Luís Vaz de Camões, whose epic poem The Lusiads created a founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exemplified in person the sometimes desperate qualities of their adventure. He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance; a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta – he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned. ‘Had there been more of the world,’ Camões wrote of the Portuguese explorers, they ‘would have discovered it’.
