Portuguese experience in America is part of a complex whole - the encounter of the Portuguese with the tropics. This experience first comprised contact with America alone, with Asia, and then simultaneously and for centuries with the hotter regions of the East, of Africa and of America.

These are the of his choice to which he seems to be attracted with the apparent force of a vocation or predisposition, indeed, more than that, almost under the compulsion of a plan of action preceded or supported by a study, if not always scientific, at least para-scientific, of the condition of nature and life in those regions and of the opportunities they offered for the development of Portuguese activity. These regions seemed to him the desirable, the ideal promised land, whereas the attitude of most other Europeans to the tropics end their "pathology" was for a long time one of hostility and strong disfavour.

Though one of the first people of Europe - perhaps the very first - to make contact with Newfoundland and with the southern extreme of Africa, and to pioneer across the cold belts of South America to Peru, the Portuguese never to have displayed great enthusiasm for settling in foggy regions or for adapting themselves to climates colder than that of Portugal. Their ideal or messianic climate seems always to have been a hotter one than that of Portugal - Portuguese emigration to colder countries such as the United State has been principally from the Azores. It may be noted that popular folklore has long since shown hostility to the cold winds that blow from Spain and linked them to Spanish brides supposedly less affectionate than Portuguese or tropical women. "From Spain neither a good wind nor a good wife" says the proverb. Spain here seems to be symbolic of an Europe colder, in its climate or "winds", than Portugal.

On the other hand, Luis de Camoes in the Lusiadas more than once expresses his countryman's liking or partiality for hot climates and torrid lands and their dislike of cold regions and fog. There is an obvious tendency in the Lusiadas to idealize bright and clear landscapes - those whose splendour is best revealed in a tropical light. We know from the biography of this great Portuguese Poet, so typical of his people in his adventurous manner of being, that he was a man both noble and simple, a warrior and a lyric Poet, a man of letters and a man of action, tall and fair of person but very sensitive to the charms of coloured women, charms to which so many Portuguese in the tropics have surrendered. Whether these were fair or dark, of Nordic or Semitic strain, where the choice was between white or coloured women, between white or yellow, or even white or black, the Portuguese preference was, in most case, for colour. This preference was noted at Baia during the first centuries of colonization by French travellers visiting the then capital of Brazil.

This "melanism" complex may perhaps be inseparable from what may be termed the pan-tropicalism of the Portuguese, i.e. the tendency which the people of Portugal, more than any other European people, seem to evince for findind in hot lands or climates the ideal environment for the extra or ultra-Europeanizing of their activities and even of their culture. A sort of Paradise Lost which the discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries allowed them to regain, at first principally in the East (after their initial contacts with Africa under Prince Henry) and later, after the 16th century, mainly in Brazil, and subsidiarily, between these two phases, in Africa. In the meantime, from the middle of the 19th century on, the so called Dark Continent also took on messianic colours in the eyes of the Portuguese, who still possessed their old pioneer streak and ancient love of adventure in the tropics. In addition, in a period when the cultured Portuguese classes were under strong French and English influence, it signified a means of escape, a flight from the contact of the new mechanical age and over refinements of Europe in art and literature, with its new scientism and technical and decadent trends, which were then beginning to pervade life in Portugal. These excesses were to be mercilessly ridiculed by a talented portuguese writer. Eça de Queiros, who is outstanding in the latter half of 19th century. Under the guise of a simple dilettante in sociological and historical matters connected with Portugal - matters which were rather the particular concern of his friend, and, some respects, teacher, Oliveira Martins - he proved in this instance to be an acute social analyst. Moreover, having himself suffered from the contemporary French and even English fever, he seems to have been towards the end of his live amongst those who were beginning to understand that there were recurring traits in his countrymen's past which, if properly redirected and revived, would be capable of contributing to a true Portuguese rebirth in a new spirit of reconciliation between Portugal's past and present, with the strongest impetus coming from her dynamic past.

Among other traits worthy of being re-established was the readiness of the well-born Portuguese to go and pit his vigour and strength against the tropics such as the African bush or the Brazilian jungles; contacts which were better calculated to regenerate European energies than those with the civilized East.

In the course of the last fifty years the idea that the dynamic force of certain dead can influence the living-as Comte believed to be the sociological tendency of at least some societies-seems to be proving or revealing, experimentally, its validity and can be tested in the constant and systematical relation of European Portugal and its projection in the tropics. This relationship gives Portugal an extra- or utra-European cultural outlook. Deprived of such relationship that culture would run the risk of perishing of claustrophobia, or, in other words, under the anguish of being asphyxiated or suffocated for lack of air other than European. For in actual fact European air was never sufficient to its live. The anguish, the near despair which the followers of Eça de Queiros came to experience in the second half of the 19th century would seen to have its source principally in the wide gap which separated intellectual life in Portugal at the time from its native tradition of contact between its best minds (Prince Henry, Gil Vicente, Camoes, Fernao Mendes Pinto, João de Barros, Dom João de Castro, Garcia da Orta, Padre Antonio Vieira, Alexandre de Guzmão, Pombal, Lacerda, Garrett) and what some have come to call lately its Luso-Tropical reality. This reality consists of the inseparability of Portuguese problems on ethnical questions, social organization and Portuguese condition of existence, of Portuguese aims of life and of those inspirations in the realms of art and literature, more deeply prized by the Portuguese, which they derived from their tropical projections-the Eastern, American and African tropic regions particularly linked to the extra- or ultra-European experience of the Portuguese. This experience has come down from the 15th century and could not be repudiated today without the loss to Portugal of her main characteristics, a loss such as would perhaps not be suffered by any other European country which has had possessions or sovereignty in the tropics, with the possible exception, and to a lesser extent, of Spain. Being also very closely bound to an extra- or Ultra-European experience in tropical lands makes it almost impossible for Spain to live at all isolated from that projection of itself on the tropics; a-------- the projection of the tropics, if not on its most ostensible present-day self, at least on its intra-history (to use Unamuno's definition), which, among Spaniards, is not completely dead but in some ways very much alive.

