The Lusiad Part 50

[607] _Malacca._--The conquest of this place was one of the greatest actions of Albuquerque. It became the chief port of the eastern part of Portuguese India, and second only to Goa. Besides a great many pieces of ordnance which were carried away by the Moors who escaped, 3000 large cannon remained the prize of the victors. When Albuquerque was on the way to Malacca, he attacked a large s.h.i.+p; but, just as his men were going to board her, she suddenly appeared all in flames, which obliged the Portuguese to bear off. Three days afterwards the same vessel sent a boat to Albuquerque, offering an alliance, which was accepted. The flames, says Osorius, were only artificial, and did not the least damage. Another wonderful adventure immediately happened. The admiral soon after sent his long-boats to attack a s.h.i.+p commanded by one Nehoada Beeguea. The enemy made an obstinate resistance. Nehoada himself was pierced with several mortal wounds, but lost not one drop of blood till a bracelet was taken off his arm, when immediately the blood gushed out.

According to Osorius, this was said to be occasioned by the virtue of a stone in the bracelet, taken out of an animal called Cabrisia, which, when worn on the body, could prevent the effusion of blood from the most grievous wounds.

[608] _Yet art thou stain'd._--A detail of all the grant actions of Albuquerque would have been tedious and unpoetical. Camoens has chosen the most brilliant, and has happily suppressed the rest by a display of indignation. The French translator has the following note on this pa.s.sage: "Behold another instance of our author's prejudice! The action which he condemns had nothing in it blameable: but, as he was of a most amorous const.i.tution, he thought every fault which could plead an amour in its excuse ought to be pardoned; but true heroes, such as Albuquerque, follow other maxims. This great man had in his palace a beautiful Indian slave. He viewed her with the eyes of a father, and the care of her education was his pleasure. A Portuguese soldier, named Ruy Diaz, had the boldness to enter the general's apartment, where he succeeded so well with the girl that he obtained his desire. When Albuquerque heard of it, he immediately ordered him to the gallows."

Camoens, however, was no such undistinguis.h.i.+ng libertine as this would represent him. In a few pages we find him praising the continence of Don Henry de Meneses, whose victory over his pa.s.sions he calls the highest excellence of youth. Nor does it appear by what authority the Frenchman a.s.sures us of the chaste paternal affection which Albuquerque bore to this Indian girl. It was the great aim of Albuquerque to establish colonies in India, and, for that purpose, he encouraged his soldiers to marry with the natives. The most sightly girls were selected, and educated in the religion and household arts of Portugal, and portioned at the expense of the general. These he called his daughters, and with great pleasure he used to attend their weddings, several couples being usually joined together at one time. At one of these nuptials, says Faria, the festivity having continued late, and the brides being mixed together, several of the bridegrooms committed a blunder. The mistakes of the night, however, as they were all equal in point of honour, were mutually forgiven in the morning, and each man took his proper wife whom he had received at the altar. This delicate anecdote of Albuquerque's sons and daughters is as bad a commentary on the note of Castera as it is on the severity which the commander showed to poor Diaz. Nor does Camoens stand alone in the condemnation of the general. The historian agrees with the poet. Mentioning the death of D. Antonio Noronha, "This gentleman," says Faria, "used to moderate the violent temper of his uncle, Albuquerque, which soon after showed itself in rigid severity. He ordered a soldier to be hanged for an amour with one of the slaves whom he called daughters, and whom he used to give in marriage. When some of his officers asked him what authority he had to take the poor man's life, he drew his sword, told them that was his commission, and instantly broke them." To marry his soldiers with the natives was the plan of Albuquerque: his severity, therefore, seems unaccountable, unless we admit the 'perhaps' of Camoens, _ou de cioso_, perhaps it was jealousy.--But, whatever incensed the general, the execution of the soldier was contrary to the laws of every nation;{*} and the honest indignation of Camoens against one of the greatest of his countrymen, one who was the grand architect of the Portuguese empire in the East, affords a n.o.ble instance of that manly freedom of sentiment which knows no right by which king or peer may do injustice to the meanest subject.

