Naked Tropics
New World in the Atlantic World
Jack P. Greene and Amy Turner Bushnell, Series Editors
Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court
In Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821
By Kirsten Schultz
Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776
By Trevor Burnard
Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia
By Linda L. Sturtz
Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues
By Kenneth Maxwell
Naked Tropics
Essays on Empire and Other Rogues
Kenneth Maxwell
ROUTLEDGE
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Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maxwell, Kenneth, 1941–
Naked tropics : essays on empire and other rogues / by Kenneth Maxwell.
p. cm. — (New World in the Atlantic world)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-415-94576-3 (hb) — ISBN 0-415-94577-1 (pbk.)
1. Brazil—History. 2. Portuguese—Foreign countries. 3. Portugal—Relations—
Foreign countries. I. Title. II. Series.
F2521.M495 2003
981—dc21
2003043129
For Stanley J. Stein and Barbara Hadley Stein
The empires of our time were short lived, but they have altered
the world forever; their passing away is their least significant feature.
V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men
Contents
Map
ix
Foreword by Fouad Ajami—Blame It on Rio
The Historical Vocation of Kenneth Maxwell
xi
Acknowledgments
xix
Illustrations
xxi
Chapter 1 First Encounters
1
Chapter 2 ¡Adiós Columbus!
13
Chapter 3 Chocolate
37
Chapter 4 Pirate Democracy
47
Chapter 5 Hegemonies Old and New
61
Chapter 6 The Spark
The Amazon and the Suppression of the Jesuits
91
Chapter 7 The Idea of the Luso-Brazilian Empire
109
Chapter 8 Why Was Brazil Different?
The Contexts of Independence
145
Chapter 9 The Odd Couple
Jefferson and the Abbé
171
vii
viii • Contents
Chapter 10 A Story of Slavery, Sex, and Mammon
187
Chapter 11 The Tragedy of the Amazon
199
Chapter 12 Chico Mendes
219
Chapter 13 The Two Brazils
243
Chapter 14 Macao
Shadow Land
257
Chapter 15 Heroes and Traitors
291
Chapter 16 Orfeu
305
Sources of Publications
311
Abbreviations
313
Index
315
ix
Travels and
Sojourns
Foreword–Blame It on Rio
The Historical Vocation of Kenneth Maxwell
In one of his arresting and subtle works, Finding the Center (1984), V. S.
Naipaul writes of the promptings of his craft and offers a narrative of his
literary beginnings—a narrative intended to “admit the reader to the process of writing.” By now we know the themes and the methods of that
writer: the journey from his small birthplace in Trinidad to the metropolitan center, the panic of arrival, the wanderlust that took him to distant
lands in a world beginning to shake off its colonial heritage. There was
glamour in the travel, and knowledge, the gathering together of the strands
of a man’s life and background. In these pages by the gifted historian Kenneth Maxwell, we are “admitted” into the process of writing as well. A historian of great talent, working at the peak of his powers, takes us into the
promptings of his own vocation. Piece by exquisite piece in this book, we
see the historian’s method and the concerns that have been the driving passions of his life for four decades now: the peopling of the Americas, the
shaking up of continents, the spirit that took a “precocious” Portugal into
its imperial venture, the play between Portugal’s extensive imperial reach
into Africa and Asia and the Americas, and the limits of its own demography and abilities, the rise of Brazil and its tumultuous history.
