Cotton and Indigo
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Etíopes são todos, mas parece Que com gente melhor comunicavam; Palavra alguma Arábia se conhece Entre a linguagem sua que falavam; E com pano delgado, que se tece De algodão, as cabeças apertavam; Com outro, que de tinta azul se tinge, Cada um as vergonhosas partes cinge.
They are all Ethiopians, but it seems they had dealings with a better sort of people, for an Arabic word here and there can be made out in the language of their own that they spoke. With a thin cloth woven of cotton they bound up their heads; with another, dyed blue, each one girds his shameful parts.
Gama's fleet has reached the East African coast. The Portuguese look closely at the people they meet and try to read them — skin, speech, cloth — for signs of how far the known world reaches.
This is a report, not a poem about wonder. Camões holds the fleet still for eight lines while the Portuguese take inventory of the people on the shore: what they look like, what they say, what they wear on the head and at the waist. The one thing the observers care about is the Arabic loanwords. A word of Arabic in an African language is proof that trade routes reach here from somewhere else, which means pilots, charts, and a way onward to India.
What a first reader misses is that "vergonhosas partes" is the observers' judgment, not a fact about the cloth. The stanza reads as neutral description right up to that adjective, and then it isn't: the sailors have decided which parts of a stranger's body are shameful and written it into the record as though it were the color of the dye. Camões does not comment. He lets the word sit there, and the reader who notices it has caught the whole voyage looking at itself.
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