Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States

Chapter 13. The British Contribution to the Study of Brazil

CHAPTER 13 The British Contribution to the Study of Brazil LESLIE BETHELL This chapter on the British contribution to the study of Brazil begins with a survey of the (relatively few) firsthand descriptions of Brazil under Portuguese colonial rule written by British (and Irish) visitors from the middle of the sixteenth century to the first decade of the nineteenth century.1 The survey ends with the first comprehensive history of colonial Brazil written by an Englishman, who never visited Brazil: the poet Robert Southey. The second section is a survey of the (many) books on Brazil by British writers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-from 1808 when the Portuguese court arrived to take up temporary residence in Rio de Janeiro and opened Brazil to international trade (and foreign visitors), and especially from 1825 when Portugal recognized Brazil's independence , to the Second World War. These are both highly selective surveys.2 The main focus of this chapter, however, like the chapters on the U.S. contribution to the study of Brazil in the rest of the volume, is on the period from 1945 to 2003. The third section surveys British writing on Brazil from the end of the Second World War to circa 1970, beginning with an assessment of the work of Britain's greatest historian of colonial Brazil, Charles Boxer. The fourth section is a survey of Brazilian studies- teaching , research, and scholarly publications (mainly books) on Brazil- in British universities and research institutes since the implementation of the Parry report on the future of Latin American studies in the United Kingdom (1965).3 Like the chapters on Brazilian studies in U.S. universities, this one concerns itself primarily with the humanities and social sciences, for the most part excluding the life, environmental, and medical sciences, 347 LESLIE BETHELL except for multidisciplinary studies of Amazonia, a field in which British scholars have made a particularly notable contribution. I. BRITISH AND IRISH ACCOUNTS OF BRAZIL UNDER PORTUGUESE COLONIAL RULE Having "discovered" Brazil in 1500, the Portuguese made every effort, not always successful, to keep out other Europeans, not least the British. Nevertheless, a number of British (and Irish) sailors, adventurers, privateers , and pirates landed on the Brazilian coast during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The journals and narratives that 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 observers include, for example, William Hawkins, who was three times in Brazil during the years 1530-32; his grandson Richard, who visited Brazil on his way to the South Seas in 1593; Richard's cousin William Hawkins and the Reverend Richard Madox, who were members of Edward Fenton's expedition of 1582- 83; Thomas Cavendish, who, after becoming only the third European (after Magalhaes and Drake) to circumnavigate the world (in 1586- 88), sacked Santos and Sao Vicente in 1586 and Sao Vicente again in 1591, and James Lancaster, who did the same to Recife in 1595, during the period of Spanish domination of Portugal; Anthony Knivet who, after being shipwrecked following Cavendish's attack on Sao Vicente in 1591 and captured by the Portuguese, experienced for almost ten years "admirable adventures and strange fortunes" in Brazil; and the Irishman Bernard O'Brien, who lived on the lower Amazon in the 1620S. Their firsthand accounts of Brazil, and many others, can be found in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1598), and Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625). In the middle of the seventeenth century, Richard Flecknoe is usually credited with having written the first book by an English-speaking traveler to Brazil: A Relation of Ten Years Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique and America (1654). Flecknoe was an Irish Catholic priest, poet, and adventurer who traveled from Lisbon to Brazil in 1648 and spent eight months in Rio de Janeiro, January- August 1649. At the end of the seventeenth century, William Dampier, pirate, adventurer, explorer, and naturalist, left narratives of his several voyages. A Voyage to New Holland . . . in the Year 1699 (1703,1709), includes a description of a month-long visit to Bahia. In the eighteenth century, an increasing number of British ships en route to the Pacific, India, and later Australia and China, via Cape Horn The British Contribution to the Study of Brazil 349 and the Magellan Straits, made Brazil, and especially Rio de Janeiro and...