How Easy the Grave Is
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" Enfim que nesta incógnita espessura Deixamos para sempre os companheiros, Que em tal caminho e em tanta desventura Foram sempre conosco aventureiros. Quão fácil é ao corpo a sepultura! Quaisquer ondas do mar, quaisquer outeiros Estranhos, assim mesmo como aos nossos, Receberão de todo o Ilustre os ossos.
So at last, in this unknown thicket, we left our companions behind for good — men who along such a road and through so much misfortune had always been adventurers at our side. How easy a grave is for the body! Any waves of the sea, any foreign hills, exactly as our own do, will take in the bones of every illustrious man.
Gama, telling the King of Melinde what the voyage cost, reaches the men buried on unknown African shores. This closes his account of the sailors lost to sickness and mischance along the way.
This is Gama winding up the ledger of the voyage's dead. He has just named the men lost to sickness and accident on the African coast, and here he leaves them: buried in a wilderness with no name, in ground no Portuguese will ever visit again. The stanza's grammar keeps circling back to "sempre" — always with us, gone forever — which is the whole arithmetic of the loss in one word used twice.
The consolation in line 5 is the part worth slowing down for. "How easy the grave is for the body" sounds like Roman stoicism, and it is: the earth covers everyone, a corpse asks for no homeland. But Camões has Gama say it immediately after admitting he abandoned these men permanently. The ease isn't comfort so much as the thing that stings — the body settles anywhere, which is exactly why nobody had to bring them home.
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