Nor can we omit the observation, that the above note of Castera is of a piece with the French devotion we have already seen him pay to the name of king, a devotion which breathes the true spirit of the blessed advice given by Father Paul to the republic of Venice: "When a n.o.bleman commits an offence against a subject," says the Jesuit, "let every means be tried to justify him. But, if a subject has offended a n.o.bleman, let him be punished with the utmost severity."

{*} Osorius relates the affair of Diaz with some other circ.u.mstances; but with no difference that affects this a.s.sertion.

[609] _Not Ammon._--Campaspe, the most beautiful concubine of Alexander the Great, was given by that monarch to Apelles, whom he perceived in love with her. Araspas had strict charge of the fair captive, Panthea.

His attempt on her virtue was forgiven by Cyrus.

[610] _And Flandria's earldom on the knight bestow'd._--"Baldwin, surnamed Iron-arm, Grand Forester of Flanders, being in love with Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald, and widow of Ethelwolf, king of England, obtained his desire by force. Charles, though at first he highly resented, afterwards pardoned his crime, and consented to his marriage with the princess."--CASTERA.

This digression in the song of the nymph bears, in manner, a striking resemblance to the histories which often, even in the heat of battle, the heroes of Homer relate to each other. That these little episodes have their beauty and propriety in an epic poem will strongly appear from a view of M. de la Motte's translation of the Iliad into French verse. The four and twenty books of Homer he has contracted into twelve, and these contain no more lines than about four books of the original. A thousand embellishments which the warm poetical feelings of Homer suggested to him are thus thrown out by the Frenchman. But what is the consequence of this improvement? The work of La Motte is unread, even by his own countrymen, and despised by every foreigner who has the least relish for poetry and Homer.

[611] _And midnight horror shakes Medina's shrine._--Medina, the city where Mohammed is buried. About six years after GAMA'S discovery of India, the Sultan of Egypt sent Maurus, the abbot of the monks at Jerusalem, who inhabit Mount Sion, on an emba.s.sy to Pope Julius II. The sultan, with severe threats to the Christians of the East in case of refusal, entreated the Pope to desire Emmanuel, king of Portugal, to send no more fleets to the Indian seas. The Pope sent Maurus to Emmanuel, who returned a very spirited answer to his holiness, a.s.suring him that no threats, no dangers, could make him alter his resolutions, and lamenting that it had not yet been in his power to fulfil his purpose of demolis.h.i.+ng the sepulchre and erasing the memorials of Mohammed from the earth. This, he says was the first purpose of sending his fleets to India. It is with great art that Camoens so often reminds us of the grand design of the expedition of his heroes to subvert Mohammedanism, and found a Christian empire in the East. But the dignity which this gives to his poem has already been observed in the preface.

[612] _Where Sheba's sapient queen the sceptre bore._--The Abyssinians contend that their country is the Sheba mentioned in the Scripture, and that the queen who visited Solomon bore a son to that monarch, from whom their royal family, to the present time, is descended.

[613] _s.n.a.t.c.h'd from thy golden throne._--GAMA only reigned three months viceroy of India. During his second voyage, the third which the Portuguese made to India, he gave the zamorim some considerable defeats by sea, besides his victories over the Moors. These, however, are judiciously omitted by Camoens, as the less striking part of his character.

The French translator is highly pleased with the prediction of GAMA'S death, delivered to himself at the feast. "The siren," says he, "persuaded that GAMA is a hero exempt from weakness, does not hesitate to mention the end of his life. GAMA listens without any mark of emotion; the feast and the song continue. If I am not deceived, this is truly great."

[614] _Victorious Henry._--Don Henry de Menezes. He was only twenty-eight when appointed to the government of India. He died in his thirtieth year, a n.o.ble example of the most disinterested heroism.

[615] _Great Mascarine._--Pedro de Mascarenhas. The injustice done to this brave officer, and the usurpation of his government by Lopez Vaz de Sampayo, afford one of the most interesting periods of the history of the Portuguese in India.

