Brazil imagined 1500 to the present

Write A Brief Essay About Representations Of Brazil As A “Locus Exoticus.”

Representations of Brazil have long alternated between the edenic and the infernal, or between the erotic and the exotic. Using this clip from the animated film Rio as a starting point, and bringing in pertinent readings, discussions and film clips (e.g., Disney’s The Three Caballeros and Carmen Miranda), write a brief essay about representations of Brazil as a “locus exoticus.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZheNUuK8jg

- Thesis must be clear in the introduction + coherent paragraphs (aka no rambling)

This book originated in a plan to write a large-scale history of Brazilian literature, showing how different authors have contributed to ideas of Bra- zilian national identity. Had I followed through with my initial aims, the result might have vaguely resembled Peter Conrad’s Imagining America (1980), which describes how certain nineteenth-century English writers who visited the United States imagined the country for their respective readerships. (Niagara Falls, for example, was a mandatory stop for Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and others, and it assumed iconic status in their works.) My plan changed, however, when in the course of researching in the Lilly Library and Newberry Library’s Brasiliana collections I began to realize the importance of early cartographic iconography to the formation of the Bra- zilian colonial imaginary. From cartography, it was a short step to studying early woodcuts and copperplate engravings, a topic that I had addressed in an earlier study of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1971 Como era gostoso o meu francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman), a tongue-in-cheek film about sixteenth-century European expansionism and indigenous anthro- pophagy. Before long, my book had grown to include not only literature but also maps, book illustrations, architecture, painting, films, and broadcast media, and my history of the nation ranged from the sixteenth century to the present. Although my study is broad, even panoramic, I should perhaps make clear at the outset that it is focused on various forms of art or mass commu- nication and takes a particular approach to the question of national iden- tity. By using this last term I mean to designate anything that contributes to the individual subject’s sense of belonging to a nation. Does national identity therefore actually exist? Yes, but as I hope to show, it always exists discursively, as a representation or as an idea that is open to contestation and change over time. How does it take shape in Brazil? In many ways— for example, we can observe its workings through a study of law, politics, religion, and even historical linguistics. My own interests, however, are slightly apart from these matters and indeed from the economic relations,

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technologies, and institutions that determine ideology. Unlike Benedict Anderson’s valuable and highly influential Imagined Communities (1983), which explores many of the material conditions that gave rise to ideas of nationhood, my book exclusively addresses imaginary representations; thus I speak only about the cultural superstructure and allude indirectly to certain concerns of historians, political scientists, and anthropologists. For instance, I have little or nothing to say about constitutional law, definitions of citizenship, geographical-territorial boundaries, industrial economies, or popular customs. I do not deal, except obliquely, with the development of print cultures or representational technologies, and I do not write about the formation of “public spheres” such as the ones that have been theorized by Jürgen Habermas. My subject is the relatively manifest ideological ef- fect of fine art, literature, architecture, film, and television on the shap- ing of “Brazilianness.” The modes of cultural expression I have chosen to analyze are obviously determined by economic and political forces, but in themselves they contribute to the shaping of national identity and give us a window onto political and social struggles. They are worthy of study in their own right and have been given relatively little attention, at least in the academic world, along the lines in which I have tried to discuss them. The process of selecting writers, artists, and works was challenging, partly because I was covering five hundred years in a changing culture. In lieu of an encyclopedic survey of the arts, I constructed a series of histori- cal moments in which one or more art forms become dominant or strongly influential. Thus my discussion of the colonial period focuses chiefly on cartography and visual arts, while in my chapter on the nineteenth cen- tury I give most of the attention to literature. When I reach the twentieth century, the materials under consideration are increasingly public, so that I discuss modern architecture, city planning, films, and television. I have also tried to explore the ways in which both foreigners and native-born Bra- zilians have imagined the country. Anyone who has studied Brazil knows that there are myriad accounts of the nation written by foreign travelers. In recent years, scholars José Car- los Barreiro, Felix Driver, and Luciana Martins have focused attention on nineteenth-century illustrations and writings by such individuals as the French painter Jean Baptiste Debret and various British subjects, including the diarist Maria Graham and naturalists William Burchell and Charles Darwin. The nineteenth century is particularly rich in foreign materials

