“Fired by thy fame,[19] and with his king in ire, To match thy deeds shall Magalhaens aspire: In all but loyalty, of Lusian soul, No fear, no danger shall his toils controul. Along these regions from the burning zone To deepest south he dares the course unknown. While to the kingdoms of the rising day, To rival thee he holds the western way, A land of giants shall his eyes behold, Of camel strength, surpassing human mould: And onward still, thy fame, his proud heart’s guide, Haunting him unappeased, the dreary tide Beneath the southern star’s cold gleam he braves, And stems the whirls of land-surrounded waves. +For ever sacred to the hero’s fame These foaming straits shall bear his deathless name.+ Through these dread jaws of rock he presses on; Another ocean’s breast, immense, unknown, Beneath the south’s cold wings, unmeasured, wide, Receives his vessels; through the dreary tide In darkling shades where never man before Heard the waves howl, he dares the nameless shore. Thus far, O favoured Lusians, bounteous heaven Your nation’s glories to your view has given. What ensigns, blazing to the morn, pursue The path of heroes, opened first by you! Still be it your’s the first in fame to shine: Thus shall your brides[20] new chaplets still entwine, With laurels ever new your brows enfold, And braid your wavy locks with radiant gold.”[21] The poet of the Lusiad, who had said that the Muses sang of Gama unwillingly, here concludes his praises of Magellan with a promise to the Portuguese of ever renewed praise—a promise which will be fulfilled by posterity whenever the character and enterprise of Magellan are compared with those of his contemporaries; for whilst the cruelty and violence of Gama, and the difficulty his companions had in restraining him, were very serious defects in his character, Magellan gave many noble examples of the opposite virtues and of other qualities of a very high order. His conduct on the occasion of the shipwreck near the Maldive Islands has been already described; the clemency with which he tempered justice when he put down the mutiny in Port St. Julian—a mutiny which Sebastian Alvarez, the King of Portugal’s agent, would appear to have been privy to, if indeed he did not prepare it, shows great self-restraint, and the whole of his conduct in the islands of Sebu and Matan, where he fell, defending the retreat of his companions, is more like that of the knights errant of an earlier date, than that of his contemporaries. Pigafetta, who was with him at his death, was deeply affected by it, and recounts his many virtues and qualities in an appeal to the Grand Master of Rhodes not to allow Magellan’s memory to be lost.