Luís de Camões wrote the national epic of Portugal, and lived a life that reads as if he were auditioning for it. Os Lusíadas (1572) follows Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in ten cantos of ottava rima, with the Olympian gods arguing over the fleet's fate and a giant, Adamastor, rising out of the Cape of Good Hope to curse everyone who rounds it. Camões lost his right eye fighting in Ceuta. He was jailed in Lisbon after a street brawl and released on condition that he serve in the East. He spent seventeen years in Goa, Macau and beyond, was shipwrecked at the mouth of the Mekong, and reportedly swam ashore holding the manuscript above the water while his Chinese companion drowned. The poem is not simple patriotism. Its most famous passage gives an old man on the beach at Restelo a speech denouncing the whole imperial enterprise as vanity, and Camões leaves the objection standing. He returned to Lisbon in poverty, received a small royal pension, and died in 1580 as Portugal lost its independence to Spain.