If Juan Lopes Sierra could read what historians have written about his hero, a distinguished Restoration period soldier and military governor who administered the State of Brazil between 1671 and 1675, he would be shocked and dismayed, for they have virtually ignored him. Nor is that surprising, for he governed without enjoying great success during the beginning of that particularly dismal period between the end of the sugar boom and the onset of the mining cycle. The major themes of this laudatory account are a series of punitive campaigns commissioned by Afonso Furtado and conducted by itinerant Paulista bandeirantes against “barbarian” Indians of the Bahian backlands who were inhibiting expansion of the cattle industry and his efforts to assist several prospecting expeditions seeking gems and silver. Fewer than 1,500 Indians were captured by four major expeditions and no significant quantities of mineral wealth were found, failures which undoubtedly caused disappointment both in Salvador and in Lisbon, so that Afonso Furtado died (the first senior administrator of Brazil to expire in office) as he had lived, a controversial figure who in his last days became more preoccupied with the state of his soul and who would succeed him than about his characteristically heavy debts.
Panegyrical accounts of the glories of the viceroys of Portuguese India are not uncommon but so far as we know this is the only one about a governor of Brazil. Though written in the guise of a eulogy, it is also a defense of Furtado’s administration and may well have been commissioned by one of his heirs, possibly the nephew to whom it is dedicated. We know virtually nothing about the author save that he was a Spaniard who, to judge from his often tedious digressions, had long been in Portugal and in Brazil, was on intimate terms with the high and mighty, and claimed to be a self-taught rustic who had written more than a score of now lost manuscripts. The apparent original (1676) of this one (there is a slightly different copy in the Ajuda Library of Lisbon) turned up in a Lisbon bookshop in 1968, when the editor procured it for the distinguished James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota. During the intervening years the convoluted Spanish text was translated (successfully except for murky passages on pp. 86-87) by a professor of Spanish and the editor who has contributed an informative introduction, an abundance of erudite notes, several appendixes which provide additional information about leading personalia, the nature of Portuguese and Brazilian military organization during Furtado’s time, his genealogy, and a reliable index. There are several well chosen illustrations and a serviceable but not wholly accurate map.
While Juan Lopes Sierra fails to tell us as much about the personal life of his hero, his relations with local bigwigs, or the major socioeconomic problems that confronted them as we should like, his narrative does throw light upon the opening up of the backlands, the religious life of the capital, and the elaborate public funeral services that honored the memory of the departed old soldier. One guesses that he would be pleased by the appearance of this attractive but expensive volume which throws some rays upon a still dark period of Brazil’s history and that he would agree that all concerned with the book’s production are to be congratulated.
