The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Anthony Knivet: An English Pirate in Sixteenth-Century Brazil
2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-7160424
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Colonialism, slavery, and trade
ResumoIn 1591, young Anthony Knivet sailed west from London with the fleet of English privateer Thomas Cavendish bound for the Pacific to capture Spanish ships. En route, they sacked Santos and raided sugar plantations along coastal Brazil. Forced back by brutal weather in the Strait of Magellan, Cavendish, reduced to a single vessel, abandoned 20 sick sailors, Knivet among them, on the island of São Sebastião. Found there by the Portuguese, Knivet, a lone survivor and a curiosity, became a servant to the governor in Rio de Janeiro. He subsequently labored in the coastal cane fields and sugar mills and then became an Indian slave trader and a gold prospector in the interior. Knivet also lived among native groups, including the Tamoio. His observations provide valuable insight into Portuguese colonial society and the incipient African slave trade. Back in London, after an adventurous decade in Brazil, he wrote his chronicle, first published by Samuel Purchas in 1625. Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá's new critical edition of this account is the first published in a separate annotated volume. Prints from the 1706–7 Dutch edition and maps embellish the text.Kogut Lessa de Sá's introduction situates the memoir within the historical context and defines its place alongside contemporary chronicles. Her informative notes draw on original research in British archives and on previous editions, especially Sheila Moura Hue's 2007 Portuguese edition (which Kogut Lessa de Sá translated) and Francisco de Assis Carvalho Franco's notes for an earlier 1947 Portuguese translation. All previous editions are listed in an annotated bibliography. Kogut Lessa de Sá's close textual analysis of the narrative follows in the appendixes, along with an essay in which she pieces together clues about Knivet's identity—not a “poore ship boy,” as he described himself to the governor of Brazil, but kin to an English lord with connections to Queen Elizabeth's and King James's courts (p. 161).Adventures and misadventures, involving shipwrecks, overland expeditions, wars, and wild animals, alternate in Knivet's narrative. A man of quickly shifting fortunes, Knivet had kept for himself a treasure chest of Spanish silver that he had found in the sacked Jesuit college in Santos. But things turned badly when, in the frigid Strait of Magellan, he pulled off his stockings and his “toes came with them,” his “feete . . . as blacke as soote” (p. 52). Marooned on the beach with the other sick men as Cavendish sailed away to oblivion, Knivet passed out and awoke to find all his companions dead, having “eaten a kind of Pease, that did grow by the Sea side which did poyson them” (p. 56). The Portuguese at one point condemned him to death for being a runaway and a “Lutheran,” but Knivet managed to hobble off to live among the Indians, preferring “the Heathen mercy of savage Man-eaters” to “the bloudie crueltie of Christian Portugals” (pp. 69, 73). He cleverly escaped other tight spots by speaking Portuguese or by posing as a Frenchman.Knivet's story usefully complements better-known sixteenth-century accounts of early Brazil by the German Hans Staden, the Frenchmen Jean de Léry and André Thevet, the Portuguese laymen Pero Magalhães de Gândavo and Gabriel Soares de Sousa, and the Jesuit Fernão Cardim, among others. Typical of the chronicle genre, an ethnographic description of native peoples and an itinerary for coastal navigation are appended to Knivet's account. His ingenuous outlook and extensive travels, including the modern-day Brazilian states of Santa Catarina, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Norte, make Knivet's observations especially noteworthy.Less thoroughly ethnographic than the French accounts, Knivet's story stands out for his firsthand experience of life among Portuguese settlers, Christian Indians, and their mixed offspring (mamelucos) as well as enslaved Africans and independent natives. His is a less cohesive narrative than those by Staden or Léry, with inconsistencies, sudden textual shifts, and inexplicable omissions. Indeed, as Kogut Lessa de Sá notes, Knivet never explained how he eventually returned to England. Yet his story is worth the read, laced as it is with a certain naïveté. He seems genuinely surprised by the astonishing twists of fate that he experienced, as were his Portuguese captors whom he described as laughing at his misfortunes, apparently in good humor. Readers should enjoy the archaic English phrasing and capricious spelling, which help re-create a sixteenth-century ambience.Even as historians gain greater access to primary sources through digitized archives, the need for carefully edited and well-annotated editions persists. For most readers, Kogut Lessa de Sá's meticulous notes will be essential to understanding Knivet's tale, enhancing its appeal to scholars of early colonial Brazil, Ibero-America, and the Atlantic world as well as general readers, who will find the themes of risk, violence, and chance intriguing.
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