[4] Pearl islands, in the bay of Panama. The sand of the beach of those islands is iron, and is as easily attracted by the loadstone as steel filings.
[5] I suppose that off St. Antonio da Barre.
[6] Pedro Fernandez Sardinha, the first bishop of Brazil.
[7] I hope the following tale is not true, though my authority is good. In this very captaincy, within these twenty years, an Indian tribe had been so troublesome, that the Capitam Môr resolved to get rid of it. It was attacked, but defended itself so bravely, that the Portuguese resolved to desist from open warfare; but with unnatural ingenuity exposed ribands and toys infected with smallpox matter in the places where the poor savages were likely to find them: the plan succeeded. The Indians were so thinned, that they were easily overcome!
[8] There is a note in the first volume of Southey's Brazil concerning the name of Marino given to Olinda by Hans Staade. The other Brazilians call the Pernambucans of Recife Marineros still. Is this from the town or their nautical habits? or from the name of the Indian village Marim which existed in the neighbourhood?
[9] In the Historia da Provincia Sancta Cruz, by Pero de Magalhaens de Gandano, 1576, there is an account sufficiently tallying with that which Southey has compiled from Hans Staade and De Lery. But it is far from being so disgusting. There is a copper-plate representing the dragging the prisoner with cords, and felling him with a club. The author gives a short account of the then known plants and animals of Brazil, and concludes with the hope that the mines believed to exist may speedily be found.—See the collection of tracts by Barbosa Maehado.
[10] Anchieta was not only a man of extraordinary firmness of mind and real piety, but a politician of no common cast, and his civil services to the Portuguese government were equal to those of the greatest captains, while his labours as a missionary and teacher were beyond those of any individual of whom I have ever read. His merits as a christian apostle and a man of literature, have disarmed even Mr. Southey of his usual rancour against the Roman Catholic faith. That excellent writer's book on Brazil is spoilt by intemperate language on a subject on which human feeling is least patient of direct contradiction, so that the general circulation of it is rendered impossible, and the good it might otherwise do in the country for which it is written frustrated. Oh, that Mr. Southey would remember the quotation which he himself brings forward from Jeremy Taylor! "Zeal against an error is not always the best instrument to find out truth."
[11] Mamaluco. These were the Creole Portuguese, who had most of them intermarried with the natives.
[12] Among these was Jean de Lery.
[13] Mr. Southey says this spot is called Villa Velha. But there is no place existing in the neighbourhood of that name, nor could I find any person at Rio de Janeiro who remembered such a place. It was, however, most probably on the site of the present St. Juan, or of the fort of Praya Vermelha, which answers exactly to the description.