The Isle of Wood
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" Passamos a grande Ilha da Madeira, Que do muito arvoredo assim se chama, Das que nós povoamos, a primeira, Mais célebre por nome que por fama: Mas nem por ser do mundo a derradeira Se lhe aventajam quantas Vénus ama, Antes, sendo esta sua, se esquecera De Cipro, Gnido, Pafos e Citera.
We passed the great Isle of Madeira, which takes its name from its heavy woods, the first of those we settled, better known by its name than by anything it has done. Yet for all that it lies at the world's far edge, none of the islands Venus loves stands above it: if this one were hers, she would forget Cyprus, Gnidos, Paphos and Cythera.
Gama is telling the king of Melinde the story of the voyage out. The fleet has left the Tagus behind, and the first landfall he names is Madeira, the oldest of Portugal's Atlantic colonies.
Gama is narrating the outward voyage to the king of Melinde, and this is the first landfall. He does what a navigator does: names the island, explains the name (madeira means wood, and the Portuguese found it forested), places it in the record as the first Atlantic settlement, and moves on. The one barb is in line four, "more celebrated by name than by fame" — a small, dry admission that Madeira is known but has done nothing worth telling.
Then the last four lines take the barb back with interest, and that is the move a first reader misses. Camões drops the four cult-islands of Venus — Cyprus, Gnidos, Paphos, Cythera, the standard classical list — and says Madeira would make her abandon all of them. It is a compliment paid in Ovid's currency: the new Atlantic is being handed the mythological furniture of the old Mediterranean. Camões will do this on a much larger scale in Canto 9, where Venus actually builds the sailors an island. This stanza is the first quiet notice that she has somewhere new to go.
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