Historical Wrting About Brazil, 1500-1800

Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 31 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 Neil L. Whitehead This chapter examines a range of historical writings on Brazil emerging between 1500 and 1800. Although modern Brazil is a Portuguese speaking nation, in the early colonial period both the physical geography of Brazil and its character as a Portuguese colony were unstable. French, Dutch, English, and Irish colonies challenged the exclusive occupation of both the coastal regions and the Amazon River basin, where the Spanish also vied for control. As a result, important writings on the history of Brazil exist in other languages than Portuguese while individual accounts of travel are also to be found in a range of European languages. Contemporary with the better known Portuguese texts of discovery relating to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, there also exist sixteenth-century writings in French, German, and English on the trade there with native populations, as well as on military engagements with Portuguese colonial outposts. In particular, the French occupation of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-sixteenth century generated substantial texts on the history of the region, as did the Dutch plantations in coastal Brazil of the seventeenth century. For the Amazon basin, the earliest writings are all in Spanish since the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas established the limits of Portuguese right of conquest to territory east of 50 degrees longitude. This meant that until the 1640s the Portuguese presence along the Amazon River was negligible, although French, English, and Irish traders all established outposts on the river and left records of that colonial episode.1 For the eastern coastal region of the ‘Captaincies’—the system by which early colonial administration was established—the bulk of writing derives from the missionary orders. The work of José de Anchieta, Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, and Manuel da Nóbrega are important in this regard as well as other histories, such as that by the colonist Gabriel Soares de Sousa. This highly linguistically and politically diverse set of texts were extensively used in Robert Southey’s well-known three-volume History of Brazil (1819), which 1 Joyce Lorimer (ed.), English and Irish settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London, 1989). Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 642 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 marks the termination of the period considered in this chapter but did much to establish the modern parameters of historical writing on colonial Brazil. TH E I NV ENT IO N OF ‘BRAZIL’ Historical writing creates a ‘Brazil’. It is through the process of codifying and reflecting on the meaning of European occupation that the notion of a place ‘Brazil’ was established and the heirs to that occupation, quite literally, ‘inscribed’ themselves as legitimate occupiers of that place. At the same time such a process of writing was not an abstract or philosophical project in the first place but rather the making of knowledge to support commercial and political ambition in the exotic space of a ‘New World’. As a result, it is the ethnology and broader cultural geography of the new space of ‘Brazil’ that dominates its representation in the period 1500–1800 and this in turn creates the master tropes of both colonial and postcolonial Brazil as a space of luxuriant and limitless nature, causally coupled to visually dazzling, sexualized, and cannibalistic human cultures.2 For these reasons, a necessary emphasis is given in the following discussion of historical writing to the depiction of native peoples as a cipher for ‘Brazil’ itself. As Janaı́na Amado argues concerning the legendary figure of ‘Caramuru’: ‘narratives about Caramuru can be considered to be Brazil’s myth of origin. The myth of Caramuru dramatizes some of the most fundamental historic and symbolic experiences of Brazil and Portugal.’3 Moreover, even if there is a critical cultural difference between Europeans and native Brazilians, this does not render invalid the attempt to read others through the writings of their conquerors, though it does pose complex issues of hermeneutical approach. It is not that cultural biases in European writing on non-Europeans needs to be factored out, accounted for, or otherwise made overt—for this leaves us only with hollow texts and empty documents. Rather, given the culturally dependent nature of historical and ethnographic representation, we must also consider native social and cultural practices, particularly as expressed in native 2 In a recent review article on the historiography of Brazil, Stuart B. Schwartz underscores how this writing of ‘Brazil’, in both the colonial and post-colonial moments, has been engaged with the idea of the indigenous. However, and contrary to the Indian’s iconic status in the colonial era, scholarship on historical works of the nineteenth century has often pointed out that there was an erasure of the Indian from the national past. See Schwartz, ‘Adolfo de Varnhagen: Diplomat, Patriot’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 47:2 (1967), 185–202. 3 Janaı́na Amado, ‘Mythic Origins: Caramuru and the Founding of Brazil’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 80:4 (2000), 783–811, at 786. Diogo Alvares or ‘Caramuru’ (electric eel) was one of Brazil’s first European inhabitants, and his story is a recurring theme in Brazilian history, literature, and imagination. Diogo Alvares was shipwrecked at the beginning of Portuguese colonization. He lived in Bahia for many years, learned the native languages, and participated in native warfare. He had many children, particularly with Paragua, the daughter of an eminent Tupinambá lord in the Bahia region. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 643 discourse. Ferocious cannibals and voracious Amazons were as much an element in existing native cosmologies and mythologies, as they are the result of European cultural projection. The presence of analogous symbolic and discursive motifs in both native Brazilian and European thought makes interpretation more difficult but simultaneously provides the hermeneutic strategy by which such histories may be written—for they are histories of the mutual, mimetic, and entangled relations of Brazil and Europe over the last five hundred years. In this way native cultural practice is itself an equally necessary and viable context for the interpretation and analysis of European texts as are the biographies and histories of their authors.4 C O A ST AL B R AZ I L , 1 50 0– 1 65 0 The Portuguese materials have a chronological priority over other sources since they include the letters of geographical discovery by Pedro Vaz de Caminha and the ‘Four Letters’ of Amerigo Vespucci. These texts are also amongst the earliest descriptions of the New World itself and justly famous for that reason. Some of the details given by Caminha and Vespucci also indicate that native Tupi populations were amongst the first American peoples to be described. However, this occurs in such a way as to establish a rhetorical association between Brazilian natives and the practice of cannibalism as well as exotic sexuality. Thus Vespucci writes, probably of the northern coasts of Brazil, that: ‘They eat little flesh unless it be human flesh . . . they are so inhuman as to transgress regarding this most bestial custom. For they eat all their enemies that they kill or take.’5 Vespucci also initiates a startling image of indigenous sexuality: Another custom among them is sufficiently shameful, and beyond all human credibility. The women being very libidinous, make the penis of their husbands swell to such a size as to appear deformed; and this is accomplished by a certain artifice, being the bite of a poisonous animal, and by reason of this many lose their virile organ and remain eunuchs.’6 Vespucci goes on to reinforce the notion of cannibalism as a subsistence practice, rather than ritual proclivity, and in so doing indelibly carved the motif of anthropophagy into the representation of Brazil through hyperbolic forms of representation: ‘I have seen a man eat his children and wife; and I knew a man who was popularly credited to have eaten 300 human bodies . . . I say further that they were surprised that we did not eat our enemies, and use their flesh as food, 4 See Neil L. Whitehead, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh (Manchester/Norman, 1997); and Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (eds.), Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham, 2008). 