It should be added that if Portugal today is, politically, a separate country from Brazil - which is its projection in the American tropics - from a cultural aspect the two have come to be, for over a century, equally vital parts of one and the same Luso-tropical reality, which is still in full development. Development in America and development in Africa; and survival in the East, which is of interest here only from a purely cultural aspect. So that Portuguese and Brazilians are, or so it seems, in the process of forming a trird man or a trird culture - a symbiotically Luso-tropial man, a symbiotically Luso-tropical culture -, out of which a still unfinished reality is arising and taking from. This is because, at a decisive moment for his extra-European development, the Portuguese went to the extreme, as no other European of today, of renouncing his ethnical and cultural purity in favour of mixed forms of man and culture in which tropical races, environments and cultures, ultra-Europeanized by the intermingling presence of the Portuguese among them, have their share. This self-same Portuguese has not for centuries been acting alone as a Portuguese who has gone from Europe to the tropics, but has had, assisting him in the creation of biologically and sociologically hybrid, Luso-tropical forms of man, behaviour and culture, not only his descendants (custodians and renewers in the tropics of the Portuguese part of that culture and ethnical species), but also Europeans of other origins, integrated in the fundamental process of this ultra-Europeanizing development. Ultimately, the ethnical side of the process loses all importance in comparison to the effect of its cultural aspect, which is the one which has come to characterize the same process most decisively; so much so that we may even include as promoters of Luso-tropical forms of man and culture in other non-Portuguese parts of Africa, the descendants of those African slaves who, in Brazil, acquired Luso-tropical behaviour and culture, and returning as free men during the 19th century to Africa, there introduced luso- tropical forms of man, behaviour and culture.

Regarding some of these truly interesting cases of the presence in British and French Africa, even today, of Luso-tropical, Brazil-developed forms of man, behaviour and culture, a French researcher, Pierre Verger, in close collaboration with a Brazilian colleague whose ideas would seem to have opened up for him new perspectives in the observation of European influence on native Africa, collected evidence which confirms generalizations put forward by the Brazilian researcher, who has for years specialized in the study of this subject. These instances are of considerable importance because there do not seem to exist any others in Africa in which semi-European, semi-tropical forms of behaviour and culture appear in the same balanced measure as in the Brazilian forms - as similar to the Brazilian are the other interpenetration of European races and cultures with tropical races and cultures, which characterize Portuguese Africa and Portuguese Asia.

If such forms of culture and behaviour evolve by themselves, that is, through the spontaneous attachment on the part of the descendants of those old African slaves to the values which characterize those cultures, if, in Africa, they resist total absorption by other cultures, then it would seem that there is something in those forms which gives them a multifarious activity, and at the same time, validity in the tropics throughout the various stages of life and cultures as they change under the influence of European cultures. This is due to the fact that they express or represent an integration of European values with tropical values that corresponds to the main desires, needs or demands of groups or communities in the throes of transition from a purely tropical quality to a tropical quality impregnated with European influences.

There is no evidence that integration has been carried out to the same extent either by the English or the French, by the Dutch, by the Germans or the Danes, or even by the Italians, in their "long-term" and systematic contacts with tropical populations and cultures. It is the portuguese or the Iberians alone who have been able to attain it. For the Spanish have attained it, though to a lesser degree, but with an equal willingness for the extra- or ultra- European life in these tropics. They have considered it a normal way of live, capable of the same expressions of culture, as within their European confines. This Spanish state of mind seems to me to be equally clear-sociologically clear - in what one could term with Professor Mariano Picon-Salas "the balance" between "the destruction" caused by these self-same Spaniards in the tropics and the "new acquirements", that is the benefits they derived from Indo-tropical values. These values were incorporated through mixed breeding and assimilation into Spanish culture, which thus spread and permeated almost as much as did the Portuguese into a symbiotic culture that could be termed today Hispano-tropical. In contrast the culture of Jamaica or Rhodesia could not be described as Anglo-tropical, nor as Gallo-tropical, the culture of Martinique or Senegal.

