this period). The first of them, written within a week of his shipwreck, spoke of Bahia: “a kaleidoscope where a man with some notion of history sees existing side by side the social disgraces that have debased the various eras of humanity.” The letter referred to slavery, which, although abolished, nonetheless still existed de facto, since in order not to die of starvation, many freed blacks had returned to their former masters and begged them to take them in again. The masters hired on—for miserable salaries—only the able-bodied, so that the streets of Bahia, in Gall’s words, “teem with the elderly, the sick, and the wretched, who beg or steal, and with whores who remind one of those of Alexandria and Algiers, the most depraved ports on the planet.”
The second letter, written two months later, concerned “the infamous alliance of obscurantism and exploitation,” and described the parade each Sunday of wealthy families headed for Mass at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia, with servants carrying prayer stools, candles, missals, and parasols so that the sun would not damage the ladies’ complexions; “these latter,” Gall wrote, “like the English civil servants in the colonies, have made whiteness a paradigm, the quintessence of beauty.” But in a later article the phrenologist explained to his comrades in Lyons that, despite their prejudices, the descendants of Portuguese, Indians, and Africans had mingled with each other quite freely in this land and produced a motley mixture of mestizos: mulattoes, mamelucos, cafuzos, caboclos, curibocas . And he added: “Which is to say, that many more challenges for science.” These human types and the Europeans who landed on its shores for one reason or another gave Bahia a variegated and cosmopolitan atmosphere.
It was among these foreigners that Galileo Gall—who at that time spoke only the most halting Portuguese—made his first acquaintances. In the beginning he lived in the Hôtel des Etrangers, in Campo Grande, but once he struck up a friendship with old Jan van Rijsted, the latter gave him a garret above the Livraria Catilina to live in, and got him pupils for private lessons in French and English so that he would have money to eat. Van Rijsted was of Dutch origin, born in Olinda, and had trafficked in cocoa beans, silks, spices, tobacco, alcohol, and arms between Europe, Africa, and America since the age of fourteen (without ever once landing in jail). Because of his associates—dealers, shipowners, sea captains—he was not a rich man; they had stolen a fair share of the goods he trafficked in. Gall was convinced that bandits, be they great criminals or mere petty thieves, were also fighting against the enemy—the state—and undermining the foundations of property, albeit unwittingly. This furthered his friendship with the ex-scoundrel. Ex because he had retired from the business of committing misdeeds. He was a bachelor, but he had lived with a girl with Arab eyes, thirty years younger than he, with Egyptian or Moroccan blood, with whom he had fallen in love in Marseilles. He had brought her to Bahia and built her a villa in the upper town, spending a fortune on decorating it so as to make her happy. On his return from one of his voyages, he found that the beauty had flown the coop after having sold every last thing in the villa, making off with the small strongbox in which Van Rijsted kept hidden a bit of gold and a few precious stones. He recounted these details to Gall as they were walking along the docks, contemplating the sea and the sailing vessels, shirting from English to French and Portuguese, in an offhand tone of voice that the revolutionary admired. Jan was now living on an annuity that, according to him, would allow him to eat and drink till his death, provided that it was not too long in coming.
The Dutchman, an uncultured but curious man, listened with deference to Galileo’s theories on freedom and the
The second letter, written two months later, concerned “the infamous alliance of obscurantism and exploitation,” and described the parade each Sunday of wealthy families headed for Mass at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia, with servants carrying prayer stools, candles, missals, and parasols so that the sun would not damage the ladies’ complexions; “these latter,” Gall wrote, “like the English civil servants in the colonies, have made whiteness a paradigm, the quintessence of beauty.” But in a later article the phrenologist explained to his comrades in Lyons that, despite their prejudices, the descendants of Portuguese, Indians, and Africans had mingled with each other quite freely in this land and produced a motley mixture of mestizos: mulattoes, mamelucos, cafuzos, caboclos, curibocas . And he added: “Which is to say, that many more challenges for science.” These human types and the Europeans who landed on its shores for one reason or another gave Bahia a variegated and cosmopolitan atmosphere.
It was among these foreigners that Galileo Gall—who at that time spoke only the most halting Portuguese—made his first acquaintances. In the beginning he lived in the Hôtel des Etrangers, in Campo Grande, but once he struck up a friendship with old Jan van Rijsted, the latter gave him a garret above the Livraria Catilina to live in, and got him pupils for private lessons in French and English so that he would have money to eat. Van Rijsted was of Dutch origin, born in Olinda, and had trafficked in cocoa beans, silks, spices, tobacco, alcohol, and arms between Europe, Africa, and America since the age of fourteen (without ever once landing in jail). Because of his associates—dealers, shipowners, sea captains—he was not a rich man; they had stolen a fair share of the goods he trafficked in. Gall was convinced that bandits, be they great criminals or mere petty thieves, were also fighting against the enemy—the state—and undermining the foundations of property, albeit unwittingly. This furthered his friendship with the ex-scoundrel. Ex because he had retired from the business of committing misdeeds. He was a bachelor, but he had lived with a girl with Arab eyes, thirty years younger than he, with Egyptian or Moroccan blood, with whom he had fallen in love in Marseilles. He had brought her to Bahia and built her a villa in the upper town, spending a fortune on decorating it so as to make her happy. On his return from one of his voyages, he found that the beauty had flown the coop after having sold every last thing in the villa, making off with the small strongbox in which Van Rijsted kept hidden a bit of gold and a few precious stones. He recounted these details to Gall as they were walking along the docks, contemplating the sea and the sailing vessels, shirting from English to French and Portuguese, in an offhand tone of voice that the revolutionary admired. Jan was now living on an annuity that, according to him, would allow him to eat and drink till his death, provided that it was not too long in coming.
The Dutchman, an uncultured but curious man, listened with deference to Galileo’s theories on freedom and the
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