Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/388

296 gardens are quaint in themselves, with great masses of granite boulders, and they were given to the town by Lourenço Marques.

Luis de Camoëns was born in Lisbon in 1524. In 1545 he fell in love with Senhora Donna Catherina de Athayde, one of Queen Catherine's ladies of honour, and for that was banished by King John II. to Santarem, on the Tagus, and later was sent to Ceuta, in Africa, to serve as a soldier. He lost his right eye in a fight with pirates in Morocco. He went to the East in 1550, and at Goa received news of the death of his beloved Donna Catherina. He then became an ardent patriot and commenced writing his famous epic Os Lusiadis. He wrote a satire on the Portuguese Government at Goa, was banished to the Moluccas for a year, and was then made Administrator of Estates of Absentees and Dead at Macao; but on his voyage there he was wrecked off the coast of Cambodia, near the mouth of the Wukong, and lost everything save the MS. of his poem.

It was in the Holy City—that is, Macao—he spent many hours in these gardens finishing the Lusiad. The grotto—where he wrote and thought—is formed of natural granite boulders, amongst which is placed his bust. Sir John Davis, Sir John Bowring, Rienzi, and others of various nationalities have written poems in his honour, and these, inscribed on tablets, are affixed to the rocks.

He died at Lisbon, and is it necessary to say, in great distress and poverty?

I do not think his immortal work is much read now in England—or perhaps in Europe. But when I first entered Camoëns' garden I felt I had won another great goal in my pilgrimage, and my face was hot and my heart fluttering at the thought of it.