Introducing this study is an episode from the opening years of the seventeenth century that concerns a Portuguese-speaking Aimoré woman who lives on her Portuguese master's estate outside Salvador, Bahia. At his request and laden with gifts as a gesture of peace, she embarks on a mission to hostile Aimoré indigenous groups to initiate peace between them and the governor of Brazil. Alida Metcalf claims that hundreds of go-betweens like this woman influenced the power dynamics at play between the Portuguese and Indian worlds during the first century of Portugal's colonisation of Brazil. Drawing on the sociologist George Simmel's distinction between the mediator and the arbitrator, she accepts his characterisation of mediators as facilitators or neutral parties ‘who guide a process of coming to terms’ (pp. 2; 217). In agreement with Simmel, she views arbitrators as one class of go-betweens with a more defined role, which leads to taking sides with only one of the parties. This does some violence to the theoretical definition of ‘arbitrator’, although as a matter of historical fact one may accept that the result of arbitration did favour the more powerful party. Metcalf states: ‘Increasingly, during the sixteenth century, the arbitration provided by go-betweens granted the advantage to the Portuguese in their struggles with Indians over which culture should dominate’ (p. 12).

Metcalf's meticulous examination of pictorial maps, correspondence, Inquisition hearings, and published primary and secondary accounts leads her to distinguish three types of go-between. First, the physical/biological go-betweens, who were initially connected to the Portuguese maritime world: sailors, traders, explorers, slaves and exiles (degredados). As third parties who lived or had extensive contact with indigenous peoples, they became familiar with the material environments of personalities, languages, plants and animals. They were also carriers and transmitters of diseases that afflicted the indigenous peoples as the human and commercial links connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe expanded. Metcalf points out that some of the early physical go-betweens, João Ramalho and his mameluco (mixed Amerindian and European race) sons or Diogo Alvares ‘Caramuru’, were also representative of the second type of go-between, the transactional go-between: interpreters, cultural brokers and powerful negotiators. Their forays into the wilderness involved colonists, armed Indians, and mamelucos, who ‘served as interpreters, made contact with Indian chiefs, established the terms of trade, and tried to persuade entire villages to willingly leave the interior and resettle on the coast’ (p. 186). Among the many examples of the power of the transactional go-between, she records Han Staden's description of Karwattuware, a Norman who traversed the commercial worlds between the Indian and the European after becoming the adopted son of a Tupi chief. As a fellow Christian, Staden was disheartened at the refusal of the French go-between to dissuade the Tupinambá from holding him captive for eventual sacrifice (p. 65). Although the activities of these groups can be distinguished for theoretical purposes, in practice people could be active in more than one of the defined roles. Hans Staden himself, for example, could be considered to be a physical, a transactional, and a representational go-between.

Physical and transactional go-betweens, introduced in the chapters entitled ‘Encounter’ and ‘Possession’, are distinguished from the third type, the representational go-betweens, whose aim was to write, draw maps, and represent the ‘other’ culture through texts, words, or images. The chapter entitled ‘Conversion’ introduces the fathers of the Society of Jesus, especially Anchieta and Nóbrega who, with other Jesuits, interceded between the Amerindians and the colonists, and in what must be considered to be an entirely separate kind of mediation, between the Amerindians and God. Metcalf notes that the Jesuit fathers did not advocate enslaving Indians in order to evangelise them, a position that was markedly different to Africa where Christian evangelism powerfully supported the enslavement of Africans. Early Christianising efforts in Bahia and São Vicente were often fruitful but just as often were compromised by the entrenched opposition of Indian shamans and transactional go-betweens – slave traders, colonists and some government representatives. Jesuits were also influential go-betweens for the Amerindians before the Portuguese crown, and registered their protests over the enslavement and the physical abuses of Indians that were characteristic of self-seeking colonists, mameluco slavers, and their indigenous recruits who, according to Nóbrega, were ‘robbing indigenous lands, children, and wives’ (p. 177). Metcalf notes that although there was an assumption of the liberty of Indians in King Sebastião's 1570 decree, he sanctioned indigenous enslavement under certain circumstances, such as a ‘just war’ (p. 182). Colonists favoured the enslavement of Brazilian Indians and, according to Metcalf, a new type of representational go-between that emerged in the latter decades of the sixteenth century gave credence to their position. In his history of Brazil, published in 1576, the returned colonist, Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, endorsed the ‘honourable’ nature of slave ownership and the ‘unquestioned acceptance of and reliance on [indigenous] slavery’ in the colony (p. 157). In his treatise to the king in 1587, Gabriel Soares de Sousa argued more forcibly that ‘without Indian slavery, Brazil could not be sustained’ (p. 247). In the light of the contentious issue of indigenous enslavement that soured relationships between the Jesuits and colonists, Metcalf is puzzled why, unlike the Spanish experience, the matter did not generate moral debates among theologians and lay authorities in Portugal.

