Luís de Camões: what is known, and what is told

A poor gentleman, a soldier for more than sixteen years outside the kingdom, and the poet of a single epic. He served in North Africa and then in Asia, returned to Lisbon in 1570 and published Os Lusíadas there two years later. His life fits into a handful of archive documents: a line in a register, a letter of pardon, three pension deeds, a payment order. All the rest comes from commentators and biographers writing after his death, and it matters which one you are reading.

His date of birth is calculated, not read anywhere. In 1643 the commentator Manuel de Faria e Sousa went through the registers of the Casa da Índia and found, under the heading of men-at-arms, a line that the viscount of Juromenha published in 1860: “Luis de Camões filho de Simão Vaz e Anna de Sá, moradores em Lisboa a Mouraria, Escudeiro de 25 annos, barbiruivo.” Squire, twenty-five years old, red-bearded, with his father as surety. The list is that of 1550, hence 1524 or 1525, the two years the Portuguese fifth-centenary mission keeps today. It is also the only physical description of him any document gives.

The document that shows him best is a letter of pardon from King John III, given at Lisbon on 7 March 1553. It says he is shut in the city gaol for wounding Gonçalo Borges in the neck with a sword, the man in charge of the king’s harness: on a Corpus Christi day, two masked horsemen provoked Borges in the rua de Santo Antão, and Camões came to his friends’ aid. Borges recovered without mutilation or disfigurement and forgave him. The king pardons in his turn, because the petitioner is a young man and poor who is leaving that year to serve in India. He pays four thousand réis in alms and walks out of prison.

So he sailed in 1553 and did not come back until April 1570, on the nau Santa Clara, which anchored at Cascais in a kingdom plague had just ravaged. Between the two: India, Southeast Asia, China, and a shipwreck. Juromenha reports, warning that he has the scene from Faria e Sousa, that at Mozambique his friends Diogo do Couto and Heitor da Silveira found him so poor that he ate at other men’s tables, and clubbed together for the two hundred cruzados he was being asked for his passage.

The first voyage of Vasco da Gama to India, in 1497-1499, the one that first joined the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The poem has ten cantos and 1,102 stanzas, according to RTP Ensina, the educational service of Portuguese public television: ten-syllable octaves, rhymed ababab then cc. But Gama is only a thread. On the way he tells the king of Malindi the whole history of Portugal, and on Olympus the gods quarrel over his fleet.

The opening is a statement of programme. In Richard Burton’s English of 1880: “The feats of Arms, and famed heroick Host, from occidental Lusitanian strand, who o’er the waters ne’er by seaman crost, farèd beyond the Taprobáne-land” (canto I, stanza 1). Taprobane is the old name for Ceylon. The hero of the book is therefore not a man: it is the Lusíadas, the sons of Lusus, that is, the Portuguese.

The most quoted passage is the giant’s. In canto V, at the end of Africa, an enormous shape rears above the ships and threatens anyone who passes. Gama asks him who he is, and in Burton’s English the answer comes: “I am that hidden mighty Head of Land, the Cape of Tempests fitly named by you, which Ptol’emy, Mela, Strabo never fand, nor Pliny dreamt of, nor old Sages knew” (canto V, stanza 50). The giant is called Adamastor, he loved a sea goddess, and the gods turned his body into a mountain: the Cape of Good Hope.

Pagan gods in a book printed with the licence of the Inquisition? The censor answered in writing, and his answer opens the volume. Brother Bartolomeu Ferreira declares that he has read the ten cantos and found in them nothing scandalous, nor contrary to the faith and to good morals. He judges that the reader need only be warned, since all this is poetry and fiction, and closes the matter with a formula: the truth of the holy faith remains safe, for all the gods of the pagans are demons.

Four things, and they are dated. The royal privilege of September 1571, reserving the printing of the poem for ten years and requiring its prior examination by the Inquisition. The printing at Lisbon, by António Gonçalves, in 1572. A royal pension the same year. And the date of his death, 10 June 1580. All these acts were transcribed in 1860 by the viscount of Juromenha from the originals in the Archivo Nacional, and it is in his volume that they are still read.