The direction of Professor Maxwell’s journey reverses Naipaul’s,
though. With the historian, it is the pushing outward of a child of the empire, a young man at Cambridge venturing into the tropics. Born in 1941,
Maxwell belonged to a generation that was hanging on with its fingernails
to the old imperial order. On a “misty, cold, damp, and dreary East Anglian
evening,” in an old picture palace that had reinvented itself as an “art the-
xi
xii • Foreword
ater,” Maxwell had seen Marcel Camus’s film Black Orpheus. It “could not
have been a greater revelation,” he writes. The ancient story set against the
tropical background, the color and the vibrancy of that background,
hooked him. “I determined immediately that Brazil, and above all, Rio de
Janeiro, was somewhere I had to go.” He went there via Lisbon, and in that
great Luso-Brazilian world he was to find his material, and his range, and
they are on full display here. This “material” could have supplied great fiction or travel writing: Maxwell himself, as these beautiful pieces demonstrate, with their love of color, with their ability to conjure up a forlorn
colonial outpost on the South China Sea (Macao), or the teeming streets of
Brazil’s cities, or the life and murder of a rubber tapper, a union activist, in
the hinterland of Brazil by a violent clan of ranchers, could have pulled it
off and produced that sort of literary work. But he is a historian of ideas,
and of social and economic life, and his insatiable, boundless curiosity infuses this work with an energy and a life all its own.
Edward Gibbon, as we learn from the late historian John Clive’s loving
tribute to the reading and writing of history, Not by Fact Alone (1989), once
called the historian’s first person “the most disgusting of pronouns.” Gibbon was giving voice to an ambivalence, for the historian’s “I” was there in
his work, in his footnotes, in the text itself, the writer’s personality and attitudes toward the subjects at hand. Macaulay, too, used his first person to
convey to his readers a sense of immediacy, of places seen and oral histories
he had collected. So did Tocqueville who had his own way of taking the
reader into his confidence, of letting the reader know what that liberal aristocratic historian thought of revolutionary violence and pretensions, Clive
tells us. The narrator’s “I” gives this work by Maxwell its unique place in
what this prolific historian has produced. We saw precious little (directly,
that is) of Maxwell when he produced his seminal biography of Portugal’s
leading eighteenth-century statesman, Marquês de Pombal, and his attempt at a revolution from above, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment
(1995). Nor would we have surmised much about the historian had we
read his definitive accounts of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, or of the
political traffic between Portugal and Brazil in the second half of the eighteenth century. This work is different: we are truly taken into the narrator’s
confidence, admitted into the craft of writing. The personal pronoun is
never intrusive though. There is a kind of trust between historian and
reader, an illicit pact of sorts.
We know and trust this historian: we are eager to travel with him to
Macao or the Amazon forests; we are eager for him to tell us about other
historians and chroniclers. We pick up his trail—and his likes and dislikes,
for that matter. When he writes that Carlos Fuentes is “never one to use
Foreword • xiii
two words if more will do,” and that that Mexican writer in one of his
works throws at the reader “every stereotype of hispanidad propaganda
(Bulls, Virgins, Tangos, Gauchos, Don Quixote),” he gives voice to his readers’ verdict (most of them, I hazard to guess) on that exhibitionist writer.
“My Portuguese was the swallowed nasal Portuguese of Lisbon, and I was
utterly unprepared for the musicality, rhythm, and softness of Brazilian
speech,” he writes on the occasion of meeting his first Brazilian in his academic supervisor’s office at Princeton. Until then his Brazil had been “entirely phantasmogorical,” he adds, the stuff of books and films. The
historian’s trail, and the anxiety of the first probings of an alien world: they
come together for us in that episode. And we don’t have to search for the
historian’s pride in the world he had come to adopt in the Americas. It is
there in Maxwell’s sense of exasperation with the “provincialism” of Europe. The Old World may have “discovered” and disrupted the New World,
but the latter remade the Old Continent, he reminds us. The educated
Europeans may have been fixated on classical literature and Renaissance
cosmology. But they did so, he adds, while “drinking their Americanproduced coffee, smoking American-produced tobacco, binding their texts
between American leather hides, and enjoying the leisure that the dividends from overseas investments made possible.”
