Ferreira de Castro, the boy from Ossela who wrote the Amazon

On 6 January 1911 a boy of twelve left the hamlet of Salgueiros, in the parish of Ossela, for the port of Leixões, outside Porto. José Maria Ferreira de Castro carried a passport issued on 6 December 1910 and the primary-school certificate he had earned that August. The next day he boarded the Jerôme, a British steamer bound for Belém do Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon.1 source1 source

He went to take his father's place as the family's breadwinner. His parents, José Eustáquio Ferreira de Castro and Maria Rosa de Castro, were tenant farmers, and his father had died in 1906, when the boy was eight. Belém, still living off the fortunes of the rubber trade, looked like the place to earn a living. The Jerôme reached it on 22 January 1911.3 sources3 sources

The family acquaintance who was supposed to look after him kept him for 28 days and then shipped him upriver on the steamer Justo Chermont, to a rubber estate called Paraíso on the banks of the Madeira, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon. He did not see Portugal again for more than eight years.2 sources2 sources

He went back to that journey in his best-known books. He said later that the germ of Emigrantes, his first major novel, came from the voyage. The forest at the end of it gave him A Selva (The Jungle), the book that carried his name from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo.2 sources2 sources

Ferreira de Castro was born under the constitutional monarchy and sailed three months after the Republic was proclaimed on 5 October 1910. Under both, the poor kept leaving. Since 1855 the Ministry of Finance had counted emigrants from the passport registers, which recorded only legal departures; nobody tried to count the people who slipped away without papers.2 sources2 sources

Even the official figures climbed steeply. In the year of his birth 23,510 Portuguese citizens took out emigrant passports. In 1911 the number was 59,652, of whom 12,134 were children under 14, like him. In 1912 it reached 88,920, nearly all of them bound for the Americas. In 1913, of 77,633 emigrants, 64,402 went to Brazil.1 source1 source

Belém and Manaus were the capitals of the Amazon rubber boom. Export firms financed trading houses in Belém that supplied the estates upriver on credit, to be paid in balls of rubber. The estates recruited their tappers among the poor of Ceará and Maranhão, in north-eastern Brazil. By one historian's count the rush lasted at most 32 years, from 1880 to 1912, and it was ending as the boy arrived.1 source1 source

Paraíso stood on the banks of the Madeira; the nearest town was Humaitá. By one account he first gathered latex like the tappers. Later, in 1912 and 1913 according to the Centro de Estudos chronology, he worked as a caixeiro, a clerk in the estate store, where the tappers drew their supplies on credit against the rubber they would bring in.2 sources2 sources

The store was how an estate held its workers. Tappers arrived already owing for their passage, their food and any money advanced to their families. In A Selva, the estate's foreman misses the days of the stocks and grumbles that nowadays nobody is jailed for debt and that, so they say, there are no more slaves. The anthropologist Christian Geffray called the arrangement an imaginary debt that kept a captive market.1 source1 source

In the forest the boy began to write. He sent stories and short pieces to newspapers in Brazil and Portugal and drafted a novel, O Amor de Simão, later retitled Criminoso por Ambição. On 28 October 1914 the owner of Paraíso forgave his debt and let him go. He went back to Belém with the manuscript.1 source1 source

The next years were hard. He pasted up posters, then shipped as a deckhand on the Cassiporé, a coaster that ran between Belém and Oiapoque on the border with French Guiana. In 1916, at eighteen, he brought out Criminoso por Ambição in instalments. In March 1917 he and another emigrant, João Pinto Monteiro, founded a weekly, Portugal, for the Portuguese of Belém, and in 1918 the Portuguese community of Manaus paid tribute to him as a journalist.1 source1 source

On 9 September 1919 he landed back in Portugal from the steamer Desna, with 400 escudos in his pocket. “From the material point of view, the one that sent so many men off to the Americas, I was a defeated emigrant,” he wrote decades later (translated from Portuguese).2 sources2 sources