[616] _Great Nunio._--Nunio de Cunha, one of the most worthy of the Portuguese governors.

[617] _Awed by his fame._--That brave, generous spirit, which prompted Camoens to condemn the great Albuquerque for injustice to a common soldier, has here deserted him. In place of poetical compliment, on the terrors of his name, Noronha deserved infamy. The siege of Dio, it is true, was raised on the report of his approach, but that report was the stratagem of Coje Zofar, one of the general officers of the a.s.sailants.

The delays of Noronha were as highly blamable as his treatment of his predecessor, the excellent Nunio, was unworthy of a gentleman.

[618] _A son of thine, O Gama._--Stephen de Gama.

[619] _A vet'ran, fam'd on Brazil's sh.o.r.e._--Martin Alonzo de Souza. He was celebrated for clearing the coast of Brazil of several pirates, who were formidable to that infant colony.

[620] _O'er blood-stain'd ground._--This is as near the original as elegance will allow--_de sangue cheyo_--which Fanshaw has thus punned:--

"With no little loss, Sending him home again by _Weeping-Cross_"--

a place near Banbury in Oxfords.h.i.+re.

[621] Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India.--_Ed._

[622] _The Rumien fierce, who boasts the name of Rome._--When the victories of the Portuguese began to overspread the East, several Indian princes, by the counsels of the Moors, applied for a.s.sistance to the Sultan of Egypt, and the Grand Signior. The troops of these Mohammedan princes were in the highest reputation for bravery, and though, composed of many different nations, were known among the orientals by one common name. Ignorance delights in the marvellous. The history of ancient Rome made the same figure among the easterns, as that of the fabulous, or heroic, ages does with us, with this difference, it was better believed.

The Turks of Roumania pretended to be the descendants of the Roman conquerors, and the Indians gave them and their auxiliaries the name of Rumes, or Romans. In the same manner, the fame of G.o.dfrey in the East conferred the name of Franks on all the western Christians, who, on their part, gave the name of Moors to all the Mohammedans of the East.

[623] _No hope, bold Mascarene._--The commander of Diu, or Dio, during this siege, one of the most memorable in the Portuguese history.

[624] _Fierce Hydal-Kan._--The t.i.tle of the lords or princes of Decan, who in their wars with the Portuguese have sometimes brought 400,000 men into the field. The prince here mentioned, after many revolts, was at last finally subdued by Don John de Castro, the fourth viceroy of India, with whose reign our poet judiciously ends the prophetic song.

Albuquerque laid the plan, and Castro completed the system of the Portuguese empire in the East. It is with propriety, therefore, that the prophecy given to GAMA is here summed up. Nor is the discretion of Camoens in this instance inferior to his judgment. He is now within a few years of his own times, when he himself was upon the scene in India.

But whatever he had said of his contemporaries would have been liable to misconstruction, and every sentence would have been branded with the epithets of flattery or malice. A little poet would have been happy in such an opportunity to resent his wrongs. But the silent contempt of Camoens does him true honour.

In this historical song, as already hinted, the translator has been attentive, as much as he could, to throw it into these universal languages, the picturesque and characteristic. To convey the sublimest instruction to princes, is, according to Aristotle, the peculiar province of the epic muse. The striking points of view in which the different characters of the governors of India are here placed, are in the most happy conformity to this ingenious canon of the Stagyrite.

[625]

_In whirling circles now they fell, now rose, Yet never rose nor fell.--_

The motions of the heavenly bodies, in every system, bear at all times the same uniform relation to each other; these expressions, therefore, are strictly just. The first relates to the appearance, the second to the reality. Thus, while to us the sun appears to go down, to more western inhabitants of the globe he appears to rise, and while he rises to us, he is going down to the more eastern; the difference being entirely relative to the various parts of the earth. And in this the expressions of our poet are equally applicable to the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. The ancient hypothesis which made our earth the centre of the universe, is the system adopted by Camoens, a happiness, in the opinion of the translator, to the English Lusiad. The new system is so well known, that a poetical description of it would have been no novelty to the English reader. The other has not only that advantage in its favour: but this description is perhaps the finest and fullest that ever was given of it in poetry, that of Lucretius, l. v. being chiefly argumentative, and therefore less picturesque.

