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An Appreciation of Charles R. Boxer: Teacher, Scholar, and Bibliophile

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-4-951

1527-1900

A. J. R. Russell‐Wood,

Philippine History and Culture

During the 40 years that I knew Charles R. Boxer, there were years of intense communication and frequent meetings, then years when months passed with little communication, followed by years when contacts were limited to a meeting at a conference, exchange of Christmas cards, or occasional letters sharing a research finding, answering a query, or recommending a new book. For me, there has been a transition from being an undergraduate student to being a fellow member of the guild of scholars, and the easy relationship that is the fruit of the passage of time. While Boxer’s knowledge was so encyclopedic that his presence inspired the feeling of being perpetually in statu pupillari, one of his many talents was an ability to make one feel a fellow traveler in the quest of knowledge for a better understanding of humankind across time and space.I first met Charles Boxer in 1961 in his office at King’s College London, at a time when he held the Camoens Chair of Portuguese at London University. I was an undergraduate in the School of Modern Languages at Oxford University. The purpose of the meeting was to persuade him to be my tutor for a course of readings on “The Chronicles of the Portuguese Expansion in Asia.” Boxer seemed both bemused and intrigued that someone would be interested in doing a study of the Portuguese in Asia, under his supervision. For a semester we met in London on alternate Tuesdays from 2:30 to 4:15 pm. The practice was for me to read to Boxer an essay that I had written. This was on a theme such as João de Barros’s concept of history, Diogo do Couto as a panegyrist and critic of Portugal in Asia, and the policies and practices of Afonso de Albuquerque.My most memorable tutorial was on “How Far Can Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação Be Regarded As a Fair Portrayal of Portuguese Activities in East Asia?” I will dwell on this because it illustrates how Boxer taught and what his expectations were as a teacher. There was a set bibliography of published primary sources, and he expected me to be fully conversant with those sources and assumed that a critical reading of them would be the basis of my essays. He suggested secondary readings either directly related to the text or in cognate fields. For the essay on the Peregrinação, he suggested Georg Schurhammer’s Fernão Mendes Pinto und seine Peregrinação, which Boxer seemed to know virtually by heart and held in the highest regard as a model of scholarship. There was a smorgasbord of other readings that included Le Gentil’s discussion of Pinto as precursor of exoticism, Maurice Collis’s The Grand Peregrination, the work of the Portuguese scholar Cristóvão Aires, and Yosaburo Takekoshi’s Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan. Boxer had favorites. He admired Collis, praised George Sansom’s The Western World and Japan, and strongly recommended Delmer M. Brown’s article on the Portuguese transport of gold to Japan in the sixteenth century. There was a liberal sprinkling of publications from the Hakluyt Society as well as articles from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In making these recommendations, there was an assumption that there would be no obstacle to my reading any work of scholarship in a Western European language.Boxer’s practice was to let me read uninterruptedly. Often he would have a toothpick in hand and could even appear disengaged, but a quick fluttering of the eyelids and a comment showed he had been paying full attention. Only if I said something that was incorrect, or if I stirred in him a train of thought, did he intervene. He was never patronizing or condescending. He always accentuated the positive and his comments took the form of suggestions, such as “you might like to look at”; or “reading of so and so might change your assessment.” This civility also held true for his comments about the work of other scholars. Boxer was demanding; only the best was acceptable. As important as the knowledge that he so generously shared with an undergraduate was his infectious enthusiasm. Boxer had the knack of inviting me on board for a voyage of discovery. Accompanying the meticulous research, the rigorous critical scrutiny and analysis, and the process of writing, was his sense of bewonderment at the marvel of it all. For a student brought up on the uninspired diet of the “ten causes, ten events, and ten results” approach to history, Boxer opened the window wide on the fascinating new world (to me) of history.Boxer was fascinated by social and economic history; less evident was his interest in administrative history. Military history, marine architecture, forts, and numismatics were topics that often led him to digress. I would be forewarned that this was about to occur when he reached into an inside jacket pocket and extracted a coin or another object, pointed to a piece of porcelain that he had recently bought, or presented a recent acquisition of a book or manuscript. Boxer would reveal his artifacts with a conspiratorial smile, a happy twinkle in the eye, and radiated enthusiasm. I came to appreciate that sources other than the printed word were valuable to historians and that the practice of history could