An Appreciation of Charles R. Boxer: Teacher, Scholar, and Bibliophile

During the 40 years that I knew Charles R. Boxer, there were years of intense communication and frequent meetings, then years when months passed with little communication, followed by years when contacts were limited to a meeting at a conference, exchange of Christmas cards, or occasional letters sharing a research finding, answering a query, or recommending a new book. For me, there has been a transition from being an undergraduate student to being a fellow member of the guild of scholars, and the easy relationship that is the fruit of the passage of time. While Boxer's knowledge was so encyclopedic that his presence inspired the feeling of being perpetually in statu pupillari, one of his many talents was an ability to make one feel a fellow traveler in the quest of knowledge for a better understanding of humankind across time and space.

Recollections of an Undergraduate

I first met Charles Boxer in 1961 in his office at King's College London, at a time when he held the Camoens Chair of Portuguese at London University. I was an undergraduate in the School of Modern Languages at Oxford University. The purpose of the meeting was to persuade him to be my tutor for a course of readings on "The Chronicles of the Portuguese Expansion in Asia." Boxer seemed both bemused and intrigued that someone would be interested in doing a study of the Portuguese in Asia, under his supervision. For a semester we met in London on alternate Tuesdays from 2:30 to 4:15 pm. The practice was for me to read to Boxer an essay that I had written. This was on a theme such as João de Barros's concept of history, Diogo do Couto as a panegyrist and critic of Portugal in Asia, and the policies and practices of Afonso de Albuquerque.

My most memorable tutorial was on "How Far Can Fernão Mendes Pinto's Peregrinação Be Regarded As a Fair Portrayal of Portuguese Activities in East Asia?" I will dwell on this because it illustrates how Boxer taught and what his expectations were as a teacher. There was a set bibliography of published primary sources, and he expected me to be fully conversant with those sources and assumed that a critical reading of them would be the basis of my essays. He suggested secondary readings either directly related to the text or in cognate fields. For the essay on the Peregrinação, he suggested Georg Schurhammer's Fernão Mendes Pinto und seine Peregrinação, which Boxer seemed to know virtually by heart and held in the highest regard as a model of scholarship. There was a smorgasbord of other readings that included Le Gentil's discussion of Pinto as precursor of exoticism, Maurice Collis's The Grand Peregrination, the work of the Portuguese scholar Cristóvão Aires, and Yosaburo Takekoshi's Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan. Boxer had favorites. He admired Collis, praised George Sansom's The Western World and Japan, and strongly recommended Delmer M. Brown's article on the Portuguese transport of gold to Japan in the sixteenth century. There was a liberal sprinkling of publications from the Hakluyt Society as well as articles from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In making these recommendations, there was an assumption that there would be no obstacle to my reading any work of scholarship in a Western European language.

Boxer's practice was to let me read uninterruptedly. Often he would have a toothpick in hand and could even appear disengaged, but a quick fluttering of the eyelids and a comment showed he had been paying full attention. Only if I said something that was incorrect, or if I stirred in him a train of thought, did he intervene. He was never patronizing or condescending. He always accentuated the positive and his comments took the form of...