The Root of the Enmity
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Se os antigos delitos, que a malícia Humana cometeu na prisca idade, Não causaram que o vaso da niquícia, Açoute tão cruel da Cristandade, Viera pôr perpétua inimicícia Na geração de Adão, coa falsidade, Ó poderoso Rei da torpe seita, Não conceberas tu tão má suspeita.
If the ancient crimes that human malice committed in the primeval age had not caused the vessel of wickedness — that scourge so cruel to Christendom — to come and set perpetual enmity, with its falsehood, in the race of Adam, O powerful King of the vile sect, you would never have conceived so evil a suspicion.
The poet pauses over the hostility the Muslims of Calicut stir up against Gama, and traces it back past politics to original sin itself. He addresses the ruling spirit of the 'vile sect' in a single long conditional sentence.
This is one long 'if' sentence, and its whole weight rests on a verb that never lands as a fact: had ancient sin not poisoned Adam's line, you would not now suspect us. The poet steps out of the Calicut plot to explain the Muslims' hatred of Gama not as strategy but as a symptom of the Fall. The 'vessel of wickedness' and 'scourge of Christendom' is Islam, and the 'powerful King of the vile sect' he apostrophizes is its animating spirit — for Camões, ultimately the Devil working through Bacchus, the poem's standing enemy of the Portuguese.
What a first reader misses is that the grammar is doing theology. By making the enmity conditional on original sin, Camões absolves no one and everyone at once: the hostility is real, but its root is the shared inheritance of Adam, not the malice of a particular people in a particular port. The insult and the universal diagnosis sit in the same breath, which is why the stanza reads as both a slur and a lament.
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