be fun and was a lifelong commitment. For Boxer, his role as collector (his collecting of netsuke reflected an interest in Japan dating from childhood) and bibliophile was inalienable from his love for history.To study with Boxer was to be introduced to a cross section of life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Asia: Japanese Christians; the casados; Indian dancing girls; nobles and nautch girls; viceroys and governors; exiles and renegades; sultans, emperors, and princes; saints and scoundrels; fishermen, soldiers, and sailors; merchants and missionaries. Maps were pulled out and routes retraced. This was a world of diplomacy and debauchery, of silver and spices, of vice and virtue spread across a canvas reaching from Malabar to the Moluccas and Japan. Boxer would quote a jingle (often scurrilous) that succinctly encapsulated the sense of paragraphs of learned but wooden prose. Boxer saw history as a vehicle to gain a better understanding of humankind and of the human condition across time and space. His writings reflect a concern for the dispossessed and voiceless: grummets, prostitutes, orphans, peasants, women, and slaves. All of this made a great impression on an undergraduate. Here was a scholar who had traveled throughout East Asia and had a photographic memory for places, names, and experiences.Boxer was always reading or writing. When I asked him how and when I could contact him if there were to be a scheduling problem, he casually said, “By telephone, I suppose, at home after eleven in the evening.” Looking back I appreciate the enduring quality of those meetings and of the lessons he taught: professional integrity; hard work; the importance of documentary sources; a fascination for research; the pleasure of writing; and, perhaps most importantly, the sheer joie de vivre of the study of history!Our correspondence started in the mid 1960s when I was a graduate student. I sent detailed reports of my findings to Boxer, shared with him my tentative conclusions, regaled him with stories of life in Bahia, and gave him news of his friends there. If the scholarly dimension and the architectural and artistic glories of Salvador appealed to Boxer, he was not immune to the hedonistic, luxuriant, and physical attractions of the city. His letters often drew on the pungent verse of the seventeenth-century poet Gregório de Matos to illustrate some point I had made, or variants (often salacious) on the theme of “o que é que a Bahiana tem.” His letters commented on my research and suggested new avenues for enquiry. A two-page letter would dwell exclusively on bibliographical references, recent publications, and other archival depositaries. Boxer’s preferred vehicle for communication was the prestamped airmail letter, and limitations of space often led him to continue around the edges on both sides.Boxer’s correspondence in the early 1970s reflected his peregrinations. Teaching in Indiana and at Yale, research trips and lecturing, involved frequent crossings of the “herring pond,” as he referred to the Atlantic. 1972 was a hectic year. A letter (21 December 1971) from New Haven, written the day following his return after the end of the semester in Indiana, announced his departure for England on 22 December and return to Yale on 5 January. March 1972 held out the prospect of visits to São Paulo and the Azores (Ilha Terceira). A few months later, a letter (3 February 1972) discussed a paper he was preparing for a pediatric conference in São Paulo on “Some Luso-Brazilian Ideas on Bringing Up Children in the Eighteenth Century.” Characteristically, this was based on primary sources, such as Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e de Proença, Antonio Ribeiro Sanches, and Alexandre de Gusmão. The year’s agenda also included a paper on “Camões and Couto: Two Comrades in Arms and in Letters” for the Camões celebrations in Lisbon in April, a “flying visit” to Japan for three weeks (September–early October), followed by a day in England before leaving for Yale and Bryn Mawr (24 October) for lectures on “Iberian Women in Overseas Expansion,” spread over four weeks. The end of November found Boxer in Lisbon; Christmas of 1972 was spent in England. In January he returned to Indiana for the new semester. The fall semester of 1974 was spent at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Small wonder that Boxer referred (8 May 1975) to how he was with “um pé no estribo” for yet another departure.A frequent lament was that “all this shuttling about between universities means that I never have the right thing in the right place” (letter of 10 September 1974). The spate of commitments placed him under great pressure. By the autumn of 1976 he had delivered to Johns Hopkins University Press the manuscript of his The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440–1770. In November he wrote that “everything else must go out of the window, to be postponed until 1977,” and he noted his struggle “against those great gluttons, time and Christmas” (letter of 2 November 1976). He was trying to finish a book on the Dutch East India Company and fighting a losing battle against the clock in cataloguing the State Papers (Portugal) in the Public Record Office. He had reached the year 1744 and hoped to reach 1780 by 31 December 1976 (letter of October 1976). This was an ongoing saga. By November he had reached 1773, leading him to remark (letter of November 1977) plaintively that “there are 20 volumes left for the remaining 8 years. 