Travels In Brazil

Travels In Brazil by Henry Koster is a firsthand English traveler’s account of Pernambuco in 1809–1810, offering a ground-level survey of Recife, Olinda, and surrounding areas. It interweaves geography, climate, commerce, and governance under Portuguese rule with frequent comparisons to England. Koster documents Recife’s three-part layout, the Capibaribe river and reef-driven harbor, Olinda’s convents and lakes, and inland plantations, and profiles governors, merchants, priests, magistrates, and local elites. The narrative covers the economy (cotton, sugar, slave trade), slave society, social life and manners, Holy Week rites, and the social mix of English merchants with Brazilian society. It critiques centralized authority, judicial restraint, and fiscal pressures, while noting reformist currents and the prospect of change. Religion, race, and class shape daily life, with attention to free people of color and enslaved populations. The work also engages Britain–Portugal–Brazil relations, abolitionist arguments, and prospects for modernization, foreseeing how geography and climate interact with economics and politics in early Brazilian colonial society. Read more