Scraping the Hulls at Saint Blaise
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Aqui de limos, cascas e d'ostrinhos, Nojosa criação das águas fundas, Alimpamos as naus, que dos caminhos Longos do mar, vêm sórdidas e imundas. Dos hóspedes que tínhamos vizinhos, Com mostras aprazíveis e jocundas, Houvemos sempre o usado mantimento, Limpos de todo o falso pensamento.
Here we scraped the ships clean of slime, barnacle shells and little oysters — the loathsome brood of the deep waters — for the ships come back filthy and foul from the long roads of the sea. From the people who were our neighbours and our hosts, with pleasant and cheerful faces, we always got the usual provisions, and they were clean of any false intent.
Gama, telling his story to the king of Melinde, describes the stop on the African coast where the fleet was careened and scoured after months at sea, and where the local people traded with them in good faith.
This is maintenance. Gama stops the story of storms and gods to describe careening the fleet: the hulls are furred with weed, barnacles and small oysters after months at sea, and the crews scrape them off. Then the local people bring food, and the trade is honest. Two ordinary things, told plainly.
What a first reader misses is the last line. "Limpos de todo o falso pensamento" is doing double duty: the ships are being cleaned of one kind of filth, and the exchange with these Africans is clean of another. Camões is measuring this landfall against the ones on either side of it — Mombasa, where the pilot's welcome was a trap — and the word for clean carries across both. He rarely says a stop was simply good. Here he does, and the compliment is built out of scraping hulls.
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