Introduction | 3

on Brazil because shortly after arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, Dom João VI opened the country’s ports to commerce. Curiously, the image of Bra- zil produced by Brazilians themselves has received far less critical atten- tion. This may explain why most of my Brazilian colleagues and friends assumed that I was focusing exclusively on the outsider or “imperial” gaze. My aim instead is to concentrate on Brazilian materials, occasionally show- ing the relationship between local and foreign imaginaries. In all cases, I have indicated the sociopolitical and economic interests and concerns that played a part in the image-making process. Although I have attempted to provide as many examples of national im- agery as is feasible, by no means is the material exhaustive or complete. The wealth of materials from which to choose is an indication of Brazil’s impor- tance as a New World territory of vast proportions, bountiful resources, and indigenous peoples; as the new home of a transplanted European royal court; as a bourgeois society eager for national independence; and as a mod- ern nation of seemingly endless potential, dubbed by a spellbound Stefan Zweig “the land of the future.” Faced with a massive archive, I have necessarily been selective and tried to be mindful of what Raymond Williams described in The Long Revolution (1961) as the “selective cultural tradition”:

Within a given society, selection will be governed by many kinds of special in- terests, including class interests. Just as the actual social situation will largely govern contemporary selection, so the development of society, the process of his- torical change, largely determine the selective tradition. . . . We tend to under- estimate the extent to which the cultural tradition is not only a selection but also an interpretation. We see most past work through our own experience, without even making the effort to see it in something like its original terms. What analy- sis can do is not so much to reverse this, returning a work to its period, as to make the interpretation conscious of showing historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation of the particular contemporary values on which it rests; and, by exploring the real patterns of the work, to confront us with the real nature of the choices we are making. . . . Every element that we analyze will be in this sense active: that it will be seen in certain real relations, at many different levels. In describing these relations, the real cultural process will emerge. (68–70)

To the best of my ability I have documented and examined representa- tions of Brazil “in something like their original terms.” By this I mean that

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I study specific images in their historical contexts and alongside other im- ages to give a sense of their significance in what Williams refers to as the “lived culture.” My study includes canonical texts as well as other works that, for whatever reason, have been neglected or dismissed. A case in point is the poetry of the nineteenth-century African-Brazilian Luís Gama, a gifted writer who was a contemporary of Castro Alves and Joaquim Na- buco. Unlike Alves and Nabuco, who wrote celebrated (and canonical) anti- slavery works during and after the abolitionist movement, Gama focused on the issue of race itself in Brazil. Among his poems are tour de force satires directed at middle- and upper-class Brazilians of African descent who try to pass as white. Perhaps for that reason, Gama never gained entry into the Brazilian literary canon. My book is concerned with a great variety of nationalistic themes in dis- tinct historical periods and at different cultural levels. I have attempted to show how national identity is shaped in the colonial and postcolonial eras, in times of dictatorship and democracy, and in response to moder- nity and postmodernity. At certain junctures I also indicate how the image of Brazil has been influenced by the politics and culture of other nations, particularly France and the United States. In addition, I realized during the course of writing the book that for the entire time span of its existence, Brazil’s imagined identity has been strongly affected by at least two impor- tant concepts that can sometimes take on different qualitative implications at different historical junctures. The first of these is race, which becomes an important issue from the moment European colonizers encounter indig- enous peoples and which lies behind the present-day recognition that the nation is made up of a multiracial population, much of it black. The second theme is nature, meaning in this case the flora and fauna of the place, and its value as a “natural resource.” From the beginning of the European “dis- covery” of Brazil, the vast and varied landscape has been seen alternately as an exotic Eden, a savage wilderness, and a source of valuable commodi- ties. The contrast in these views of the natural world is vividly evident to- day in the long-unequal distribution of landownership and especially in the ever-increasing conflict between ecology and commerce. Both sides of this conflict tend to cultivate a rhetorical technique called ufanismo, which praises to the point of exaggeration Brazil’s resources. Although largely a characteristic of sixteenth-century texts by Portuguese writers who were

