The Lusiad Part 32

[96] The Turks, or Osmanli Turcomans.--_Ed._

[97] Constantinople.

[98] _Straight as he spoke._--The description of the armoury, and account which Vasco de Gama gives of his religion, consists, in the original, of thirty-two lines, which M. Castera has reduced into the following sentence: _Leur Governeur fait differentes questions au Capitaine, qui pour le satisfaire lui explique en peu des mots la Religion que les Portugais suivent, l'usage des armes dont ils se servent dans la guerre, et le dessein qui les amene._

[99] _i.e._, helmets.

[100] Coats of mail.

[101] _When Gama's lips Messiah's name confess'd._--This, and the reason of the Moor's hate, is entirely omitted by Castera. The original is, the Moor conceived hatred, "knowing they were followers of the truth which the Son of David taught." Thus rendered by Fanshaw:--

_Knowing they follow that unerring light, The Son of David holds out in his Book._

Zacocia (governor of Mozambique) made no doubt but our people were of some Mohammedan country. The mutual exchange of good offices between our people and these islanders promised a long continuance of friendship, but it proved otherwise. No sooner did Zacocia understand they were Christians, than all his kindness was turned into the most bitter hatred; he began to meditate their ruin, and sought to destroy the fleet.--OSORIO, Bp. of Sylves, Hist. of the Portug. Discov.

[102] Bacchus, G.o.d of wine.

[103] _Whom nine long months his father's thigh conceal'd._--Bacchus was nourished during his infancy in a cave of mount Meros, which in Greek signifies a _thigh_. Hence the fable.

[104] Alexander the Great, who on visiting the temple of Jupiter Ammon, was hailed as son of that deity by his priests.--_Ed._

[105] Bacchus.

[106] _His form divine he cloth'd in human shape_--

_Alecto torvam faciem et furialia membra Exuit: in vultus sese transformat aniles, Et frontem obscaenum rugis arat._

VIR. aen. vii.

[107] To be identified with the Sun, in the opinion of later mythologists; but not so in Homer, with whom Helios (the Sun) is himself a deity.--_Ed._

[108]

_Thus, when to gain his beauteous charmer's smile, The youthful lover dares the b.l.o.o.d.y toil._

This simile is taken from a favourite exercise in Spain, where it is usual to see young gentlemen of the best families entering the lists to fight with a bull, adorned with ribbons, and armed with a javelin or kind of cutla.s.s, which the Spaniards call _Machete_.

[109]

------------_e maldizia O velho inerte, e a may, que o filho cria._

Thus translated by Fanshaw--

------------_curst their ill luck, Th' old Devil and the Dam that gave them suck._

[110]

_Flints, clods, and javelins hurling as they fly, As rage, &c.--

Jamque faces et saxa volant, furor arma ministrat._

VIRG. aen. i.

The Spanish commentator on this place relates a very extraordinary instance of the _furor arma ministrans_. A Portuguese soldier at the siege of Diu in the Indies, being surrounded by the enemy, and having no ball to charge his musket, pulled out one of his teeth, and with it supplied the place of a bullet.

[111] The italics indicate that there is nothing in the original corresponding to these lines.--_Ed._

[112] See Virgil's aeneid, bk. ii.--_Ed._

[113] Quiloa is an island, with a town of the same name, on the east coast of Africa.--_Ed._

[114] _But heavenly Love's fair queen._--When GAMA arrived in the East, the Moors were the only people who engrossed the trade of those parts.

Jealous of such formidable rivals as the Portuguese, they employed every artifice to accomplish the destruction of GAMA'S fleet. As the Moors were acquainted with these seas and spoke the Arabic language, GAMA was obliged to employ them both as pilots and interpreters. The circ.u.mstance now mentioned by Camoens is an historical fact. "The Moorish pilot,"

says De Barros, "intended to conduct the Portuguese into Quiloa, telling them that place was inhabited by Christians; but a sudden storm arising, drove the fleet from that sh.o.r.e, where death or slavery would have been the certain fate of GAMA and his companions. The villainy of the pilot was afterwards discovered. As GAMA was endeavouring to enter the port of Mombaz his ship struck on a sand-bank, and finding their purpose of bringing him into the harbour defeated, two of the Moorish pilots leaped into the sea and swam ash.o.r.e. Alarmed at this tacit acknowledgment of guilt, GAMA ordered two other Moorish pilots who remained on board to be examined by whipping, who, after some time, made a full confession of their intended villainy. This discovery greatly encouraged GAMA and his men, who now interpreted the sudden storm which had driven them from Quiloa as a miraculous interposition of Divine Providence in their favour.

