The study of history is a major preoccupation for any society and every country devotes a good part of its intellectual energy in one form or another to the consideration and examination of the past. Those who make a profession of that business, the historians, are always significant weather vanes, pointing out the direction the wind blows in their own culture and indicating at times its velocity as well.

By the end of the nineteenth century the American public, if it had cared to enlarge upon its knowledge of the Empire of Brazil, could easily have done so without even the necessity of learning a foreign language. From 1822 to 1888, beginning with the independence of Brazil from Portugal and ending with the abolition of slavery— a period corresponding almost exactly with the life span of the Brazilian Empire—about twenty books on Brazil were published by Americans. These were obviously not the only books on the subject in the English language because Britishers wrote about Brazil too (indeed they wrote more about it than we did) and these books on Brazil were also available on this side of the Atlantic. The combined output of the two nations was, therefore, considerable, and the curiosity of the Anglo-Saxon mind which it for the most part reflected presented Brazil to the American reader under a great variety of aspects. There were the solid three volumes on the colonial period of Brazilian history by Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England who was much better as a historian, and the two-volume sequel by John Armitage, who was neither a historian nor a poet but a lover of liberty.

The distinguished Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945, died in Hempstead, Long Island, on January 10, 1957, of cancer. In the numerous articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines after her death the factual mistakes about her life and writings were endless. Although her critics have not been careful to separate myths from facts, most of these errors can be corrected by referring to books or articles about her—but not the mistakes about her as yet unpublished Poema de Chile. For this reason I have assembled these notes about the Poema de Chile taken from conversations with Gabriela during the last four years of her life which she spent for the most part working on the Poema and on her Lagar poems. Part of the Lagar poems she published in 1954. The rest of her Lagar poems will be published posthumously by her literary heir, Doris Dana. These will probably appear before the unfinished Poema de Chile because of the difficulties inherent in the preparation of the Poema for publication.

During the forty years from 1567 to 1607 there were three Spanish expeditions from Peru to the South Seas. The first, under Alvaro de Mendaña in 1567, was for the discovery of some rich islands, called Solomon, believed to lie in the equinoctial region between New Guinea and Peru. In the following year he reached a group of islands. Mendaña did not then give them a collective name, but subsequently they became known as the Solomon Islands. With the expedition were four Franciscan friars acting as chaplains and missionaries. The second, a colonizing expedition, was in 1595, again under the Adelantado Mendaña. And here we introduce the celebrated figure and the one to achieve immortal fame in the proto-history of Australia, Pedro Fernández de Quirós. He accompanied the adelantado as captain of his capitana and chief pilot of his fleet of four ships. Because of errors in reckoning latitude and longitude Quirós brought the fleet with close on four hundred settlers to Santa Cruz Island instead of the Solomons, discovering on the way the Marquesas group. At Santa Cruz the settlement knew only tragedy. There was mutiny and disease. Pestilence thinned their ranks by death, and—above all—the adelantado himself died there on October 18, 1595. The settlement, then only a month old, was a month later abandoned. Quirós, by a remarkable feat of navigation, brought the remnants of the expedition to Manila.

Madrid, 20 September 1623.

Requesting that the natives of the Austral
Lands be given into the care of the Franciscan
friars, who would undertake their conquest
by spiritual and peaceful means.

Most Holy Father

Friar Juan de Silva, preacher of the Seraphic Order of our Father St. Francis (and confessor of the Royal Palace of His Majesty), of the Province of Castile, prostrate at the feet of your Holiness says that, with zeal for the honor of God, Our Lord, and for the propagation of the Holy Gospel, and at the express command of his Majesty Philip II (who is in heaven), he went to the Realms of the Indies.