Introduction | �

eager to promote the country’s colonization, ufanismo continues to inflect contemporary writings about the nation. At the outset I emphasize the importance of historiography, cartogra- phy, engravings, and woodcuts to the construction of the first images of Brazil. As I show in Chapter One, among the best-known representations of Brazil were Belgian-born Johann Theodor de Bry’s sensational engravings of indigenous cannibals, images that circulated throughout Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. Those engravings not only refuted earlier im- ages of Brazil as a paradise populated with Edenic inhabitants, as recorded by the Portuguese royal scribe Pero Vaz de Caminha and others, but also helped to bolster and justify an aggressive colonial campaign to enslave and ultimately rid the Brazilian coast of the native presence. In Chapter Two, I show how the contrasting images of Brazil as terres- trial Eden and barbarous land continued to be explored in Dutch paintings by artists who accompanied Prince Johan Maurits von Nassau-Siegen to Pernambuco in the seventeenth century. Although scenes of anthropopha- gy appear on Dutch maps and in other works of the time, they are relatively few and always subordinate to images of passive if not friendly natives, happy African slaves, and an energetic commerce—all of which was de- vised to encourage Dutch colonization. The paradise described in writings by early Dutch visitors is especially evident in the work of Frans Post, who is regarded as the first landscape artist of the New World, and in Albert Eckhout’s ethnographic-style paintings of Indians, flora, and fauna. The Edenic vision became a major topos in the earliest literature written in Bra- zil, and nativist works by poet Manuel Botelho de Oliveira and the Jesuit Vicente do Salvador, among others, extolled the country’s natural beauty and abundant resources. Renowned for his satiric verses, the Bahian poet Gregório de Matos took a different approach by criticizing his bountiful homeland for enriching foreigners at the expense of locals. The discovery of gold and diamonds in the mid-eighteenth century confirmed early proph- esies of Brazil as a land rich in precious stones, which resulted in represen- tations of the country along the lines of a tropical Eldorado. That image contrasted sharply with pictorials and accounts of the brutal treatment and death of African slaves who were brought to Brazil to work the mines and plantations. If Brazil was a paradise on earth for some, it was at best (in the words of the Jesuit Antônio Vieira) a “sweet hell” for those enslaved.

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Chapter Three focuses on the flight of the Portuguese royal court from the Napoleonic invasion and their arrival in Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Early writings by the newly arrived immigrants complained about the lack of civ- ilization in Brazil and drew unfavorable comparisons between the country and the homeland left behind. Following various proclamations and proj- ects to lift the profile of the new royal capital, in 1816 the monarch Dom João VI invited a group of French artists and architects to Rio to train lo- cal talent and design buildings in keeping with Brazil’s newly appointed status as part of the kingdom with Portugal and the Algarve. The opening of Brazilian ports to overseas commerce in 1808 encouraged the arrival of various foreign scientific expeditions that documented flora and fauna and produced ethnographies of its people. Travelers like the British-born Maria Graham and John Mawe kept diaries of their visits that described in detail the problems and impact of imported notions of civilization on a people and nation eager for independence. With the proclamation of Brazil’s independence in 18�� and the begin- ning of the Brazilian empire, a new image came to the fore; and the Indian, who was no longer visible, having died or fled into the interior, became an icon of the recently independent nation. As I discuss in Chapter Four, al- though the Indian had appeared earlier in Brazilian literature, the European romantics, including the Portuguese poet Almeida Garrett and the French Brazilianist Ferdinand Denis, encouraged their Brazilian cohorts to adopt the figure of the noble savage as a national symbol. Meanwhile, as Antônio Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar were writing popular epic-style works about valiant indigenous warriors and maidens in the wilderness, other in- tellectuals and artists were beginning to write works about life in the city. The desire to forge a national literature moved from discussions of the Indian to debates among urban novelists such as Joaquim Manuel de Mace- do and “regional” writers such as Franklin Távora, and by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the literary image of the nation was split (albeit unevenly) along geographic lines. On the one hand were works of limited circulation about the Brazilian interior with its “exotic” flora and fauna and regional types such as farmers and storekeepers, muleteers and bandits. On the other hand were the more widely published books about the city and the urban middle class. Blacks rarely figured in either genre; when they did ap- pear, they were usually cast as slaves. However, the image of the slave took on new meaning in abolitionist writings and oratory of the period, efforts

