he allows his
keen resentment of this unjust treatment to impel him into the
reckless and turbulent life of a bully. It was thus that during the
festival of Corpus Christi in 1552 he got into a quarrel with Goncalo
Borges, one of the King's equerries, in which he wounded the latter.
For this Camoens was thrown into jail until March, 1553, when he was
released only on condition that he should embark to serve in India.
Not quite two weeks after leaving his prison, on March 24th, he sailed
for India on the flag-ship Sam Bento, bidding, as a true Renaissance
poet, farewell to his native land in the words of Scipio which were to
come true: "Ingrata patria non possidebis ossa mea." After a stormy
passage of six months, the Sam Bento cast anchor in the bay of Goa.
Camoens first took part in an expedition against the King of Pimenta,
and in the following year (1554) he joined another directed against
the Moorish pirates on the coast of Africa. The scenes of drunkenness
and dissoluteness which he witnessed in Goa inspired him with a number
of satirical poems, by which he drew upon himself much enmity and
persecution. In 1556 his three-years' term of service expired; but
though ardently longing for his beloved native land, he remained in
Goa, influenced either by his bent for the soldier's life or by the
sad news of the death of Donna Catharina de Athaide in that year. He
was ordered to Macao in China, to the lucrative post of commissary for
the effects of deceased or absent Portuguese subjects. There, in the
quietude of a grotto near Macao, still called the Grotto of Camoens,
the exiled poet finished the first six cantos of his great epic 'The
Lusiads.' Recalled from this post in 1558, before the expiration of
his term, on the charge of malversation of office, Camoens on his
return voyage to Goa was shipwrecked near the mouth of the Me-Kong,
saving nothing but his faithful Javanese slave and the manuscript of
his 'Lusiads'--which, swimming with one hand, he held above the water
with the other. In Cambodia, where he remained several months, he
wrote his marvelous paraphrase of the 137th psalm, contrasting under
the allegory of Babel (Babylon) and Siam (Zion), Goa and Lisbon. Upon
his return to Goa he was cast into prison, but soon set free on
proving his innocence by a public trial. Though receiving, in 1557,
another lucrative employment, Camoens finally resolved to go home,
burning with the desire to lay his patriotic song, now