Our author studied at the university of Coimbra, where the ancient system and other doctrines of the Aristotelians then, and long afterward, prevailed.

[626] _He holds His loftiest state._--Called by the old philosophers and school divines the sensorium of the Deity.

[627] _These spheres behold._--According to the Peripatetics, the universe consisted of eleven spheres inclosed within each other; as Fanshaw has familiarly expressed it by a simile which he has lent our author. The first of these spheres, he says--

"Doth (_as in a nest Of boxes_) all the other orbs comprise."

In their accounts of this first-mentioned, but eleventh, sphere, which they called the Empyrean, or heaven of the blest, the disciples of Aristotle, and the Arab Moors, gave loose to all the warmth of imagination. And several of the Christian fathers applied to it the descriptions of heaven which are found in the Holy Scripture.

[628] _Hence motion darts its force._--This is the tenth sphere, the _Primum Mobile_ of the ancient system. To account for the appearances of the heavens, the Peripatetics ascribed a double motion to it. While its influence drew the other orbs from east to west, they supposed it had a motion of its own from west to east. To effect this, the ponderous weight and interposition of the ninth sphere, or crystalline heaven, was necessary. The ancient astronomers observed that the stars s.h.i.+fted their places. This they called the motion of the crystalline heaven, expressed by our poet at the rate of one pace during two hundred solar years. The famous Arab astronomer, Abulhasan, in his Meadows of Gold, calculates the revolution of this sphere to consist of 49,000 of our years. But modern discoveries have not only corrected the calculation,{*} but have also ascertained the reason of the apparent motion of the fixed stars.

The earth is not a perfect sphere; the quant.i.ty of matter is greater at the equator; hence the earth turns on her axis in a rocking motion, revolving round the axis of the ecliptic, which is called the procession of the equinoxes, and makes the stars seem to s.h.i.+ft their places at about the rate of a degree in 72 years; according to which all the stars seem to perform one revolution in the s.p.a.ce of 25,920 years, after which they return exactly to the same situation as at the beginning of this period. However imperfect in their calculations, the Chaldean astronomers perceived that the motions of the heavens composed one great revolution. This they called the _annus magnus_, which those who did not understand them mistook for a restoration of all things to their first originals.

{*} However deficient the astronomy of Abulhasan may be, it is nothing to the calculation of his prophet Mohammed, who tells his disciples, that the stars were each about the bigness of a house, and hung from the sky on chains of gold.

[629] _And binds the starry sphere._--This was called the firmament, or eighth heaven. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Diana, were the planets which gave name to, and whose orbits composed, the other spheres or heavens.

[630] _In s.h.i.+ning frost the Northern Chariot rides._--Commonly called Charles' Wain. Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus, king of Ethiopia, and of Ca.s.siope. Ca.s.siope boasted that she and her daughter were more beautiful than Juno and the Nereids. Andromeda, to appease the G.o.ddess, was, at her father's command, chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster, but was saved by Perseus, who obtained of Jupiter that all the family should be placed among the stars. Orion was a hunter, who, for an attempt on Diana, was stung to death by a serpent. The star of his name portends tempests. The Dogs; fable gives this honour to those of different hunters. The faithful dog of Erigone, however, that died mad with grief for the death of his mistress, has the best t.i.tle to preside over the dog-days. The Swan; whose form Jupiter borrowed to enjoy Leda.

The Hare, when pursued by Orion, was saved by Mercury, and placed in heaven, to signify that Mercury presides over melancholy dispositions.

The Lyre, with which Orpheus charmed Pluto. The Dragon which guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides, and the s.h.i.+p Argo complete the number of the constellations mentioned by Camoens. If our author has blended the appearances of heaven with those of the painted artificial sphere, it is in the manner of the cla.s.sics. Ovid, in particular, thus describes the heavens, in the second book of his Metamorphoses.