Introduction | 7

toward emancipation that were finally rewarded in 1888. Despite emancipa- tion, the suffering slave continued to be evoked in speeches and writings as a metaphor for a nation eager to wrest its freedom from the imperial monarchy. The freeing of the slaves anticipated by one year the overthrow of Emperor Pedro II and the establishment of the republic. At the same time, novelist Machado de Assis was charting a new course for Brazilian literature that shifted emphasis from romantic nationalism to a more cos- mopolitan, proto-modernist sensibility with which he dissected the values and foibles of the growing bourgeoisie. Chapter Five focuses on the images of modernist Brazil, beginning with the Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 19��. Held in the Municipal The- ater during the centennial celebration of Brazil’s independence, the week’s events were an attempt by writers, artists, and musicians to expand on the nation’s cosmopolitan image while emphasizing the importance of its re- gional character. Once again the Indian was called forth as a national sym- bol. Instead of the romantic bon sauvage, however, poet Oswald de Andrade summoned the anthropophagous figure as part of a modernist counter- colonialist strategy: the local culture would ingest (as oppose to emulate) foreign sources in order to strengthen what was endemic to the nation. The desire to “make it new” was especially evident in painting and architecture, in which classical forms gave way to futurism, expressionism, cubism, and other modernist schools. This radical shift in the arts and architecture cul- minated years later with the construction of the futuristic capital, Brasília. The “new way” also produced bossa nova, a cool, hip music whose impact was felt far beyond Brazil. In Chapter Six I examine the 19�0s, when Brazil’s national identity was shaped not only by its own artists but also by the U.S. Good Neighbor policy, which fostered cultural exchanges and an emphasis on both modernity and exoticism. During this time Hollywood transformed Carmen Miranda into a colorful, amiable, and tropical Latin icon—an image that endured long after the end of World War II. In the same period Orson Welles functioned as a goodwill ambassador from the United States; through his aborted film, It’s All True, and his radio programs broadcast from Rio and New York, he emphasized a very different image of Brazil as a racially diverse, culturally rich, and respected wartime ally of the United States. The early oscillating images of Brazil as Edenic and barbarous reemerge in the later part of the twentieth century as Cinema Novo films about the

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utopian possibilities of a poor but developing nation accede to darker pic- tures of a dystopia plagued by corruption, drugs, and violence. I explore these contrasting media images in Chapter Seven, and in many ways they remain at the heart of the country’s view of itself today. The media coverage of Brazil’s growing poverty, violence, and corruption coexists with reports on the country’s emergence as a global economic power—a contradiction that seems more extreme with each passing year. The contradiction is espe- cially evident in the major cityscapes, where towering multinational build- ings and high-end shopping centers appear alongside modest housing and sprawling favelas, or slums. It is impossible to predict what lies ahead for a nation still referred to as “the land of the future”; nevertheless, an examina- tion of the ways the nation has been represented over the centuries should provide us with a better understanding of the imaginary that has shaped Brazil and may shape it in decades to come.

Edenic and Cannibal Encounters

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When the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Cabral and his armada of thirteen ships left Lisbon on March 9, 1�00, his mission was to sail to the port city of Calicut in India and bring back spices, silks, porcelains, and other valuable commodities.1 Vasco da Gama had opened the sea route to India two years earlier, and the Portuguese monarch, Dom Manuel I, was eager to send a much larger expedition to keep Portugal in the forefront of maritime trade with the East.2 Onboard Cabral’s ship was the royally ap- pointed financial administrator from Oporto, Pero Vaz de Caminha, who was attached to Cabral’s ship as scribe. It was on that trip that Caminha wrote his famous letter of May 1, 1�00, to Dom Manuel, in which he de- scribes the founding of a land that eventually would be called Brazil. There are different hypotheses about why Cabral sailed so far west of Vasco da Gama’s Atlantic route to India that he ultimately sighted Brazil. In his Tratado da terra do Brasil (Treatise on the Land of Brazil), written in 1�7�, the Portuguese chronicler Pero de Magalhães Gândavo attributes the fleet’s southwesterly turn to doldrums that forced Cabral to seek better sailing winds far off the Guinea coast. This course took his armada directly west to Porto Seguro and the coastline of what is today Bahia. According to Brazilian cultural historian Luís da Câmara Cascudo, for a long time the discovery of Brazil was attributed to a storm that caused Cabral to change direction and head south-southwest. But neither Caminha’s letter nor nau- tical charts of the period refer to any inclement weather that might have driven Cabral off course.3 Portuguese literary historian Jaime Cortesão argues that imperialism, and not nature, was the real reason for Cabral’s westerly turn. He contends that with the Spanish already in North America and with the redrawing of the Line of Tordesillas in 1�9� to a more favorable position for Portuguese expansion (370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands), Cabral’s imagina- tion was fueled by the possibility of new Atlantic conquests (Cortesão 1967, 90–91). The German-born medievalist scholar Carolina Michaëlis de Vas-