5 Vespucci, The letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 11. 6 Ibid., 46. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 644 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 for they say it is excellent.’7 Absurd and defamatory though these claims appear, the sacrifice of children or women with affinal status is thus more clearly explained in later sources, as is the accumulation, through the capture and sacrifice of enemies, of honorific names, which was indeed a way in which an individual may have claimed to have ‘eaten’ more than three hundred of his enemies. In the same way the ‘excellence’ of human flesh can be related to the importance and satisfaction of revenge through ritual sacrifice, as much as to any gustatory pleasures. Vespucci’s verifiable voyage to Brazil in 1502 was preceded by that of Pedro Vaz de Caminha, who accompanied and described Pedro Alvares Cabral’s foundational discovery of Brazil in 1500. Caminha does not mention ‘cannibalism’8 but rather signals ‘savagery’ through the sexualized nakedness of the natives they encounter.9 Caminha also highlighted the use of feathers among the Tupi as well as their use of lip-plugs. The sexual voraciousness and participation of women in cannibal violence is given an emphasis by Vespucci that foreshadows, along with other accounts from the Caribbean,10 the emergence of the idea of New World ‘Amazons’, later fully realized in Gaspar de Carvajal’s account of Francisco de Orellana’s first descent of the ‘River of the Amazons’ in the 1540s (see below).11 After the period of initial discovery there is a hiatus in the Portuguese materials until the 1540s, when the first missionary writings begin to appear. The reports of Manoel da Nóbrega, head of the Jesuit Order in Brazil, written some fifty years after these first encounters, still provide some of the most extended accounts of Brazil. As a missionary resident among the natives Nóbrega was in a good position to outline some of the key features of Tupi culture and society. He duly notes subsistence practices, political and ethnic divisions, and the rules and customs of marriage and birth, the role of the pagé and karai (shamans and prophets)—but spends no less space re-inscribing the cannibal motif.12 Accounts 7 Vespucci, The letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 47. In fact ‘cannibalism’ as a word derives from the Columbian voyages to the Caribbean where the native term ‘caniba’ came to stand for a European notion of the eating of human flesh. See Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day: An Anthology (Oxford, 1992). It is notable that Amerigo Vespucci uses the term ‘canibali’ in his accounts of the regions to the north of the Amazon but not in regard to Brazil. See Vespucci, The letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of his Career, trans. Clements R. Markham (London, 1894), 23. Hans Staden does not use the term at all, nor do other commentators on the Tupi. 9 Pedro Vaz de Caminha, The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India (London, 1938), 15. 10 Hulme and Whitehead Wild Majesty, 15 11 Gaspar de Carvajal, ‘Discovery of the Orellana River’, in The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents, ed. J. T. Medina, trans. B. T. Lee (New York, 1934), 167–235. 12 Manoel da Nóbrega, ‘Informaçāo das Terras do Brasil’ (1549), in, Cartas do Brasil (São Paulo, 1988), 100. 8 Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 645 such as Nóbrega’s were intended as synthetic summaries, as ethnological overviews, and so necessarily tended to erase the contingent and particular in order to arrive at a generalized statement of habits and customs. Like Caminha and Vespucci, Nóbrega also signals the erotic and bodily as part of native Brazilian identity.13 This theme is also taken up forcefully in the French texts (see below), but the overall conjunction of the material, fleshy, and naked cannibal body with the spirituality of Eucharistic sacrifice is a theme that pervades the historical literature. In this vein, the writings of José de Anchieta, from the period of the late 1550s, broach not just sensuality but also exotic sexuality,14 as first mentioned by Vespucci. Anchieta also widens this concern with sexuality to encompass the rules of marriage, incest, and the sexuality of sacrifice. He also hints at how the politics of leadership among the Tupi were affected by the colonial intrusion, while neatly casting suspicion on the French for having stimulated Tupi savagery: I was told that Ambirem, a great chief of Rio de Janeiro, . . . ordered that one of his twenty wives, who had committed adultery, should be tied to a post and have her stomach cut out . . . But this appears to have been a lesson taken from the French, who are accustomed to dealing out such deaths, because no Brazilian Indian would normally inflict such a punishment.15 It is not for another twenty years or so after Anchieta was writing that we get further extensive reportage, this time from a secular source, Gabriel Soares de Sousa. Sousa was writing as a Portuguese colonist resident many years in Brazil and offers a compendious description of the colony.16 Sousa resided mainly in the region of Bahia. Like Anchieta he was alert to the politics of cultural practice in the period of his residence, and he also ‘verifies’ the erotic and exotic nature of cannibal sexuality: They are addicted to sodomy and do not consider it a shame. The one who acts as the male regards himself as virile and they boast of such bestiality. In their villages in the bush there are such men who keep shop to all those who want them, like prostitutes . . . They are not satisfied with their penises as nature made them, but many of them expose theirs to the bites of poisonous animals which causes their penises to swell and they suffer for six months during 13 Ibid., 101. ‘The hair of others [a kind of centipede] . . . are venomous and provoke libidinous desires. The Indians are accustomed to apply them to their genital parts which incites and intensifies sensual enjoyment: after three days these hairs putrefy: sometimes the prepuce is perforated and the sexual organs infected with an incurable disease: they not only soil themselves with this foulness, but they also defile and infect the women with whom they sleep.’ Ibid., 126. 15 Ibid., 256. 