Between The Lines: Scientific Expeditions in Colonial and Imperial Brazil, and Science History – The Expeditions Undertaken To Espírito Santo

Abstract

An aspect little studied by the historiography regards to the role that the scientific expeditions played to the Science History. These expeditions gave a glance of the Brazilian way of living and specially of the captaincy of Espirito Santo to Europe and helped to build the Brazilian social representations by Europeans, while they set up a notion about the imaginary and how people worked to tame the land and turn it as their needs. Upcoming the science at a contextualized point of view, the purpose of this paper is to present a panel of scientific expeditions undertaken to the Espirito Santo Capitaincy from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, by imperial times, and, in this approach, to highlight the ideological reasons of the mechanisms that led to the occurrence of such expeditions. After the analyses of the travel reports and narratives produced, we realized that the Brazilian Science History was based on the European point of view which influenced the constitution of its cultural diversity. Maybe many of the prejudice against Brazil that has still existed until today originated from these expeditions.