Portugal's national day marks the poet of The Lusiads
Luís Vaz de Camões—born around 1524 or 1525, dead 10 June 1580—is hailed as Portugal's greatest poet, ranked beside Shakespeare, Milton, and Homer. Os Lusíadas so shapes the tongue that people joke Portuguese is Camões's language, and the anniversary of his death is Portugal's national day.
Reliable dates for Camões are scarce; folklore thickens around the few documented moments. Ancestry runs to Galician troubadour Vasco Pires de Camões, who entered Portugal in 1370. Paternal ties reach Vasco da Gama through Guiomar da Gama. Simão Vaz de Camões and Ana de Sá e Macedo were his parents; early biographers floated 1517, but Casa da Índia lists point many scholars toward Lisbon in 1524, though Coimbra, Santarém, and Alenquer still claim him and recent work treats birthplace and year as uncertain.
Tradition says uncle Bento steered him toward Coimbra studies in history, cosmography, and literature, yet his name is absent from university rolls; the dense classical allusions in his verse still imply a solid education. Around age twenty he likely entered John III's court as a poet. He lost his right eye in a naval fight in the Strait of Gibraltar during about two years at Ceuta. A 1550 enlistment for India lists him as a twenty-five-year-old ginger-bearded squire of Mouraria; after wounding Gonçalo Borges he was jailed, then pardoned and released 7 March 1553 to serve in India.
He sailed Palm Sunday, 24 March 1553, on the São Bento with Fernão Álvares Cabral's fleet, quoting Scipio Africanus on his ungrateful homeland. After a Cape storm that wrecked three companion ships, he reached Goa in 1554, fought under viceroy Afonso de Noronha, and wintered at Ormuz in 1555. Tradition places part of Os Lusíadas in a Macau cave while he served as Superintendent for the Dead and Missing from 1563 to about 1564–65. Shipwreck near the Mekong mouth left him, legend says, with only himself and the manuscript—an ordeal Diogo do Couto linked to thematic shifts from Canto VII onward.
From tavern brawls to imperial voyages, the epic grew out of a life that Portugal still marks each 10 June.
Source: Luís de Camões
