Luís de Camões

Camões lost an eye fighting in Ceuta, was jailed in Lisbon for wounding a courtier in a street fight, and was released on condition that he sail for India. He spent seventeen years in the East — Goa, Malacca, Macau, and a shipwreck off the Mekong from which, the story goes, he swam ashore holding the manuscript above the water. He came home in 1570 with the poem and nothing else.

The Lusiads, printed in 1572, tells of Vasco da Gama's voyage in the manner of Virgil, and it does something unusual for a national epic: it ends by turning on the country itself, with a lament that Portugal has grown deaf to poetry and hard with greed. The king granted him a small pension, paid irregularly. He died in Lisbon at fifty-six, poor, in the year the Spanish crown took the throne; he is said to have written that he would die not only in his country but with it. He was buried in a common grave. His supposed remains were moved to the Jerónimos in 1880 for the tercentenary, and it is openly acknowledged that they may belong to somebody else.