18th century verbosity on both sides.”There were the constant distractions of what he referred to as “minor projects” (letter of 29 August 1977). In a letter of 13 May 1983 he wrote that he had “Three books at press, and as many articles in hand.” Four years later he wrote “My room [at Ringshall End] is knee-deep in books, articles, and drafts, all awaiting attention” (letter of 25 July 1987). In 1990 he bemoaned the slow progress, which he attributed to “constant distractions,” on his “Macao and the Maritime Silk-Trade, 16th to 18th Centuries” (letter of 16 October 1990). One casualty of this heavy commitment was his biography of Dom Pedro de Almeida, count of Assumar and marquis of Castello-Novo (later marquis of Alorna). Boxer had been collecting materials for this over many years. In 1959 he had bought at Maggs Brothers a descriptive catalogue of papers collected by Dom Pedro between 1744 and 1750 when he was viceroy of the Estado da India. Whatever progress had been made on the book must have been slow. In 1977 Boxer wrote that work was “at a standstill,” although he was still collecting materials. He had been forced to put it aside for a projected book The Philippines and the Dutch War, 1600–1650, as part of a multivolume history of the Philippines to be published in Manila (letter of 17 July 1977).Boxer took a close interest in every stage of the publication of each of his books. He was a meticulous proofreader. In anticipation of a second edition of his The Dutch Seaborne Empire (1965) already in the end pages of the final proofs of the first edition Boxer had penned in “Additional Bibliography (for a second edition).” Although most of his major works were published before the advent of prizes offered by professional societies and associations, or would have failed to meet the criteria, there were psychic rewards. The page proofs for his De Ruyter en de Engelse Oorlogen in de Gouden Eeuw (Bussum: De Boer Maritiem, 1976) had been lost in the mail but, once published, it sold out two editions in three months and “briefly topped the Dutch best-seller list” (letters of 7 October 1976 and of 17 July 1977). Boxer was also very pleased with the publication in 1979 by the Academia das Ciencias de Lisboa of the first two volumes covering the years 1661–1765 of his A Descriptive List of the State Papers Portugal, 1661–1780, in the Public Record Office, London. He commented, “very nicely done, indeed, with no expense spared and printed at Braga, thanks to the late General da Câmara Pina, whose death is a great loss” (letter of 10 August 1981). But the publishing process also had its frustrations. Two pet aversions were outside readers and copyeditors. Frustrated by the delay in acceptance by a major university press in the United States of a manuscript, Boxer wrote that the delay “I now suspect is due to the ‘outside reader’ rather than to some nit-picking copy editor. The former are apt to plead being overwhelmed by teaching commitments, and unable to read the manuscript until the long vacation. I never do this myself as, if I cannot read a manuscript within three weeks, I do not accept to read it at all, and I seldom take more than seven or ten days” (letter of 10 April 1977).There were the further annoyances of translations and pirated editions. He observed that translators of his works had been “uniformly, totally disastrous” (letter of 10 August 1981). He learned that an edition of his Salvador de Sá had been published in São Paulo in 1972, but as of 1974 he had not seen a copy. In a letter of 10 September 1974, he observed that, “I was very dissatisfied with the Idade de Ouro, although I could not prevent it from going into a second edition there. A Rio publisher, unknown to me, did a Brazilian translation of my Race Relations some years ago, but I have never seen that either.” Such lapses made Boxer irascible. This was not provoked by the fact that they might be attributable to human error, but rather reflected his feeling that they represented lapses in professional standards or civility. Bureaucrats provoked similar impatience. His experience of bureaucrats (notably in comptrolers’ offices) in a university in the United States, prompted the observation that there had been “bumbling by a lot of geriatrics with cotton-picking minds” (letter of 3 February 1972).Boxer was until the mid 1990s a frequent traveler, be it on a slow boat to Japan in 1930, or train (“always first class”) or, increasingly, by air. For Boxer, travel was never in the context of a vacation, but related to a conference, a lecture, an award, or research. Ideally, the three ingredients which guaranteed a pleasant trip were meeting interesting people, visiting archives, and buying books or manuscripts. All these desiderata were present in trips described in a letter of 12 April 1972. Boxer wrote that, “I had a very pleasant trip to São Paulo, Lisbon, and Angra in the Easter vacation, and at S. P. I met again Sér-gio Buarque, Caio Prado Júnior, Almeida Prado, Roberto dos Santos (from Bahia), Alice Canabrava, Myriam Ellis, etc., etc., and at Lisbon I bought a bundle of the original correspondence of Luís Diogo Lobo da Silva, Governor of Pernambuco, with a juiz de fora there in 1762. I had a very good week in the archive at Angra.” No visit to Lisbon was complete without a visit to Américo Marques, “who usually has some mouth-watering