Francisco de Lacerda

Francisco José de Lacerda e Almeida (22 August 1753 – 18 October 1798) was a colonial Brazilian-born Portuguese explorer in the 18th century. For 10 years he traveled a large part of South America, by river routes, between Belém, Vila Bela and São Paulo in the border demarcation campaign between Brazil and Spanish America. Later, he traveled through part of Mozambique and present-day Zambia, in what would become the first scientific attempt to cross Africa.

Biography

He was son of the Portuguese captain José António de Lacerda and Francisca de Almeida Pais. His father, a native of Leiria, had emigrated to São Paulo, where he owned one of the only three pharmacies that existed there in 1765, located in the current Praça da Sé. On his mother's side, whose family was described by Pedro Taques in his work Nobiliarquia Paulistana Histórica e Genealógica, Lacerda e Almeida descended from some of the first settlers of São Vicente such as Estêvão Gomes da Costa or Garcia Rodrigues and of well-known sertanistas and bandeirantes such as Lourenço Castanho Taques, the first discoverer of Brazil's gold mines, who "having received an invitation from the Prince Regent Dom Pedro in 1674 for the discovery of gold and silver [...] resolved with his funds and force of arms to penetrate the wilderness of the Cataguases gentiles [...] and achieved the first knowledge of the mines, at first called Cataguazes, and later [...] called Minas Gerais".

Early life and education

Lacerda e Almeida was part of the Brazilian elite that in the late 18th century went to study at the University of Coimbra, recently reformed by the Marquis of Pombal. It is not known where he did his first studies, but the records of the University of Coimbra indicate that in 1772, Lacerda e Almeida was already enrolled in the 2nd year of Philosophy and the 1st year of Mathematics. With him were other "Brazilians", among whom was his future colleague in Brazil, the miner Antônio Pires da Silva Pontes. In 1777, at the age of twenty-four, he received a doctorate in Mathematics and Astronomy, having graduated nemine discrepante.

Demarcation of the Brazilian borders

In 1780, Lacerda e Almeida and his colleague Antônio Pires da Silva Pontes received the task of taking the astronomical measurements necessary to demarcate the border limits of Mato Grosso with the Castilian colonies. The demarcation mission, which left Lisbon in 1780, bound for Belém, was a result of the Treaty of Santo Ildefonso, signed in 1777.

From Belém, the astronomers went to Vila Bela, in Mato Grosso, where they began to work on the demarcation of the borders. Lacerda e Almeida was given the task of exploring the basins of the Guaporé and Paraguay rivers. Finally, he headed to Cuiabá and from there to São Paulo, where he arrived in 1790. He spent more than ten years exploring the backlands of Brazil.

Lacerda e Almeida left a series of diaries relating to each of the stages of his great journey through the interior of Brazil, as well as maps and tables of latitudes and longitudes. These diaries would be published in 1841, by order of the Legislative Assembly of the São Paulo Province, with the title Diário da viagem do Dr. Francisco José de Lacerda e Almeida pelas capitanias do Pará, Rio Negro, Matto-Grosso, Cuyabá, e S. Paulo, nos annos de 1780 a 1790.

Return to Portugal

Lacerda e Almeida arrived back in Portugal in 1791, becoming professor at the Royal Academy of the Navy Guards. Meanwhile, while still traveling through Brazil, he had already been elected a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.

In 1797, he was appointed Governor of the Sena Rivers (Zambezia), in East Africa, by the then Minister and Secretary of State for the Navy and Overseas Territories, Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho. His specific mission was to make the African crossing between Mozambique and Angola.

First attempt to cross Africa

English map showing the route of the Lacerda e Almeida trip to Cazembe (route 4)

In October 1797 Lacerda e Almeida is already in Mozambique. His journal (Diário da Viagem de Moçambique para os Rios de Senna) indicates that he left Quelimane on October 30, 1797 and arrived in Tete, capital of Sena Rivers, on January 23 of the following year.

After several months of preparation Lacerda e Almeida led, between July and October 1798, what would become the "first scientific expedition in southern Central Africa" [...] resulting in "the discovery of the Kazembe's division of the Lunda empire, a country on the Luapula and Lake Mweru", on the current border of Zambia with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

After traveling more than 800 miles from Tete, Lacerda e Almeida arrived in Cazembe, then part of the Kingdom of Lunda, on October 3, 1798, already ill and with fevers, where he made contact with King Muata Lequéza, 4th sovereign of Cazembe, who received him as "brother". After two weeks, he died without being able to complete the crossing.

File:Travel Diary that Governor Francisco Joze de Lacerda e Almeida.jpg

Lacerda e Almeida's journal containing instructions for the continuation of the mission

In his travel journal, he left express written orders for his subordinates to continue the mission. However, there was a revolt and the expedition returned to Mozambique. The men who remained loyal to Father Francisco João Pinto, appointed by Lacerda e Almeida himself before he died to succeed him in command of the expedition, remained for a few months in Cazembre but also returned to Tete without trying to continue to Angola, as initially planned.

The explorer's travel journal was saved and brought to Tete and published for the first time in Lisbon between 1844 and 1845 in the Anais Marítimos e Coloniais on the initiative of the Marquis of Sá da Bandeira accompanied by the journal of the return trip to Tete by Father Francisco João Pinto. These documents would later be translated into English and published in London in 1873 in a work entitled The Lands of Cazembe: Lacerda's Journey to Cazembe in 1798 by English explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, who wrote "If Dr. de Lacerda did not carry out his whole project, his partial success considerably increased our knowledge of the African interior [...] Until Dr. Livingstone shall have returned from his third expedition, the writings of De Lacerda must continue to be our principal authority."

In 1879, in one of his history books, entitled The Great Navigators of the 18th Century (3rd volume of the General History of the Great Voyages and Great Travelers), French writer and historian Jules Verne wrote briefly about Lacerda e Almeida, lamenting the lack of more complete documentation about the explorer and expressing "a deep regret for not having been able [...] to write more extensively about the history of a man who made such important discoveries, and in relation to whom posterity is supremely unfair, leaving him in oblivion."

Legacy

The city of Pontes e Lacerda in the state of Mato Grosso was so named in honor of the two scientists, Silva Pontes and Lacerda e Almeida, who drew the first sketches of the geographic chart of the rivers of the Amazon and Prata river basins.

Other places in Brazil, such as the Lacerda e Almeida River in the State of Rondônia or the Lacerda e Almeida Island in the Paraná River, State of São Paulo, were named after the work carried out by Lacerda e Almeida in those regions.

In Africa, the first tribute was an initiative of the King of Cazembe, who had a "Maxâmo" installed, to the memory of Lacerda e Almeida, whom Major Pedroso Gamito still had the opportunity to see in 1832. Major Gamito explained that Maxâmos are "the deposits of the Muatas [kings] that the Cazembes revere as sacred places."

In 1893, a settlement in Mozambique on the right bank of the Zambezi was named Lacerdónia in honor of the explorer.

References

• Almeida de Eça, Filipe Gastão de (1951). Lacerda e Almeida, Escravo do Dever e Mártir da Ciência. Lisboa.
• Angelier, François (2011). Dictionnaire des Voyageurs et Explorateurs Occidentaux. Pygmalion.
• Mello Pereira, Magnus Roberto de & André Akamine Ribas (2012). Francisco José de Lacerda e Almeida: Um Astrônomo Paulista no Sertão Africano. Curitiba: Editora Universidade Federal do Paraná.

External links

• Works by Francisco José de Lacerda e Almeida at Gallica