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English and Irish settlement on the river Amazon, 1550–1646 . Edited by Joyce Lorimer. Pp xxvi, 499, maps. London: Hakluyt Society. 1990. £25. (Second series, vol. 171)

IN view of the attention paid by historians in recent decades to the early exploration and settlement of North America, the neglect of such an important area as the Amazon in the same period seems odd. The pioneering studies of J. A. Williamson and Aubrey Gwynn are now some fifty years old, and modern scholarship has yet to reassess their work and revise their conclusions in the light of such material as has come to light in the interval. The volume under review presents a comprehensive selection of documents relating to exploration, trade and colonisation on the Amazon, the great bulk of it new material from English, Portuguese and Spanish archives. Even though the Irish originally went to the Amazon under English auspices, and despite the fact that no evidence has as yet emerged of a direct trade between the Amazon and ports in Ireland, Dr Lorimer, following Williamson and Gwynn, rightly deals with the English and Irish efforts as separate phenomena. This review will concentrate on the work as it relates to Irish involvement in the opening up of the Amazon. Between 1611 and 1620 separate Irish tobacco plantations and factories emerged on the Amazon, operated by individuals who were determined to preserve and develop the commercial advantage conferred upon them by the anomaly of their nationality. Although they maintained good relations with the English settlements in the region, they resisted attempts by the short-lived Amazon Company and its later successor, the Guiana Company, to subsume their trading activities, preferring often to deal with the more reliable Dutch as trading partners. Both English and Dutch eagerly sought out the Irish as participants in their enterprises, valuing them for their knowledge of the river and the Indian languages, as well as for their expertise in plantation methods. After the destruction of their settlements by the Portuguese in the years 1625-9 English and Irish entrepreneurs were tenacious in their attempts to retain a foothold in the Amazon region. Two Irishmen, Jasper Chilian and Bernard O'Brien, petitioned the Spanish crown in the early 1630s, distancing themselves from their erstwhile English and Dutch partners and confidently relying upon their Catholic religion and supposed devotion to the Spanish interest in an attempt to obtain official sanction for their projected settlements. Dr Lorimer publishes a translation of the Chilian memorial, although, strangely, she fails to mention Gwynn's identification of Chilian with a Jasper Collins, a member of Waterford's merchant community in the early part of the seventeenth century. O'Brien was a more flamboyant figure and claimed to belong to a prominent County Clare gentry family, which can only be the O'Briens of Leamaneh. It is more probable, though, given his inflated claims in relation to the part he played in Amazon settlement and exploration that he was merely a connexion of the Leamaneh house, using his knowledge of the family in order to enhance his status with the Spanish authorities. Neither Chilian nor O'Brien were successful in their petitions, although another Irishman, Peter Sweetman, who petitioned the restored Portuguese monarchy in 1642, may well have been successful in his attempt to obtain permission for the transfer of 400 Irish settlers from the Caribbean island of St Christopher.