to the King on land, with the style that Pallas was teaching him, spoke these words, pleading thus:
Arrived at friendly Malindi after the treachery of Mombasa, Gama sends a second, silver-tongued ambassador ashore to make peace with the King and to excuse his own refusal to leave the ships.
The stanza is pure diplomatic machinery: Gama picks a second, more polished messenger, hands him two errands (make peace, and apologize for staying aboard), lands him, and sets him before the King. Camões then names the source of the man's eloquence: Pallas, goddess of wisdom, guides his tongue. The closing line leaves him mid-bow, about to speak the oration that fills the next stanzas.
What a first reader skims past is why an ambassador must apologize for his captain refusing to come ashore. Gama has just escaped the ambush at Mombasa, and his courtesy here is caution wearing court manners: he will negotiate, but he will not put his body within reach of another shore. Invoking Pallas is not decoration either. It marks this speech as an epic set-piece in the Homeric and Virgilian mode, where a goddess lends a hero the right words at the hinge of the plot.
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