An Eternal and New Sepulchre
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--" E do primeiro Ilustre, que a ventura Com fama alta fizer tocar os Céus, Serei eterna e nova sepultura, Por juízos incógnitos de Deus. Aqui porá da Turca armada dura Os soberbos e prósperos troféus; Comigo de seus danos o ameaça A destruída Quíloa com Mombaça.
And of the first illustrious man whom fortune shall raise, by his high fame, to touch the heavens, I shall be an eternal and newly-made grave, through the unknowable judgments of God. Here he will lay down the proud and prosperous trophies he won from the hard Turkish fleet; ruined Quíloa, together with Mombaça, threatens him with his own destruction, and I am the means of it.
The giant Adamastor, guardian of the Cape, keeps prophesying the Portuguese disasters his waters will hold. Here he foretells the death of the first great Portuguese viceroy of India on his own shore.
Adamastor is still naming his dead. This one is Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy of India, who beat a Muslim fleet at Diu in 1509 and was killed the next year in a pointless skirmish with herdsmen at Table Bay, on the very cape the giant guards. The stanza runs his whole arc in eight lines: fame high enough to touch the sky, then a grave, then the two African cities he had sacked coming back for payment.
The line most readers slide past is "Por juízos incógnitos de Deus" — by God's unknowable judgments. It is doing real work. Camões has spent four cantos arguing that Portuguese conquest is providential, and here he concedes that providence also arranges for the conqueror to die in the dirt with no reason a reader can be given. He does not resolve it. He calls it unknowable and moves on, which is the only honest thing an epic can say when its hero's end refuses to mean anything.
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