Adam Smith declared that “the discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and the most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” If modern historians agreed, they would rewrite our histories and give Portugal first rank in the creation of our modern world. Portugal found Europe small and made it large: the Portuguese alone discovered the entire western coast of Africa; a Portuguese-trained Italian in Spanish service, Columbus, discovered America; Vasco da Gama made the first voyage from West to East; a Portuguese made the effective discovery of Brazil; Portuguese mariners extended western knowledge of the East to Malacca, China, and the East Indies within 20 years after the Da Gama voyage; and a Portuguese, Magellan, in Spanish service, began the first circumnavigation of the globe. The Portuguese Empire, with that of Spain, transformed western European history, shifting the center of world trade and power to the Atlantic, where it remained until this century. Historians know this and give lip service to it; but when they write, they submerge the greater importance of Portugal and Spain into the lesser contributions of the English, the French, and the Dutch, making it appear that the modern world owes little to the Iberians.
Fortunately there is a recent tendency to redress the balance. Of the historians to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for rewriting history, none has made more important contributions than Charles R. Boxer, whose many books on the Portuguese in Africa, the East, and in Brazil, are now our best single source of knowledge for the history of Portuguese expansion.
The present volume is a summary of Portuguese accomplishments from the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, their first step outside Portugal in the creation of an empire, to 1825, when they retired to the homeland, leaving in Brazil a Portuguese culture.
Boxer’s topics are not new. They could not be. But his manner of treatment differs considerably from the customary, particularly the romantic, approach to explorations. These are no swashbuckling heroes, knife held in teeth, boarding enemy vessels. Boxer deals with such substantial elements as Guinea gold, spices, converts to Christianity and the Christian clergy, slaves, sugar, the bitter facts about sea-faring in the sailing days, the abhorrent realities of relations between the “natives” and their European conquerors, and the generally unpleasant past which characterized the expansion of Europe. This is not, however, a sordid history of the Portuguese and mankind in general, it is factual—factual in a way frequently not acceptable to Portuguese sensibilities, particularly where it deals with racial relations.
The materials from which this work is drawn represent widely printed and manuscript sources. Boxer knows, uses, and cites the best collections of documents, secondary works, and many manuscripts, some of which he himself has been the first to use effectively. This reviewer frankly envies him his art in weaving complicated threads of history into an understandable tapestry. No serious student can fail to appreciate and profit from the reading of this work. With no effort whatever to write in a popular fashion or for a general reader, Boxer nevertheless achieves an easy narrative style that keeps the reader’s interest. If he sometimes seems to mention too casually the finding of Carthaginian coins in the Azores or Roman coins in Venezuela, as possible evidence for the pre-Christian discovery of America, or slips up on dates, such as 1496 instead of 1495 for the beginning of Manuel’s rule, these are but nearly invisible cracks in a generally magnificent structure.
From the practical viewpoint of the teacher, it may be noted that those interested in the New World will find the chapters dealing with slavery, sugar, the struggle with the Dutch, Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, royal patronage of the Church, racial relations, town government, and the merchants, can all be used as text material. Equally so, those interested in Africa and the East can find readings suitable for their students.