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concelos argues that Caminha’s letter to the king makes Cabral’s intentions clear, for instead of using the term descobrimento (discovery) when referring to the “Land of Vera Cruz” claimed for the Portuguese by Cabral,4 Caminha used the word achamento (finding). Vasconcelos infers from Caminha’s word choice that the armada did not make a chance “discovery” as the result of weather but a “find” while searching for new territory.5 Her interpretation supports at least one other theory that Cabral had prior knowledge of the new land from earlier navigational sources and that he journeyed westward from Africa to claim it officially for the Portuguese empire.6 Whatever the actual case, together the various speculations about the events and intent surrounding Cabral’s voyage have transformed the “discovery” of Brazil into something akin to legend or myth—as if the “find” in and of itself were somehow insufficient to convey the extraordinary nature of Cabral’s maritime achievement. Given all the different theories and speculations, Caminha’s description of the sighting of Brazil seems almost matter-of-fact: “On this day [April ��], in the evening hours, we sighted land: first of a very high, large and round mountain, and of other, lower mountains to the south of it, and of flat lands with giant groves of trees. The captain gave the name of Monte Pascoal [Easter Mountain] to the tall mountain and to the land he gave the name the Land of Vera Cruz.”7 One might infer from his description that the “finding” was less important to Caminha than what was actually found. Unlike the customary brief messages written to the king by Cabral and other ship captains about the sighting, Caminha penned a lengthy mis- sive (fourteen folios, front and back) that is remarkably detailed and ethno- graphic in its descriptions of the land, the people (Tupiniquims, or Tupis), and their customs. Caminha is modest about his abilities as a scribe, telling Dom Manuel that he is the least equipped to put these matters into writing; nonetheless he assures him that he will strive neither to play up (aformosen- tar, to make beautiful) nor play down (afear, to make ugly) what he has seen. His letter has long been recognized as the official record of the first contact between the Portuguese and native Brazilians. No indigenous documents exist on this or any other encounter between the two groups. As for Caminha’s objectivity, it should be noted that his letter concludes with a petition to the king to grant clemency to his son-in-law, Jorge de Osório, who had been exiled to São Tomé off the west coast of Africa.8 Al- though petitions of this kind were not uncommon, especially when a ser-

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vant of the King provided him with good news, one cannot help but wonder the degree to which Caminha’s request affected his objectivity. It seems un- likely that he would pen anything “ugly” that might displease his sovereign, while he would have every reason to curry favor and write a positive if not exuberant account. Historian José António Costa Idéais has observed that the custom of the alvíssara (a gift given to a bearer of good tidings) was an incentive for the embellishment of events: the better the news received, the more valuable the gift given (in Amado and Figueiredo �001, 113–11�). For centuries, maritime accounts of new lands and peoples were regarded along with charts, maps, and illustrations as historical documents and, therefore, as truth. But Caminha’s reference to the alvíssara is an important reminder that even the most apparently straightforward narratives are produced not in a vacuum but within a context that can bring to bear forces as widely divergent as a family member’s plight, a religious conviction, or a broader ideological position, which in sixteenth-century Portugal was steeped in imperialism and the desire for territorial conquest and global commerce. It should not come as a total surprise, then, that Caminha’s letter offers a very favorable impression of Brazil. Although the armada had landed in one of the more humid areas in the tropics, he described the weather as cool and temperate and compared it with the climate of northern Portugal. He praised in particular the bountiful forests filled with different species of trees (including the dyewood, also known as brazilwood, which would be- come the first commodity exported by the Portuguese), the vast mountain ranges, and the sweet and plentiful waters of the rivers. He was amazed by the abundance of shrimp of a size he had never before seen and by the ma- caws and vibrantly colored parrots of multiple hues. Although he did not see many other birds while on shore, he inferred from the number of trees and forested areas that they were many. Not unlike some ancient and medi- eval myths about remote Atlantic islands, one of which was called Brazil,9 Caminha’s account describes the “island of Vera Cruz” along the lines of the classical locus amoenus (gentle place)10—in this case, a tropical Eden with comely and innocent men and women who are curious about yet shy of the European. This image of a paradise on earth was not unique to Caminha’s letter; indeed, as scholars such as Henri Baudet, E. Barlett Giamatti, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Laura de Mello e Souza have pointed out, the biblical garden was repeatedly evoked in writings about the New World.11 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the name “Brazil”—long associated

