The River of Good Signs
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" Muito grandemente aqui nos alegramos Com a gente, e com as novas muito mais: Pelos sinais que neste rio achamos O nome lhe ficou dos Bons Sinais. Um padrão nesta terra alevantamos, Que, para assinalar lugares tais, Trazia alguns; o nome tem do belo Guiador de Tobias a Gabelo.
Here we rejoiced greatly at the people, and much more at the news. Because of the signs we found in this river, the name Rio dos Bons Sinais, the River of Good Signs, stayed with it. In this land we raised a stone pillar; the fleet carried several, to mark places like this one. It takes its name from the beautiful guide who led Tobias to Gabelo.
Gama is still narrating his outbound voyage to the king of Melinde. The fleet has stopped at a river on the East African coast where, for the first time, the sailors meet people who know of India and wear cloth from the East. They name the river and leave a marker.
The stanza does two pieces of business at once: it names a river and plants a pillar. The joy is not about the place itself but about information. The people here had heard of India and had seen goods from it, so the river gets called Good Signs, named for what it told the Portuguese rather than for what it is. The padrao is the physical half of the same act: a carved stone column, stamped with the arms of Portugal, that Gama's ships carried as cargo and set up on the coasts they claimed to have reached first.
The last two lines are the part a first reader slides past. The pillar was named for Saint Raphael, and Camoes refuses to say the name outright, calling him instead the beautiful guide who led Tobias to Gabelo. That is a story from the Book of Tobit: the archangel walks beside a young man on a long journey to collect money in a distant country, and gets him home safely. Gama's ships were named Sao Gabriel and Sao Rafael, and the archangel that a Portuguese sailor wanted with him was not the one who announces things but the one who walks the whole road and brings you back.
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