The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

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Sabine MacCormack
and some considerable distance inland. Instead, Portuguese forts, settlements,
and sugar plantations run by slaves brought from Africa covered
the land that the Tupinamba had once occupied. But in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, and indeed ever since, the Tupinamba
have provided the outside world much food for thought.
In 1553, the German gunner Hans Staden, who was serving among the
garrison of a Portuguese fort on Guanabara Bay, where Rio de Janeiro
had recently been founded, was captured by the Tupinamba. After nine
months of captivity, he managed to escape. His illustrated account of his
experiences, published in 1557, was incorporated into the extremely influential
compilation of diverse writings about the Americas that appeared
in 1592 from the press of Theodore de Bry in Frankfurt. In 1554 and 1555,
Andre Thevet, the French Franciscan friar and cosmographer, spent some
time with the Tupinamba of the same region, and in 1557, the Calvinist
missionary Jean de Lery did likewise. Their work also was excerpted in
De Bry's compilation. By the time that Staden, Thevet, Lery, and the
Jesuit missionaries who were working among the Tupinamba put pen to
paper, the Indian world of South America was no longer the terra
incognita that it had been to Vaz de Caminha. Rather, the publications
of Amerigo Vespucci, of the Italian humanist Pedro Martir de Angleria,
and of Antonio Pigafetta who chronicled Magellan's circumnavigation of
the globe, and numerous other writings whether published or not, had
produced in Europe a certain familiarity with the "new" continent.
Much of what had been written was inevitably incomplete and in places
misleading, but at the same time, a certain typology of themes had been
established that led those who wrote about South America to order their
materials in accord with these themes and readers' expectations. Thus,
for example, Staden, having recounted his personal experiences in chronological
order, concluded his work with a synthetic account of Tupinamba
customs and material culture. An attentive reader of Schmidel
and Cabeza de Vaca might have deduced the importance of ceremonies
of greeting in the Tupi-Guarani world. But Staden, Lery, and Thevet, all
of whom had learned to communicate in the language of the Tupinamba
to a greater or lesser extent, were specific and very articulate on this
subject. In the early seventeenth century, two further French missionaries,
Claude d'Abbeville and Yves D'Evreux, who worked among the
Tupinamba in Maranhao, also learned the language and wrote in accord
with that knowledge. Beyond language, certain further topics, mentioned
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