Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage

Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage was born in Setúbal, S.Sebastião, on 15th September 1765. He was the grandson of a French Admiral, who came to Portugal to organise our Navy, and the son of the lawyer José Luis Barbosa and of Mariana Lestaff du Bocage. He soon revealed his literary sensibility, which his family encouraged. At the age of 16 he joined the Army in Setúbal and at the age of 18 he joined the Navy. He did his training in Lisbon and later he was assigned to Goa as an officer.
In 1786, on his way to India, he stopped in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In October 1786, he arrived in Portuguese India but he was unable to adapt its values. As a matter of fact, the climate, the vanity and the lack of culture increased his dissatisfaction that he pictured in some of his satirical sonnets.
Later he was assigned as a second lieutenant in the territory of Daman. His immediate reaction was to desert. He then travelled all over the world: from India to China, from China to Macao and then back to Europe in August 1790.
In the capital of Portugal, Lisbon, he lived a bohemian life. He attended the cafés that spread the ideas of the French Revolution and wrote satirical poems about the stagnant Portuguese society. In 1791 he published the first volume of Rimas and afterwards, its sequels, respectively in 1798 and in 1804. Early in the 1790s, he joined "Nova Arcádia", a literary society controlled by Pina Manique, which Bocage bluntly imploded. In fact, his conflicts with the poets of that society became frequent as it is visible in many of his poems. In 1797, Bocage was arrested after a police raid. He was caught both with pamphlets defending the ideas of the French revolution and with political and erotic poems, namely "Pavorosa Ilusão da Eternidade" also known as "Epístola a Marília".
Jailed in "Limoeiro", accused of high treason, he contacted powerful people, and was, later, delivered to the Inquisition. In February 1798, he was handed over to the Police general superintendent, Pina Manique, who sent him to the Monastery of S.Bento and later, to "Hospício das Necessidades" (a hospice) to be "reeducated". Later that year he was finally released.
In 1800, he was assigned by the scientist and priest José Mariano Veloso to the Tipografia Calcográfica do Arco do Cego as a translator, earning 12,800 réis a month.
In the meantime his ever fragile health became weaker and weaker due to the bohemian life he had led. In 1805 his death in Travessa de André Valente, in Lisbon, at the age of 40, deeply moved the whole population. He was buried in the Igreja das Mercês.

Portuguese literature had lost one of its most authentic poets, a man of many talents, who to many generations symbolised irreverence, someone who spoke out against tyranny and defended a paradigmatic humanism.