Luis de CAMOENS- 1

Alfredo de Mello

[ The 1581 portrait of Luis de Camoens with the inscription in Marathi / Hindi which reads MahaKavi Camoi-ish  in other words: the Great Poet Camoens ]

The 10th June  is Luis de Camoes Day and Portugal's greatest holiday. I thought that it would be fitting for the TGF to have an account of the life of Camoens, his sad life, and the 16 years spent in Goa and the East, where he wrote his most celebrated Opus" The Lusiads".

Camoens had a Goan lover, called Barbara, and she took care of him in Lisbon until his death, exactly 420 years ago. He did not make any money, as the other Portuguese of his time, and he paid dearly for his satire, and his writings criticizing the Portuguese rule. Personally I feel, that Camoens belongs to Goa also, and it is a pity that the Indian Govt. took down the statue of Luis de Camoens, which was erected in Old Goa.  A de M
 

In the heyday of Golden Goa, during the Vice-Royalty of Dom Afonso de Noronha, the sixteenth Governor General, and fifth Viceroy of the ESTADO DA INDIA, on the first of September 1553, just after the monsoon ended, allowing the caravels to ford the entrance of the river Mandovi, there arrived the sole carrack "Sâo Bento" piloted by Diogo Garcia, a Castillian, having as shipmaster Antonio Ledo, and next in command Francisco Pires, all men highly esteemed as worthy seamen. The vessel carried the usual shipload of appointed fidalgo officers, sundry goods, and commissioned soldiers, black Kaffir slaves and a non commissioned soldier called Luis de Camoens, who was obliged to serve as warrior for five years to commute a jail sentence. 

The carrack Sâo Bento was then considered the best sea-worthy vessel in the "Carreira das Indias", that is the mail boat service, or rather the umbilical cord connecting the Metropolis with the seat of its far flung Asian Empire, plying between Lisbon and Goa. In fact, the fleet that sailed from Lisbon on March 24, consisted of four carracks, namely the Conceiçâo, Loreto, Santa Maria da Barca and Sâo Bento. Halfway down the Atlantic, the "Conceiçâo" was obliged to return to Lisbon, the "Loreto" had to spend the winter in Mozambique for repairs, and the "Santa Maria da Barca" limped to Cochin at the end of November. 

These disasters of the Armadas which sailed for India were almost exclusively due to the fact that they sailed too late from Lisbon. they should have sailed at the end of February in order to catch favourable winds on the leg down to the Cape of Good Hope. The fault lay in the bureaucratic bungling in Lisbon, which caused severe losses of vessels in the high seas and enormous sacrifice of lives. Moreover, the ministers for provision of food and drinking water were guilty of embezzlement: they had orders from the King to supply each vessel with enough supplies for seven months; instead, only five-month provisions were loaded. Thus if a voyage which in normal circumstances took six months, the sailors and passengers died of hunger; it was worse when the voyage took seven months. Besides, the provisions were of the worst possible quality. 

Luis de Camoens, who had lived a turbulent life, was twenty nine years old when he landed in Goa. He was born in a poor fidalgo family in Lisbon in 1524. Due to the plague which ravaged Lisbon in 1527, his father, who had inherited the house of Luis's grandfather Joâo Vaz de Camoens, in Coimbra, moved the family up north to that city famous for its University. The family accompanied the King and the Court who also fled from bubonic-plagued Lisbon. Luis' uncle Bento de Camoens had been appointed Chancellor of the University by King Joâo III, and when Luis was thirteen, due to the influence of his uncle, he received a scholarship as an honest poor student. It was obligatory to speak Latin in Coimbra. He studied Grammar and Rhetoric for two years, he studied the Arts, Logic, and natural Philosophy, then in 1542 he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Arts. The philosophical knowledge derived from reading the works of Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Aullus Gellius, Pliny the senior, and from the Anthologies, as well as from the writings by Homer, Aelian Xenophanes, Virgil, Lucanus Ovid, Horace, Plautus, Titus Livy, Eutropius, Justine and Claudius Ptolomy, the Greek scientist and mathematician. A characteristic of the time was the acquisition of knowledge, and encyclopaedic learning, which was the golden dream of the humanists. Therefore Camoens was a legitimate son of the Renaissance. 

