The Idolater Wants to See the Ships
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Já com desejos o Idolatra ardia De ver isto, que o Mouro lhe contava. Manda esquipar batéis que ir ver queria Os lenhos em que o Gama navegava. Ambos partem da praia, a quem seguia A Naira geração, que o mar coalhava. A capitania sobem forte e bela, Onde Paulo os recebe a bordo dela.
By now the idolater was burning with desire to see for himself what the Moor had been telling him. He orders boats fitted out, since he wanted to go and look at the ships in which Gama sailed. The two of them set off from the beach, and after them came the whole Nair race, so many that they curdled the sea. They climb aboard the flagship, strong and beautiful, and there Paulo receives them on her deck.
In Calicut, the Catual (the Samorin's governor) has been hearing Paulo da Gama and Monçaide explain the painted banners of Portuguese history. Curiosity finally moves him to go out and see the fleet itself.
This is a hinge stanza: the long gallery scene ends and the poem moves back out onto the water. The Catual has been standing in front of painted banners hearing Portuguese history secondhand; now he wants the thing itself. Camões marks the turn with verbs of motion stacked one on top of another - manda, ir, ver, partem, sobem - after a canto of people mostly standing and talking.
What a first reader skims past is coalhava. To curdle the sea is not decoration; it is the poem quietly counting. The Nairs are the warrior caste of Calicut, and Camões has them swarm out in numbers thick enough to set the water, while the Portuguese answer with one ship and one man at the rail. That imbalance is the real subject of the second half of Canto 7, and the stanza states it in a single verb rather than a boast.
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