O Imperador Do Brasil E Os Seus Amigos Da Nova-Inglaterra
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O IMPERADOR DO BRASIL E OS SEUS AMIGOS DA NOVA-INGLATERRA Explicação Apresenta o Museu Imperial, neste número de seu Anuário, um trabalho do prof. David James, acerca das relações entre d. Pedro II e os seus amigos da Norte América. Não é a primeira vez que honra o prof. James as páginas desta publicação. No volume referente a 1946 apresentou ele erudito e interessante estudo sabre o pintor francês Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin, artista ligado à arte brasileira do Segundo Reinado, tendo, nessa oportunidade, a colaboração do sr. Francisco Marques dos Santos, profundo conhecedor de nossa história, e cuja sempre solicitada e nunca negada cooperação foi, mais uma vez, posta à prova. Vem agora o prof. James trazer-nos o resultado de suas laboriosas pesquisas em arquivos nacionais e estrangeiros, avultando entre aqueles a preciosa coleção de documentos da família imperial brasileira, agora incorporada ao patrimônio deste museu. As relações entre o imperador e os sábios estrangeiros não é assunto inédito no Anuário. Já no volume VIII, referente a 1947, foi publicado um substancioso estudo sobre o tema, intitulado: “Dom Pedro II e os intelectuais portugueses”, de autoria do saudoso diretor desta casa, Alcindo Sodré. O trabalho do prof. David James é obra primacial para o estudo das relações entre os nossos dois países e ninguém mais indicado para fazê-lo que quem, como o autor, vem se dedicando à pesquisa de fatos e temas relacionados com a história e a literatura latino- americanas. Deu o autor ao seu trabalho o título: “The emperor of Brazil and his New England friends”. Foram os originais traduzidos – introdução e prefácio, pelo conservador Mário José da Silva Cruz, chefe da Divisão de Ourivesaria do Museu Imperial, e o restante pelo signatário destas linhas. Nestas condições, vai, em tipo menor, a tradução do texto do professor James, encontrando-se, em pé de página, as notas originais em inglês, figurando, as em português, no fim de cada capítulo, para não sobrecarregar o texto. Lourenço Luiz Lacombe (Chefe da Divisão de Documentação Histórica) Preface This volume is an account of the friendship of the second Emperor of Brazil, the magnanimous Dom Pedro II with his friends in North America: the Reverend James Cooley Fletcher, the Agassiz family, and the poets, Longfellow and Whittier. The story of their acquaintance is told almost entirely in their own words by the arrangement in chronological sequence of the 130 unpublished letters which were exchanged between them over a period of nearly thirty years. The original letters from the New Englanders to Dom Pedro are in the Archives of the Imperial Museum in Petropolis in Brazil; the Emperor’s answers to the Agassiz have been preserved in the Agassiz Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard, while his letters to Longfellow are in the vault at the Longfellow House in Cambridge. If Dom Pedro wrote any letters to Whittier they have presumably been lost. It is certain that the Emperor wrote one letter to the Reverend Fletcher in 1877, but it has not been possible to find it. It is through the kind permission of the three custodian collections that the entire group of letters is now being made public. The fifty-two letters by Louis Agassiz constitute what is believed to be the largest group of letters, addressed to a single correspondent, by the eminent American scientist that has yet been published. The intersticial material and the notes attempt to provide links between the letters where pertinent material from closely related sources could be introduced. The editor is grateful to Miss Caroline Dunn of the Indiana Historical Society for a wealth of documentation from the Fletcher Papers; to the late Henry Wadsworth Longefellow Dana and to Mr. Thomas de Valcourt for material in the Longfellow House in Cambridge; to Mr. William Jackson of the Houghton Library of Harvard University; to Professor Harcourt Brown of Brown University for many helpful suggestions; to the Essex Institute in Salem; to the Boston Society of Natural History; and to the entire staff of the Museu Imperial in Petropolis, particularly to its Director, Dr. Alcindo Sodré, to its Curator, Senhor Paulo Olinto de Oliveira, and to its Historical Advisor, Senhor Francisco Marques dos Santos. Introduction I The Emperor Dom Pedro II The Brazilian side of the correspondence begins in 1863 when Dom Pedro answered a friendly inquiry from Louis Agassiz, and ends in 1889, the year of the Emperor’s abdication, with a note to Alexander Agassiz. In the Emperor’s letters we feel that he is stealing time to write to his friends from the vast duties of his position as ruler of the largest geographical entity in the Western World. For Dom Pedro’s widespread and diversified cultural interests were a constant temptation. He participated with skill and understanding in all the principal branches of human knowledge. His royal heredity, his early training, and his strong personal initiative help to explain his remarkable career. He was born in Rio de Janeiro on December 2, 1825, the son of the Emperor Pedro I and of the Empress Leopoldina. His father was a direct descendent of the Portuguese House of Braganza and had been Regent in Brazil front 1821 until he declared the former colony independent of Portugal in 1822. The mother of Dom Pedro II, the Empress Leopoldina, was the daughter of Francis II of Austria and therefore a Hapsburg. Her sister Marie-Louise became the second wife of the Emperor Napoleon. The young prince was thus the heir to two of the oldest royal families of Europe, but he was born in the New World and he always insisted upon his Americanism and was proud that had been able from the beginning to shape his own destiny and that of his people. As Sarmiento and Mitre in Argentina, as the North American presidents, he felt deeply the responsibility of leading his countrymen through freedom, education, and cultural and scientific progress, to a better and richer life. Ano 1952, Vol. 13 Dom Pedro was left an orphan when he was still very young. His mother died in 1826 and his father abdicated in 1831 and returned to Lisbon where he died in 1834. The ten years of the Regency (1831-1840) for Dom Pedro II, or Dom Pedro d’Alcantara as he signed many of his letters, correspond to the years of his education and preparation for the throne. His two sisters, both older than he Dona Francisca who later became Princesse de Joinville through her marriage to the third son of Louis-Philippe, and Dona Januaria, later countess of Aquila, shared many of his lessons in the Imperial Palace of Saint Christopher (São Cristóvão). The first official supervisor of the prince’s education was José Bonifacio Andrada, statesman and scholar, who was however replaced in 1833 by the Marquis of Itanhaem who continued in his position until the Coronation of his disciple in 1841. The staff of Imperial tutors who trained Dom Pedro II is an impressive list of the intellectual leaders of the early years of the Brazilian nation and will not be amiss to reproduce it here: Director of Studies and Tutor of Religious Subjects, Latin and Mathemathics: Friar Pedro de Santa Mariana, later Bishop of Chrysópolis. Tutor of Reading and Writing: Louis Alexis Boulanger. Tutor of Geography and History: Félix-Emile Taunay, later Director of the National Gallery of Fine Arts. Tutor of French: René Pierre Boiret. Tutor of English: Nathaniel Lucas. Tutor of German and Italian: Dr. Roque Schuch. Tutor of Literature and Exact Sciences: José de Araujo Vianna. Tutor of Natural Sciences: Alexandre de Andrade Vandelli. Tutor of Drawing and Painting: Simplicio Rodrigues de Sá. Tutor of Music: Mazziotti. Tutor of Fencing: Luis Alves de Lima, later Duke of Caxias, foremost military leader of the reign of Pedro II 1. 1. This list is based en the account given by Mesquita Pimentel in his biographical study: D. Pedro II, Petrópolis, Papelaria Silva, 1925, p. 27. 20 Anuário do Museu Imperial Far from being weighed down by this array of scholarly sub- jects, Dom Pedro could not learn rapidly or extensively enough to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. His interest in the natural sciences may have been inherited from his mother who has an amateur bi- ologist and geologist and had established a primitive palace labora- tory at Saint Christopher. One can see from the list of tutors that France was well repre- sented, just as she had always been in Portuguese-speaking areas. The French language was the international instrument of commu- nication for Europe and Latin America in the 19th century and Dom Pedro continued to use French throughout his life whenever be was addressing any person whose native language was not Por- tuguese. But he developed facility in the other European languages: German, which had been his mother’s native tongue and was the language of his Hapsburg cousians; Italian, which was to be the language of his bride and lifelong companion, Teresa-Cristina of Naples; and English, the language of the British Empire, and of the Republic of the United States whose institutions he painstakingly emulated. Later in his life the Emperor studied Provençal, Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit, and became a recognized authority on the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. In the year of his Coronation, 1841, the formal education of Dom Pedro II came to an end although he was only sixteen years old. From now on he learned by doing, by governing his huge ter- ritory, by reading incessantly in all languages, and especially by talking with the distinguished foreign statesmen and scholars who visited Rio de Janeiro.