In the two final chapters, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Power’, Metcalf reviews the impact of the century's warfare, disease and slavery on indigenous groups and observes that by the latter decades isolated groups had either been killed off or had migrated inland from the coastal areas of Portuguese colonisation. Metcalf sustains her thesis that the Portuguese had ‘won’ Brazil by the end of the century but accounts of indigenous responses to the Portuguese reveal new representational go-betweens. She is guided by the intricacies and complexities of indigenous and European relations that leap from the interrogations of defendants who appeared before the Holy Office. Much of the analysis concerns the indigenous santidades, messianic movements of resistance under the leadership of wandering prophets, one of whom was the Christian Indian known as Antonio the Pope, ‘who preached alternatives to both the traditional Indian village life and the Portuguese colony’ (p. 196). Particular mention is made of the Santidade de Jaguaribe movement that emerged in the backlands of Bahia in the 1580s in response to ‘fears among some that the world would be destroyed and replaced by a new creation’ (p. 218). In her summation, Metcalf argues that ‘the Jesuit and mameluco go-betweens in the sertão represent two approaches for contacting, interacting, and ultimately dominating the Indian world’ (p. 256). This assertion and Figure 8.3, which curiously is entitled ‘Go-betweens and modes of domination in sixteenth-century Brazil’, strike this reviewer as odd since go-betweens by definition are not in a position of ‘domination’, although clearly they could be agents of power centres. Figure 8.3 links the Portuguese Colony with high cultural and economic exploitation, the Jesuit go-betweens with low economic exploitation and high cultural exploitation, mameluco go-betweens with low cultural exploitation and high economic exploitation, and the Indian world with low cultural and economic exploitation (p. 256). Metcalf does not restrict the concept of go-betweens to the sixteenth century: ‘Just as go-betweens had been indispensable in the “winning” of coastal Brazil in the sixteenth century, so, too, would they be crucial in tilting new frontiers toward Portugal [a concept which gave this reviewer some moments of vertigo] in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in fostering the emergence of modern Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (p. 12).

Metcalf 's exhaustive consultation of a variety of sources sustains her historical account of these go-betweens well. The study might have been enriched by a chapter on the vocabularies, pidgins, dialects and creoles that emerged from the translators and cultural interpreters who mediated the European, indigenous and African worlds. Apart from a few translations of indigenous names, Metcalf does not address the impact, and indeed the legacy, of the go-betweens – the varied, changing and rich linguistic borrowings that played into the process of the Portuguese colonisation of Brazil. Furthermore, the restrictions bounding the scope of her study could well have been made more explicit. The existence and activities of ‘go-betweens’ are intrinsic to any process of colonisation, however defined. They are, surely, essential elements, engendered by, employed by, and relied upon in any significant contact between cultures, peoples or states, short of a total rapid extermination. One might consider the role of the Jesuits themselves, far wider than evangelisation, in early contacts between the West and the empires of China, Vietnam and Japan. The shroffs and compradors who worked in the warehouses of Europeans throughout the Far East are hardly an unknown class, and the numerous Westerners employed in Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century to bring in modern scientific and technical knowledge are copiously documented.