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with an imaginary island paradise, not to mention the valuable and coveted dyewoods indigenous to the land—would ultimately replace “the Land of Vera Cruz.” Although Caminha discusses in some detail the topography and wild- life of the new land, most of his narrative focuses on the human inhabit- ants, many of whom carry bows and arrows: “In appearance they are brown, somewhat reddish, and they have good faces and well-shaped, good noses” (folio �, verso). Here Caminha defines the native Brazilians’ facial features in terms of their similarity to Europeans; there is also the suggestion that they are different from the west coast African, whose broader, flattened nose was deemed unattractive by the Portuguese. Caminha remarks more than once on the native inhabitants’ cleanliness, their unusual fitness, and their complete lack of awareness or shame about their nakedness. At one point, he compares their total innocence to that of the biblical Adam, and he praises them over “civilized man” for their personal hygiene and purity of mind. What is particularly interesting to note is Caminha’s use of neu- tral terms, such as “men,” “young women,” “girls,” “people,” and “gallants” to describe the local population. These non-racial, non-ethnic terms would soon be substituted by either tribal designations, such as Tupiniquim and Tupinambá, or by the generic “Indian” (used by Columbus to refer to the Caribbean populations that he believed to be East Indians), or by the depre- catory “savage,” “beast,” and “barbarian.” The ethnographic feel of Caminha’s account is especially evident in his detailed descriptions of the indigenous culture. He refers on various occa- sions to the different dyes used to tint the inhabitants’ bodies. For example: “This one . . . was tinted with red dye on his chest, shoulder blades, thighs, hips, and down to the lower part of his legs, while his stomach and other places were of his own color. And the dye was so red that it would neither wash off nor dissolve in the water. On the contrary, when he came out of the water, he looked even redder” (folio �). Later on he observes: “[There was] one with her thigh from knee to hip and buttock all tinted with black paint and the rest of her in her own color; another had both knees and calves and ankles so painted, and her private parts were so naked and exposed with such innocence that in this there was no shame” (folio 7).12 Caminha also commented on the male tradition of wearing decorative bone fragments and stones in the lower lip, and at one point he seems amused by an old man’s attempt to provoke Cabral, if not silence him: “This old man had his

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lip bored so deeply that a large thumb could fit into the hole; and in it he wore a large and worthless green stone that closed the hole from the outside. The Captain made him take it out. I know not what devil spoke to him, but the old man took it directly to the Captain in order to place it on his mouth” (folio 7). Caminha noted that like their European counterparts, the men were not circumcised, while the young women’s genitalia were remarkable for their lack of pubic hair. He gave considerable attention to the inhabitants’ hair (or lack or it) as well as to their headdresses and other adornments, many of which were made of bird feathers. Caminha also commented on their basic foodstuffs of seeds and yams and their fear and suspicion of unknown ani- mals such as lambs and chickens that were brought on the ships. When two men were invited to board the captain’s vessel, Caminha described their be- ing treated as if they were visiting royalty. Following a welcome ceremony, they were given food and drink (which they tasted and subsequently spit out); when night fell, they curled up on the floor and fell asleep, and the cap- tain ordered his men to cover them with blankets, and pillows were eased beneath their heads. There is no question that Caminha regarded the native inhabitants as primitive and “other”; in at least two places in the narrative he refers to “taming” the population, and he calls them “bestial” on another occasion. In most instances, however, he preferred to draw comparisons be- tween them and animals of a benign nature—especially with birds whose prized feathers decorated the natives’ heads and bodies. Although the Portuguese and indigenous peoples were unable to under- stand each other’s language (unlike the African experience, no interpreters were available to the Portuguese on this expedition), Caminha nevertheless commented on the Tupiniquim’s purported lack of religious belief. He gave special attention to their curiosity about the Catholic masses conducted while the Portuguese were on shore and approved of the ways they imitated the Europeans by remaining silent during the services and standing and kneeling at different parts of the ceremony. As important as gold, spices, and other precious commodities were potential converts to Christianity who could help the Portuguese empire deter the spread of Islam. Indeed, the Treaty of Tordesillas was enacted specifically to allow the Portuguese and Spanish to claim territories for their respective kingdoms as long as the native inhabitants were non-Christian. For Caminha, the goodness, pas- sivity, and simplicity of the native people and their receptivity to ceremony

