The Master's Whistle
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Mas, neste passo, assim prontos estando Eis o mestre, que olhando os ares anda, O apito toca; acordam despertando Os marinheiros duma e doutra banda; E porque o vento vinha refrescando, Os traquetes das gáveas tomar manda: " Alerta, disse, estai, que o vento cresce Daquela nuvem negra que aparece. "
But at this moment, while they stood thus ready, behold the master, who goes about watching the skies, sounds his whistle; the sailors wake, rousing themselves from one side of the ship and the other. And because the wind was coming on fresher, he orders the foresails taken in from the tops. "Alert," he said, "stand ready, for the wind is growing out of that black cloud that is appearing."
The sailors have just finished passing the night with stories. The watch officer, still reading the sky, cuts the storytelling short with a whistle and an order to shorten sail.
This is the hinge of the canto. The sailors have spent the night telling the story of the Twelve of England to stay awake on watch; the whistle cuts the tale off mid-air and the poem changes register instantly, from storytelling to work. Everything in the stanza is an order or a response to one: the master reads the sky, blows, and men move.
What a first reader skims past is the vocabulary. Traquetes and gáveas are not poetic words; they are the foresails and the topmasts, the specific canvas you shorten first when the wind rises. Camões had sailed to India and back, and here he lets the technical language stand unornamented in the middle of an epic. Virgil's storms arrive as weather that happens to men. This one arrives as a job.
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