16 See John M. Monteiro, ‘The Heathen Castes of Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America: Unity, Diversity, and the Invention of the Brazilian Indian’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 80:4 (2000), 697–719, for a thorough discussion of the significance of Sousa’s ethnology and its role in the nineteenth-century ‘invention’ of the Tupi. 14 Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 646 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 which time their organs change. Their members become so monstrously big that women can hardly stand them.17 Paradoxically, given the negative tone of this passage, Sousa actually opens a slightly broader window on Tupian subjectivity, particularly with regard to the power of the karai (prophet-sorcerers) who were a constant feature in missionary accounts, since spiritual conquest was all-important to such writers. But for someone so long a resident in Brazil, the facts of Tupian war-sacrifice also loomed large and, for example, Sousa mentions details concerning the subjectivity of the sacrificial executioner; notes how individual enthusiasms cross-cut ceremonial order; and provides an extensive description of sacrificial killing, but crucially notes that gastronomic ‘cannibalism’ was not the purpose of such rituals. As descriptions and commentary on the Tupi move into the latter part of the sixteenth century, further ethnological detail emerges. But as Tupian societies along the Brazilian coast faced deepening social crisis through demographic losses due to European disease and political and economic conquest, as well as through increasing dependency and entanglement with the colonial intruders, so the Tupi become a more abstract context for the philosophical and liturgical musings of the commentators. At this point in time, Gandavo makes the following statement about the ‘savages’ of Brazil, which has become a somewhat hackneyed statement of the colonial mentality of the time: ‘It [the Tupi language] lacks three letters; one does not find in it, namely, F, nor L, nor R, a very wonderful thing, for they have neither Faith, Law, nor Ruler: and thus they live without order, counting, weights or measures.’18 These scattered and inevitably partial accounts of the Tupi peoples found in the early Portuguese texts nonetheless often contrast favourably with the relatively brief (and perhaps derivative) French materials. The extensive and often systematic ethnology of the Portuguese missionaries, as well as the observations of long-term residents such as Sousa, combine to provide an important historical and ethnological resource. However, for various reasons, the French texts have attracted a much more substantive secondary commentary; principally because of the way in which they were seized upon by European philosophers and intellectuals, such as Michel de Montaigne or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also because the French missionaries evangelized the region around the Amazon to the north of Rio de 17 Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Notı́cia do Brasil (São Paulo, 1974), 172. Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, ‘History of the Province of Santa Cruz’, in The Histories of Brazil, vol. 2 (New York, 1922), 85. Although in Vespucci’s earliest description we are told that ‘they use the same articulations as we, since they form their utterances either with the palate, or with the teeth, or on the lips, except that they give different names to things’, suggesting clearly that colonial attitudes were themselves historically evolving, as was the significance of language as a comparative anthropological tool. 18 Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 647 Janeiro in the early seventeenth century, producing very extensive descriptions of Tupi peoples there. The early French works on coastal Brazil all date to a relatively brief period in the mid-sixteenth century, deriving from the attempt by Nicholas de Villegagnon to directly colonize the region that their traders had been regularly visiting since the 1520s. Arriving in the Bay of Guanabara (the site of the present-day cities Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi) in November 1555, the French fortified a position at the mouth of the bay and named their enclave France Antarctique. The nascent colony, despite the prior presence of French traders in the region, was not a success, as Villegagnon failed to negotiate the complexities of native allegiances. This encouraged rebellion from these ‘Norman’ traders. As early as 1503 a French trader from Normandy, Paulmier de Gonneville, spent some five to six months living among the Carijó, a coastal Tupi people, initiating a system of Norman ‘interpreters’ living for extended periods amongst native peoples in order to organize and promote trade. But also, according to Jean de Léry, ‘accommodating themselves to the natives and leading the lives of atheists, not only polluted themselves by all sorts of lewd and base behaviors among the women and girls . . . but some of them, surpassing the savages in inhumanity, even boasted in my hearing of having killed and eaten prisoners’.19 The rebellion of the traders was suppressed and Villegagnon sought both political and spiritual reinforcement. He wrote to Jean Calvin requesting that pastors be sent, one of whom was to be Jean de Léry. However, the Franciscan André Thevet already served the colony—and consequently the religious tensions and conflicts of Europe were transposed to Brazil, where the native practice of ritual cannibalism became the colonial mirror of theological dispute over the meaning of Christian Eucharist. Villegagnon in fact turned against the Protestant pastors and executed five of them, even as Léry was returning to France.20 Léry and Thevet are therefore positioned very differently with regard to both the politics of colonialism in the region and the significance of Tupian sacrificial rituals. André Thevet, in his earliest work on Brazil, Les Singularitez de la france Antarctique [The Singularities of Antarctic France] (1557), delineated a geography of man-eating that located the uncultured ‘cannibals’ to the north towards the Amazon River, and the ritualized ‘anthropophages’ in the orbit of French influence. The former are characterized as cruel eaters of human flesh as a matter of diet, the latter as exponents of certain elaborate rituals of revenge. Not surprisingly, this cannibal cosmography also conforms to the patterns of French trading and military alliances with the indigenous population in the region. But it is the matter of direct experience that requires special note here, since Thevet, although often lauded as the ‘first ethnographer’ of the Tupi, in fact composed 19 Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley 1990), 128. 20 Ibid., 218. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 648 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 his account, or had others do so, from a multiplicity of second-hand sources. But both Léry and Thevet who, in the transliteration of Tupian ritual into something more akin to a witches’ sabbat, suggest the women who are key to this ritual practice. Elaborate though anthropophagic ritual becomes in Thevet’s subsequent account in the Cosmographie Universelle [Universal Cosmography] (1575) and his manuscript work Histoire de . . . deux voyages [History of . . . Two Voyages], it is clear that vengeance is the hermeneutic key for the missionary writers in understanding the meaning of the cannibal act, such that description of the careful distribution of the victim’s body parts among allies and affines, as well as the embedding of the ritual in myth, becomes central to these later works. Thevet thus provides details of Tupian cosmology and mythology in the Cosmographie that appear nowhere else. However, the cultural importance of the sorcerer-prophets, the Karaiba, as well as the evil spirits, are certainly mentioned in most of the other sources, both Portuguese and French, reviewed here. Montaigne later collapses this binary geography and restricts the notion of the cannibal (as opposed to anthropophage) to the Tamoio, as constructed by Thevet twenty years earlier and as contemporaneously read by Léry.21 Montaigne’s method is to conjoin the sensationalism of cannibalism with an unexpected eulogy, mimicking another work of the period on the savageries and civilities of the Ottoman Turks, Guillame Postel’s La République des Turcs [The Republic of the Turks] (1560). As F. Lestringant wryly notes, this particularization of the cannibal, unlike with Thevet, allows Montaigne actually to conceal the extent of his analytical and descriptive borrowing from Thevet through Léry, and directly from Léry himself.22 Léry’s borrowing from Thevet, despite their theological differences, is very evident. In fact Léry actually adds very little new ethnographic evidence but nonetheless vastly enriches the interpretation and symbolic exploitation of that material. In his writing the cannibal becomes a universal symbolic and tropic key; the central motivation of vengeance is made systematic through an examination of various aspects of Tupi culture and he clearly allegorizes the act of eating. In this new framework of semiophagy the carnal and spiritual are expressed through the opposition of the raw and cooked. As a Calvinist pastor, Léry was also a witch-hunter of some enthusiasm in Europe, so that the imagery of life-sucking hecuba and witch cannibalism of the innocent play easily into his representation of Tupian ritual.23 This misogyny is given further inflection through the facts of Léry’s own biography since he personally encountered survival cannibalism 21 Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Paris, 1580); and Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (Geneva, 1578). 22 F. Lestringant (ed.), Jean de Léry: Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578) (Paris, 1997), 54–5. 23 A similar transformation is evident in the reworking of Staden’s illustrations for the visual compendium Americae, published in 1592 by Théodore de Bry. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 649 during the siege of Sancerre, just before turning to write the Histoire d’un voyage (1578). HANS STAD EN , A NT HON Y K NIVET , A ND T H E DU T C H I N B R A Z I L At the same time that Jean de Léry first travelled to Brazil, the Tupinambá captured Hans Staden, a German gunner in the service of the Portuguese. In itself this was not such a remarkable event, but in order to understand the centrality of ethnology to South American historiography, and the notion of indigenous cannibalism to the imagining of Brazil in particular, then Hans Staden’s text—the Warhaftige Historia [True History] (1557)—is of key importance. The Warhaftige Historia is a fundamental text in the history of the discovery of Brazil, being one of the earliest accounts we have of the Atlantic world from an eyewitness who was six years in Portuguese service and captive among Indians for more than nine months, as well as offering highly detailed description of the nature of early Portuguese enclaves in the region of Rio de Janeiro.24 As mentioned, the work dates to a point in time when the Portuguese presence in the region was directly challenged by the French, who had been visiting the Brazilian coast for the trade in Brazilian wood since at least the 1520s. In this context, both the French and Portuguese attempted to recruit and maintain native alliances, making knowledge of the indigenous population much more than a disinterested ethnological issue. Staden’s account therefore also hinges on the way in which this inter-colonial conflict played into his situation as a captive of the Tupinambá,25 allies to the French. In this way the work, although chiefly famed until now as a text on Tupian cannibalism, is no less important for appreciating the nature of European colonialism in Brazil and how that context was significant for the emergence of various ethnic and national antagonisms in Europe. In fact the issue of cannibalism, although obviously prominent in Staden’s text and its accompanying visual illustrations (see Fig. 31.1), is by no means the only matter of contemporary interest to historians and anthropologists. The Portuguese made every effort, not always successful, to keep out other Europeans, not least the British. Nevertheless, a number of British (and Irish) 24 See Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (eds.), Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham, 2008). 25 The term ‘Tupi’ is a collective term applied to a number of Tupı́-Guarani speaking tribes such as the Caeté, Potiguara, Tamoyo, Timino, Tupinambá, and Tupiniquin, who in the sixteenth century occupied extensive areas of the Brazilian Atlantic coast from southern São Paulo to the mouth of the Amazon River. Though now extinct, these widely dispersed tribal groups showed considerable uniformity in language and culture. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:43 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 650 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 Figure 31.1 Konyan Bebe addresses Hans Staden on his capture. From Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (eds.), Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham, NC, 2008), 63. sailors, adventurers, privateers, and pirates landed on the Brazilian coast during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The journals and narratives many of them wrote about what they found there are of great interest in themselves and of great value to historians of colonial Brazil. These first-hand accounts of Brazil can be found in Richard Hakluyt’s, Principal Navigations (1589), Theodore de Bry’s, Grands Voyages, vol. III Americae (1592), and Samuel Purchas’s, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1613). Among the more notable of these accounts is Anthony Knivet’s story of his ten years of ‘admirable adventures and strange fortunes’ (1592–1601), after being captured by the Portuguese during Thomas Cavendish’s attack on Santos. Thus, some forty years after Staden’s captivity text was published, the Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 651 Master Antonie Knivet appeared in Purchas’s collection of travel literatures, Purchas His Pilgrimes. The text includes the story of Anthony Knivet’s voyage to Brazil, his life among the indigenous cultures there, and his eventual return to England. After shipwreck along the Brazilian coast Knivet is held captive by the Portuguese. One of his tasks under the governor is that of bandeirante (licensed explorer, fortune hunter). As both escapee and slave, Knivet lives among the Indians, observing their customs, language, military technique, and culture. He recounts many of his experiences, including vivid portraits of numerous Native American individuals and tribes. Knivet recounts the long march of the Tamoyo, who had captured Knivet, and the other twelve members of his bandeira. He witnessed the deaths by bludgeoning of all his companions. He attributed his own survival to a lie he told, stating that he was French rather than Portuguese, as had also been the case for Hans Staden. During his two-month captivity, Knivet forges a friendship with the Tamoyo. They share information on fishing, hunting, and military technique. When his military advice proves useful against the Tomomino and Tupinikin tribes, Knivet gains a position of authority among his captors. Planning to make his way to the coast in order to board a ship for England, Knivet takes