Page 4 - History of Portuguese in the Gulf_Neat

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INTRODUCTION.
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PEDRO TEIXEIRA.

EGARDING Pedro Teixeira we know
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very little beyond what he himself tells
us in his book.1 Dr. M. Kayserling, in
his Introduction to I. J. Benjamin's Eight
Years in Asia and Africa (Hanover,
k!'":
1S63), says: “Our Pedro Teixeira2 be­
longed to one of those Portuguese-Jewish families who
dared not openly avow their religion, or educate their child­
ren in the faith of their fathers .... Although born of
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Jewish parents, who in all probability resided in Lisbon, he
was yet not educated in the Jewish faith. Notwithstanding
his submission to the will of the Almighty, which seemed ■P
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to have been innate in him, and which may be traced in s ■
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almost every leaf of his book of travels, ... we still think * .
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1 The best biographical notice of Teixeira that I have seen is that in ■
the Biographic Universclle) tom. xli, p. 206. I
2 Dr. Kayserling refers to the fact that there were several noted
men of this same name ; and this is also pointed out in a footnote on , '
p. 29 of the Viajc del capitdn Pedro Teixeira aguas arrilm del rio dc
las Amazonas (163S-1639), by Mancos Jimenez tie la Espada(Madrid,
! 1SS9). A celebrated family of cartographers of the same surname
were contemporaries, and possibly relatives, of our traveller (see
Sousa Viterbo’s Trabalhos Nauticos dos Poringuezes, Lisbon, 189$,
pp. 294-299).
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