Though Gonçalves Dias lived much of the time abroad following his education at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, his songs, published as Primeiros Cantos (1846; “First Poems”), Segundos Cantos (1848; “More Poems”), and Últimos Cantos (1851; “Last Poems”), continually celebrated, with exuberance and longing, the New World as a tropical paradise. He was himself of the common Brazilian racial mixture—Portuguese, Indian, and African—that Brazilians consider to be the source of their distinctive temperament.

Despite the romantic bohemianism of his personal life and his many fleeting love affairs, he was a respected ethnologist and scholar. He published a dictionary of the Tupí Indian language and an unfinished Indian epic, Os Timbiras (1857; “The Timbiras”). He held governmental posts in which he surveyed the school system of northern Brazil, and he did research on Brazilian historical sources in European archives.

In 1859 he took part in a scientific exploration of his country's natural resources in the Upper Amazon Valley, from which he returned suffering from tuberculosis. In 1862 he sought a cure in Europe, but his health continued to deteriorate, and he sailed for Brazil in 1864. He died in a shipwreck within sight of Maranhão.