Gama's Appeal to the King
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" Mas tu, em quem mui certo confiamos Achar-se mais verdade, ó Rei benigno, E aquela certa ajuda em ti esperamos, Que teve o perdido Ítaco em Alcino, A teu porto seguro navegamos, Conduzidos do intérprete divino; Que, pois a ti nos manda, está mui claro, Que és de peito sincero, humano e raro.
But you, in whom we very surely trust that more truth is to be found, O kindly King, and from whom we hope for that sure help which the lost man of Ithaca had in Alcinous, to your safe harbor we sail, led by the divine interpreter; for, since he sends us to you, it is very clear that you are of a sincere heart, humane and rare.
Still speaking to the King of Melinde, Gama asks for the trusted help a good king owes a wandering guest, and frames his own arrival as a Homeric scene of hospitality.
Gama keeps petitioning the King of Melinde, and the whole stanza runs on a flattering syllogism: a god steered us here, so you must be a good man. He asks for "truth" and "sure help," then licenses the request with the precedent of the lost Ithacan (Ulysses) welcomed by Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, who fed the wanderer, heard his story, and sent him home. Camões is quietly casting Gama as a new Ulysses and the African king as a new Alcinous, importing the Homeric law of hospitality to a shore Homer never knew.
The line a first reader skims past is "o intérprete divino." It reads like a human dragoman, but it is Mercury: earlier in Canto 2 Venus sends the god to dispose the King of Melinde kindly and draw the fleet to a friendly port. So the compliment has real machinery under it. If a god was the one who pointed us to your harbor, the king's virtue is not Gama's guess but a divine verdict already handed down, and the flattery becomes something closer to proof.
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