Abstract
This article analyzes the religiosity of a 16th century slave sailor, Pedro João, imprisoned by the Portuguese inquisition. Forced to profess the faith of his masters, Pedro João went from Catholicism (in which he was baptized and confirmed in Olinda, his hometown) to Protestantism when he was imprisoned on the high seas by an English privateer in 1629. Taken to the village of Plymouth and then to Millbrook, there he married a Protestant woman and had a son. In 1637, when he landed in Lisbon on the ship he worked on, Pedro João was arrested by the inquisition. Questioned by the inquisitors in matters of faith, Pedro João provided us with elements to probe his Puritan Protestantism, of a Calvinist-Zwinglian nature, although mixed with Catholic reminiscences. We tried to demonstrate that our agent, an Atlantic figure, was born a Catholic in Portuguese America and had his soul “caught” in the Atlantic by English Protestantism, experiencing the hardships of religious conflicts that marked the so-called first European modernity.
Keywords:
black sailor; inquisition; catholicism; protestantism