Naked, and Crusted with the Sea
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O corpo nu, e os membros genitais, Por não ter ao nadar impedimento, Mas porém de pequenos animais Do mar todos cobertos cento e cento: Camarões e cangrejos, e outros mais Que recebem de Febe crescimento, Ostras, e camarões do musgo sujos, As costas com a casca os caramujos.
His body naked, and his genitals too, so as to have no hindrance in swimming; but even so, covered all over, hundreds on hundreds, with the small creatures of the sea: shrimp and crabs, and others besides that take their growth from Phoebe the moon, oysters, and prawns filthy with weed, and the snails carrying their shells on their backs.
Triton, Neptune's herald, is still being described as he swims to summon the sea-gods to council. Camões finishes the portrait from the shoulders down.
This finishes a portrait Camões has been building for three stanzas. Triton is the messenger of the sea, and he is not sent off with a herald's costume: he is stripped for speed, and the price of living in the water is that the water has settled on him. The stanza spends its last four lines simply listing what has taken up residence on a god's skin — shrimp, crabs, oysters, prawns, snails. A catalogue of vermin, where an epic normally puts a catalogue of arms.
The line a first reader skims is the one about Phoebe. Camões is not decorating; he is reporting natural science as his century had it, from Pliny onward: shellfish were believed to wax and wane in flesh with the moon, growing full when she was full. So the encrustation on Triton is not just grime — it is tied to the same lunar clock that pulls the tides. The god is naked because he must swim, and the sea has answered by making him one more surface it grows on.
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