CAMOENS AND INDIAN EXPLORATION 71 ness necessary to carry out the explorations which ended in the discovery of the Cape route to India, except under pressure from a line of resolute kings. It is certain that the Italian republics had not. But it is equally certain that, in spite of the devotion of Portuguese sov- ereigns and the heroism of the Portuguese chivalry, the curse of the weird prophet of the Lusiad, amid whose maledictions Da Gama departed, in the end came true the prize a shadow or a rainbow blaze. The expedition struck, however, a chord of Portu- guese national feeling. Both king and people regarded it as a continuation of the Crusades: a crusade on a larger scale and with better prospects of plunder. Ca- moens opens the seventh book of his Lusiad by re- proaching Germany, England, France, and Italy for their coldness to the sacred cause, calls them once more to Holy War, and shames their silence by declar- ing that Portugal will single-handed fight the battle of God. His contempt for these Gallios of Christendom is only equalled by his hatred of the Moslems and his travesty of their faith. In the mythological machinery of the Lusiad, Bacchus stands forth as the genius of Islam while Venus pleads the cause of the Christians. Bacchus appears to a priest of the Koran in the form of Mohammed the founder of a religion of abstinence from wine! No doubt Camoens had in his mind the celestial Venus and the Indian Bacchus. His ignorance of the Moslem creed is as complete as his confidence in his own. The noble Portuguese cavalier would no more inquire into the truth of his religion than into
