Euclydes da Cunha, whose way of dealing with topics he considered of historical and sociological interest was essentially Brazilian, inevitably came across the figure of José de Anchieta, the Jesuit who played such a remarkable role in the heroic origins of Brazil. So impressed was da Cunha by the beneficent deeds of this extraordinary Jesuit who was wholly devoted to his order, that he became reconciled to the Society of Jesus which he had previously in low esteem. Obviously through, he had reason for supporting the numerous criticisms of the history and the policies of the Society: in short its specific place in the history of Brazil.

I feel in a similar position when considering the figure of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, who was apparently so devoted to the service of the Dutch West India Company, but was paradoxically a greater benefactor to Brazil than that powerful trading company. In effect, Johan Maurits reconciled Brazilians to Dutch rule in Brazil. Sociologically and from a Brazilian viewpoint, the Dutch presence has been judged in an unfavourable light insofar as it represented two things: an imperialist commercial undertaking by the Company, amounting to economic exploitation, allied to the Protestant bigotry of Dutch Calvinists who practised a type of Christianity based more perhaps on the Old Testament than the New and intolerant of coloured peoples and their cultures, regarding them as irredeemably inferior.

The figure, the personality and the deeds of Johan Maurits formally an agent of the West India Company and defender of Calvinism and its aims - intolerantly anti-Catholic, anti-Latin, anti-non-European peoples as potential equals of northern Europeans - were in effect a negation of these attitudes. Because of his outlook, which was brilliantly revealed in what he did as governor, he gave Dutch rule an image which bore little resemblance to that projected officially by the Dutch West India Company through the businessmen and orthodox Calvinists who were its directors. To these people Brazil meant almost exclusively sugar, and what sugar could yield in the form of profit. To this end the Brazilian population, which was predominantly Catholic and consisted mainly of people of Portuguese or mixed Portuguese-Amerindian origin, had to be oppressed, stifled and denigrated, while those of pure Amerindian stock were educated to become the Calvinists' serfs and Calvinists of an inferior kind.

Disagreeing with both economic exploitation and Calvinist intolerance, Johan Maurits acted in a surprising fashion in Brazil. He set himself up as a sort of Prince, as if intent on developing a real principality in the Brazilian tropics and seeking to inspire it with the values of northern European civilisation, with a dash of Latin. He encouraged studies of the natural history and peoples of tropical Brazil, according to the foremost anthropological knowledge of the time, including medicine, and recorded the landscapes, dwellings and human types found in the region occupied by the Dutch, in drawings and paintings, with the help of other northern and central Europeans.

Since he was not utopian in his plans for the Europeanization of the Brazilian tropics, he devoted his efforts to their study, both for the purposes of economic exploitation and to enable Europe, which was more cultured than Brazil at the time, to learn in scientific and artistic terms about the exotic beauty of Brazil and its people ant the scope they offered for scientific and cultural analysis. So systematic was the method used, so constant were the efforts made by Johan Maurits in this study and in this humanistic use of Dutch painting, that they resulted in an extraordinarily valuable collection of scientific data and in a revelation in the visual arts of what were largely unknown quantities. Information was recorded about peoples, animals, plants, customs, about the indigenous population and Europeans who had already become acclimatized to this part of America, about food, disease, types of shelter, kinds of work, fishing, hunting, cane planting and sugar manufacture. To this was allied the extremely valuable work of Dutch cartographers, some of whom added creative artistry to their highly respected scientific efforts. Sure proof of this can be found in the originals of numerous maps of 17th century Brazil which can be seen in the Map Department of the Vienna Library, Austria, and which I had the pleasure of examining not long ago. it was my unique experience, with the technical assistance of Austrian cartographic experts, to identify seven maps which had never previously been published, which I was allowed to bring back on microfilm to Brazil. There are now copies in the archives of the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia and at the Joaquim Nabuco Social Research Institute in Recife.

