Eventually the charges against him were dismissed, but his impoverished situation landed him back in jail when he couldn’t pay his debts. From his writings, it’s very clear that Camões never liked the important trading city of Goa, which was the hub of the great Portuguese empire in the East, and which Camões, in one of his few surviving letters, called “the mother of knaves and the stepmother of honest men.” His continual despair in Goa (“Babylon”) and his longing for Lisbon (“Zion”) is a constant and powerful theme in his lyric poetry.

Eventually, Camões managed to arrange passage to Mozambique in 1567, but he ended up stranded and penniless on the African coast. When he was finally discovered by the Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto and another friend, they were appalled by his condition, and they gave him the necessary money to complete his passage back to Lisbon on the Santa Clara.When, at long last, Camões arrived back in his beloved country, Lisbon was engulfed in the plague, and the country itself was absorbed with the grandiose ambitions of its young king, Sebastião. As for Camões, after seventeen years abroad, he’d returned to his native land even poorer than when he’d left. At the age of fifty-one, his only publication thus far had been a dedicatory poem for Garcia da Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da India, etc. (Goa, 1563), a scientific book about medicinal plants. His beloved Caterina de Ataide had long been dead (1556), and he’d returned to Portugal an obvious failure. The world had seemingly passed him by. All he had were his manuscripts.

Two years later, in 1572, Camões published his epic poem, Os Lusíadas, in Lisbon with the approval of the ecclesiastical censor. The book, dedicated to King Sebastião, is a paean to the Portuguese people and an account of the history-making journey of Vasco da Gama in 1497–98. The book was very well-received and apparently popular at all levels of Portuguese society. King Sebastião, gratified by the tribute, awarded the poet a modest but most welcome pension. Six years later, the young king led his troops into Africa, and his army was obliterated by the superior Muslim forces at Alcácer-Kebir. Not only was Sebastião killed, but the entire flower of the Portuguese nobility perished in the distant deserts of Morocco. It was the most devastating moment in the history of the valiant Portuguese nation; and it seemed so incomprehensible to the people in Portugal that the great myth of the king’s survival and his forthcoming return (“Sebastianism”) forced itself into the cultural consciousness of the nation; and it still, in various manifestations, survives today. The impact of AlcácerKebir on Camões, the poetic chronicler of Portuguese history, was devastating. Not long before his death two years later in 1580 during a revival of the plague, Camões wrote a friend in one of his few extant letters: “I have come to the end of my life, and everyone can see that I loved my native land so much that I was content to die not only in it, but with it.”

Having returned to his Catholic faith, Camões died in the arms of the Dominican Frei Josepe Indio, who later reported that the famous poet died in poverty, without even a burial shroud (Luiz de Camões,1923). As Camões had requested, his remains were interred in the nearby Church of Santa Ana. There was no co≈n, and his body was placed in an underground crypt along with many other coffinless victims of the plague. Later that same year, after a Spanish military force had invaded Portugal, King Philip II arrived in Lisbon to claim the Portuguese throne and initiate sixty years of Portuguese subservience to the Spanish crown. On his arrival, Philip, who’d previously read Os Lusíadas, is reputed to have asked for Camões. When he learned that the great poet had died, he was sorely grieved, and it’s clear from the royal records that he permitted Camões’s elderly mother to continue receiving the poet’s pension until her death.

Thus the legend of Camões was clearly underway, but his lyrics, among the most beautiful in world history, were still unknown and unpublished.

Camões’s Literary Work

While Camões made his living as a professional soldier and a public official, his true and obsessive vocation was as a writer of verse, which he composed over three tempestuous decades. Despite the disorder of his writing career, his literary achievements fall rather neatly into three categories: the epic, the lyrics, and the plays.

the epic

Camões’s international reputation was initially based on his authorship of the last great Western epic, Os Lusíadas, published in 1572, eight years before his death. It’s clear that the project consumed much of his life. Most scholars agree that he probably conceived the idea of a national epic long before he left Lisbon in 1553, and that his extraordinary experiences in the Orient inspired him to focus the poem on the epoch-making journey of the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama, who sailed to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. Contemporary Americans rightly recognize the history-making voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492, but at the end of the fifteenth century, Europe was much more interested in the gradual progress of the Portuguese navigators around Africa, culminating in the voyage of Camões’s distant kinsman five years later. Da Gama’s voyage opened up the trade lanes to the Orient and initiated an incredible Portuguese trading empire that would soon span more than half the globe, from the Amazon to the Moluccas in Indonesia. The impact of da Gama’s accomplishment on world history is staggering and, for modern minds, it’s often compared to the endless potentials and ramifications of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.

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But Camões’s Os Lusíadas not only chronicles the adventures of da Gama’s journey, it also exalts the vision and bravery of the Portuguese people and their entire history. Camões, while writing his epic a half century after da Gama’s journey, is literally living within the Eastern empire which it created. He’s also writing at a time when the resources of the small Portuguese nation were being severely strained in its efforts to maintain its vast trading empire, especially given Spanish, English, and Dutch incursions.