The Year Named by the Sun
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Entrava neste tempo o eterno lume No animal Nemeio truculento, E o mundo, que com tempo se consume, Na sexta idade andava enfermo e lento: Nela vê, como tinha por costume, Cursos do sol quatorze vezes cento, Com mais noventa e sete, em que corria, Quando no mar a armada se estendia.
At that time the eternal light was entering the savage Nemean beast, and the world, which time itself wears away, was moving through its sixth age, sick and slow. In that age it sees, as it always had, courses of the sun fourteen times a hundred, with ninety-seven more, in which it was running, when the fleet spread out upon the sea.
Gama, telling the story of the voyage to the king of Melinde, dates the departure. Instead of naming a year outright, he gives it as a position of the sun and a count of solar circuits.
This is a date, delivered the long way around. The sun entering the "Nemean animal" means Leo, the lion Hercules killed, so the season is high summer; the counted solar circuits give 1497, the year Gama's ships left Lisbon. Camoes will not simply write the number. He makes the reader assemble it from the zodiac and from arithmetic spread across three lines.
What is easy to miss is the tone underneath the display. The world here is not a stage for glory but a sick body: enfermo e lento, in the sixth and last age before the end, wasting with the time that measures it. So the fleet sets out into a creation already running down. That framing belongs to Gama the narrator, who is telling this to a foreign king after the voyage has cost him almost everything, and it sets the register for the whole canto he is about to give.
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