this opportunity to persuade the Tamoyo chief to move his people eastward. Knivet and thirty thousand Tamoyo thus depart for the Atlantic coast and, after further tribulations, Knivet does indeed manage his return to England. Richard Flecknoe is usually credited with having written the first separately published book by an English-speaking traveller to Brazil. Flecknoe was an Irish Catholic priest, poet, and adventurer who travelled from Lisbon to Brazil in 1648 and spent eight months in Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro in 1649. William Dampier—pirate, adventurer, and explorer—also left a narrative of Brazil at the end of the seventeenth century in his work A Voyage to New Holland in the Year 1699 (1729), which includes a description of a month-long visit to Bahia. The Dutch, as with the British adventurers, also sustained important colonial connections with Brazil and between 1500 and 1610 numerous titles were published in the Netherlands, many of which contained American references. Dutch trading and trading posts in the New World led to the development of the West India Company in 1621 and Dutch pamphleteers not surprisingly represented their commercial rivals, the Spanish and Portuguese, as cruel and despotic. In particular the extended reports by Dierick Ruyters and Johannes de Laet,26 both of whom provided important navigation information and detailed accounts of the West India Company’s operations in Brazil, represent the most important of this kind of promotional literature, rich with ethnographic detail. 26 Dierick Ruyters, Toortse der zee-vaert (1623; The Hague, 1913); and Johannes de Laet, Nieuwe wereldt ofte beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (Leiden, 1625). Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 652 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 F IR S T CON TA C TS A L O NG T HE AM A ZON RI V E R AN D THE CAPTAINCY O F MARANHÃO , 15 4 0– 16 5 0 First contacts were often much later along the Amazon than the coastal regions of Brazil and the Guianas, since neither the Spanish nor Portuguese tried to settle the Maranhão region or the upper Amazon until the1640s. Although other colonial powers were established throughout this region, their settlements were simply fortified trading posts. Notably, the first Iberian expeditions to travel the length of the Amazon departed from the Andean regions to the west. Francisco de Orellana left Quito for the ‘Land of Cinnamon’ in the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro in 1541 and, although it did not represent the first European intrusion into the Amazon basin, it did signal the start of a serious interest in its exploitation and discovery. Until this point, the interior regions of the Amazon valley were not central to Spanish colonizing efforts. The Portuguese had first sighted Brazil from the fleet of Pero Álvares Cabral in 1500; the first Spanish discovery of the Amazon had been made by Vincent Yánez Pinzón a few months earlier. The Spaniards named the channel at the mouth of the Amazon Santa Marı́a de la Mar Dulce, recording that the outlet that discharged so much freshwater into the ocean seemed to be a ‘sea’ itself. The region around the Amazon delta was difficult for sailing ships to navigate and a coastal environment of mangrove swamps made landings difficult, with the exception of the region around São Luı́s de Maranhão. The ‘captaincy’ of Maranhão, created by King João III in 1534, was the most northerly grant of land made by the Portuguese king. The Crowns of Portugal and Spain negotiated a treaty in 1494, which limited Portuguese possession in the New World to a region east of the ‘line of Tordesillas’ during the subsequent fifty years. Technically almost all the Amazon basin lay outside Portuguese jurisdiction and, by 1554, the Portuguese had desisted from their attempts to colonize Maranhão. Together with a lack of Spanish colonization, this situation created fertile conditions for the Dutch, English, French, and Irish trading ventures that represented the sole European occupations of the river until the 1630s. In the European exploration of South America, the Caribbean Islands, coastal Guiana, and the Brazilian littoral south of the Amazon were the easterly starting points for journeys into the hinterland. However, Spanish occupation of the Inca Empire in the 1530s meant that the first journeys down the Amazon channel were made from the west, following the headwaters to the mouth. It is from these four regions that the first travel accounts began to emerge, all projecting different kinds of imagery of the interior, but all being simultaneously concerned with how that interior night be better known and so emphasizing the character of indigenous peoples, the ramification of their social and political systems, and the opportunities for trade and plunder that existed among them. Equally significant Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 653 for these early writers was the hydrology, topography, and agricultural potential of the land—for writing about one’s travels and getting it published required both a financial investment, and that such a publication had demonstrable political utility. The first accounts of travel along the Amazon were never published by their authors. Gaspar de Carvajal’s account of the journey made in 1541 by Francisco de Orellana—from the Amazon headwaters in Peru to its mouth—is nonetheless one of the most important documents of New World exploration for its description of societies of the Amazon before significant European occupation of the river in the 1630s. Carvajal also sets a tone for the way in which the river will be described in most subsequent accounts—vast, incomprehensible, filled with wonder, and rich in life and culture. For example, Carvajal writes of one of the villages they plundered: ‘In this village there was a villa in which there was a great deal of porcelain ware of the best that has ever been seen in the world, for that of Málaga is not its equal . . . they are so accurately worked out that with natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things like Roman [ware].’ But this evidence of civility masks a more sinister aspect to native culture: ‘In this house there were two idols woven out of feathers of different sorts, which frightened one, and they were of the stature of giants, and on their arms stuck into the fleshy part, they had a pair of disks resembling candlestick sockets’, while in another landing they see: ‘A hewn tree trunk ten feet in girth, there being represented and carved in relief a walled city . . . at this gate were two towers, very tall and having windows . . . and this entire structure, . . . rested on two very fierce lions.’27 Such marvels also implied connections both with the Inca and the walled city of El Dorado, and these connections are repeatedly evidenced in the journey through references to the presence of llamas, copper axes, clothing, and so forth. Carvajal also announces the presence of the Amazons who came to fight against the Spanish expedition with such ferocity that they clubbed any of their own warriors who turned back from the attack, and their brigantines were so stuck with arrows that they ‘looked like porcupines’.28 Carvajal also initiates an ethnological framework for understanding the great diversity of peoples whereby those upstream subtly approximate the ‘civilized’ Indians of Peru, while those downstream, noted for their use of poison arrows and display of severed heads, thus appear more wild and distant. The Amazonians thus occupy an ambiguous mid-point, both culturally and fluvially, as eminent women capable of brutal ferocity. The account of Lope de Aguirre’s descent of the Amazon, redacted into Pedro Simon’s Historical Notices followed a similar route some ten years later.29 The 27 Carvajal, The Discovery of the Amazon, 201, 205. Ibid., 214. Simón, Pedro, William Bollaert, and Clements R. Markham, The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560–1 (London, 1861). 