They Drove Us From the Tagus
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Porque eles, com virtude sobre-humana, Os deitaram dos campos abundosos Do rico Tejo e fresco Goadiana, Com feitos memoráveis e famosos: E não contentes inda, e na Africana Parte, cortando os mares procelosos, Nos não querem deixar viver seguros, Tomando-nos cidades e altos muros.
For these men, with a valor beyond what is human, drove them out of the rich Tagus's abundant fields and the cool Guadiana, by deeds memorable and famous. And still not satisfied, they cut across the stormy seas into the African region as well, where they will not let us live in safety, but keep taking our cities and high walls from us.
The Muslim merchants of Calicut are denouncing Gama to the Catual, arguing that the Portuguese are conquerors, not traders. Here they recite their own grievance: these men expelled them from Iberia and then followed them across the sea into Africa.
This is not the narrator speaking. It is the Muslim merchants of Calicut, making their case to the Catual that Gama's men are conquerors wearing the mask of traders. Their evidence is history: the Portuguese pushed the Moors off the Tagus and the Guadiana, and then, not stopping at the Strait, crossed into North Africa and went on taking walled towns there. On the facts they are right, and the Catual has no way to check them.
The thing a first reader misses is who is paying the compliment. "Virtude sobre-humana," "feitos memoráveis e famosos" — that is the vocabulary of the poem's own praise, put in the mouths of the enemy. Camões lets the accusation stand because it doubles as testimony: the case against the Portuguese is that they win. What the merchants call an intolerable habit of taking cities is the same record the epic exists to celebrate, and the reader is asked to hear both at once.
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