Mention of the Recife Social Research Institute - a Federal institution which bears the name of an outstanding 19th century Brazilian public figure and writer, Joaquim Nabuco, - should be made here. This eminent Brazilian was well known for his admiration of Johan Maurits and it was a tribute to him that he gave his firstborn son, later to become Ambassador Maurice Nabuco, the name of the man who for eight fruitful years was a distinguished Governor of Dutch Brazil. For Joaquim Nabuco, the activities of Johan Maurits as Governor of a Brazil which had Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, as its chief city and where, on his initiative, a type of representative government took root in this vast region led to the development of a political spirit in the 17th century. This spirit has since come to characterize the Brazilians of Pernambuco: a sort of Nassau - inspired political spirit, a pioneering spirit of political, administrative, intellectual and artistic adventure. Joaquim Nabuco himself was an example of this spirit in the days of Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, politically as an abolitionist or reformer, and intellectually as an outstanding writer, with a remarkable style of essay writing and a new way of interpreting Brazilian society and its past. Paradoxically, the Nassau spirit was always present in the mind of this Lusophile who, as a historian, had never been convinced by the critical assessment of the way in which Portugal had colonized Brazil.

What he always seems to have been was the sort of 'Nassauvian' who would perhaps have accepted, though this is purely conjecture, a principality created in Brazil by Johan Maurits independently of the West India Company and Calvinism but with the support, in the 17th century, of a Catholic population with an emerging national consciousness. The people held in highest regard both by Johan Maurits himself and by Nabuco seem to have been of an aristocratic rather than a bourgeois type of Luso-Brazilian, a type which possibly contrasted in his eyes with the solidly anti-Catholic, solidly mercantile northern European. Certainly, the contrast would not have escaped such an astute observer nor one so acute and so wholly uncommitted in practice, to aims such as those of the Company, and, in theory to strictly Calvinistic ideals, ethics and morals.

When, at one point in his life, before his supremely sage and apollonian autumn years, Joaquim Nabuco admitted that if, by some mischance, Pernambuco were to break away from the Brazil of the time the 1870s) - a Brazil politically and economically dominated by the centre and south - he would remain with Pernambuco, he spoke as the Dionysian that he then was. It is fair to imagine that this potential separatism was a reflection of the 'Nassauvian' in Nabuco, the part of him impressed by the achievements of Johan Maurits in the Brazil under his rule, his achievements, in contemporary terms, in the arts and sciences; the Observatory which he had built; the Botanical and Zoological Gardens which he founded; the urban development plan which he drafted for Recife; the scientific work of Pies and Markgraf; the historical chronicle which he commissioned van Baerle to write; his supremely liberal spirit; his religious tolerance, perhaps including an aesthetic appreciation of Catholic rituals, such as procession, with coloured the streets of Olinda and Recife, which had been banned by the Calvinists but which Johan Maurits allowed. In addition, Nabuco was undoubtedly particularly impressed by the fact that a parliamentary, representative government had taken root in Brazil under Johan Maurits.

We could therefore be justified in suggesting that Nabuco as a supporter of Johan Maurits, would not kindle a 'Dutch nostalgia' of the type which the great Brazilian critic José Veríssimo contrasted with the reality of Dutch rule in Java, but a Nassau nostalgia of the kind which could possibly be expressed as follows: 'Why didn't Johan Maurits seek to remain in Brazil after he broke with the Dutch West India Company, consolidating an independent principality here, one which would no longer be a Portuguese colony or a Dutch domination but a 'Nassauvian' creation assimilating Luso-Dutch values and promoting a new form of European integration in tropical America, where nature and the Indian himself would form the basis of a new national concept?

Nostalgia there certainly was in Brazil; not for the rule of northern European Protestants which symbolized the oppression of the Catholic religion which meant so much to 17th century Brazilians but for Johan Maurits himself the 'dutchified' German. He represented everything Dutch in the best sense of the word - the States-General, ideals of political representation, personal freedom and social tolerance, in contrast to the narrow commercialism of the Dutch West India Company and the narrow religious sectarianism of orthodox Calvinism.

This sort of nostalgia is described in a remarkable book by that other Brazilian from Pernambuco who, like Nabuco, was moved with admiration for the extraordinary figure of Johan Maurits, Oliveira Lima - the greatest and the most sociological of Brazilian historians, the one with the broadest vision and whose sensitivity was most complementary to his critical sense.

