The first fifty years of the long seventeenth century bore witness to a once-proud Portugal subsumed at home—by the Spanish, and abroad—by the Dutch. This paper investigates the Portuguese reaction to the traumatic “moment” known as Dutch Brazil. The heart of a dissertation project, this paper utilizes Luso-Brazilian accounts of the fleeting colony to reveal the pull of prophecy, Portuguese diplomatic maneuverings, and the struggle of colonial quotidian life during a time of profound double humiliation.
Records of shifting loyalties indicate that Lusophone denizens of Dutch Brazil and Portugal betrayed religion, crown, and family time and time again. Far from contemporary Dutch-commissioned celebrations of Dutch Brazil, such accounts uncover unexpected alliances and tensions, among and between the Dutch and their unwilling Iberian subjects, moradores and their families, African slaves and freedmen, and indigenous peoples who fought on both sides of the Pernambucan-centered war of “Divine Liberation.”
For nearly four hundred years, scholars have most often rendered Dutch-held Brazil through an imperial lens. This is in no small part due to the accessibility of Dutch West India Company records and commissioned descriptions, deployed from the mid-seventeenth century on to imagine a well-ordered, humanistic South Atlantic. Yet thick description of Portuguese language Inquisitorial interrogations and Dutch-ordered depositions, as well as letters, sermons, and contemporary accounts, lend unexpected texture to the South Atlantic during the contested long seventeenth century. Such sources indicate a global awareness and a broader vision as Luso-Brazilians negotiated Spanish and Dutch rule.