[115] _i.e._ Mohammed.--_Ed._

[116] After GAMA had been driven from Quiloa by a sudden storm, the a.s.surances of the Mozambique pilot, that the city was chiefly inhabited by Christians, strongly inclined him to enter the harbour of Mombas.

[117] "There were," says Osorius, "ten men in the fleet under sentence of death, whose lives had been spared on condition that, wherever they might be landed, they should explore the country and make themselves acquainted with the manners and laws of the people."

During the reign of Emmanuel, and his predecessor John II., few criminals were executed in Portugal. These great and political princes employed the lives which were forfeited to the public in the most dangerous undertakings of public utility. In their foreign expeditions the condemned criminals were sent upon the most hazardous undertakings.

If death was their fate, it was the punishment they had merited: if successful in what was required, their crimes were expiated; and often they rendered their country the greatest atonement for their guilt which men in their circ.u.mstances could possibly make. What mult.i.tudes every year, in the prime of their life, end their days in Great Britain by the hands of the executioner! That the legislature _might_ devise means to make the greatest part of these lives useful to society is a fact, which surely cannot be disputed; though, perhaps, the remedy of an evil so shocking to humanity may be at some distance.

[118] Semele was the mother of Bacchus, but, as he was prematurely born, Jupiter, his father, sewed him up in his thigh until he came to maturity.--_Ed._

[119]

_On it, the picture of that shape he placed, In which the Holy Spirit did alight, The picture of the dove, so white, so chaste, On the blest Virgin's head, so chaste, so white._

In these lines, the best of all Fanshaw's, the happy repet.i.tion "so chaste, so white," is a beauty which, though not contained in the original, the present translator was unwilling to lose.

[120] See the Preface.

[121] When GAMA lay at anchor among the islands of St. George, near Mozambique, "there came three Ethiopians on board (says Faria y Sousa) who, seeing St. Gabriel painted on the p.o.o.p, fell on their knees in token of their Christianity, which had been preached to them in the primitive times, though now corrupted." Barros, c. 4, and Castaneda, l.

i. c. 9, report, that the Portuguese found two or three Abyssinian Christians in the city of Mombas, who had an oratory in their house. The following short account of the Christians of the East may perhaps be acceptable. In the south parts of Malabar, about 200,000 of the inhabitants professed Christianity before the arrival of the Portuguese.

They use the Syriac language in their services, and read the Scriptures in that tongue, and call themselves Christians of St. Thomas, by which apostle their ancestors had been converted. For 1300 years they had been under the Patriarch of Babylon, who appointed their _Mutran_, or archbishop. Dr. Geddes, in his History of the Church of Malabar, relates that Francisco Roz, a Jesuit missionary, complained to Menezes, the Portuguese archbishop of Goa, that when he showed these people an image of the Virgin Mary, they cried out, "Away with that filthiness, we are Christians, and do not adore idols."

Dom Frey Aleixo de Menezes, archbishop of Goa, "endeavoured to thrust upon the church of Malabar the whole ma.s.s of popery, which they were before unacquainted with."--Millar's History of the Propag. of Christianity.

[122] Venus.

[123] _Proud of her kindred birth._--The French translator has the following note on this place:--"This is one of the places which discover our author's intimate acquaintance with mythology, and at the same time how much attention his allegory requires. Many readers, on finding that the protectress of the Lusians sprung from the sea, would be apt to exclaim, Behold, the birth of the terrestrial Venus! How can a nativity so infamous be ascribed to the celestial Venus, who represents Religion?

I answer, that Camoens had not his eye on those fables, which derive the birth of Venus from the foam of the waves, mixed with the blood which flowed from the dishonest wound of Saturn: he carries his views higher; his Venus is from a fable more n.o.ble. Nigidius relates that two fishes one day conveyed an egg to the seash.o.r.e. This egg was hatched by two pigeons whiter than snow, and gave birth to the a.s.syrian Venus, which, in the pagan theology, is the same with the celestial. She instructed mankind in religion, gave them the lessons of virtue and the laws of equity. Jupiter, in reward of her labours, promised to grant her whatever she desired. She prayed him to give immortality to the two fishes, who had been instrumental in her birth, and the fishes were accordingly placed in the Zodiac, the sign Pisces.... This fable agrees perfectly with Religion, as I could clearly show; but I think it more proper to leave to the ingenious reader the pleasure of tracing the allegory."