n the course of which Camoens produced his _Filodemo_, a
dramatized novel written in his court days. The same occasion probably
gave birth to the _Disparates na India_ ("Follies of India"), and
certainly to the _Satyra do Torneio_ ("Satire of the Tourney"), which
confirmed the poet's reputation as a sayer of sharp things and gave
considerable umbrage to those whom the cap fitted. However, it was not
the enmities thus aroused but military duty which compelled him to quit
Goa once more in the spring of 1556. He had enlisted in Lisbon for five
years, the usual term, and in compliance with the orders of the governor
he sailed for the Moluccas in April and there fought and versified for
two years, though nearly all is guesswork at this period of his life. He
appears to have spent the time between September 1556 and February 1557
in the island of Ternate, where he wrote Canzon 6, revealing a state of
moral depression similar to that of Canzon 10, and he perhaps visited
Banda and Amboina. In the following year he took part in the military
occupation of Macao, which the emperor of China had presented to the
Portuguese in return for their destruction of a pirate fleet which had
besieged Canton. The poet's five years' term of service was now over,
and he remained at Macao many months waiting for a ship to carry him
back to India. He had made some profit out of the _Merci de Viagem_,
granted by the governor Barreto to free him from the poverty in which he
habitually lived, and he spent his money royally. At the same time he
continued his epic, working in the grotto which still bears his name.

All seemed to be going smoothly with him until suddenly his fortunes
took a serious turn for the worse. As the result of an intrigue the
captain of the yearly ship from China to India, who acted as governor of
Macao during his stay in port, imprisoned Camoens, and took him on
board with a view of bringing him to trial in India. The ship, however,
was wrecked in October 1559 at the mouth of the Mekong river, and the
poet had to save his life and his _Lusiads_ by swimming to shore, and
though he preserved the six or seven finished cantos of the poem, he
lost everything else. While wandering about on the Cambodian coast
awaiting the monsoon and a vessel to take him to Malacca, he composed
those magnificent stanzas "By the Waters of Babylon," called by Lope de
Vega "the pearl of all poetry," in which he recalls the happy days of
his youth, sighs