Here we come upon what may perhaps be the essential difference between the two processes of the long and systematic contact of the European with the tropics in general since the 15th century, and with the American tropics in particular since the 16th century. It illustrates the Iberian or Hispanic development, in which the Portuguese exemplifies the highest intensification in a pan-tropical sense, so to speak, of the Iberian or Hispanic need to fulfil the extra- or ultra-European destiny or mission of a people or culture uneasily European, the need to integrate h------- the tropics, not as if the tropical environment were entirely hostile to his ra---- culture, but, for the Portuguese and even for the Spaniard, if in certain aspects the tropical environment were his ideal. The non-Hispanic process has meant, by contrast, the domination and exploitation of tropical resources and populations by Europeans of other origin who, with a few notable exception, have evinced neither the desire and mental aptitude for integration in the tropics, nor any sense of fellowship towards tropical values either of race or culture, nor interest in the utilization of such values outside the sensuous, the commercial, the economic and the strategic.

The essence of this difference was perceived a century ago by a Mexican historian, Lucas Alaman, whose tribute to the Spanish mode of procedure in the South of the American continent is described in Chapter II of a study by Professor Mariano Picon-Salas, "Tres Siglos de Historia Cultural Hispanoamericana", entitled De la Conquista a la Independencia, and published also in Mexico in 1944. According to Alaman, as retold us by the Venezuelan historian, the Spaniard in America "in contrast to the Englishman was ready to adopt native customs", and these customs, it should be added, were predominantly tropical in pattern of life, behaviour and culture. It follows that whilsh English colonization of America was "merely a displacement of Europe to more amenable lands", the Spaniard in America fostered the growth "on a primary native subsoil" of a new culture, the Hispano- American. Hispano-American, according to Alaman's conception, in his History of Mexico (1849-1852), revived almost a century later by Picon-Salas in a masterly essay; "Hispano-tropical" we would say today, though in such a general term we run the risk of failing to include the whole of Spanish-colonized America. However, that risk does not imply any slight on Spanish effort in other areas; we are here particularly concerned with interpreting the relation of Europe with the tropics, suggesting the contrast between the Hispanic attitude and the non-Hispanic, and distinguishing it in so systematic a manner that it will be possible for us to talk of a Hispano-tropicology and, in particular, of a Luso-tropicology. This then would specialize in the study, description and attempted explanation of what constitutes the Hispanic and in particular the Portuguese method of developing cultures and population in the tropics, that are symbiotic in their especially distinct way of bringing about a deep and close integration of European and tropical values. One fact stands out clearly, and that is that outside the tropics and sub-tropics of America, even in Spanish colonized areas, little is to be found that is original and new in type of culture or man - new, or trans-European, or extra-European. Much that is outstanding in the culture of the colder Argentine, Uruguay or Chile by its technical excellence or intellectual distinction - will be found to be neo-European or sub-European excellence or distinction (which in no way implies any anti-European criticism) rather than a trans-European or extra-European affirmation new in ethnical type, through its mixed parentage and in its cultural aspects, new through its profound interpenetration of European and tropical cultural values.

In a clear lucid commentary on Alaman's ideas in defence of the Spanish system of colonizing America, as opposed to the English system. Professor Picon-Salas sets forth his ideas which coincide with a point of view I have been suggesting since 1933, on the possible interpretation of the sociologically oecological process of occupation of those tropical areas by the Portuguese, in contrast to the also sociologically oecological process of occupation and invasion of those same areas by Europeans of other origins. A coincidence which flatters me most highly.

The Venezuelan historian would say "Spanish" where I have been saying Portuguese, or "Hispanic" in the "Iberian" sense; however, his theory is precisely that "if the British were good colonizers when they found lands with temperate climates as in North America, Southern Australia and New Zealand, where it seemed easy to transpose their customs and ways of life, they made no similar effort in their colonies in the tropics. Nor was there ever any comparison between the tradition of European life, culture and intellectual refinement with which Spain marked her imprint upon Puerto Rico, and the inferior factory style which British Jamaica mainta---- in those same Caribbean waters". He further recalls that "this problem was documentally studied by the Cuban writer. Ramiro Guerra, in his invaluable book Azucar y Población en las Antillas (Sugar and population in the Antilles), in my opinion a truly essential book for the study of Hispano-tropicology as it becomes systematized into a science; as essential to these studies as some of the Brazilian work, such as the anthropological research research done by Roquette Pinto on Brazilian mixed types. For in contrast to the Spaniard, and more especially to the Portuguese, the Englishman in the tropics, both American and Asian, "preferred to hold aloof from the non-white community, with hardly any other relationship with it except that of master---- servant". Furthermore the Venezuelan essayist - rather in praise of Spanish colonization which for a time was subject to excessively unfavourable and sociologically erroneous criticism from various Hispano-Americans - reminds us that out of "torrid Jamaica, good produce of rum sugar cane", no Hostos or Rizol ever emerged, as in Spanish Puerto Rico or the Philippines, to become the interpreters of nascent nationalities. Again "to have tamed the hot earth, to have brought an urban culture to the toughest and hardest climate of tropical America - Carthagena de Indias, Panama, Guayaquil, etc. - was a Spanish enterprise, brought about despite the poverty of technical means available between the 16th and 17th centuries".

