Engel Sluiter (1906-2001)

Engel Sluiter, a longtime student of European overseas expansion, once predicted that curiosity would kill him, but he was mistaken: he died of a heart attack in Kensington, California, on 28 May 2001, just over a month prior to his 95th birthday. The son of a Dutch-born rancher, teacher, and county supervisor, and the grandson of windmill operators in Holland, he was born on a ranch near New Holland, South Dakota. His youthful enthusiasms helped to shape his adult preoccupations. One was his inexhaustible passion for knowledge, reflected, for example, in his practice of regularly slipping through an open window of the closed local library in order to find reading materials that would satisfy his curiosity. Another was his fascination with the achievements of Dutch mariners and their European rivals throughout the globe during the early modern period. A third was his penchant for solitary endeavors: the fact that he was the only Boy Scout in his community did not deter him from earning merit badges. A fourth was his craving for physical exertion: as a boy he performed chores about the ranch; as a graduate student he became an ardent hiker; he remained a vigorous walker into his late 80s. Although he did not take up tennis until his 30s, he developed into an exceptionally adroit, cunning player. The Sluiters became a dedicated tennis family. Their daughters became star performers and Engel's widow, Shirley, is still a competitive player. Infirmities of age finally drove Engel from the court in his mid-80s.

Engel did not set out to become a scholar. In 1924 he withdrew from high school in Hull, Iowa, in order to teach seventh and eighth grades in a local school and to study voice at Central College in his mother's hometown of Pella, Iowa. But after a year he abandoned plans for an operatic career and set out for California in a Model T Ford with a friend. When they reached the valley town of Modesto, their car broke down. Engel then enrolled first in Modesto Junior College and later transferred to Stanford University where he worked with Percy Alvin Martin, a now forgotten Brazilianist, and graduated in 1929 "with great distinction."

Despite the onset of the Depression, he obtained a position in a junior high school in Downey, California, where for two years he taught social studies, doubled as track coach, and worked with the football team. In 1931 he took a marked reduction in income in order to return to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he began graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, under the supervision of the formidable Herbert E. Bolton. He earned his M.A. there in 1933 and, following a year in the archives of Holland and Spain, his Ph.D. in 1937. Next, he taught briefly at Chico State College and at San Francisco State Colleges before returning to Berkeley, where he would teach from 1940 until he reached mandatory retirement in 1973. A dynamic lecturer who constantly bounded about the room and candidly conceded that much of Latin American history still remained to be discovered, Sluiter offered a variety courses concerning Latin American history, including the popular History of the Americas, a survey of the colonial period, and another concerning the history of Brazil. He also gave demanding graduate seminars that customarily met after nightfall and that, during the 1950s, regularly attracted about ten students. Their emphasis was upon preparatory oral bibliographical reports and the reading of draft chapters of M.A. and Ph.D. theses. Sometimes tedious, the sessions were generally lively, though sometimes ego-shattering. It was Engel's practice to have the victim read his paper (for there were very few women in Berkeley's graduate seminars in those days), followed by assessments from supportive members of the class. A hush would descend around the large round table in Berkeley's main library where Professor Bolton once presided. Then Sluiter would...