At the heart of this book, its binding if you will, is of course Portugal’s
imperial journey: it is the historian’s beat and his pride. It was the Portuguese, he reminds us, who linked the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, who
mapped the coastline of Asia, and explored the African coastline from
Cape Verde in the West to the mouth of the Red Sea in the East. In one of
those mysterious spurts that enable a particular people to do stunning,
surprising feats, the Portuguese recast and revisioned the world. Their advantage, we learn, was less navigational than conceptual: their cartography
enabled them to arrive at a “new graphic conception of global space.” The
Portuguese broke the monopoly of the trans-Saharan trade route between
West Africa and the southern shores of the Mediterranean. In less than two
decades after Vasco da Gama’s voyage of discovery of 1497–1498, Portugal
had claimed a vast dominion: Brazil in 1500, Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511,
Hormuz in 1515, and so on. Portugal aimed for the passageways of trade,
the “choke points” of international trade: Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Mombassa and Mozambique, Malacca, the Azores, Macao at the
mouth of the Pearl River in China, Cape Verde. The Portuguese must have
intuited their own weakness. Portugal, Maxwell reminds us, was after all, a
“small country with a large empire.” No wonder the Portuguese hugged the
coasts—and stayed aloof from the interior of the worlds they probed and
ventured into.
xiv • Foreword
Weakness—and backwardness—stalked the imperial push. The nemesis was not far behind. In the span of a few decades after that remarkable
spurt, Portugal itself slipped under Castilian hegemony in 1580. A deranged monarch had taken the country and its nobility on a quixotic crusade into North Africa; the venture had issued in tragedy and the
decimation of the country’s nobility. Philip II had offered a traumatized
Portugal rescue. But an absentee, semi-alien monarch would not do. Portugal was to recover its independence in 1640, but the imperial thrust was
broken. There would be no Portuguese empire in the Orient. The very national epic of Portugal’s voyages of discovery, The Lusiads, by the great poet
Luís Vaz de Camões, published in 1572, was a lament for what might have
been. There was patriotism aplenty in Camões, and there was national
pride, to be sure. The poet, who had spent seventeen of his adult years as a
sailor and soldier in Goa, Cochin, and Macao, praised Portugal’s urge to
“discover the sun’s very cradle in the East.” But Camões himself was a child
of disappointment. The trajectory of his country—the early success, then
the steady retreat from progress, and Castilian rule—brackets his life. He
was born the year Vasco da Gama died, in 1524; he died in 1580, right as his
country was slipping under the Castilian noose. Portugal succumbed to
despondency, and the sorrow is there in The Lusiads, and a knowledge of
the heartache that came with the imperial temptation. In Canto IV, a wise
old man comes to the shore to bid farewell to the voyagers and to weep for
his country, and for the sorrow that imperial appetite heaped upon her:
Oh craving of command! Oh vain Desire!
Oh vainest vanity man miscalleth Fame!
Oh fraudulent gust, so easy fanned to fire
By breath of vulgar, aping Honour’s name!
What just and dreadful judgement deals
thine ire,
To seely souls who overlove thy claim!
What deaths, what direful risks, what
agonies
Wherewith thou guerdonest them, thy
fitting prize!
What new disaster dost thou here design?
What horror of our realm and race invent?
What unheard dangers or what deaths
condign,
Veiled by some name that soundeth
excellent?
Foreword • xv
What bribe of gorgeous reign, and golden
mine,
Whose ready offer is so rarely meant?
What fame hast promised them? What
pride of story?
What palms? What triumphs? What
victorious glory?
That sorrow and despondency of Portugal—and the urge for reform
and repair—are caught in Maxwell’s pages. But that despondency that
until recent years hovered over Portugal, a steady shadow and companion,
did not travel to Brazil. The tropics worked their will here. Indeed, it is
doubtful, I would think, that a child of an empire in decline (Britain) of
Maxwell’s temperament would have been hooked on another somber land.