28 29 Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 654 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 account is also charged with wonder and mystery, but as much with regard to the politics of colonialism as the environment and its peoples. Aguirre, known also as ‘The Tyrant’ and ‘The Hooded Pilgrim’, in fact mutinied against the original commander of the expedition, executed his followers, and led the survivors on a journey to establish a new empire, distinct from that of Spain. Guided in part by Tupi Indian prophets searching for their own mystical ‘land without evil’, Aguirre’s journey establishes the Amazon as a cultural site for social experiment, ethnological extremes, and mystical endeavour. After the French Huguenots led by Nicholas de Villegagnon at Rio de Janeiro were driven out by a Portuguese attack in 1560, the French presence in Brazil persisted through numerous trading voyages. Since Portugal had not established any settlements in the Maranhão region, it was here that the French attempted another colonial venture during the early seventeenth century. In 1612 the Capuchin father Claude d’Abbeville arrived with a French expedition at Maranhão, situated along the east coast of Brazil, just south of the Amazon River. The company was headed by Daniel de La Touche and Sieur de La Ravardière and operated under a charter granted in 1610 by Marie de Medici, acting regent for King Louis XIII. Although the Portuguese presence in Brazil was dominant, French traders had operated along Brazil’s coast throughout the sixteenth century. Norman French were the chief operators of an active trade in Brazilian dyewood. Members of these trading parties were frequently left to live among Brazil’s natives in order to learn their language and organize the cutting and gathering of logs for the returning French ships. Claude d’Abbeville’s initial reaction to the natives of the Maranhão region was positive, and his hopes for success were great. His early letters, besides expressing his own optimism, served a propaganda purpose as well. Sustained contact with the Indians led d’Abbeville to express many doubts as to the permanent success of the Capuchin missionary effort in Brazil. Fr Claude’s ideas evolved during the course of his four-month stay with the Tupinambá, which began in August 1612. His initial optimism and enthusiasm gave way to more ambivalent attitudes towards the natives and their potential for conversion. These more complex and realistic thoughts are expressed in a 381-page account that was published in 1614, one year following d’Abbeville’s return to France.30 He thus had time to reflect on his experiences. This work contains a history of the Capuchin missionary work in Maranhão, a very detailed relation of native customs and ceremonies, and information about the physical environment. Yves d’Evreux, the Capuchin cleric who continued d’Abbeville’s work among the Tupinambá, contrasts his own two-year stay in Brazil with the four-month visit of d’Abbeville, but his overall attitudes are similar in seeing good possibilities for the conversion of the 30 Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des Pères Capucins en l’Isle de Maragnan et terres circinfines . . . (Paris, 1614). Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 655 natives.31 However, Claude d’Abbeville’s hopes for continued French presence in Brazil were not sustained. In 1614 the Portuguese built a fort at Maranhão and began to attack the French and their Tupinambá allies. In November of the following year, Sieur de La Ravardière surrendered. The French abandoned their colony and never renewed their efforts to establish their presence in Brazil. The Tupinambá Indians were either killed or enslaved by the Portuguese during the next decade. The French colony at Maranhão was short-lived, lasting only three years. C O L O N I AL G L I M P SE S I N T O T H E I N T E R I O R , 1 65 0– 1 85 0 As the colonial regimes in South America moved permanently to occupy and expand their initial coastal enclaves, so the place of travel accounts in the cultural work of conquest changes. Although travellers coming directly from Europe are still represented, a new kind of traveller emerges—one who negotiates not so much geographical distance as cultural difference. The codification of that difference, its repeated proof and extension through journeys into the hinterland beyond administrative control, the tribal zone of anthropology, or the contact zone of literary scholarship,32 is now the site for the production of exemplary experience and useful knowledge. The fact of encounter is itself no longer remarkable, rather specific kinds of encounter with both moral and natural phenomena provide the evidence of authentic travel. As a result, accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries move from the more general evocations to the minutiae of particular landscapes, plants and animals, or the investigation of specific cultural proclivities and practices. Writers of this period therefore tend to have clearer and more sustained identities within the colony, rather than the metropolis, and fall into two main classes, missionaries and administrators. This by no means precludes other kinds of writers, but it is striking that much of the literature was produced by such individuals. The missionary narratives of Padre Cristobal Acuña and Padre Samuel Fritz thus return us to the sites first visited by Carvajal but narrate a loss and destruction of native culture in the intervening 130 years. This gap in writing about the Amazon was not as total as the limits of space in this chapter make it appear, since there exist manuscript accounts of individual reconnoitring and even of a journey to the palace of Coñori, Queen of the Amazons. The hiatus in published accounts was due to the fact that after Carvajal and Aguirre the only European presence in the river basin itself was provided by the existence of 31 Yves d’Evreux, Voyage dans le nord du Brésil, fait durant les années 1613 et 1614 (Paris, 1985). See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/New York, 1992); and R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe/London, 1999). 