Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

at São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, further down the coast. Suspicions that the
Portuguese Governor in Bahia was supporting the rebels only added to the potential danger. 3
Bad as this news was, it did not come as a complete surprise. Johan Maurits, who until
May 1644 was Governor General of Dutch Brazil, had warned on his departure that maintaining
civil order would require great care to balance the interests of the colony’s three groups—the
military, the merchants, and the citizens, both Portuguese and Dutch—and ample arrangements
for military defense. 4 He had recommended in the strongest possible terms that the existing
garrisons be paid on time, provisions for religious toleration be maintained, and care taken not to
exert excessive pressure on Portuguese planters who had become deeply indebted to the
company. But with Maurits gone, and funds in short supply, the council and the company had
largely ignored these recommendations: troops were given license to return home, payments fell
behind, and public worship by Catholics was strictly curtailed. By October of 1644 there were
rumors in Brazil of a revolt; by February these rumors were serious enough that the Council
asked the company, as a precaution, to send additional men and munitions. 5
When the news of the revolt reached the United Provinces it created a sensation, not only
in the taverns and coffeehouses where Brazil had for a generation been a staple of public debate,
but also in the halls of government. 6 In Amsterdam, Middelburg, The Hague, and elsewhere,
3 The classic account of the "War of Divine Liberty" is contained in Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654, 159-
203. See also Wätjen, O Dominio Colonial Hollandez no Brasil: um Capitulo da Historia Colonial do Seculo XVII,
222-286.
4 On his departure Maurits' left behind a lengthy set of instructions for the remaining members of the Hoge ende
Secrete Raed. This document, often referred to as Maurits' "Political Testament," though he never gave it that label,
was transcribed by Casper Barlaeus in his official history of Maurits' tenure in Brazil, Rervm per Octennivm in
Brasilia, published in 1647. The standard modern edition is L’Honoré Naber, Nederlandsch Brazilië Onder Het
Bewind Van Johan Maurits Grave Van Nassau, 1637-1644 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1923). There is now
an English translation, Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil Under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits of
Nassau, 1636-1644, trans. Blanche T. Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011). On the
balancing the three groups, see Ebeling, 279.
5 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654, 176.
6 On the popular recneption of news about Dutch Brazil two decades earlier, see Michiel van Groesen's article on
news of the Dutch seizure of São Salvador da Bahia in 1624, “A Week to Remember: Dutch Publishers and the
42