Opinion: Charles Boxer

10/02/2014 - 11h04

I had lunch last week with Helder Macedo. For many years he was the Camoes Professor of Portuguese at King's College, London. He retired in 2004.

He is very well known in Brazil as a poet, essayist and novelist. Professor Macedo was a strong opponent of the Salazar dictatorship.

He was imprisoned in Lisbon and then lived in exile in London during the 1950s.

Among Professor Macedo's predecessors was Charles R. Boxer, a remarkable historian of the Portuguese Speaking world, as well as of the Dutch colonial empire.

Boxer was the author of "Salvador de Sa and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola 1602-86" (1952), his best book in my view, which tells the remarkable story of Salvador de Sa who fought the Dutch invasion of Bahia and regained Angola and Sao Tome for the Portuguese from the Dutch, and later was governor of Rio de Janeiro, Southern Brazil, and Angola.

Among Boxer's numerous works, which cover an astounding range from 16th century Japan to Macao, is his classic "The Golden Age of Brazil 1695-1825" (1962) and his "The History of the Portuguese Seaborn Empire 1415-1825" (1969). Boxer was a British military officer before the was appointed to the Camoes Chair in 1947.

He had been seconded to the Japanese army in the 1930s, and was imprisoned when the Japanese seized Hong Kong.

He was most famous in the United States for his very public affair with Emily Hahn, an American journalist and writer for the "New Yorker," who he met in Shanghai, and who later became his second wife. Boxer died in 2000 at the age of 96.

I had always been a bit nervous about Charles Boxer. He seemed to be supremely competent. I meet him in 1968 when I was being interviewed for a job at Indiana University. Boxer had recently retired from King's College and had been appointed a visiting professor there, and Indiana University's Lilly Library had purchased his library (or at least part of it).

I was at the Newberry Library in Chicago where I was completing my dissertation. I took my umbrella to the interview with Professor Robert Quirk, who seemed much more interested in my umbrella than in me. He could not take his eyes off it. Needless to say I did not get the job.

But I did have a marvellous evening with Charles Boxer. Indiana must have been a "dry" state at the time (a hangover from the time of prohibition which meant you could not buy liquor by the glass and were obliged to keep a bottle for personal use behind the bar.)

The same rule applied in Kansas where I did get my first job (I did not take my umbrella to the interview a second time).

A young Spanish history scholar, Richard Kagan, was also then teaching at Indiana, and he owned a small red MG sports car. He drove us for miles over the state border from Indiana into Illinois.

There we enjoyed a delicious dinner with plenty of scotch whiskey and wine. Charles Boxer insisted in sitting in the (very small) back seat of the MG for the long drive back. It was no good protesting. Boxer was absolutely determined.

But Boxer did not stay much longer in Indiana. Later that year he was invited to Yale by the historian Richard Morse, who like Charles Boxer, was a man who also enjoyed his scotch whiskey.