There may have been troubles in Brazil, but the history was one of tumult
and possibilities. In that Luso-Brazilian encounter, the issue, the child of
the encounter, bounced with greater freedom, had less burden to carry
than the motherland. In its passage from colony to imperial center (the
monarchy had quit Portugal for Brazil in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies’ invasion of Portugal in 1807) to independent nationhood in
1822, Brazil charted its own course; Portugal had for all practical purposes
become a dependency of Brazil.
A central theme of Brazil’s history, and a theme that Maxwell handles
with amazing skill, concerns the tension between liberty and order in
Brazilian history. In a land where the whites constituted a distinct minority, the revolution that held the attention of the oligarchs and the elite of
the land was not the American Revolution in 1776 but the Haitian slave revolt. In Haiti’s fire, in the success of its rebels, the Brazilian elite saw the
specter of its own undoing. There was fear of revolutionary “contagion”
and a recognition that a society that would give unfettered run to the idea
of “equality” in a land “ordered by racial as much as by social hierarchy”
would be torn asunder. Progress in this outwardly flamboyant land was
tethered to order.
Nor was the American republic, for that matter, so keen on seeing its liberty replicated in the South American landscape. In a characteristic bit of
homage to liberty’s reach, Thomas Jefferson, in 1820, had written to a Portuguese-born friend, Abbé Corrêa da Serra, in praise of a new world in the
Americas free of the curse of Europe’s wars, of a day over the horizon when
the fleets of Brazil and the United States would ride together “as brethren
of the same family and pursuing the same object.” Jefferson was in retirement in Monticello then. As Maxwell reminds us, the decisive American
voice on the independent nations of South America belonged to John
xvi • Foreword
Quincy Adams both as secretary of state between 1817 and 1825 and as
president in the four crucial years that followed. Adams was bereft of tropical romance. “He saw South Americans as irredeemably corrupted by the
Roman Catholic religion, Iberian tradition, and the tropical climate.”
Brazil had to find its own mix of liberty and racial assimilation. Maxwell
allows Brazil its final flourish and vindication, a signature of its own on
this great quest: the seminal, great figure of its independence, Jose Bonifácio, was a metallurgist. He aimed for a Brazilian race that would “amalgamate” all the diverse “metals” of Brazil, blend them into a common
national identity.
***
Now a word about the “introducer’s” personal pronoun. My knowledge
of the Americas is rather scant, of the Iberian world a bit better. My authority for writing these brief pages of appreciation I owe to Kenneth
Maxwell’s flattering and surprising invitation. I couldn’t have declined the
honor, though undeserved. Circles are closed and connections are made in
these pages. It was at Princeton where Maxwell met his first Brazilian, as we
were told. It was there, on the same campus, a decade later, where I met
Professor Maxwell. We are roughly the same age; he had grabbed the colonial drama of the time, Portugal’s struggle with its last African colonies
and Portugal’s struggle at home with its rebellious young officers who had
had their fill with imperial burden. It was with excitement that I can still
call up that I read his magnificent depiction of the Portuguese Revolution
of 1974, and my admiration of his craft has never ceased.
My second claim is given me by the work itself. Maxwell writes of broken worlds and “hollow empires.” A child and a chronicler of matters and
lands Islamic and Arab, I know something of that malady and of the trajectory of civilizations that rise on impulse, draw on mysterious energy, and
then succumb to despondency. I may be unfamiliar with the settings of
Professor Maxwell’s work, but the themes are innately, painfully, familiar.
The very first time I came upon fado music and songs, I understood not a
word, but I intuitively, readily, caught the themes and the mood—love and
loss and lament. I had no difficulty “entering” the haunting songs of the
great Amália Rodrigues: we have her peer in the legendary Egyptian
woman singer Umm Kulthum, who must be reckoned the twentieth century’s greatest Arabic singer, and whose themes and tone were evocations
of loss and sorrow. The “fado” in the Portuguese fragments by Maxwell is
familiar to me in the same way. Of all of Maxwell’s work, this work is
meant for the general reader (hence my casting) who wants to know about
Foreword • xvii
the history of chocolate, or the voyages of discovery that have remade our
world, or the true historical sociology of pirates and piracy.
