Sails Out for the Dawn
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Outras palavras tais lhe respondia O Capitão, e logo as velas dando, Para as terras da Aurora se partia, Que tanto tempo há já que vai buscando. No piloto que leva não havia Falsidade, mas antes vai mostrando A navegação certa, e assim caminha Já mais seguro do que dantes vinha.
The Captain answered him with other words to this effect, and at once, setting the sails, he departed for the lands of the Dawn, which he has already been seeking for so long. In the pilot he carries there was no falsehood; on the contrary, he goes on showing them the true course, and so the fleet travels on, safer now than it came before.
Gama takes leave of the king of Melinde and puts to sea again, this time with a Muslim pilot who — unlike the treacherous ones at Mombasa — is telling the truth. The last leg of the outbound voyage begins.
This is a hinge stanza, and it does its work quietly. Gama answers the king, the sails go up, and the fleet turns east toward "the lands of the Dawn" — India named by the direction of sunrise rather than by any name on a chart. The last two lines carry the point: the pilot is honest, the course is true, and the ships are safer now than when they arrived.
What a first reader misses is how loaded the word Falsidade is here. Every pilot the Portuguese took on before this one was a plant — Mombasa and Mozambique sent them guides meant to wreck the fleet on a reef or steer it into an ambush. So this stanza is not a bland travel note. It is Camões marking the first time in the whole voyage that the man at the helm is not lying, and he puts the word at the head of line 6 where you cannot miss it. The reassurance lasts exactly four stanzas: Bacchus is already on his way to the sea-gods to arrange the storm.
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