Furthermore, ---------ce to tropical climates as "tough and hard" is some cases, is opposed to the dominant idea held among North Europeans that these climates invariably contribute to the softening of Europeans energy in hot countries, instead of acting as a challenge and inciting them to further effort, as so often happened in the East, in Africa, and even in America itself. Anyone visiting Goa and Mozambique today will still come upon what are unquestionably truly monumental relics of past efforts in which Portuguese energy in the tropics in so splendidly illustrated. It was only the ravages of malaria which hindered Portuguese energy in its audacity and in these ventures (which expressed a will to stay and a desire for full integration to the tropics). So also it was malaria which impeded French energy in Panama, and it seems, German energy in Catucá, in Northern Brazil. We know too that to the Amazons, generally considered "the worst" tropical climate of tropical America, came Hispanic energy with similar strength; Spanish, in Barinas, San Carlos, Ospino, Guanare and Upper Orinoco: Portuguese in the Upper Amazon (where Portuguese engineers centuries ago raised Fort Principe da Beira in the very heart of the jungle) and in the centre of Goias and Matto Grosso, where the Portuguese similarly founded cities, towns and plantations in reply to the challenge of a climate held by other Europeans to be inhuman.

Had the portuguese or the Spanish been able to equip themselves technically and scientifically against malaria between the 16th and 18th centuries, not only their agriculture but also their town-building in the tropics would have reached proportion considered impossible in tropical lands by other Europeans of the same period. The latter, always marginal in their contacts with the tropics, passed on, without the burning enthusiasm to build in those lands, not merely factories, but churches, monasteries, schools, palaces and residences, such as were built by the Spanish and the Portuguese. The Spaniards, surpassing the Portuguese, even raised or founded universities deep in the heart of the tropics, showing their contempt for the North European conviction, then already in circulation, that it was impossible to develop in hot climates the highest forms of intellectual, moral and artistic culture.

Looking at South America as it appeared at the beginning of the 20th century to the critical North European eye, James Bryce, as if entrusted with mission of confirming even in this present century that disbelief in achievement considered by many North Europeans to be so remote a possibility, made the following sweeping statement: "Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabitants of the colder regions to work hard and in enabling those of the hotter to take life easily". He contended therefore that "the tropical states have on the whole lagged behind the temperate ones...".

This factor of climate, however, does not seem to have prevented Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil from outstripping the Argentine, Chile and Uruguay in some of their cultural achievement, resulting from a vigour born of the introduction and implanting of Hispanic energies into regions where living conditions are for the most part harshly tropical. Bryce would perhaps have to reconsider his words today and recognize, with other English-speaking people such as the Anglo-American, Charles Morrow, in his book The Tropics Would of Tomorrow (New York, 1951), that in many cultural spheres - in art, medicine and agriculture, in intellectual and industrial pursuits - much may be expected to come from the tropics inhabited today by mixed populations whose colour, contrary to the Aryanizing dreams of certain Aryans, according to Wilson, "tends to grow darker"- oecologically darker. It will come despite the fact that those populations, largely halfcoloured, may in their human efforts have enormous odds to face in such regions as the Hispano-tropics: acid lands, such as a considerable part of the Brazilian Amazons, for example; so-called tropical diseases, which are as inimical to the development of human life as to animal and useful plant life. These are all challenges to the capability of a tropical people to triumph over the lands which they occupy. These obstacles, moreover, being consequences of climate, are not absolute inexorabilities of climate, but problems which can be solved through the application of technical and scientific knowledge, freed from the North European conventional outlook and applied to the consideration of such problems oecologically, or as they present themselves in their own environment under tropical conditions of life.

Perhaps in connection with these developments, that is in adapting North European or Anglo-American technical and scientific knowledge to tropical conditions of life, it is the Brazilian, with his Portuguese background, who of all the modern Hispano-tropical people has made most strides in practical, experimental work useful to those states in the same oecological situation and with the same cultaral traditions. This may be because the Portuguese, in contrast to the Spaniards, who instituted their tropical universities at an early stage, always had to compensate his inferiority in academic resources and university education in the tropics by extra-academic experiments. Since colonial days he has, by such experiments, created centres for the study of matters of scientific interest, out of monasteries such as the Benedictines' at Rio de Janeiro, out of botanical gardens such as the one at Olinda, and out of industrial installations such as the sugar plant at Muribeca (where the famous Moraes carried on his studies even in colonial times on the alterations suffered by the Portuguese language in Brazil). The Portuguese used these centres for research into problems peculiar to the tropics - to Brazil or to tropical America; or for study of the development of Hispanic and Christian forms of life, economy and culture in the tropics. There ----- experiments as those of the Benedictines in Rio de Janeiro to determine which racial type - the negro, the "cafuso" or the mulatto - was the most capable of efficient work or of intelligent activity in Brazil. There were the experiments to determine which tropical plants could be used in the treatment of diseases dominant in Brazil and unresponsive to European medicines; or again, those on the diet of agricultural workers and on the feeding of their domestic animals. Further still, there was the work of José Bonifacio on Brazilian ores, an extra-academic work carried out in Brazil which won him academic renown in Europe including the award of a doctorate entitling him to a chair at the University of Coimbra.

