St. Elmo's Fire and the Waterspout
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" Vi, claramente visto, o lume vivo Que a marítima gente tem por santo Em tempo de tormenta e vento esquivo, De tempestade escura e triste pranto. Não menos foi a todos excessivo Milagre, e coisa certo de alto espanto, Ver as nuvens do mar com largo cano Sorver as altas águas do Oceano.
I saw, plainly and clearly, the living flame that seafaring people hold to be holy in time of storm and hostile wind, of dark tempest and sad weeping. No less excessive a miracle to us all, and a thing certainly of high astonishment, was to see the clouds of the sea draw down a broad spout and suck up the high waters of the Ocean.
Gama is telling the King of Melinde what his fleet saw on the open Atlantic. Here he reports two sights no one at court would have witnessed: the light sailors call holy, and a waterspout drinking the sea.
Two sea phenomena, reported as eyewitness. The first is the electrical glow at a ship's masthead that sailors called St. Elmo's fire and took as a sign of protection; the second is a waterspout. Gama gives each the same weight and the same word, milagre, and offers no explanation of either.
The pull of the stanza is in who is speaking and to whom. Gama is at the table of the King of Melinde, and what he claims is not learning but sight: vi, claramente visto. Camoes is quietly making a case that sailors know things scholars do not, because they were there. The next stanza starts explaining the waterspout anyway, in detail, and ends by telling the philosophers who wrote about the world from books that experience has taught the plain seaman more than they ever guessed.
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