Cape Verde Islands: Jesuit Documents

As part of a projected series of edited early Portuguese texts on Guinea, in the early 1960s the late Vice-Admiral Avelino Teixeira da Mota began to assemble, partly from archives, documents for a volume he intended to call 'Jesuit Reports'. As it happened, many of the documents, especially those from Jesuit sources, were published in 1968 by another Portuguese scholar, the late P. António Brásio. But Teixeira da Mota did not abandon his project, partly because he considered that Brásio did not always take account of all copies of a document and all variant readings, and partly because Brásio was unable to accompany the documents with informed Africanist annotation. In the 1970s Teixeira da Mota sent me his own collection of documents to translate into English - and also so that I could ultimately contribute part of their annotation. My translations were completed just before Teixeira da Mota died in 1982. Not all of the documents were written by the Jesuits themselves, but most were. - P.E.H. Hair