Only a short while ago, after visiting Venezuela, a well-known Brazilian, Professor Assis Chateaubriand, who is also one of today's foremost authorities on South American economic problems, wrote that he had found modern Venezuelan animal husbandry to be based on "three Brazilian off-shoots, namely Angola Grass, Jaraguá Grass and Gyr Cattle, which were put to better use there than in Brazil where they had been developed and where a Portuguese or a Brazilian had shown their oecological excellence". In his letter from Caracas to the Diario Associados of Brazil, he goes on to say: "It is only on seeing Venezuela's field work at Turem that one can form an idea how these experimental stations and laboratories here in Venezuela handle our Brazilian grasses. Both Jaraguá Grass and Angola Grass (known here by its English name of Pará Grass) are prolific and rich grasses. Either is capable of feeding a high number of livestock per hectare". Further: "After many years of attempts to establish a national stock of cattle of European strain. Venezuelan specialists have come to the conclusion that without some degree of blending of native blood a breed cannot be obtained that will stand up to local conditions", that is to say, to tropical conditions. These specialists turned their attention to the experience of Brazil, in other words to the experience of another tropical country, where every possible combination and type of breed having been tried, the zebu-cross had finally been arrived at as the ideal standard for a country such as ours rather than a breed of European or Asiatic stock.

This is a typical example of the solving of an economic problem common to the tropics through specifically Luso-tropical and non-academic methods of research and experiment, where the resultant benefits were reaped or sometimes put to better use, by Brazil's Hispano-tropical neighbours - such as, in this case, modern Venezuela, rather than by the country which originated them. The point, however, which I would like to stress is that for the Portuguese colonizers, the lack of universities in the Eastern, African or American areas which they occupy, was not necessarily a hindrance to the development of a science and technology best suited to the solution of tropical problems peculiar to these regions, or to the assimilation to tropical condition of the European or Northern institutions or values brought there by the Portuguese. On the contrary, though it was in many aspects deplorable, the absence of universities, which in Portuguese tropical areas such as those of Spanish colonized America, would have been centres of European science and knowledge in their most orthodox, academic forms, gave to the Portuguese established in the tropics unfettered freedom to carry out their bold experiments. Consequently tropical problems were considered empirically, confronted and investigated in all their tropical aspects, in the search for solutions which were neither academic nor strictly or passively European. This boldness was carried on down to the time of the founding of Brazil as a sovereing nation. Without the aid of universities - which Portuguese America to come to know only on attaining adult nationhood - it was manifested in the from of scientific research, experiments and systematics, which caused considerable repercussion, in not world-wide, at least throughout America.

Even without recalling the work of José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva, the mineralogist, often known as the "Father of Brazilian Independence", and of the philologist de Morais, of Dictionary fame, we could without any boasting claim that, amongst American works of acknowledged standing, that repercussion gave rise to achievements such as Teixeira de Freitas Legal Code--adopted in various parts by Chile and the Argentine; the research dane by that authority on African matters, Nina Rodrigues, who specialized in the study of Afro-Brazilian forms of behaviour and culture; the investigations of Silvio Romero into local traditions and folklore; the anthropological and anthropometrical research work of Roquette Pinto; the medical researches of Osvaldo Cruz; the aeronautical experiments of Santos Dumont; the agricultural work of Manuel Cavalcante on the sugar cane; in economics, the study of so-called "valorisation of coffee"; the historical investigations of Vannhagem Oliveira Lima, Capistrano de Abreu; the exploratory work in central Brazil of Candido Rondon, the explorer and geographer.

In face of those achievements, when in 1911 James Bryce visited Brazil - at a time when much of this work and research was being or had already been carried out and mostly in connection with tropical, American or regional matters considered for the first time with scientific objectivity - though he may have been right in deploring the fact that "learning and the abstract side of natural science are undervalued in a country which has no university, nothing more than faculties for teaching the practical subjects of law, medicine, engineering and agriculture", he certainly was a little hasty in his judgement that Brazilians have "a quick susceptibility to ideas, like that of Frenchmen or Russians, but have not so far made any great contributions to science, philology or history ------emed to him a "deficiency of a taste for and interest in branches of knowledge not directly practical...".

Even more superficial in this respect was the Anglo-American economist, Roger Babson, in his book The Future of South America (Boston, 1915), on accepting from one his Brazilian "friends" the scathing remark: "there is something here in the tropics which takes the ginger out of all of us. Did you ever hear of a great inventor, artist, writer, or any other man of real note who did his work in the tropics? ".

In Brazil such men were already in existence - though not many - and for that matter also in the Spanish countries of tropical America. Babson and his friends ignored them. Nevertheless, the American tropics had already produced and were producing notable work in scientific invention, art and literature: a production that has become more impressive in recent years.

The same practical sense for solving tropical problems in economics, in architecture and in human relations, problems peculiar to the countries in which the Portuguese had decided to settle since their first contacts with India (where, incidentally, on the initiative of Alfonso de Albuquerque, they first began to practise their policy of mixed or Luso-tropical marriages), seems to be evidenced in other Portuguese ventures, entitling them to rank as pioneers among the European colonizers of the tropics. Pioneers, at that, whose foresight seen today in its right perspective is still a living impulse in the relations of Europe (not just Portugal or even Iberia, but Europe as a whole) with the tropics, and also in other inter-tropical relationships. As, for example, the American tropics with the African, and Asiatic with the American.

