From the Tagus to the Nile
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E por longos rodeios a ti manda, Por te fazer saber que tudo aquilo Que sobre o mar, que sobre as terras anda De riquezas, de lá do Tejo ao Nilo, E desde a fria plaga de Gelanda Até bem donde o Sol não muda o estilo Nos dias, sobre a gente de Etiópia, Tudo tem no seu Reino em grande cópia.
And by long roundabout ways he sends me to you, so as to let you know that everything which moves over the sea and over the lands in the way of riches — from the Tagus over there to the Nile, and from the cold shore of Zealand all the way to where the sun does not change its habit in the length of the days, over the people of Ethiopia — all of it he has in his Kingdom in great abundance.
Before the Samorim of Calicut, Gama finishes explaining why the King of Portugal sent him. The king wants nothing; he already has everything the world carries — or so Gama says.
Gama closes his introduction to the Samorim with an inventory. He draws a box around the known world — Tagus to Nile on one axis, the cold Dutch coast down to the equator on the other — and says his king already holds everything inside it. The point of the long voyage, then, was not need. It was to make the Samorim aware of a peer.
The boast is a bluff, and Camões knows it. Within a few stanzas the Portuguese gifts are laid out at Calicut and the court finds them shabby — cloth, honey, hats, the trade goods of a small Atlantic kingdom offered to a port that handled the pepper of the world. The catalogue here is a negotiating voice, not an accounting. Gama has to speak as an equal before he can be treated as one, and the geography is the only capital he has on hand.
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Os Lusíadas 7.61 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/7.61/