manuscripts for sale”(28 February 1977). In October 1977, Boxer visited Paris for a mesa redonda and enjoyed meeting the “old guard” of Léon Bourdon, Raymond Cantel, Frédéric Mauro and Jean Aubin for an informal dinner. Later in the same month he was in Portugal: in Viana do Castelo he made “a quick reconnaissance” of the archives of the Câmara and of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, the latter being “very rich”; and in Lisbon where “I only had time to check a few references in the Torre do Tombo and meet a few friends like Magalhães Godinho. I also bought (among other things) the original last wills (1645, 1650) and testamentos of António Telles da Silva, Governor of Bahia, 1642– 47, which used to belong to Virginia Rau que Deus tem” (letter of 4 November 1977). Boxer was not a conventional sightseer, but perked up at the prospect of a visit to a fort or maritime museum.Boxer had no time for pretentiousness or self-promotion. A greeting card (actually a Christmas card produced by the United Service and Royal Aero Club, London, but Boxer had crossed out the “Best wishes for Christmas and Happy New Year” part!) carried the illustration of a Marshal of the Royal Air Force in full dress uniform and listed his decorations. Boxer added several exclamation marks, tantamount to saying “Now, come on!” Rarely does self-commentary come through in his letters. Instead, when referring to himself or his works, there is a self-deprecating humor. He wrote (letter of 17 February 1976) to the editor of Johns Hopkins University Press that publication of his Schouler Lecture series on “The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1419–1800” would be the “kiss of death” and then detailed how previous publications of his lectures by university presses had resulted in financial deficits! October 1977 found Boxer in Paris at a mesa redonda with Jean Aubin. The subject was João de Barros. Boxer wrote that, “As I spoke in my vile Portuguese, I doubt if anybody understood a word, but as my French is even worse, I had no option” (letter of November 1977).Boxer took genuine pleasure in the unexpected. In a letter of 3 February 1972, he described how he was preparing for his two courses at Yale. With surprise and pride, he noted: “I now have 19 students in my ‘Race Relations’ course, whereas in previous years the highest number was six.” During his life, Boxer received many honors. One which gave him great pleasure was the award in December of 1986 of the Gold Medal Dom Pedro II awarded by the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. Boxer observed that this was “a great honour, as it has only been awarded 8 times in 150 years, and the last time some 60 or 70 years ago. The cariocas pulled out all the stops” (letter of 29 December 1986). The effects were lingering. Seven months later he wrote, “The gold medal Dom Pedro II was indeed a wonderful piece of ego-balm, if undeserved” (letter of 25 July 1987).Boxer’s letters usually ended with the conventional “Yours ever,” or “Best wishes.” His feelings about the pressures of the holiday season were reflected in a pre Christmas letter in 1974 that ended: “Compliments of the ghastly season.” Sometimes he would take an expression culled from a Portuguese document. The archives of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon house letters received by the eminent historian of art, Robert Chester Smith Jr. Boxer ended a letter with the phrase “escravo que roja aos seus pés” (letter of 6 April 1970).That Boxer was a “larger than life” personage led inevitably to a wealth of stories, some true, others without merit, and still others a blend of fact and fiction. One such concerned his teaching skills. Boxer decried his abilities in this regard. My own experience, to be born out by his teaching at Yale, Indiana University, and other American universities, was that he was eminently accessible, and that undergraduates found him a stimulating teacher, in part because of his vast knowledge of history of the world, but also because his love of history was infectious. That he could tell anecdotes from the present as well as the past, that these were sometimes couched in language rarely heard in the so-called hallowed halls of academe, and that the comments could be irreverent and even off-color enhanced his appeal. He seems to have enjoyed an instant rapport with undergraduates as he took them on historical voyages from Ambon to the Amazon. His appeal as a teacher and scholar was that he was less concerned with the process of empire building in an institutional framework, but with the human dimension. He was interested in the production and flow of commodities (sugar, spices, bullion) and once pointed out that bullion could not be studied in the context of individual European empires but only globally. His was a history based on manuscript and primary printed sources, but enlivened with references to namban screens, pictures, and engravings, to vessels and their rigs, to the respective merits of different artillery pieces, and with full recognition of the importance of terrain, currents, and wind systems.Boxer was always very generous with his knowledge. After any lecture there would be a line of people—undergraduates, graduates, professors, and history buffs—in front of the podium to ask questions. Boxer would listen attentively—yet another of his abilities to make the person asking the question feel that he or she was