The system of labour in force at the time, i.e. slavery, was of considerable help in developing this inter-relationship. The Portuguese, as founders of modern agriculture in the tropics, considered the use of slaves be essential, though they preferred to follow the Arab example rather than the system of "industrial slavery". In other words, they preferred the personal, patriarchal, family relationship of master and captive as against the impersonal relationship characteristic of industrial slavery, or semi-slavery, which was the system mainly followed by Northern Europeans in their tropical enterprises. This does not mean, however, that the more personal and less industrial slavery did not at times involve the same cruelty, on the part of the master towards his slave, as he meted out also to his wife and children. Nevertheless, the personal system of slavery followed in Hispanic and especially in Luso-tropical communities, appears to have contributed, perhaps through Arab influence, to the integration of the African into Hispanic and Luso-tropical cultures and communities, in which the slave could participate with relative ease, despite his condition. It does not seem that the more industrial type of slavery or semi-slavery gave its captives this opportunity of integration, even when it was ameliorated to the point of forbidding the master to administer to the slave such punishment as in his patriarchal disciplinary fashion he imposed on his son.

It must not be forgotten to that very system of slavery which the Portuguese used so widely to found the modern tropical agriculture of Brazil, impulses which changed almost overnight the old system of interarea relationships. These inter-relationships, let it be stressed again, were not only between Europe and the tropics as a whole, but also between the different tropical regions, which otherwise would have kept more to thernselves, with obvious resultant loss to their peoples in such matters as their food supply, recreation and general well-being. The Portuguese, who were especially interested in developing their sugar cane plantations, contributed enormously to the development of other agricultural activities ancillary to the sugar cane and thus greatly benefited the economic situation of these tropical populations, victims hitherto of their own isolation or inertia.

Professor H. J. Harrison Church, the English geographer, in his excellent Modern Colonization (London, 1951, page 20) relates that in order to feed Africa the slaves awaiting shipment to brazil and to provide food during the crossing to America for the considerable shiploads despatched, the Portuguese introduced into West Africa a vast number of new plants. Among the mos---mportant were casava nuts, sweet potatoes, maize, cocoanuts, citrus fruits, oranges - these probably directly from Portugal - and later, Professor Church tells us, cocoa. Whatever the reason for introducing these most useful food plants from tropical America to Africa, counterbalanced by bringing into tropical America other plants not only from temperate Europe but also from tropical Africa and tropical Asia, such as mangoes, jacks, cinnamon, bread-fruit, and the Indian cocoanut, there is no doubt that the Portuguese by their activity in this field wrought great changes in the vegetable oecology of Africa, America and even India itself, where they introduced the cajú nut, so that its human population and its animal population - some of them victims of shortages and even lack of food - benefited from it, as did its economy and agriculture. This interchange of nutritional plants within the tropics was perhaps the largest ever made.

At the same time the Portuguese and the Spaniards, but more so the Portuguese, seem to deserve full credit for having been the first to introduce from the tropics into Europe new values and crafts which were to modify European ways of life considerably and to bring European economy and culture into closer contact with the tropics. This influence was to continue right down to our time, as exemplified in the change brought about in European summer clothing, in the modern slacks, for instance.----- these changes in dress, first championed by the Portuguese in India, were to incur much criticism from the British, whose conception of the White Man's status as Empire Builder in the tropics forbade any alteration in their way of dressing to suit local conditions, as practised by the Portuguese. This difference was strikingly apparent to European travellers who visited those parts in the East where the Portuguese, who had come to settle permanently and not transiently as did other Europeans, had made their mark. This was so true that, not only did the Portuguese bring about a change in their clothing habits to suit tropical conditions, but they also began to show in the architecture of the churches, convents and homes which they built there, a tendency to combine Iberian and oriental building techniques and values. Many of these new ideas, first tentatively carried out in India - and often on a grand scale - were brought over to the American tropics, where they developed, perhaps under a less florid guise but certainly on just as solid a basis, into a symbol of European permanency and stability in the tropics. The stately homes of the sugar plantation owners of Brazil represented to many the perfect expression of that desire of the Portuguese to settle definitely and for good in the American tropics, and to attain full assimilation. Professor Church's generalization that: "Although white settlers have affected the pattern of many tropical colonies, it remains true that most colonization is by association and is economic in character", does not seem to apply to what we have been calling, in this essay, the Portuguese trans-Europeanization of the tropics, nor to the tropicalization of European settlers and their descendants. Neither does it apply to the essential core of Portugal's culture with its roots deeply embedded in Europe nor to those other European cultures which have been more closely inter-related with it down the ages. These cultures have all been affected by the tropicalization of the Portuguese as reflected in his tastes and ways of life. Incidentally, his taste for a wider use of cotton or tropical materials in his underclothing, in such items as shirts, underwear, etc.., appears to date from his early contacts with the East and its tropics, this, in spite of the Englishman's contention that he was the first to introduce pyjamas into the modern wardrobe. The mosquitonet, however, which is so characteristic of the American tropics, does appear to have been inspired principally by the Portuguese not only in Europe and in Africa but also in other tropical parts of the world where it had previously been unknown.

Yet, it is interesting to note that Professor Church does admit an exception to his assertion that most tropical colonization is either merely "by association" or simply "economic in character". He refers to the case of Goa, which he admits is characterized by "considerable intermarriage" and which is all the more remarkable because it occurred in a part of the Eastern world which already knew civilization. This was the result, as we know, of a planned policy directed and instigated by Alfonso de Albuquerque four centuries ago, and of a certain "espirits", which even today reflects the ancient missionary fervour that inspired the early Portuguese who first came into contact with the tropics, as it also inspired the first Spaniards, bringing to their colonizing efforts impulses which were not only "economic in character" but also of a more cultural and psychic nature. Hence, the development of Goa into a complex body which, the English geographer admits, "reflects the characteristics of both peoples". Consequently, it fits into the characterisation or classification of Luso-tropical, suggested in this essay.

