GARDIM, FERNÃO. - A Portuguese missionary, born in Viana de Alvito (Alentejo) in 1550, he entered the Society of Jesus in Évora on 8 February 1567. In 1582 he was chosen to accompany the Visitor, Fr. Alessandro di Gouvea, to Brazil. The visitation, which in six years took the two fathers through all the Jesuit missions along the coast from Bahia to São Paulo, is known to us from a lengthy report by C. Remaining in Brazil, he served as rector for six years in Bahia and three in Rio de Janeiro. In 1598 he was elected procurator for the Brazilian province in Rome; but on his return journey he was captured by the corsair Francis Cook of Dartmouth and taken to England. Among the papers seized from him were two treatises on the geography and ethnography of Brazil; these came into the hands of the well-known collector Samuel Purchas, who published them in his collection of voyages, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. IV, London 1625, pp. 1289-1320, mistakenly attributing them to another author. Ransomed and returned to Brazil, C. subsequently served as provincial (1604-1609) and as rector of the colleges in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. During the turmoil that followed the Dutch capture of Bahia (9 May 1624), he had to act as provincial after the incumbent was taken prisoner to Amsterdam. He died near Bahia on 27 January 1625.
Fr. C. wrote three treatises of great value for the knowledge of Brazil at the beginning of the colonial period: Do clima e terra do Brasil, first published in its original form in 1885 by Capistrano de Abreu, and Do princípio e origem dos índios do Brasil, published in 1881 by the same historian (another edition in 1885). These are the two texts printed in English by Purchas in 1625 as A treatise of Brasil written by a Portuguese who had long lived here. The third, published by F. 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 C. during Fr. de Gouvea’s visitation. The three treatises were reprinted together by R. Garcia in Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro 1925), with an excellent introduction and notes.