The passages of the book Pernambuco, seu desenvolvimento historico where Oliveira Lima records the farewell to Brazil of the 'Prince' are today considered classic. According to this objective historian, quoting an eyewitness of the time, groups of 'inhabitants' who were in fact already potential Brazilians bade Johan Maurits farewell 'with so much affection that tears welled up in their eyes'. These were people for whom count Johan Maurits had been 'the antithesis of all tyranny in peach the living guarantee of fairness and clemency" .Such "demonstrations by the vanquished" would have intensified in Johan Maurits what Oliveira Lima described, using an untranslatable Portuguese word, as his saudade for Brazil, a saudade which followed him to Europe. He lived in The Hague, a town house built with timber from Brazil and with rooms 'decorated with reproductions of the most colourful Brazilian birds' and 'where, soon after he had settled in, he gave a party at which eleven Indians who had gone with him entertain the guests with their dances'. He is also known to have taken 'Brazilian pictures and drawings' with him as well. In all the other important posts which he subsequently held he was always known as 'Johan Maurits', the Brazilian".

Oliveira Lima describes the desolation of Dutch Brazil once Johan Maurits had left it. It reached extremes of hunger and thirst amongst the beside while the besiegers were already enthused with a 'patriotic fervour' which Johan Maurits had not dampened, so well was he able to understand it. With Recife or 'Mauritsstad' as it was called uno siege, Moreau, a French contemporary observer reports that entire streets were demolished bye them who were defending the city against the would be restorers of Portuguese rule. The same fate bot fell the precious park with Johan Maurits, the lover of tropical nature, had laid out: 'beaux et rieux arbres de bois de brésil, palmiers, d'ébènne de cèdre, bois blanc comme neige, bois de violet et marbré, et autres de senteurs Qui embelissaien les spacieuses at longues allés à perte de vue'. Brazilian trees. African trees. Asian trees. A rare and splendid gathering of all the tropics.

How does European historical scholarship regard the figure of Count Johan Maurits and his relationship with present-day Brazil, in the light the most advanced sociological analysis? An outstanding exponent of this type of scholarship and its sociological form of historical interpretation Ernst Samkaber, the author of Süd-Amerika (Spanish title Sudamerica, Biografia de un Continente, Buenos Aires). to the author of this sociological wide-ranging and historically detailed study - a biography of the people of a continent - Johan Maurits was within this vast context a 'first class statesman'. Furthermore his almost complete la of concern for 'trade' made him only marginally bourgeois.

According to Samkaber his government of Dutch Brazil can be said to mark the beginning of a new type of colonization. Seeking 'the fusion of a new Dutch presence in the tropics with the old Portuguese population in the region', Samkaber says, Johan Maurits' wish seems to have been to perform a task which in modern sociological terms could be described as social engineering, an extension of the 'sumptuous buildings' and the 'magnificent gardens' for which he was responsible. Social engineering was the search for that fusion in a style conciliating opposites totally uncharacteristic of the way in which intransigent imperialism sought to dominate - not even when the European empire-builders of the time were such figures as a Clive or a Dupleix. These are the two people referred to by Samkaber when he recalls that Holland, France and England set aside the notion of 'prepotency of the State' in their colonial systems and instead resorted to 'private companies' such as the 'East and West India Companies'. But these 'private companies' were no less prepotent than the State or - Samkaber could have noted - than the Church, when it sought to be theocratically colonizing and imperialism during the same period.

Thus, in the light of the studies made by European historians such as Samkaber about imperialism in the tropics and other parts of the world, it can be concluded that Johan Maurits in Brazil was surprisingly, even ingeniously original, creative and innovatory in the way in which, through European imperialism, he laid the foundations for a new society in a non-European region. For him the Brazilian north-east was a vast laboratory for experiments in civil engineering and human and social engineering, using the sciences, the arts and letters in these experiments in a way that had never before been attempted.