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made them ideal candidates for Christian conversion: “And I believe that were Your Majesty to send someone here to stay longer among them, they will all be converted according to Your Majesty’s desire” (folio 13). He con- cluded his account of the New World by drawing links between Christi- anity, colonization, and commerce. After praising the vast lands, plentiful waters, and gentle climate, he wrote: “However, it seems to me that the best fruit to be taken from this land would be that of saving this people. And this should be the principal seed that Your Majesty should cast here” (folio 13, verso). As the expedition’s leader, Cabral wanted to prove the potential com- mercial wealth of the new land to Dom Manuel, and he immediately dis- patched a ship back to Lisbon with a small cargo of brazilwood (March- ant 19��, �8–�9).13 The vessel also carried Caminha’s letter as well as other communications about the discovery. The rest of the armada continued its voyage to India, where Caminha died in December during an attack by Hindi locals on the Portuguese trading post in Calicut. Although his letter remained unpublished until 1817, it is a prototype of an emerging literary sensibility known as ufanismo, whose rhetoric is characterized by glowing and often highly exaggerated descriptions of New World lands and peoples. In his 1�00 missive, Caminha lays the foundation for subsequent descrip- tions of Brazil as a tropical Eden—an idea that would become a major trope in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of Brazil.14 This im- age confirmed and bolstered the sense of good fortune and accomplishment that was associated with Portuguese expansionism; at the same time, it ul- timately persuaded the monarchy to engage in a more rigorous colonization enterprise.15 As mentioned earlier, Caminha was one of several who wrote to the king, but only two other documents from the 1�00 voyage have survived. In the Carta do mestre João (Letter by Master João), the armada’s surgeon-astrono- mer writes briefly about the newfound “islands” but reserves most of his comments for a discussion of the estrelas da Cruz, or Southern Cross.16 In a much longer document known simply as the Relação do piloto anônimo (Ac- count by the Anonymous Pilot), the unnamed author wrote that they had landed on terra firme, an observation that confirmed Cabral’s belief that they had encountered a continent and not an island as posited by Caminha in his letter’s closing. This is an important observation because history has long credited the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci as the first navigator

Edenic and Cannibal Encounters | 1�

to recognize that the territory was a continent. The anonymous report dif- fers from Caminha’s account in one other, significant way. While Caminha only focuses on the new land and its people, the nameless author places the founding of Vera Cruz within the much broader context of the fleet’s expe- dition to India, and he writes about negotiating trade as well as about the loss of men and ships in the battle at Calicut. Although his report is positive in its description of Brazil, it lacks the breadth and ethnographic specificity that makes Caminha’s letter so fascinating to read. The anonymous letter suggests that the discovery of Vera Cruz, albeit fortuitous, was of minor importance in comparison with the fleet’s arrival in India, whose precious commodities were the objective of the voyage. Although Dom Manuel forbade the publication of navigational charts and maps outlining the route to India (Marchant 19��, �97), in the summer of 1�01 he wrote to his Spanish in-laws, the Catholic royal couple Fernando and Isabel, to inform them of finding “Santa Cruz.”17 He was succinct in his account of the new land, stating that it provided logistical support for the expedition, which made repairs and replenished water supplies there. In fact, he made only one brief reference to the people of Santa Cruz, stating that they were nude, innocent, and peaceful. No mention was made of the natural beauty, wildlife, or other resources amply described in Caminha’s narrative. Similar to the account by the anonymous pilot, Dom Manuel’s letter gives far greater emphasis to Cabral’s voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to India, the loss of ships and life in battle and at sea, trade with the East, and the commercial success of the venture. However, prior to writing to his Spanish relatives, Dom Manuel had commissioned the renowned cosmographer Amerigo Vespucci to make a second voyage to Brazil to strengthen Portugal’s claim to the territory.18 In June 1�01, on his way to Brazil, Vespucci wrote a letter to his former pa- tron and friend in Florence, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, from Cape Verde, where he encountered ships from Cabral’s fleet on their way back to Lisbon.19 This letter and subsequent correspondence with Medici brought word of Brazil and Portugal’s successful commercial enterprise in India to the Florentines, and from there, word spread to other parts of Europe. From Cape Verde, Vespucci traveled from what was believed to be the mouth of the Amazon River to the Rio de la Plata region, helping to establish with greater exactitude the line that separated Portuguese from Spanish hold- ings. In a second letter to Medici written after he returned to Lisbon in

