Henry Koster (c. 1793 – 15 May 1820), also known in Portuguese as Henrique da Costa, was an English coffee-grower, explorer and author who spent most of his short adult life in Brazil, writing about his travels, slavery, and other subjects.
Henry Koster | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1793 Lisbon, Portugal |
| Died | 15 May 1820 (aged 26–27) |
| Occupation(s) | coffee-planter, traveller, author |
His work was also published in French under the name of Henri Koster.
Life edit
The son of John Theodore Koster, of Liverpool,[1] a sugar merchant, Koster was born in Portugal. In 1809 he was sent to Pernambuco because it was thought to be the way to improve his poor health.[2] He sailed from Liverpool in a ship called Lucy on 2 November 1809, travelling with a family friend, and arrived in Recife, Brazil, on 7 December.[3][4] He spent a year at Recife before beginning a programme of travels around the country. In 1812 he rented an estate at Jaguaribe, where he slept in a hammock in an unfinished church until he could get possession of the big house, bought slaves, and established himself as a fazendeiro, growing and exporting coffee.[5] Koster spent the rest of his life in Brazil, except for short visits to England. While in Brazil, he pursued a particular study of the institution of slavery there, travelling widely, and began to write books about his experiences that were published in London.[2] His works are considered the most detailed accounts of north-east Brazil written in English in his period.[4]
Koster was a friend of the poet Robert Southey, who encouraged him to write his Travels in Brazil (1816),[6] which was dedicated to Southey "in memorial of affectionate respect and gratitude".[7] He began but did not finish a translation into Portuguese of Southey's multi-volume History of Brazil (1810–1819).[8] Southey mentions the sad loss of his young friend Koster in his Sir Thomas Marc (1831).[9]
He died in Pernambuco on 15 May 1820. A report of the death in The Gentleman's Magazine said he was "in his 27th year".[1]
Major works edit
- Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816)
- Voyage dans la partie septentrionale du Brésil, depuis 1809 jusqu'en 1815 (Paris: 1818)
- On the Amelioration of Slavery (1816)
See also edit
References edit
- ^ a b The Gentleman's Magazine (London), Vol. 128 (1820), p. 186
- ^ a b Leslie Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (1985), p. 175
- ^ Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (1816), pp. 1–3
- ^ a b Francis A. Dutra, A Guide to the History of Brazil, 1500–1822 (1980), p. 396
- ^ 'Art. IV. Travels in Brazil By Henry Koster', review in The Quarterly Review dated January 1817, in bound volume XVI (London: John Murray, 1817), pp. 344–387
- ^ Leslie Bethell, 'The British Contribution to the Study of Brazil', in Marshall C. Eakin, Paulo Roberto de Almeida, eds., Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), at p. 352
- ^ Koster (1816), p. iii
- ^ Lionel Madden, Robert Southey: the Critical Heritage (2002), p. 23
- ^ Robert Southey, Sir Thomas Marc, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (London: John Murray, 1831), p. 152
- ^ International Plant Names Index. H.Kost.
Bibliography edit
- Anderson Carvalho Sandes, British Travel Accounts and Maps: Henry Koster and the Making of Space in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (2010)
- Kirkbride, Joseph H. (August 2007). "A 19th Century Brazilian botanical dictionary". Taxon. 56 (3): 927–937. doi:10.2307/25065874. JSTOR 25065874. Retrieved 11 May 2015.
External links edit
- Henry Koster, On the Amelioration of Slavery (at Archive.org, full view)
- Works by Henry Koster at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