Samkaber's analysis forms the basis of the new interpretation of Johan Maurits' activities in Brazil which is developed here from a Brazilian viewpoint, which coincides with the statements of European historians as regards the originality of those activities, and the extent to which they were out of step with conventional imperialism. He says that Johan Maurits was very careful to grant the 'potential' Brazilians both freedom of conscience and 'a wide degree of autonomy', the return of land to its owners, and dispensation from taxes. When he comments that these were the measures of a statesman and extremely valuable from a Brazilian point of view and in violent opposition to the interests of the Dutch West India Company, he characterises Johan Maurits as a quasi-negation of the imperialist type of colonialist, the mercantile type of imperialist, and the European bourgeois with a 'right' to exploit the non-bourgeois in non-European lands. This placed him in a paradoxical position which clearly he could not maintain for long. Johan Maurits was more an ally of the non-Europeans rooted on the land than of the European bourgeois intent on making large profits by exploiting the land and its inhabitants, be they masters, serfs or savages. Thus it can be said that Johan Maurits' eight-year presence in Brazil was something of a Chaplinesque comedy written and acted by himself.

The suggestion that Johan Maurits in Brazil acted as an engineer of nature, society and culture is prompted by the fact that he was aristocratic rather than bourgeois and therefore felt himself free to carry out constructive experiments without commitments to a Company, which was essentially bourgeois in its capitalism and essentially capitalist in its imperialism. He was a man free to act in favour of a population which was prenational, as far as the aristocratic, seignorial class was concerned, and Catholic in its belief representing - both to the leaders and to other members of the population, including Indians converts to Catholicism, Africans and mestizos - a sort of support for sentiments approaching those of a future national conscience. It is precisely this that explains how Johan Maurits charismatically seduced all the members of that non-European population which, in return, together with the tropical Brazilian landscape, seduced him. It is no exaggeration to say that the conqueror was so overwhelmed by his subjects that he came to protect them, improve them and make a very substantial contribution to their future emergence as an independent nation. This makes him a unique and truly singular case in the complex history between Europeans and non-Europeans.

If one reads works such as Sea Power and Empire (London, 1940) by F.C.J. Hearns and The Ocean in English History (Oxford, 1941) by J. A. Williamson - after the 1940s the subject of 'imperialism' was treated in a demagogic rather than a sociological spirit, with outstanding exceptions such as Asia and Western dominance (London, 1953) by the Indian writer K.M. Panikkar and The British in Asia (London, 1947) by Guy Wint - it will be seen that the early analysis of the British Empire and its rival contemporary empires, as the expression of an imperialist process with positives aspects as well as horrendously negative ones, tends to attribute largely mercantile motives to the moderns phase of that process - that its, from the 15th century onwards. Within this characterization, which is sociological and not pejorative, Dutch imperialism, represented almost entirely by efficient and commercially well-organized private companies, seems to have stood out as a promoter of markedly capitalist-bourgeois mercantile interests. The other contemporary imperialist systems were not without similar motives but, apparently, less exclusively so. Dutch imperialism was animated by motives other than the religious ones with which it came be to associated in Brazil, although Calvinism possibly attributed greater value than other types of Protestantism to capitalist competition. If this is indeed so, it underlines the quixotic element of the clearly non-mercantile nature of Johan Maurits' behaviour in Brazil. Not that he himself wholly scorned profits and business: we know that this was not the case. The fact is however that he seems to have taken little interest in these aspects in his running of Dutch Brazil thus anticipating in this respect the future 'welfare state'. He was anxious to behave like a prince, to exercise political power as Governor counter to the solely mercantile interests of the Company which had charged him to represent it and not to exercise that political power in a manner so quixotically favourable to Brazil. In fact he was so quixotic that he left the Company in the position of a Sancho Panza: wholly impotent in its realism.