16 | brazil imagined

1�0�, Vespucci described the new land in Edenic terms: “sometimes I mar- veled so much at the delicate scents of the herbs and flowers, and the tastes of those fruits and roots, that I thought I must be in the Earthly Paradise . . . What is there to say of the quantity of birds, their plumes and colors and songs and how many kinds and how beautiful they are? (I do not wish to enlarge upon this, for I doubt I would be believed)” (in Formisano 199�, 30–31). Although Vespucci was clearly moved by the riches of the land, he was far more judgmental than Caminha in his assessment of the native popula- tion. Having lived among native Brazilians for nearly a month, he report- ed on their “pagan” custom of body piercing and wearing large bones and stones in their facial holes for the “brutal business” of making themselves look fierce. Caminha’s description of New World inhabitants seems almost pastoral compared to Vespucci’s narrative,20 which comments on their cru- elty in warfare and their anthropophagy:

And at certain times, when a diabolical frenzy comes over them, they invite their relatives and people to dinner, and they set them out before them—that is, the mother [enemy captive] with all the children they have got from her— and performing certain ceremonies kill them with arrows and eat them; and they do the same to the . . . male slaves and the children that have come from them. And this is for certain, for in their houses we found human flesh hung up for smoking, and a lot of it. (In Formisano 199�, 33)

A text often attributed to Vespucci entitled Mundus novus (1�03) enjoyed wide circulation—twenty-two editions of the Latin version appeared by 1�06 (Amado and Figueiredo �001, 3��), and sixty-six editions in six other languages were available by 1��9 (Lestringant 1977, �8])—spreading even greater affirmation of Brazil as a tropical Eden. In both Vespucci’s private correspondence to Medici and in the apocryphal Mundus novus, attention is given to the temperate climate, the bountiful flora and fauna, and the miraculous life spans of the native population.21 Like later narratives about Brazil, certain editions of Mundus novus were illustrated by artists who had never even traveled there. Woodcuts represented native Brazilians as trans- planted classical Greek or Roman figures with long, curly, golden tresses, and a few men even sported beards. One of the earliest of these woodcuts of indigenous Brazilians appears in the 1�0� Basel edition of Mundus novus.

Edenic and Cannibal Encounters | 17

Attributed to the German Johann Froschauer, it is a broadside, and its in- scription reads:

This figure represents to us the people and island which have been discovered by the Christian King of Portugal or by his subjects. The people are thus naked, handsome, brown, well-shaped in body, their heads, necks, arms, private parts, feet of men and women are a little covered with feathers. The men also have many precious stones in their faces and breasts. No one also has anything, but all things are in common. And the men have as wives those who please them, be they mothers, sisters, or friends, therein make they no distinction. They also fight with each other. They also eat each other and even those who are slain, and hang the flesh of them in the smoke. They become a hundred and fifty years old. And have no government. (In Eames 19��, �7)

In the center foreground of the woodcut a woman is seated and seems content to watch the children around her, one of whom suckles at her breast. To the far right of the woodcut, two men, one bearded, the other clean- shaven, appear to be in friendly conversation, while another bearded man and young boy are looking back at the nursing mother. In the left corner and behind the mother figure is a group of four people standing around a headless body that is stretched out on its side. Although the body has little definition and could be that of an animal, one of the men is clearly chewing on a limb that has a hand and fingers attached. In the center background of the illustration and hanging from a makeshift rack over an open fire are human body parts, including a head, an arm, and a leg. Although cannibal- ism is far from an Edenic activity, the image in the woodcut has a certain benign, almost pastoral look. In fact, the face of the severed head is turned in the direction of the two men in amiable conversation—as if it were some- how partaking of their fellowship. Despite the fact that Mundus novus and the woodcut’s inscription re- fer to the people’s nakedness, the men and women are depicted wearing headdresses, skirts, and other adornments made of feathers. Moreover, all male and female sexual organs are concealed—even those of the children. It is not clear if the artist had actually traveled to Brazil, but the physical representation of the local population is in many ways more realistic than some later illustrations. Like an iconic signature, two caravels appear in the upper right corner to mark the European presence. This single woodcut