32 Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 656 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 scattered trading posts manned by small companies of French, English, Irish, and Dutch adventurers. It was not until 1639 that the Portuguese actually made their first attempt at settlement of the river, and Padre Acuña was part of that armed ingress. He is therefore overwhelmingly concerned with the economic and political prospects for the river and its peoples. He also explicitly revisits many of the sites of Carvajal’s narrative as if to exorcize the shadow of that Spanish emissary in favour of his Portuguese king—the Amazon basin itself having been delineated by the Pope as a Portuguese territory in the Treaty of Tordesillas. In emulating the track of Carvajal, Acuña’s narrative harks back to the initial metaphors of vastness and mystery, even resurrecting by allusion the conjecture of Columbus that the hydrology of the southern continent was consistent with it being the site of the biblical Eden. Acuña writes: ‘if the Ganges irrigates all India . . . if the Nile irrigates and fertilizes a great part of Africa: the river of the Amazons waters more extensive regions, fertilizes more plains, supports more people, and augments by its floods a mightier ocean: it only wants, in order to surpass them in felicity, that its source should be in Paradise’.33 The theme of an Amazonian dystopia thus becomes firmly embedded in subsequent writings, both anthropological and literary. However, it is Fritz’s account that gives the more intimate picture of the Amazon since he was precisely a stationary traveller, moving in cultural rather than geographical space in the upper reaches of the river. He gives himself this kind of identity as a ‘traveller’, not just as an evangelical functionary, through his partial intellectual detachment from the immediate missionary project. This is signalled through nostalgia for the Amazon’s native past, a sense of its destruction through disease and slavery, and ambivalence to the eradication of its superstitions. The territorial expansion of ‘Brazil’ was not only taking place in the Amazon basin at this time but also along the frontier between the coastal regions and the vast hinterland that the bandeiras of Knivet’s era had only just begun to penetrate. Histories of the Brazilian frontier experience often emphasize the contributions of both blacks and Indians as a matter of course. In Brazilian historiography the term used for this frontier hinterland is sertão. During the colonial era this word referred to all the unexplored and unsettled land in Brazil, and so remains evocative even today, where much still remains unexplored and the vast interior of the country remains unsettled. The sertão appears infrequently in histories of Brazil written during the country’s first three centuries. Study of the interior did not attract much attention prior to the end of the nineteenth century, for in both countries the European heritage dominated histories of the colonies. Most chronicles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese America were thus limited to description of the native inhabitants, the coastal environments, and settlements. An exception to this relative lack of writings on the sertão appeared 33 Padre Cristobal Acuña, ‘A New Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons’, in Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, ed. Clements Markham (London, 1859), 61. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 657 early in the eighteenth century in the chronicle by Andre Antonil, Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas [The Culture and Wealth of Brazil’s Products and Mines], which gave an account of the colony’s economic activities, from sugar and mining to cattle. But it was quickly suppressed, probably because Portuguese authorities believed it described Brazil in terms that might prove useful and attractive to other European powers. Later in the eighteenth century the sertão was lauded as a unique element shaping civilization in Brazil, and local historians, such as Pedro Taques de Paes Almeida Leme and Gaspar de Madre de Deus, wrote works that intimately described the region of the Paulista plateau.34 ‘COL ONIAL B RAZIL’ AS HISTOR ICAL M OTIF The historiography of colonial Brazil as written by its contemporary authors reflected an idea of the chronicler as recording rather than interpreting past events. The Historia da America Portuguesa [The History of Portuguese America] (1730) written by Rocha Pitta, a member of a wealthy family in Bahia, precisely exemplifies these characteristics but, as A. J. R. Russell-Wood notes, it ‘remains worthy of consultation less as a source of factual information than for the author’s perspective’. It was ‘unbound by an institutional environment’, since Rocha Pitta brought a perspective that revealed attitudes, values, and reflected contemporary mentalities.35 However, neither Rocha Pitta nor his contemporary chroniclers engaged in archival research, yet chronicles of this kind had an established place in writing on Brazil. The first history of Brazil under Portuguese colonial rule to treat the entire three centuries from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, and to be based on extensive research, was written by the English Romantic poet Robert Southey, who had also never visited Brazil. The first volume of what became a three-volume History of Brazil was published in 1810, two years after the Portuguese court had moved to Brazil, but Southey had begun work on the project more than a decade earlier. In 1796, aged 22, Southey spent three and a half months visiting his uncle who was chaplain to the community of British merchants in Lisbon. He later returned for fifteen months in 1800–1. Southey wrote his History based on the collection of books and manuscripts on Luso-Brazilian topics that belonged to his uncle. Southey himself was a disciple 34 Cited by Mary Lombardi ‘The Frontier in Brazilian History: An Historiographical Essay’, The Pacific Historical Review, 44:4 (1975), 446, she writes: ‘In the nineteenth century the sertão began to appear more frequently in the histories of Brazil, and its absence elicits criticism. The prize-winning essay by Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, ‘How the History of Brazil Should be Written’, for example, in addition to perceptively understanding the basic themes of Brazil’s past, also suggested that the history of the sertão deserved to be better known.’ 35 A. J. R. Russell-Wood, ‘Brazilian Archives and Recent Historiography on Colonial Brazil’, Latin American Research Review, 36:1 (2001), 75–105, at 78. Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 658 of the political philosophy of Burke and Coleridge. His sympathies lay with humanist reformists and Liberal politics, which equated to a dogmatic conviction in the absolute superiority of English civilization. Southey’s History is accordingly conservative in tone. Nevertheless, Southey critiqued Portuguese colonization and, although he admired racial mixing and what he saw as a policy of ethnic integration on the part of the Portuguese, he abhorred the slave-owning aristocracy and the power of the local political elites. In the History of Brazil Southey’s defence of strengthening the state and institutionalizing paternalist social bonds (slavery) led him to welcome the arrival of the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro, seeing this as a chance to found an empire whose mission would consist of adjusting the country to the civilizing benefits of English trade. Broadly speaking, Southey was interested in the nature of miscegenation between ‘Indians’ and colonists and understood the effects that epidemic disease, especially smallpox, had had in creating the colonial demography of Brazil, noting that ‘the mixture and intermixture of three different races—European, American, and African—had produced new diseases, or at least new constitutions, by which old diseases were so modified that the most skilful physicians were puzzled by new symptoms’.36 He was also committed to discovering the significance of religion in history: ‘When America was discovered, the civilization of its different nations was precisely in proportion to the degree of power and respectability which their priests possessed; and this authority of the priesthood was not the consequence of an improved state of society, but the cause of it.’37 Thus, Southey’s historical writings reflect the idea that key individuals determined the course of historical events against the backdrop of certain political and moral certainties. CONCLUSION The importance of Southey’s work is thus perhaps the way in which it was valued by the builders of the Brazilian Empire and by the defenders of centralized monarchy and slavery, as much for the way in which it matches modern conceptions of what ‘history’ should be. In this way, Southey’s History also returns us to the first moment of writing ‘Brazil’ and the inception of conquest. History did not originate with the Europeans and this chapter could have also reflected further on the forms of historical ‘writing’ and the epistemological disjuncture between European and native forms that is thereby revealed.38 Ironically it was an anthropologist of Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who notoriously suggested that native societies were ‘cold’ and European ones were ‘hot’ in terms of their openness to, and consciousness of, change as a means of social 36 37 38 Robert Southey, History of Brazil, vol. 1 (London, 1819), 327. Ibid., 251. Neil L. Whitehead, Histories and Historicities in Amazonia (Lincoln, 2003). Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 659 progress and cultural destiny. In this view, native Brazil has ‘no history’ but exists in an eternal present of ‘first contacts’ and ‘marvelous discovery’.39 A lack of cultural significance and historical depth to native societies was, as the sources reviewed above reveal, already a historical assumption even before the pronouncements of Lévi-Strauss. As a result, historical writings about Brazil, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, are largely cast in terms of travelogues, ethnological inventories, tales of heroic evangelical redemption, or natural histories, in which the natives figure as an especially exotic form of savage wildlife. Too exclusive a focus on ‘writing’ also blinds us to the visual histories, contained both in the books and printed works discussed above, but also by constituting their own kinds of non-textual histories, as in the work of Albert Eckhout.40 In just this way the archaeological record, both pre- and post-Cabral, is as yet a mute source for historiography, underlining the fundamental but unresolved historiographical issue of the periodization of the ‘Native’ and the ‘Colonial’. As in the rest of the Americas, the stubborn persistence of the ‘Native’ permanently challenges the construction of the ‘National’ as an inclusive trope of contemporary history-writing. For all these reasons, it is to be hoped that this brief review will also function to stimulate a broader definition of what might come to constitute a more complete historiography of Brazil. K E Y HI S TOR I C AL S OU R C E S Abbeville, Claude d’,Histoire de la mission des Pères Capucins en l’Isle de Maragnan et terres circinfines . . . (Paris, 1614). Acuña, Cristobal d’, ‘A New Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons’, in Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, ed. Clements Markham (London, 1859). Anchieta, José de, ‘Information on the Marriage of the Indians of Brazil’, Revista trimensal de historia e geographia, 8 (1846), 254–62. ——Cartas, informaçoes, fragmentos históricos e sermoes (São Paulo, 1988). Anon., ‘Enformação do Brasil, e de suas Capitanias’, Revista trimensal de historia e geographia, 6 (1844), 412–43. Bry, Théodore de, Americae Tertia Pars (Frankfurt, 1592). Caminha, Pedro Vaz de, The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India (London, 1938). Cardim, Fernão, ‘A Treatise of Brasil and Articles Touching the Dutie of the Kings Majestie our Lord, and to the Common Good of all the Estate of Brasill’, in Samuel Purchas (ed.), Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrims, vol. 16 (Glasgow, 1906), 417–51. 39 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York, 1992). Albert Eckhout was a Dutch portrait and still-life painter. He was among the first artists to paint scenes from the New World. In 1636 he travelled to Dutch Brazil, invited by John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen. There, he painted portraits of natives, slaves, and mulattos, as well as depictions of Brazilian fruits and vegetables. 40 Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi 660 Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800 Carvajal, G. de, ‘Discovery of the Orellana River’, in The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents, ed. J. T. Medina, trans. B. T. Lee (New York, 1934). Evreux, Yves. d’, Voyage dans le nord du Brésil, fait durant les années 1613 et 1614 (Paris, 1985). Fritz, Samuel, Journal of the Travels and Labours of Father Samuel Fritz in the River of the Amazons between 1686 and 1723, trans. and ed. George Edmundson (London, 1922). Gandavo, Pero de Magalhães, ‘History of the Province of Santa Cruz’, in The Histories of Brazil, vol. 2 (New York, 1922). Knivet, Anthony, ‘Anthony Knivet, his Comming to the R. De Janeiro and Usage Amongst the Portugals and Indians: His Divers Travels, Throw Divers Regions of Those Parts’, in Samuel Purchas (ed.), Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrims, extra series, no. 14–30 (Glasgow, 1625). Léry, Jean de, Histoire memorable de la ville de Sancerre (Geneva, 1574). ——Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (Geneva, 1578). ——History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, 1990). Montaigne, Michel de, Essais (Paris, 1580). Nóbrega, Manuel da, ‘Informaçāo das Terras do Brasil’ (1549), in Cartas do Brasil (São Paulo, 1988), 97–102. Simon, Pedro, Sixth Historical Notice of the Conquest of Tierra Firme (London, 1861). Sousa, Gabriel Soares de, Notı́cia do Brasil (São Paulo, 1974). Thevet, André, Les Singularitez de la france Antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique: et de plusieurs Terres et Isles decouvertes de nostre temps (Paris, 1557). Vespucci, Amerigo, The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of his Career, trans. Clements R. Markham (London, 1894). BIBLIOGRAPHY Amado, Janaı́na, ‘Mythic Origins: Caramuru and the Founding of Brazil’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 80:4 (2000), 783–811. Ferguson, R. Brian and Whitehead, Neil L. (eds.), War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe and London, 1999). Hulme, Peter and Whitehead, Neil L. (eds.), Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day: An Anthology (Oxford, 1992). Lestringant, F. (ed.), Jean de Léry: Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578) (Paris 1994). ——Cannibals (Berkeley, 1997). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques (New York, 1992). Lombardi, Mary, ‘The Frontier in Brazilian History: An Historiographical Essay’, The Pacific Historical Review, 44:4 (1975), 437–57. Monteiro, John M., ‘The Heathen Castes of Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America: Unity, Diversity, and the Invention of the Brazilian Indian’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 80:4 (2000), 697–719. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992). Comp. by: pg4118 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001331940 Time:14:20:44 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001331940.3D Date:3/10/11 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, 3/10/2011, SPi Neil L. Whitehead 661 Schwartz, Stuart B., ‘Adolfo de Varnhagen: Diplomat, Patriot’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 47:2 (1967), 185–202. Whatley, Janet (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Jean de Léry: History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (Berkeley, 1990), pp. xv–xxxviii. Whitehead, Neil L., Histories and Historicities in Amazonia (Lincoln, 2003). ——The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh (Manchester and Norman, 1997). ——and Harbsmeier, Michael (eds.), Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham, NC, 2008).