After a short stay with his family in Ossela he went to Lisbon, where he knew nobody in the newspapers. A paper he founded to bring Portugal and Brazil closer, O Luso, lasted a few months, and at times he went hungry.1 source1 source

He wrote for whoever would print him. In 1921 it was Imprensa Livre, the paper of the libertarian writer Campos Lima; in 1922 he founded a magazine of his own, A Hora. By 1925 he was writing much of the literary supplement of A Batalha, the daily of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union confederation, the CGT. He joined the Lisbon press union that April and was elected its president in 1926.1 source1 source

That was the year the military coup of 28 May 1926 ended the First Republic, and press censorship followed. Ferreira de Castro fell out with his colleagues in the union, whose protest he wanted to be tougher. In 1927 he joined O Século, Lisbon's big daily, to run its foreign pages, and the journalist and writer Diana de Lis became his companion.2 sources2 sources

He wrote fast in those years: stories, novellas, a satire under a pseudonym. Later he disowned almost all of it. In 1949, when his publisher began his collected works, he refused to include anything written before Emigrantes, and turned down 300 contos, a large sum, for the rights.1 source1 source

Emigrantes (1928) follows Manuel da Bouça, an illiterate peasant from a village called Frágua, above a stretch of the river Caima lined with willows and alders; the scholar José Maria Silva Rosa notes that it could just as well be called Ossela. He mortgages his fields to pay the agent, sails third class on the Darro and ends up on a coffee estate in the interior of São Paulo state, where the wages barely keep him alive.1 source1 source

Letters from home bring news that his daughter has married the man he least wanted and then that his wife has died. He pays his passage back with jewels stolen from a dead man, finds he is a stranger in his own village and leaves again on a bus to nobody knows where. The Centro de Estudos Ferreira de Castro, in Ossela, calls the book a turning point in his work and in the Portuguese novel; it had reached its 24th edition by 1988.2 sources2 sources

A Selva (1930) goes back to Paraíso. Its hero, Alberto, is a law student from a comfortable family and a monarchist who has taken part in the failed royalist rising of Monsanto, in Lisbon, in 1919. He flees to an uncle in Belém, cannot find work and is sent upriver as a tapper, on the same Justo Chermont that had carried the author. At the estate he lands among men from Ceará and Maranhão, under the owner, Juca Tristão.3 sources3 sources

The novel ends in fire. After runaway tappers are caught and beaten, Tiago, an old freed slave from Maranhão who had served Juca Tristão for years, sets the main house alight and shuts the doors so that his master cannot get out. Then he asks to be taken to the jail at Humaitá.2 sources2 sources

The year of A Selva was also the year Diana de Lis died, on 30 May 1930. In November 1931, gravely ill with septicaemia, he tried to take his own life; the surgeon Reinaldo dos Santos treated him, and he spent 1932 convalescing in Madeira.1 source1 source

Meanwhile the book travelled. A German translation of 1933 by Richard A. Bermann, a friend of Stefan Zweig, drew international attention to it, and in 1938 the writer Blaise Cendrars translated it into French for Grasset, which still publishes it. By May 1945 A Selva was in its tenth Portuguese edition and had sold half a million copies around the world, 42,000 of them in Portugal.1 source1 source

Recent critics read the book less kindly on one point. The Brazilian scholar Adriana Rodrigues argues that its Black characters fall into old stereotypes. Filipe, a cheerful fellow passenger on the boat upriver, fits the type of the loyal, cordial Black companion. Tiago, whom the narrator calls an ebony Mephistopheles and likens to a straw puppet, is the demon figure, even though the plot makes him the one man who acts against the estate's cruelty.1 source1 source

Terra Fria (1934), drawn from long stays in the Barroso highlands of the far north, won the Academy of Sciences' Ricardo Malheiros prize. At the end of that year, worn down by the censors, he gave up journalism in Portugal. In 1935 he edited the paper O Diabo for two months, from 8 September to 10 November. In March 1936 a government order banned his play about the Lindbergh kidnapping case, written for the National Theatre; it stayed unpublished until 1994.1 source1 source