Brazil's development also has been guided only on these lines. It is a complex today of Luso-tropical culture and oecology in which European contributions and characteristics predominant so far have combined with two strong tropical cultures and populations - the South American Indian the African, whilst in the modern provinces of Portuguese Africa, this Luso-tropical complex, which is a socio-cultural or ethno-cutural symbiosis and not a "mere association" purely economic in character, is growing and beginning to show African characteristics - and, in some places, East Indian characteristics also - in culture and racial traits, together with European values within a framework, which to date is decisively European and Christian, though not imperially European nor exclusively Christian; cultural, of course, in its sociological sense. This despite the fact that this process of symbiosis or amalgamation is sometimes disrupted, as in areas such as Mozambique, by the contact of its White population with the Whites of Rhodesia and South Africa with their unrelenting European outlook. Similarly in Angola, the same thing is to be met with in certain restricted areas such as in those dominated by the powerful Diamond Company whose directives, though issued by the Portuguese would seem to be influenced by the Belgian and sometimes British policy of "association" and "segregation", in a field concerned almost exclusively with the economic exploitation and occupation of the tropics by the White man.

Although there is still discussion of the bio-social problem whether it is possible for the White man to remain in the tropics after three generations, the Portuguese for more than four centuries have come to the tropics with the firm ideal of settling to remain. They fall easily into the un-European environment which they find there, without bothering too much about racial niceties or purity per se, except in those rare cases where they try to ape North Europeans or come under pressure from them regarding conduct - though it must be noted that in several instances Portuguese occupation has been markedly aristocratic in stamp, as in India and Pernambuco, for example. This aristocracy has been one family or family caste, rather than one of racial exclusiveness or of solicitude for the preservation of untainted European blood.

Quite the reverse, mixed marriages, i.e. Luso-tropical marriages, were definitely encouraged from the very beginning provided that the tropical "stock" was of equally good birth, the tropical equivalent of European nobility, such as the daughters of Indians of noble birth to whom the Portuguese gave the title of "Princess", or such as the South American warriors to whom was accorded the rank of "Captain" or "Lieutenant".

There are some who think I. Schividetzky in his study Grundzüge der Volkerbiologie (translated from the German into Spanish by Heriberto F. March under the title "Etnobiologia-Base para el estudio biológico de los pueblos y el desarrollo de las sociedades", Mexico, 1955), that there are limits to the tropics of the North European, for whose mass settlement there is almost impossible. For one thing, malaria would be a serious - one might almost say an oecological - impediment to the settlement of a certain ethno-biological type of man in the tropics. Not however to others, since according to some medical authorities of tody, "pigmentation of the skin is not foreign to resistance to such disease", but rather "decisively related" to it. Thus the Portuguese and the Spaniards would seem to offer a greater resistance to tropical malaria than any other potential European settler in the tropics, since both Portugal and Spain are to a large extent peopled by dark-skinned populations in whose veins runs not only Jewish, but principally Moorish, blood. In addition, the Portuguese, helped by their inclination for mixed marriages with coloured women, do create a hybrid, Luso-tropical man, resistant to tropical diseases possibly correlated to pigmentation, with his own definite culture, type and behaviour.

Furthermore, it is Schividetzky who points out in the same Etno-biologia that North Europeans do not appear to feel any repugnance, that is physical repugnance, for the coloured woman - as otherwise there would have been no half-coloured populations in South Africa and in Indonesia. What repels them (a factor which was stressed by me in a study published in Rio de Janeiro and already in its second edition in 1936) is legitimate union with such women - "wedlock, followed by all its biological consequences and implied permanent relationship". For that was how Schividetzky acknowledges "Spanish and portuguese colonizers gave rise in their midst to large masses of mestizos, allowing them into their circle of procreation: this gave origin to the formation of an entirely new people".

I hardly think it is altogether correct to use the expression "entirely new" with emphasis on "entirely", given the fact that these mestizos (in tropical areas of Spanish civilization in general, and Portuguese in particular) preserve in their physical aspects, behaviour and culture, and inclusively in their dances, music and culinary arts, both the European and tropical characteristics of their original populations and cultures. What is new is the way in which they combined such characteristics symbiotically, as for example in Goa, or in Salvador da Baia, in Belém do Pará, the Island of Mozambique or in Cape Verde Islands.

In this symbiotic genius which the Hispanic people have for creating new types of man - and principally of women - new types of behaviour and of culture in the tropics, the Portuguese have shown themselves to be the more intense in carrying out or expressing that biosocial symbiosis. This is the suggestion that runs through my every at tempt at re-interpreting Portuguese ways of life in the tropics as the most intense expression of Hispanic influence or symbiosis, never denying it on any essential point nor breaking away in any decisive aspect.

The portuguese settler has so intensified the Hispanic process, moreover, that it would seem to justify us in singling out Portuguese effort in the tropics, with its related achievements and creations, as distinctive in establishing a civilization centred on Christianity (that is a sociologically Christocentric civilization) with a unity of form rather than of objectives. That distinctive core is lacking in the Spanish civilization which is less Christocentric - in a sociological sense, of course, not from a theological point of view - that nationally or imperially Spanish.