Undoubtedly, if there was any European imperial governor in the tropics who was ahead of his time in understanding the importance of an approach which we today would call ecological, then that man was Johan Maurits and the expression of this quixotic pioneering was his work as Governor of Dutch Brazil. Geographer-ecologists such as S. W. Woolridge and W. G. West of Great Britain define this approach as being physical and thus social; in the Brazil of the 17th century it involved cartography, anthropological research, medical studies, town planning for Recife, together with the social studies and the humanities - the literature and historiography of van Baerle, the paintings and drawings of Frans Post, Eckhout, Wagner and research in the natural and biological sciences. If to European eyes these studies, research, and works of art enriched the knowledge of the human condition in a remarkable way, being amazingly non-European or exotic, so far as Brazil is concerned they represented the road to self-knowledge. Brazilians were empowered to analyze and interpret their country and to write it own collective autobiography in a process in which paradoxically an imperialist was involved.

Although such a possibility was never clearly foreseen by Johan Maurits he was in fact an imperialist favouring the emergence of a new nation; in retrospective terms, he was one of the helmsmen of a future nation, an organizer of the humanistic and scientific material which is fundamental to the appearance of a new type of society.

If Panikkar is right (his book contains a sociological critique of European imperialism in the tropics and other non-European areas from a non-European viewpoint) to the effect that the Dutch were not interested in culture and education in Eastern lands, in contrast to the Portuguese who were so concerned with the Indians' souls that they imposed the Inquisition on them as if they were Europeans, Johan Maurits' influence in Brazil gave another direction to the Dutch presence in the tropics, distinguishing it by truly remarkable cultural achievements. It was also very different from the emphasis of British imperialism in the East, which is harshly criticized by Guy Wint as having been characterized by 'indifference' to culture: 'This may be a ground of complaint for the Eastern peoples who are entitled to say no true friendship is possible in which there is not a two-way traffic.' The prevalent concern with trade was, generally speaking, common to all the European imperial systems since their birth in the 16th century. There were exceptions such as the attention paid by both Spanish and Portuguese imperialism to converting the population to Catholicism and to religious or humanistic aims such as those mentioned by that remarkable black African intellectual and sociologist, Léopold Senghor, in a recent speech at the Academia das Ciências in Lisbon. Johan Maurits' activities in Brazil which were characterised by humanistic, cultural and scientific concern stand out in the history of European imperialism and occasionally offer a shameful contrast to the attitudes of the Dutch West India Company.

In Modern Colonization (London, 1951), the British geographer R. J. Harrison-Church distinguishes between those colonies described by French geographers as colonies de peuplement - with their corresponding type of imperialism and the colonies d'exploitation or colonies d'encadrement again with a corresponding type of imperialism. In the opinion of Professor Harrison-Church, the latter type of colonialism could be classified as economic and its corresponding form of imperial rule over dominated peoples and lands would either be that of economic and political domination or that applied by British imperialism in the 19th century in some of its territories. This involved 'indirect rule' along the liberal lines of 'laissez-faire' in contrast to the system of almost absolute imperialism pursued by the British in India. The imperialism in Brazil represented by the private companies of the type that had Count Johan Maurits as their agent was in its orthodox aspects a mixture of direct and indirect rule, with mercantile aims. It used both methods according to circumstances and resorted to the use of military force in order both to dominate the population which was to be economically exploited and to prevent competition by the other imperialist systems, the latter mainly through its naval power. In contrast, Johan Maurits acted in Brazil as a forerunner of the highly successful scientific approach of today, which stresses the importance of outsiders adapting to strange areas in order to achieve national dominion over them, instead of attempting to dominate by force. It is remarkable how sensitive Johan Maurits was a European to the need to adapt not only the policy of his government but also the whole complex matter of the relationship of a northern European culture to a non-European environment, by making a vast effort of adjustment and even to understand the differences. He was ahead of his time in practising that scientific policy of adjusting to 'environmental conditions' which was first devised in 1950 by a lecturer at the University of London, A. E. Moodie, and which replaced the theory of geopolitics by a more historically and sociologically conditioned 'political Gergraphy', as described in Geography behind Politics (London, 1950).