The pension says both the honour and the hardship. By a deed signed at Lisbon on 28 July 1572, King Sebastian grants him fifteen thousand réis a year, for three years only, from 12 March 1572, for the services he rendered in the Indies and for the worth of the book he composed. One condition: to reside at court, and to prove it every year with a certificate. It was extended for three years in August 1575. An order of 22 June 1576 records that the money for 1575 has still not been paid, for want of an entry in the finance book.

His death is dated by an accounting hand. On 13 November 1582 the treasurer pays 6,765 réis to Ana de Sá, mother of Luís de Camões, for what was still owed to her son from the first of January 1580 until the tenth of June, when he died. Juromenha published that document in 1860; before him, biographers wrote 1579. Another deed, of 31 May 1582, leaves the mother six thousand of the fifteen thousand réis, because she is very old and poor and no other heir remains.

Even the 1572 edition raises a question. Two printings carry that date, and they are told apart first by the pelican on the title page, turned left on one and right on the other. In 2021 the scholar Rita Marnoto compared the wear on the woodcut initials and concluded that the one with the pelican turned left is the first edition, and the other an imitative edition, that is, a counterfeit. About thirty survive according to the fifth-centenary mission, about forty according to Marnoto.

Three famous episodes rest on no contemporary document: the eye lost before Ceuta, the manuscript saved by swimming in the Mekong, the death in destitution. The point is not to throw them out. They are part of what Portugal made of Camões, and the oldest go back to his seventeenth-century commentators. The point is only to say where they come from.

The eye. Ferdinand Denis, in the notice he put at the head of the 1841 French translation, writes that he lost his right eye in an action against the Moors, and that it took place before Ceuta. The Vida published in 1843 by José Barreto Feio and José Gomes Monteiro says the same in Portuguese: in a naval fight against the Moors near Ceuta, he lost his right eye. Neither cites a document, and the register line of 1550, which notes even the colour of his beard, says nothing about a missing eye.

The shipwreck is in the poem. In the last canto, Thetis shows Gama the Mekong and foretells that this river shall one day receive, in Burton’s English, “the Song, that swam to land from sad and piteous shipwreck dripping wet, ’scaped from the reefs and rocks that fang the strand” (canto X, stanza 128): Camões is speaking of himself, through a goddess addressing a captain fifty years dead. The swimming, on the other hand, is the biographers’ addition. The 1843 Vida writes that he could save nothing but his life and his poem, reaching the beach by swimming, like Caesar. The date wavers too: around 1561 for the 1841 edition, late 1566 for the fifth-centenary mission.

The poverty of his last years is attested, its degree is not. Nineteenth-century biographers quote Faria e Sousa: a Javanese slave named Antonio begged in the evening to feed him, and a market woman brought him a dish of what she was selling. A missionary, brother José Indio, wrote on a copy of the Lusiads that he saw him die in hospital without a sheet to cover himself with. But Ferdinand Denis, who reports that testimony, writes himself that the story leaves doubt hanging over the circumstances of his end, and notes that Francisco Alexandre Lobo denied this extremity of misery on the strength of a friend of the poet’s silence.

Because it is the day he died. The Dia de Portugal, de Camões e das Comunidades Portuguesas falls on 10 June, the date of the death of the poet Luís de Camões, as the Eurocid portal of the Portuguese foreign ministry recalls. The holiday began as a Lisbon public holiday devoted to the poet, became national under the Estado Novo, then took its present name after the revolution of 25 April 1974, when the Portuguese communities abroad were joined to it.

His fame is posthumous, and a famous reader noticed. His short poems never appeared in his lifetime: the first edition of the Rimas came out in 1595, fifteen years after his death, assembled by the bookseller Estêvão Lopes from a hundred and fifty texts scattered through manuscripts. Voltaire, who gave the Lusiads a chapter of his Essai sur la poésie épique, finds grave faults in it and likens him to Homer on one point: he travelled as Homer did, he lived and died poor, and had no reputation until after his death.

Today he is a school syllabus. The official learning outcomes for the ninth year in Portugal require stanzas 1 to 3 of canto I and stanzas 37 to 60 of canto V, that is, the giant’s episode. The fifth-centenary mission celebrated on 12 March 2026 the 454th anniversary of the poem’s publication. And Voltaire, who had not liked all of it, bowed before that phantom standing at the end of the world: that, he wrote, is great in any country.