Our towering historians are few and far between. In the age of the 24/7
cable channels and the gabfest and the instant analysts, those historians are
sure to become rarer still. Attribution, rigor, fidelity to sources, once the assumed tools and ways of the craft, are flung on the sidelines. Behold in
these pages this distinguished historian, the (younger) peer of Bernard
Lewis on Islam and C. Vann Woodward on Southern history and Arthur
Schlesinger on the American experience and David Landes on economic
history. In these pages we are in the hands of a guide who truly owns his
field, and roams its expanses with easy authority and a genuine wonder at
the ways of our world.
Fouad Ajami
Acknowledgments
First my thanks to Tomás Amorim who is a valued colleague at the Council
on Foreign Relations and as my research associate from 1999 to 2002 has
been instrumental to seeing this selection of essays prepared for publication. I am grateful to him for his care and attention to detail and for his patience with my endless reworkings of the texts. The Council has provided
me with a stimulating environment for work, and I appreciate the great
latitude they have allowed me over the years to pursue my interests in history as well as public policy. I owe much to its president, Leslie H. Gelb, for
his encouragement and support, and not least appointing me in 1995 as
first holder of the Nelson and David Rockefeller Chair. Peter Tarnoff and
Nicholas X. Rizopoulos invited me to join the Council in 1989, and for this
I am much in their debt. I have had the great privilege of working with fine
editors such as Bob Silvers of the New York Review of Books, James Chace
and Linda Wrigley of the World Policy Journal, Helder Macedo and Toni
Huberman of Portuguese Studies, and Steven Lagerfeld of the Wilson Quarterly, as well as Dauril Alden, Marcos Sá Corrêa, Flávio Pinheiro, Pedro
Doria, Adriano Schwartz, and Marcos Flamínio Peres. All held me to the
highest standards. It is a special pleasure to appear in the Routledge Series
New World in the Atlantic World, edited by Jack Greene and Amy Bushnell.
Both have been pioneers in the field of cross-cultural Atlantic studies, long
an orphan, but now at long last receiving due attention by their colleagues,
and they have always understood the interconnectedness of the Americas
and the value of comparative approaches to histories which remain too
often parochial and compartmentalized. I am especially grateful to Jack
since he has long kept me linked to the historical profession despite my
xix
xx • Acknowledgments
wanderings (or, as Albert Hirschman calls it, “trespassing”) between various disciplinary fields. For this I am ever grateful. John Coatsworth, director of the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard, and James Dunkerley,
director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of
London, read the whole manuscript, and I was encouraged to go forth with
their support. And not least, my thanks to Fouad Ajami for his splendid if
undeserved foreword.
Kenneth Maxwell
New York City, March 2003
Illustrations
All illustrations are from The Boy Travellers in South America: Adventures of
Two Youths in a Journey through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay,
Argentine Republic, and Chili, with Descriptions of Patagonia and Tierra del
Fuego, and Voyages upon the Amazon and La Plata Rivers, by Thomas W.
Knox (New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1886).
Foreword—Entrance to the harbor of Rio
Chapter 1—Surveying under difficulties
Chapter 2—Marching through the forest
Chapter 3—Cacao
Chapter 4—Buccaneers embarking on an expedition
Chapter 5—Bay of Panama, from the southeastern rampart
Chapter 6—Ruins of church of San Domingo
Chapter 7—View of Rio from Boa Vista
Chapter 8—Statue of Pedro I
Chapter 9—Pair of toucans and their nest
Chapter 10—In the fields
Chapter 11—A Brazilian forest, with characteristic mammalia
Chapter 12—In the rainy season
Chapter 13—Sedan chair
Chapter 14—Scene on a coolie ship
Chapter 15—Looking across the bridge
Chapter 16—Rio de Janeiro: The aqueduct
xxi