the most important person in the world at that moment for him—and reply. A few weeks or even months later, the questioner would often receive a letter from Boxer with a bibliographical reference, source, or quotation.Boxer’s love of good company, hard liquor, and good food was legendary, as too were stories of his verbal indiscretions or social transgressions. While there is some truth to these, many stories are apocryphal. Did he indeed present a paper at a major scholarly convention in Rio de Janeiro wearing canary- colored slacks? Were the nights at Nick’s bar in Bloomington as well lubricated as reputed? Did he and a group of graduates make considerable inroads into the holdings of the private bar of the president of The Johns Hopkins University?While Boxer himself remarked that “as long as I’ve got books and my art things around me, I don’t care much whether people are there or not so long as I’ve someone who cooks” [For published interview, see Camões Center Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1989): 11–22], he was keenly interested in people provided that they were interesting. He had an incredible range of contacts from all walks of life: “You must look up that German in Espírito Santo who studies humming birds”; “Please invite to my talk the Goan doctor now living in Baltimore”; or “If your son Karsten goes to Taiwan, tell him to contact Stephen T. C. Chang, a young Chinese scholar who has published a good book.”His scholarship has withstood the test of time remarkably well. This achievement is even greater in view of the fact that his topics often involved contacts between Europeans and indigenous peoples or that they were exercises in comparative studies of empires, both fraught with the potential danger of imbalance in approach or treatment. While it has been claimed that a lack of familiarity with Chinese sources led him to overemphasize the European side, on the other hand his treatment of Anglo-Dutch rivalries, and of Portuguese encounters with English, Dutch, and French was remarkably even handed. He did not shy away from confrontation, if the historical record supported his views, no matter how controversial. His writings on race relations in the Portuguese empire provoked a strong and antagonistic response not limited to ivory towers and his lectures at Bryn Mawr on the position of women in the overseas Iberian empires were not well received. Oftentimes this was attributable to his delivery. Boxer always had a prepared text that he read. The danger came when he departed from his text: as at a lecture at the Taylor Institution in Oxford when, while discussing literary sources for the history of colonial Brazil, Boxer could not refrain from ad-libbing on the French traveler Le Gentil de la Barbinais’s comments and fantasies about love affairs by nuns in the Convent of the Poor Clares in Salvador. Only later did Boxer realize the presence of a trio of nuns in his audience. Or at The Johns Hopkins University when he confided to his audience that, faced by a crucial decision as to whether to accept an invitation to have a brandy after luncheon or to retire to his room to write a paragraph on the inquisition for his afternoon lecture, he had opted for the former.What makes his books and articles so eminently readable is a fluency of style, a lively lexicon, and generous use of quotations. As in a work of fiction, the scene is set, the characters are introduced and often reappear, there is a plot, and a dénouement. His writings are redolent with movement. Essays on individuals and biographical sketches show his interest in people. If his writings are a stage for a kaleidoscopic variety of characters drawn from all walks of life, there is a special concern for those who were not privileged, who had no voice at court, or were the victims of racial, social, or religious prejudice or discrimination. This human dimension gives Boxer’s message a universal quality: how do people cope in the face of adversity? How do they relate to each other? What are their hopes, fears, and ambitions? What are their strengths and weaknesses?The bibliography [Revista Portuguesa de História do Livro 11, no. 4 (1999): 17–68] meticulously compiled by Manuel Cadafaz de Matos, underlines a fact which might otherwise be lost in Boxer’s prolific publications. There is no facet of the activities of a professional historian which Boxer did not practise: as author, biographer, editor, bibliographer, archivist, cataloguer, translator, and reviewer. No bibliography, no matter how excellent, can provide a window onto the thinking of this intensely private gentleman who became a legend in his own lifetime. One has to turn to other sources to appreciate the mystique and fascination history possessed for Boxer, and his passion in sharing this as a teacher, lecturer, and author. It was appropriate that this bibliography appeared in a journal dedicated to the history of the book. The building of his own magnificent library, his numerous essays on editions and on seminal works in the history of Portugal at home and overseas, testify to his life-long affair with the printed work as artifact: to be acquired, cherished, scrutinized, and for its contents to be shared with others. Small wonder that, when asked what he would do with the proceeds gained from the sale of his library to the Lilly library at Indiana, he replied, with a twinkle of anticipation in his eyes, “Buy more books, of course.”