Guerras luso-holandesas na Capitania da Paraíba (1631-1634): um estudo documental e historiográfico

Abstract

During the first phase comprising the period of Dutch Brazil (1630-1636), which corresponds, according to Evaldo Cabral de Mello (2007), the phase of conquest and consolidation of military campaigns promoted by the West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie - WIC) in actual northeastern Brazil, the Captaincy of Paraiba was one of the first four captaincies to be conquered, the next to last to surrender. This occurred after three conflicts, of which the Portuguese and Spanish were victorious in two. The purpose of this study is to analyze how they developed the three Dutch invasions in Paraíba, made in December 1631, and in February and December 1634; its impact to the colony, its connection with the conflicts in the neighboring captaincy of Itamaracá, Rio Grande and Pernambuco, and the difficulties that the Dutch had to win the Paraíba captaincy, because our conclusions reveal that the warlike enterprise undertaken by WIC to conquero Paraíba; It consisted of one of the many challenges we faced in those early years. This study was guided on the analysis of four primary sources, written by characters who attended the event in question: the relation written by Fr. Paulo do Rosário, OSB (1632); the travel journal written by Ambrósio Richshoffer (1677), german soldier, who served in the army of WIC; daily memories of Duarte de Albuquerque Coelho (1654), governor of Pernambuco, and the historical annals of Joannes de Laet (1644), a director of WIC in Amsterdam, which was not a direct witness. Such sources express the views of the Portuguese side and the Dutch side in order to build an account of such conflicts by comparing the narratives of both sides of the battlefield. To address these sources, it was decided by a discourse analysis methodology and literary analysis in order to understand the textual and discursive variations of each of the authors, showing how their values interfered in their opinions and judgments about such battles. In the analysis of conflicts, these were based on the approach of the "new military history" field of study emerged in the wake of the "new history", which seeks to rethink the study of military and war forces, not limited to the traditional war history, based in the battles and political and economic factors, but trying to understand the war in their social precepts, cultural, religious and others.