RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON NO BRASIL: UM OLHAR PARA A GUERRA DO PARAGUAI A PARTIR DE CARTAS DOS CAMPOS DE BATALHA (1865-1869)

Abstract

During the 19th Century, several adventurers, mainly European, roamed the Brazilian territory, producing countless reports which are used as sources for the study of the land, people and nature or the time, since such travel literature deals with the experience of contact. Such reports are not only sources of information about Brazil, but also indicate important interpretative lines of Brazilian history. As such, this work tries to study one of the most noteworthy scholars of the 19th Century, Richard Francis Burton, born in 1821 in Torquay e deceased in 1890, in Trieste. This voyager lived during a very important time in politics for his country, the Reign of Queen Victoria of England. He was a military, diplomat, scientist, naturalist, author translator, and so on, and a known explorer of the African continent, where he involved himself in daredevil expeditions beside John Hanning Speke, being at the center of the debates about the source of the Nile. In Brasil, Burton was the British consul at Santos, between 1865 and 1869, writing several important voyage reports and a narrative on the Paraguayan war and the Brazilian context of the time, in the form of letters, sent to an anonymous character: “Z...”. In the work Letters from the Battlefield of Paraguay, published in London (1870), Richard Burton gathered 27 letters, the first one written in Montevideo in August 11, 1868, and the last one written in em Buenos Aires in April 21, 1869, after he visited the battlefields twice (from August 17 to September 5, 1868) and from April 4 to 18, 1869). We will analyze the peculiar trajectory of this traveler, as well as his “social place”, his reports which go beyond picturesque observation and are historical sources for studies about the people, landscape, nature, social relations, conflicts, etc. We will study the interests he had which made him travel through Brasil and the Plata region, where the Paraguayan war took place, as well as his representations and relationships established in these territories.