[631] _Such are their laws impress'd by G.o.d's dread will._--Though a modern narrative of gallant adventures by no means requires the supposition of a particular Providence, that supposition, however, is absolutely necessary to the grandeur of an epic poem. The great examples of Homer and Virgil prove it; and Camoens understood and felt its force.

While his fleet combat all the horrors of unploughed oceans, we do not view his heroes as idle wanderers; the care of heaven gives their voyage the greatest importance. When GAMA falls on his knees and spreads his hands to heaven on the discovery of India, we are presented with a figure infinitely more n.o.ble than that of the most successful conqueror who is supposed to act under the influence of fatalism or chance. The human mind is conscious of its own weakness. It expects an elevation in poetry, and demands a degree of importance superior to the caprices of unmeaning accident. The poetical reader cannot admire the hero who is subject to such blind fortuity. He appears to us with an abject, uninteresting littleness. Our poetical ideas of permanent greatness demand a GAMA, a hero whose enterprises and whose person interest the care of Heaven and the happiness of his people. Nor must this supposition be confined merely to the machinery. The reason why it pleases, also requires, that the supposition should be uniform throughout the whole poem. Virgil, by dismissing Eneas through the ivory gate of Elysium, has hinted that all his pictures of a future state were merely dreams, and has thus destroyed the highest merit of the compliment to his patron Augustus. But Camoens has certainly been more happy. A fair opportunity offered itself to indulge the opinions of Lucretius and the Academic Grove; but Camoens, in ascribing the government of the universe to the will of G.o.d, has not only preserved the philosophy of his poem perfectly uniform, but has also shown that the Peripatetic system is, in this instance, exactly conformable to the Newtonian.

Though the Author of nature has placed man in a state of moral agency, and made his happiness and misery to depend upon it, and though every page of human history is stained with the tears of injured innocence and the triumphs of guilt, with miseries which must affect a moral, or thinking being, yet we have been told, that G.o.d perceiveth it not, and that what mortals call moral evil vanishes from before His more perfect sight. Thus the appeal of injured innocence, and the tear of bleeding virtue fall unregarded, unworthy of the attention of the Deity.{*} Yet, with what raptures do these philosophers behold the infinite wisdom and care of Beelzebub, their G.o.d of flies, in the admirable and various provision he has made for the preservation of the eggs of vermin, and the generation of maggots.{**}

Much more might be said in proof that our poet's philosophy does not altogether deserve ridicule. And those who allow a general, but deny a particular providence, will, it is hoped, excuse Camoens, on the consideration, that if we estimate a general moral providence by a.n.a.logy of that providence which presides over vegetable and animal nature, a more particular one cannot possibly be wanted. If a particular providence, however, is still denied, another consideration obtrudes itself; if one pang of a moral agent is unregarded, one tear of injured innocence left to fall unpitied by the Deity, if _Ludit in humanis Divina potentia rebus_, the consequence is, that the human conception can form an idea of a much better G.o.d. And it may modestly be presumed we may hazard the laugh of the wisest philosopher, and without scruple a.s.sert, that it is impossible that a created mind should conceive an idea of perfection superior to that which is possessed by the Creator and Author of existence.

{*} Perhaps, like Lucretius, some philosophers think this would be too much trouble to the Deity. But the idea of trouble to the Divine Nature, is much the same as another argument of the same philosopher, who having a.s.serted, that before the creation the G.o.ds could not know what seed would produce, from thence wisely concludes that the world was made by chance.

{**} Ray, in his Wisdom of G.o.d in the Creation (though he did not deny a Providence), has carried this extravagance to the highest pitch. "To give life," says he, "is the intention of the creation; and how wonderful does the goodness of G.o.d appear in this, that the death and putrefaction of one animal is the life of thousands." So, the misery of a family on the death of a parent is nothing, for ten thousand maggots are made happy by it.--O Philosophy, when wilt thou forget the dreams of thy slumbers in Bedlam!

[632] _Here Christian Europe.--Ves Europa Christian._--As Europe is already described in the third Lusiad, this short account of it has as great propriety, as the manner of it contains dignity.