On 17 November 1945, the eve of a parliamentary election the opposition had called on voters to boycott, he gave the Diário de Lisboa an interview denouncing the harm censorship did to Portuguese writers. He sat on committees of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), the broad opposition front formed that October, and on 30 November 1946 he was at its meeting at the Voz do Operário, where a message for freedom and against the Estado Novo was read out.3 sources3 sources

In 1949 he campaigned for the opposition presidential candidate, General Norton de Matos. In 1958 a group of opponents asked him to stand himself; he refused, and also declined to join Humberto Delgado's honorary committee, critical of an opposition divided between two candidates, Delgado and his friend Arlindo Vicente. He told the Lisbon paper República that May that the regime had always been the enemy of the country's intellectuals. “I belong to no political party,” he said (translated from Portuguese).2 sources2 sources

The political police, known from 1945 as the PIDE, opened his mail and filed reports from informers on his travels, the petitions he signed and the tributes paid to him. The historian Luís Reis Torgal, who read the files in the Torre do Tombo, found that he was never arrested. When the PIDE summoned him to its Lisbon headquarters on 1 August 1962, the file notes that he did not come because he was taking the waters at Melgaço.1 source1 source

Torgal puts this down to his good name as a writer, at home and abroad. He places him among the opposition intellectuals whom the historians Irene Flunser Pimentel and Fernando Rosas call “untouchables”, a word Torgal finds perhaps too strong: watched all the time, but free to speak more or less openly. In 1962 the Portuguese Writers' Society elected him its president unanimously, and he led it until 1964.2 sources2 sources

In October 1959, forty years after he had left Brazil, he went back at the invitation of the Brazilian Writers' Union. Rio de Janeiro made him an honorary citizen and gave him the key to the city, and President Juscelino Kubitschek took him to see Brasília. In 1970 he won the Golden Eagle at the Nice book festival, from a jury chaired by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and in 1971 a stretch of the Trans-Amazonian Highway was named after him.1 source1 source

The Nobel Prize nomination archive, now open for those years, lists seven nominations for him. The first came in 1951 from the Danish scholar Holger Sten. From 1969 every nomination paired him with the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, and three of them came from the Brazilian writer and professor Antônio Olinto. The Centro de Estudos dates the Brazilian Writers' Union's joint proposal to 1968; the archive records the first joint nominations for the 1969 prize. The prize never came.2 sources2 sources

He lived to see the Estado Novo fall on 25 April 1974 and joined the first free May Day. On 5 June he suffered a stroke at Macieira de Cambra, and he died in the Hospital de Santo António in Porto on 29 June 1974, aged 76.1 source1 source

In 1970 he had asked to be buried beside one of the paths that climb to the Castelo dos Mouros in the hills above Sintra, where he had spent long stretches of his life. On 31 May 1975 his remains were laid in a hillside of the Serra de Sintra on the way to the castle.1 source1 source

He had given his things away before he died. In 1967 he handed the house where he was born to the people of Oliveira de Azeméis. With the money from two French prizes in 1970 and 1971 he built a library at Ossela for the village. In April 1973 he gave most of his papers and possessions to Sintra, and the town's Museu Ferreira de Castro opened on 6 June 1982.3 sources3 sources

Few Portuguese writers of the twentieth century travelled as far in translation. The museum in Sintra ends its displays with a room of his translations, and the town council's guide to it calls him the most translated Portuguese writer of his day. In 2014 A Selva was put on the list of books suggested for reading in the tenth year of Portuguese secondary schools.2 sources2 sources

His subject has not gone away either. Emigrantes describes a man who mortgages his land to leave and finds, when he comes back, that there is no home to return to. In April 2018 the council of Oliveira de Azeméis bought a lot of his photographs, letters and manuscripts at auction for the house museum in Ossela, among them the original of a proposal for the Nobel Prize signed by Portuguese writers and journalists.2 sources2 sources