Cardim, Frei Fernão (1540–1625)

Frei Fernão Cardim (b. 1540; d. 27 January 1625), Portuguese Jesuit and writer. Cardim accompanied the visitador Cristóvão de Gouveia to Brazil. Arriving in Bahia on 9 May 1584, Cardim described their activities in a report on the Jesuits entitled Narrativa epistolar, ou Informação da missão do padre Cristóvão de Gouveia às partes do Brasil. The two had visited the captaincies of Bahia, Ilhéus, Porto Seguro, Pernambuco, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Vicente. Cardim was nominated dean of the Jesuit colégio in the city of Salvador, where he served until 1593, and then as dean in Rio de Janeiro in 1596. Returning from a 1598 mission to Rome, he was captured by Flemish pirates and kept in England until 1601.

By 1604 Cardim was provincial of the Jesuits in Brazil, and in 1607 he was nominated for the second time as dean of the Bahian colégio, the position he occupied when the Dutch attacked Salvador in 1624. The Jesuits took refuge in the Indian village of Espírito Santo, where Cardim died in 1625. He summarized his Brazilian experiences in two treatises: Do princípio e origem dos índios do Brasil e de seus costumes e cerimônias and Do clima e terra do Brasil e de algumas coisas notáveis que se acham assim na terra como no mar, both published anonymously in Samuel Purchas's Purchas his Pilgrimes (London, 1625).

See alsoJesuits .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

João Capistrano De Abreu, Ensaios e estudos: Crítica e história (1st and 2d ser., 1975, 1976).

José Honório Rodrigues, História da história do Brasil, vol. 1, Historiografia colonial (1979).

                       Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva