Camarão Indians' letters

**Camarão Indians' letters** () is the name for six letters the Potiguara Indians wrote during 1645. They were written because of the Dutch Invasion of Brazil. They are also known as **Tupi letters from Camarão Indians** ().   They are the only known texts written by Brazilian Indians until the Independence of Brazil. The Camarão Indians' letters are also the only record of Old Tupi writing in Colonial Brazil. Today, the letters are in the archives of the Royal Library of the Netherlands; they have been there for almost 400 years.

The letters are known since 1885. People tried to translate them, but failed.  Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, a philologist , published the first complete translation in October 2022. He also transcribed the letters, and left some comments.

A seventh letter was later found in the National Archive, in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

## Context

In 1624, the Dutch organized an invasion of the Brazilian Northeast. They did this using the West India Company. They were not successful. They later returned to Europe with some natives. Among them we Antonio Paraupaba and Pedro Poti. Both converted to Calvinism in Europe, where they lived for five years. They also got an education in Dutch.

Five years later, in 1630, the Dutch again invaded Pernambuco in order to establish a colony in Brazil. They came with more than seven thousand men and  67 ships. They succeeded, and by 1640 they already dominated a considerable portion of the northeastern coast. — Maranhão, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte and Sergipe.  However, in 1644 the Dutch governor Jean Maurice (Johan Maurits) of Nassau returned to the Netherlands.  He had managed to balance the complicated relations between the West India Company and the indebted sugar plantation owners, and to enforce religious freedom.
Because the Dutch always came to collect the debts, the sugarcane farmers wanted to expel the Dutch. When Maurice of Nassau left, religious conflicts started agaiin. In 1645, the Dutch killed faithful Catholics, in Cunhaú, in the town of Canguaretama. In October, another slaughter was recorded, this time in Uruaçu.

In the same year, the  began, a movement opposed to Dutch rule and commanded by André Vidal de Negreiros, Henrique Dias, and Antônio Filipe Camarão.

A Tupi-speaking Potiguara, Filipe Camarão was responsible for leading the Christian Indians (like his uncle  and his cousin Diogo Pinheiro Camarão) against the Dutch. Some Indians supported the Dutch side, among them the caciques Pedro Poti, also a cousin of Filipe Camarão, and Antônio Paraupaba.

That is the context in which the letters were written and exchanged among the Portuguara. Those on the side of the Portuguese sent letters to the allies of the Dutch, to persuade them to change sides. The messages were written in Old Tupi because their recipients, Pedro Poti and Antônio Paraupaba, had been literate in Dutch, unlike their senders who were literate in Portuguese. The Old Tupi language was therefore a means of communication between the two sides of the conflict.

### History

In 1906, the engineer Teodoro Fernandes Sampaio attempted to translate the letters in his article _Cartas tupis dos Camarões_ (Camarão Indians' Tupi letters). He received them from historian , who had discovered them in 1885. Sampaio confessed that only with great difficulty could he understand them, and he could not translate them all. He therefore limited himself to only two letters.

Until the 1990s, there are no other documented attempts at translating them. In the 1990s, Aryon Rodrigues, a professor at Unicamp and a linguist went to the Netherlands, to look for them. He tried to translate them, but was unable to.  At the same time, philiogist  Eduardo de Almeida Navarro came in cxontact with the letters. He said the were hard to translate, because there were no Tupi dictionaries. In 2013,  Eduardo Navarro published published a dictionary. He also devoted himself to the letters, and produced a microfilm version.  This versionis at the Hague Library.

Eight years later, in 2021, , Eduardo Navarro announced that he had translated the six letters. This was widely covered by the Brazillian press. The transcription and annotated full translation of the Camarão Indians' letters were published in the periodical _Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi_ in October 2022.

### Challenges

According to Eduardo Navarro, the letters' contents were mysterious because few people knew about the  Tupi language,  Few systematic studies about the language, such as dictionaries, had been created.

Tupi was mostly a spoken language. As a result, the same word can be spelled a number of different ways. In some cases, words were written separately, in others they were written as one word. Teodoro Sampaio also said this.

Other problems with the translation were that words were often abbreviated, but that not all people used the same abbreviations. Finally, there are differences in punctuation. What is more, the people writing the letters were literate in Portuguese, the wrote their native language as they heard it. Like a Portuguese speaker, they wrote  "taquesse" instead of "táxi". They also do not use certain phonemes, nor puctuation markers or accents. The letters also present a Tupi that was spoken in a colloquial way, which is different from the formal writings of the Jesuits.

### Letters

Roughly speaking, the pro-Portuguese natives asked those who were allied with the Dutch to return to the Portugese side, calling the Protestants heretics. This is the argument used by Filipe Camarão in his first letter to Pedro Poti, dated August 19, 1645. He also states that the Dutch are in "the Devil's fire".

Pedro Poti ordered that the messenger of such a letter be killed, and its answer is known only through Dutch summaries by Pastor Johannes Edwards, because the Portuguese did not preserve the letters of the indigenous people. The cacique Pedro Poti is said to have criticized the Portuguese forcefully, saying that he could not switch to the Portuguese side, because they had only harmed his people by enslaving and killing them.

In general, the letters show that the  Indians were disstified with the dituation  they were in. They wanted their relatives to unitte, to stop fighting each other, and to go back to living according to their old traditions. They are desperate efforts in an attempt to save their people from destruction, The disruption of their traditional world is noticeable in all six letters.

In his letters, Filipe Camarão tried to appeal to the sense of identity among the Potiguaras. He also assured Pedro Poti and Antônio Paraupaba that the natives would be forgiven if they went over to the Portuguese side, but said that if they resisted, they would be killed, since the honors bestowed by the Dutch on the natives were not valid for the Portuguese — when Europeans were captured, they were not killed, but turned into prisoners and used as bargaining chips.

### Importance

The letters are important today, because they are written by people who have always been oppressed. They were written by indigenous people. The letters show that these people were not content with their situation. They also show that there were conflicts between the different Europeans, and that the native people wanted to rescue past traditions. The letters also bring to light previously unknown information, such as place names and other indigenous combatants, as well as revealing details about battles.

As far as the scientific study of language is concerned, the letters of the Camarão Indians are considered the most valuable documents in the field of Brazilian . They show how Old Tupi was actually spoken by the people writing the letters. They also show that the Jesuit missionaries correctly described the Tupi language. There are some scholars, such as  who claim that the Jesuits adapted the language to their own interests, pejoratively calling it "Jesuit Tupi"._'

Furthermore, the letters of the Camarão Indians also help to understand the linguistic evolution of Old Tupi, influenced by Portuguese. In fact, these writings display the use of the gerund in constructions analogous to the Portuguese "" (I'm speaking), when it was Tupi's nature to invert this logic and say "falo estando" ([I] speak being).

The letters also reveal the predominance of a subject-verb-object syntax ( — "" [I have sent my soldiers there]), although there were still examples of subject-object-verb syntax ( — "" [there also two women I sent]), primitive Tupi tendency, as recorded in  texts.

### Popular culture

In March 2022, Natal mayor  met with Eduardo Navarro and agreed that the city would distribute didactic material about the letters to public school students and tourists. The mayor showed his intention to democratize the access to information about the correspondence between the Potiguaras.

## Related pages

- Protestantism

## Other websites

- _Cartas tupis dos Camarões_, by Teodoro Sampaio, at
- _Cartas de indígenas potiguaras'', by Cerno e Obermeier, at Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library