Cardim, Fernão

CARDIM, FERNÃO. - Portuguese missionary, b. at Viana de Alvito (Alemtejo) in 1550, entered the Society of Jesus at Evora on 8 February 1567. In 1582 he was chosen to accompany the visitor Father Alessandro di Gouvea to Brazil. The visitation, which over six years took the two fathers through all the Jesuit missions along the coast from Bahia to S. Paulo, is known to us from a long account by Cardim. Having remained in Brazil, he was rector for six years at Bahia and three at Rio de Janeiro. In 1598 he was elected procurator in Rome of the Brazilian province; but on the return journey he was captured by the corsair Francis Cook, of Dartmouth, and taken to England. Among the papers of which he was stripped were two treatises on Brazilian geography and ethnography; they came into the hands of the well-known collector Samuel Purchas, who published them in his collection of voyages, Hakhsytus posthumus, or Purchas his pilgrimes, vol. IV, London 1625, pp. 1289-1320, erring, however, as to the identity of the author. Ransomed and returned to Brazil, Cardim was subsequently provincial (1604-1609), and rector of the colleges of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. In the turmoil that followed the capture of Bahia by the Dutch (9 May 1624), he had to replace the provincial, who had been taken prisoner to Amsterdam. He died near Bahia on 27 January 1625.

Father Cardim wrote three treatises of great value for the knowledge of Brazil at the beginning of the colonial era: Do clima e terra do Brasil, first published in the original in 1885 by Capistrano de Abreu, and Do princípio e origem dos Índios do Brasil, published in 1881 by the same historian (another ed. 1885). These are the two texts printed in English by Purchas in 1625 as A treatise of Brazil written by a Portugal which had long lived here. The third, published by A. Varnhagen in 1847 under the title Narrativa epistolar de uma viagem e missão jesuítica 1583-90, and reprinted several times, is the diary kept by Cardim during the visitation of Father de Gouvea. The three treatises were reprinted together by R. Garcia, Tratatos da terra e gente do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro 1925), with an introduction and valuable notes.

Edmondo Lamalle