Not the merits of its scholarship but an accident—the quadricentennial of the founding of the “muito leal e heróica cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro”—explains the recent reissue of this chronicle, first published in 1944. This festive edition appears now, revised and enlarged, with forty-three handsome maps (mostly of the period), photographs, poems, two indexes, and a short bibliography.
In a preface Francisco Assis de Barbosa presents the chronicler as a tough old journalist and amateur historian who systematically cut into the virtually unexplored wilds of seventeenth-century south Brazilian history. Coaracy’s account, if not “fundamental,” has begun to fill the gap between the legendary period before it and the golden one after. When he rings down the final curtain on Salvador Benevides (whose death at 94 he puts in 1688), Coaracy recommends that more detailed study be made of that flinty character. Less than a decade later appeared C. R. Boxer’s Salvador de Sa and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602-1636. This masterwork contains frequent, explicit references to Coaracy’s work and minor corrections. Boxer agrees fully with the principal fresh interpretation which Coaracy claims to have made—raising the carioca tumults of 1660-61 to the dignity of a successful popular revolution that removed once and for all the heavy seignorial hand of Governor de Sá from Brazil. Boxer’s account of the uprising is more complete, including a summary of the thirty-eight charges leveled by the rebels against their ambitious governor. This revolution, in which the cámara plays a prominent role, is the dramatic high point of the century. Afterwards interest falls off until the discovery of gold.
Boxer’s professional history cannot fail to afford pleasure and profit to more readers than a plodding narrative that lists events large and small as they occur from 1601 to 1700. But for the scholar in quest of the date of the founding of the Irmandade da Misericórdia or the original site of the slaughterhouse or the arrival of the first bishop (surprisingly not until 1683), Coaracy’s chronicle will be useful. It records the year-in, year-out wrangling over taxes, Indians, and real estate by the interest groups of Guanabara Bay: the municipal cámara, the royal governor, the ecclesiastical administrator, the chief magistrate (ouvidor), the Benedictines, Jesuits and other orders, the Brazil Company (Companhia do Comércio), the Correia de Sá family, and, less concretely, o povo. Yet “the people” and their “democratic spirit” that Coaracy invokes elude the reader. Only through taking sides among the disputing interests could propertyless moradores hope to make their influence felt. Rather, we catch glimpses of “the people” of Rio de Janeiro in menacing quilombos, in lepers roaming the city, and in countless others who succumb to smallpox epidemics.