In Brazil, the imperial Dutch presence and specifically that of the Dutch West India Company was characterized by a desire for direct economic dominion - economic exploitation - served by military force. Settlement by northern Europeans was minimal in relation to the population with which it was to compete in quantity, a population which was becoming increasingly aware of its national identity. Any competition in terms of quality was that between poorly motivated settlers with little patriotic zeal within their mercantile spirit, and 'pre-Brazilians' already motivated by Catholic religious mysticism, as well as by economic interests since they felt that they were being interfered with in this regard by the aggressively mercantile invader.

The position assumed by Count Johan Maurits in the government of Dutch Brazil in no way corresponded to that of the agent of an imperial power who identified completely with the predominantly mercantile aims of the invading and dominating force. In many respects his position was so singular that he came to favour the oppressed against the oppressor. So intent was he on improving the lot of the oppressed that he even went so far as to reduce their taxes thereby calling into question an obligation sacred to the dominant European imperialist systems of the time as an expression of the particularly aggressive and expansive phase of what Karl Marx described, two centuries later, as bourgeois-capitalist economy.

Large-scale settlement in Dutch Brazil by northern Europeans was not to be expected, given the tropical ecology of the part of South America conquered by the Dutch West India Company. The rule was bound to be almost exclusively what French academics classified as the 'exploitation' type of colonialism, although northern European settlers were not completely absent from the imperial Dutch occupation of north-east Brazil. One of them, Caspar van der Ley, became famous for the way in which he became integrated with the apparently oppressed - even going so far as to marry the great-grand-daughter of a certain Mello whose family had been 'Brazilianized' since the 16th century and had become the lords of the occupied lands. There were mixed marriages: of northern Europeans with the descendants of the Portuguese, of Protestants with Catholics. Some northern Europeans favoured integration with Brazil after the invaders had been conquered by the Luso-Brazilians, but this was insufficient to leave any significant mark on what social ecologists call the succession i.e. the replacement of a native or quasi-native population or racial or cultural stock by another invading one, alien or adventitious to the environment.

Count Johan Maurits possessed an agile and astute intelligence. He would certainly have been aware of the fact that the Brazil conquered by the Dutch West India Company had it own incipient population consisting of descendants of both the Portuguese and the mestizos and that it was integrated into a physical environment and ecology which differed entirely from that of northern Europe. It is possible that it occurred to him that the Brazilian of the future belonged rather to this already numerous population integrated with the tropics, than to the van der Leys whom he knew so well and who had opted to become a part of Brazil. The latter integration had been achieved through the union of northern Europeans with women from the Brazilian tropics or who were already acclimatized and through the adoption of Roman Catholicism which was already organically Brazilian and which the invaders found among the people they dominated militarily and economically.

It is possible that if Johan Maurits had been a simple northern European settler in Brazil, he would have behaved like his friend and partner Captain Caspar van der Ley after the victory of the Brazilians over the invaders. It is possible that in that situation he would have become 'Brazilianized' - even likely if one considers the fact that the tropical landscape had conquered him aesthetically as his words and attitudes make clear. It can also be assumed that in addition to the aesthetic delights of the landscape he had also been charmed by the dark-skinned women, whose shades of brown varied according to the influence of dark pigmentation, age-old mixtures of Luso-Moorish blood or the recent blending of Luso-tropical blood. As for developing a sympathetic tolerance towards Catholicism, if he had been another Caspar van der Ley, even if he had never come to embrace the religion so closely linked with the Brazil which he loved, it is likely that he would have experienced an aesthetic sort of tolerance. This would have been far from insignificant although such a statement is little more than speculation.

It should be noted that tolerance even in religious matters seems to have been characteristic of Johan Maurits when he was in Brazil in relation to Catholic and Jews. During his rule of Dutch Brazil the Jews of Portuguese origin who went to Brazil from Amsterdam enjoyed complete freedom, which explains why they identified themselves so closely with the Dutch oppressors. One of them, Aboah da Fonseca, even wrote a poetic apologia for the Dutch presence or the presence of Johan Maurits in Brazil. The poem has great historical significance since according to literary experts it marks the start of Jewish literature on the American continent.

