Camões, the harbinger of national calamities

Abstract

The Goan freedom-fighters blew up the larger than life size statue of Camões in the neighbourhood of the See Cathedral of Goa when the Portuguese were commemorating the fourth centenary of his death. It was not for the first time that Camões must have felt unwanted in Goa. If he decided to leave back to his country, that was probably motivated by his fear that his jewish background and his friendship with Garcia da Orta had made him a likely target of the Inquisition. Garcia da Orta had published his Colóquios in Goa in 1563, and it carried the first published ode of Camões. Garcia da Orta died in 1568 and the Inquisition burned his sister in 1569. Later they exhumed his bones and burned them. In the meanwhile Camões had scooted away.