No Doctor Aboard
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" -- Apodrecia com um fétido e bruto Cheiro, que o ar vizinho inficionava; Não tínhamos ali médico astuto, Cirurgião subtil menos se achava; Mas qualquer, neste ofício pouco instructo, Pela carne já podre assim cortava Como se fora morta, e bem convinha, Pois que morto ficava quem a tinha.
It rotted with a foul, brutal stench that infected the air around it. We had no shrewd physician there, and a skilful surgeon was even harder to come by; but anyone at all, with little training in that trade, would cut away the already rotten flesh just so, as though it were dead meat — and rightly so, since the man it belonged to was as good as dead already.
Gama, telling the King of Melinde about the voyage out, describes the scurvy that ate his crews alive. The rot of the gums has become a stench, and there is no one on board trained to treat it.
This is Gama telling the King of Melinde what scurvy did to his crews. The stanza is almost clinical: the smell, the missing doctor, the missing surgeon, and then whoever happened to be standing there cutting the rotten flesh out of a shipmate's mouth. Camões gives no name to the sick man and no heroism to the one holding the knife.
The turn is in the last two lines. "As if it were dead" is not a simile the sailors chose — the flesh really was dead, and the joke closes on the man himself: he kept the flesh only as long as he was alive to keep it. Camões served in the East and saw ships like this; the epic's machinery of gods and prophecy stops here, and nothing rescues anyone. That silence is the point.
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