Camoens, with a reddish beard, had an impetuous, valiant character, sword-happy, and in Coimbra he made friends with the youth of the principal fidalgo families. At the age of eighteen, he returned with the Court to Lisbon. By then he was a true poet.

Once in Lisbon he started frequenting the Court. He flirted with the ladies-in-waiting of Queen Catarina, by writing sonnets in their praise, and improvising verses on the spot, as was the fashion, and thus he earned the sobriquets of "Mermaid of the Court", or "Swan of the Tagus", but his genius provoked deep envy on the part of the other young fidalgos.

Young Camoens lost his time in writing verses, in roaming the streets and plazas of Lisbon, in having fun with friends at night, and getting into brawls, challenging and dueling. However he fell in love with a young blond girl, whose mother was Spanish and had come from Madrid as lady-in-waiting of Catarina of Austria, Queen of Portugal, sister of King Charles V the Habsburg king who inherited the Spanish Empire, and was also known as Carlos I of Spain., since 1516. The blond girl was thirteen years old, called Caterina de Athayde,  daughter of a highly ranked fidalgo. Camoens wrote many poems dedicated to her, using the anagram Natercia, and although she reciprocated in her feelings, the match was impossible as Camoens was a poor fidalgo without means. Another impediment was the hostility of King Joâo III towards Luis's uncle Dom Bento de Camoens, and this was cleverly reminded by mediocre young men, envious of Camoens' talent.

The hostility had arisen some years before when a treasure was found underneath the Monastery of Santa Cruz, which belonged to the University of Coimbra. D. Bento de Camoens claimed that the treasure belonged to the University , but the King usurped it. 

Thus Camoens went to serve as soldier in the Portuguese city of Ceuta in North Africa, for two years, 1542-43, where he lost his right eye in a battle. He returned to Lisbon, in 1544, when once again he entered the royal Court and dazzled the Court ladies, who requested him to write poems, which were most impressive by the beauty of their form, and by the gallant touches cloaking a passionate vibration. His love for Caterina de Athayde remained unabated, and , according to Dr. Wilhelm Storck, this romance bloomed again around Easter 1544. However a year later, there began the sadness, dejections, misfortunes and dangers caused by the intriguing busybodies in the Palace.

Although people in Lisbon admired him and stopped in the streets when he walked by, this provoked latent envies of those who plotted his ruin and his social career. He was nicknamed "Face without eyes", "Blustering bully" by his enemies. It seems that the Queen disapproved of this love affair, and had him banished from the Court. 

In 1545 Camoens wrote a play "King Seleucus", which was a comedy and satire of the sensational scandal, dealing with the loves of Antiochus, son of the old king Seleucus, towards his beautiful and young stepmother, Stratonice. This had occurred in the year 294 B.C., in Syria. Seleucus, who founded the Seleucid empire, was the Greek son of the Governor appointed by Alexander the Great. Young Antiochus, having a guilty feeling, became sick, and deprived himself of food. The court doctor Erasistratus soon recognized what was ailing Antiochus, who, whenever he was near Stratonice, behaved strangely and became pale and speechless, sweating all over. Plutarch, who wrote about the passion of Antiochus, tells us of the stratagem of the doctor, and the reaction of the king. Plutarch, however, wrote that king Seleucus assembled his vassals and declared his decision to make his son King and to maintain his wife as Queen of his Empire, by having the couple married.

The Court was not amused by this play as there was an analogy of the situation of King Joâo III and his love for his stepmother Eleanor of Austria, third wife and widow of his father King Manuel ( the king of Portugal when Vasco da Gama landed in  India). 

 continued on Page 2

Alfredo de Mello
resubmitted to TGF on Aug 15 1999

 

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