In this way of seeing the subject - that is, the emphasis I give to the Christocentric unity of Portuguese effort in the tropics - a Mexican historian and sociologist, Professor Silvio Zavala, has suggested that there is perhaps the revival of an opinion proclaimed long ago by a French Jesuit, Father J. L. Lafitau, early in the 18th century; and whose forgotten work. Histoire des découvertes et conquêtes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde, published in Paris in 1733, is revealed to us by Professor Zavala in his excellent book America en el espirito frances del siglo XVIII, which appeared in Mexico in 1949 and in which is given the gist of the Jesuit Father's ideas. I do not think that there is anything more than a superficial likeness between the two concepts. Professor Zavala himself remarks that lafitau by "treating together as one, portuguese expansion in Asia, Africa and America", has followed "Portuguese antecedents". Such antecedents, and not the French Jesuit work, may possibly have contributed to the Brazilian idea expounded by me in my books that the tropics under Portuguese influence form a sort of "cultural federation". On other hand, I believe Brazilian sociologists are the first to have pointed out the particular sociologically Christocentric character of Portugal's colonization of the tropics, which reached the extent that, to a number of Eastern peoples, the Portuguese became known as the "Christians" and the portuguese language as the "Christian language".

Lafitau's book concerned as it is with the Portuguese effort is the work - as Professor Zavala stresses - of an author who was a Jesuit and who wrote at a time when Jesuit forces were active simultaneously in the colonial empires of Spain, Portugal and france, a position which give them "an international vision above the petty differences of view point engendered ------ rivalry between the European Powers". Its merit lies in the fact that in the 18th century, when Portugal was already decadent, Lafitau should have drawn would attention to the virtues of Portugal's achievements, which were then being obscured by the almost exclusive exaltation of Spanish conquests in Mexico and Peru - conquests which, though perhaps more dramatic, were by no means more important than those achieved by Portugal. For to lafitau, according to professor Zavala, "Spanish conquests"(he obviously refers to those that took place in the tropics) were inferior, in many respects, to Portuguese, distinguished as the latter were by a diversity of character in the individuals and types of achievements concerned, which he thought was -acking in the Spaniards. Summing up the 18th century Jesuit's conclusions on the accomplishment of the Portuguese, in what Lafitau called the "New Would" and which to him covered the East Indies and included, so it seems, all tropical parts where they had extended their activity, Professor Zavala gives emphasis to Lafitau's admiration for this activity which, according to the Jesuit writer, was carried out "though immense effort, innumerable dangers, surprising and often incredible deeds of valour, overcoming and subjecting many nations, humbling the proudest kings and carrying the faith of Christ everywhere under the protection of their conquests and discoveries". High praise indeed, though perhaps a little too fervent.

However, these laudatory comments on the Portuguese and their work in the tropics are not without significance, coming as they do from one who was not only French, but also a Jesuit, with an "international vision" of European activities in the tropics - an "international vision" stressed by Professor Zavala. Lafitau seems to have anticipated the modern preference to rehabilitate rather than to exalt such activity and to acknowledge its importance in the development in Brazil and other tropical areas of a complex tropical civilization. It is a civilization which some of today's interpreters of the historical development of brazil, of the East and of Portuguese Africa, consider as being more sociologically Christocentric than ethnocentric in character, a civilization, they consider, that non-Portuguese racial and cultural contributions will continue to enrich without compromising its unity of basic forms. This unity of basic forms is what has made possible the development in various tropical areas of what I have called Luso-tropical civilization in the East, in Africa and in America, which is so superior to the differing national and quasi-national forms of civilization which in found in those areas, that, instead of developing with the passage of time, such differences have largely decreased.

And if it is true, as the Anglo-American Marston Bates contends in his Where Winter Never Comes - A Study of Man and Nature in the Tropics (New York, 1952), that Latin American culture is infinitely more interesting in those regions wherever it has broken away most completely from typical Western or European cultures - as in Mexican art - it seems to be true also of that culture or of that civilization for which I have suggested the characterisation of Luso-tropical. Its virtue seems to lie more and more in its capacity to dissociate from its original European or Iberian or Portuguese civilization without any wilful denial, contradiction or opposition, but rather with the aim of bringing it into a closer symbiosis with the different tropical cultures with which it has effected contact. The fact that the tropics whether in the East, in Africa or in America are almost, if not entirely, identical in certain essential, natural and oecological aspects, and that the Portuguese attitude towards these different tropics in regard to their nature, populations or cultures has always been imbued with the same tendency towards integration, explains the unity of basic forms which has characterized their civilization, spread over a number of continents, surrounded by many varied neighbours, opposed and disparaged by their enemies: enemies of the so-called geopolitical type. Everywhere in tropical lands occupied by the Portuguese this attitude has been the same: constant almost unalterable. No attempt has been made these lands to subject them to absolute racial, social or cultural dominance by Europe, Iberia or Portugal, but through compromise in racial, social and cultural matters, to achieve a symbiosis, not merely an association of Europe with the tropics.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. Impact of the Portuguese on the American tropics. Neuchatel: La Baconniére, 1958.