Dutch rule in Brazil gave rise, both then and later, to various studies by 'pre-Brazilians', almost all of whom defended the restoration of Portuguese rule. None of them analyzed or interpreted the figure of Johan Maurits from the point of view of his significance for the future Brazilian nation. An apology for Johan Maurits is found in the Latin work by Caspar van Baerle, which consists of a history of the eight years of Johan Maurits' rule based on Johan Maurits' official correspondence, and which the Brazilian historian F. A. Varnhagen considered 'an ever important book worthy of consultation'. The book is illustrated with drawings by Frans Post, an artist closely associated with the cultural side Johan Maurits' presence in Brazil.

In his Biblioteca Exotico-Brasileira (published in Rio de Janeiro in 1929 during the Estácio Coimbra government by decision of that illustrious public figure), the historian Alfredo de Carvalho refers to the work of van Baerle on Johan Maurits as important, and also mentions the excellent Historia Naturalis by Markgraf and Pies as a valuable work linked to the name of Johan Maurits. He also stresses that the 'Dutch invasion of East Brazil' increased the volume of foreign bibliography about Brazil by 'hundred of books and pamphlets' some of which Alfredo de Carvalho himself translated into Portuguese. The translation include Cartas Nassauvianas - Correspondência do Conde Maurício de Nassau, Governador do Brasil holandês com os Estados Gerais (1637-1646). Alfredo de Carvalho made an important contribution to our knowledge of what the Dutch presence in Brazil represented for Brazilian culture, its repercussions on folklore and on the world of the occult, especially during Johan Maurits' rule.

It is a good thing indeed that such an outstanding academic as Alfredo de Carvalho, specializing in such an important field for Brazil, should today have a successosr in the person of another lucid Brazilian from Pernambuco, Professor J.A. Consalves de Mello. It would be opportune to compile a book of writings and studies of Johan Maurits by Brazilians: about the positive influence on the future nation and Brazilian culture as it was evolving at the time of his quite unorthodox way of representing the Dutch West India Company when he was Governor of Dutch Brazil. Reference to the influence of Johan Maurits' rule on folklore reminds me of the initiative which had such a resounding effect at the time, of announcing that an ox would fly in a Recife square on a certain feastday. With the help of some machinery this happened much to the delight of the Brazilians who held the ox in such high esteem, in their life, their work, their mysticism and folklore. Johan Maurits was thus seen to be going out to meet a popular superstition, associating himself with it and linking the name of the 'Flamengo', as the Brazilian people called him, forever with the glorification of the ox, the peasant's workmate.

With a certain degree of rhetoric the Brazilian historian Oliveira Lima said that the Dutch occupation of Brazil in the shape of the Dutch West India Company represented the impotence of the 'Shop-counter' (the symbol of mercantile imperialism) against the 'Cross', in other words the Catholicism out of which - to elaborate on Oliveira Lima's theme or to make one of his ideas more explicit - evolved an early feeling of nationhood amongst the 'pre-Brazilians' of the north-east which was subsequently sharpened by their resistance as an emergent people of three races. In an attempt to be fair to Holland, Brazil's leading historian admits that, in the face of the rule of the Dutch West India Company in north-east Brazil, 'the States-General did not have time to replace a mercantile association, odious in its greed, with the persuasive inflow of new theories of government which it had championed in a Europe sunk in the mire of absolutism'. But he fails to emphasize that the supposed intention of the States-General to redirect Dutch rule in Brazil along truly Dutch lines, after once again taking up the imperial power wielded by the 'financial adventurism' of the Dutch West India Company - and which would have included founding a university and a press in Pernambuco and granting it economic freedom - were all anticipated by Johan Maurits. The Brazilian historian merely records, in favour of a somewhat stereotyped image of Holland, that in the 'vast Dutch-Brazilian bibliography' relating to the days of the West India Company's rule in Brazil, 'there are many defamatory pamphlets' which 'unmask the tricks of the Dutch financiers'. It was precisely these almost absolute holders of Dutch sway in Brazil against whom Johan Maurits waged an unequal quixotic struggle, fighting practically single-handed against the powerful collusion of the united Sancho Panza.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen from a Brazilian viewpoint. The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979. p.237-246.