Engel Sluiter (1906-2001)

Engel Sluiter, a longtime student of European overseas expansion, once predicted that curiosity would kill him, but he was mistaken: he died of a heart attack in Kensington, California, on 28 May 2001, just over a month prior to his 95th birthday. The son of a Dutch-born rancher, teacher, and county supervisor, and the grandson of windmill operators in Holland, he was born on a ranch near New Holland, South Dakota. His youthful enthusiasms helped to shape his adult preoccupations. One was his inexhaustible passion for knowledge, reflected, for example, in his practice of regularly slipping through an open window of the closed local library in order to find reading materials that would satisfy his curiosity. Another was his fascination with the achievements of Dutch mariners and their European rivals throughout the globe during the early modern period. A third was his penchant for solitary endeavors: the fact that he was the only Boy Scout in his community did not deter him from earning merit badges. A fourth was his craving for physical exertion: as a boy he performed chores about the ranch; as a graduate student he became an ardent hiker; he remained a vigorous walker into his late 80s. Although he did not take up tennis until his 30s, he developed into an exceptionally adroit, cunning player. The Sluiters became a dedicated tennis family. Their daughters became star performers and Engel’s widow, Shirley, is still a competitive player. Infirmities of age finally drove Engel from the court in his mid-80s.Engel did not set out to become a scholar. In 1924 he withdrew from high school in Hull, Iowa, in order to teach seventh and eighth grades in a local school and to study voice at Central College in his mother’s hometown of Pella, Iowa. But after a year he abandoned plans for an operatic career and set out for California in a Model T Ford with a friend. When they reached the valley town of Modesto, their car broke down. Engel then enrolled first in Modesto Junior College and later transferred to Stanford University where he worked with Percy Alvin Martin, a now forgotten Brazilianist, and graduated in 1929 “with great distinction.”Despite the onset of the Depression, he obtained a position in a junior high school in Downey, California, where for two years he taught social studies, doubled as track coach, and worked with the football team. In 1931 he took a marked reduction in income in order to return to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he began graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, under the supervision of the formidable Herbert E. Bolton. He earned his M.A. there in 1933 and, following a year in the archives of Holland and Spain, his Ph.D. in 1937. Next, he taught briefly at Chico State College and at San Francisco State Colleges before returning to Berkeley, where he would teach from 1940 until he reached mandatory retirement in 1973. A dynamic lecturer who constantly bounded about the room and candidly conceded that much of Latin American history still remained to be discovered, Sluiter offered a variety courses concerning Latin American history, including the popular History of the Americas, a survey of the colonial period, and another concerning the history of Brazil. He also gave demanding graduate seminars that customarily met after nightfall and that, during the 1950s, regularly attracted about ten students. Their emphasis was upon preparatory oral bibliographical reports and the reading of draft chapters of M.A. and Ph.D. theses. Sometimes tedious, the sessions were generally lively, though sometimes ego-shattering. It was Engel’s practice to have the victim read his paper (for there were very few women in Berkeley’s graduate seminars in those days), followed by assessments from supportive members of the class. A hush would descend around the large round table in Berkeley’s main library where Professor Bolton once presided. Then Sluiter would launch into his own trenchant assessment. Often he began by chiding the seminar for the blandness of the members’ remarks. Turning to the victim, he always started with the positive, but if he congratulated him for the skillfulness with which his paper had been typed, that was invariably the signal that thunder was about to follow. Tactfully but firmly, he chastised the victim for deficient research, sloppy organization, dubious logic, and deplorable writing. Many a confident seminarian left the room humbled and not a few abandoned their dreams of graduate degrees. But others survived the experience and were the better for it. Among them were Roderick Barman, the late Fred Bowser, James Boyajian, James Guill, Henry Keith, Clifton B. Kroeber, Donald Rady, Herbert Raffeld, Mario Rodrigues, and the undersigned.All of us became part of the Sluiter legacy. But there is also another, more durable part of that legacy. It consists of the Sluiter Collection now in the Bancroft Library. That collection represents six decades of solitary, far-flung multiarchival research in major and minor archives throughout Europe and Latin America. Engel undertook 13 extended archival forays, each of which gave him profound satisfaction, each of which yielded thousands of frames of microfilmed documents in half a dozen languages that he subsequently meticulously transcribed and annotated in his study. His workday nominally began about 8 A.M. and normally ended close to midnight but it really stated anew as early as 4 A.M. since he was a chronic insomniac. Over the decades Engel reshaped the focus of his vast, never-completed project several times. Initially, he studied the early Dutch voyages to the Pacific during the early seventeenth century. That emphasis broadened into a study of Dutch-Iberian global rivalry between 1568 and 1648. After he “retired,” Engel reoriented the project further when he decided to assess the impact of Dutch rivalry on the Spanish empire by reconstructing the costs of imperial defense throughout the world during the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. His family and close friends repeatedly urged him to stop collecting and start writing, but he always found reasons why he must probe ever more deeply in the sources in order to reach a level of understanding that he found intellectually satisfying. The result was a modest, eccentric, publication record entirely incommensurate with his exceptional paleographic skills, his unrivaled erudition, or his decades of unrelenting toil. Still, he produced a massive documentary collection of more than 160,000 pages organized chronologically and topically in 56 standard-sized file drawers. Each drawer is filled with complete transcriptions headed by succinct summaries. One entire file cabinet, for example, consists of the records of 10,000 individual ship voyages along the Pacific coast of Spanish America during the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries: the name of the ship, the master, the size of the crew, and the exact cargo and its taxable value are all conveniently summarized. Other drawers provide details concerning the voyages of Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese ships from Europe to the New World; the transatlantic slave trade; the Newfoundland fisheries, the Atlantic whaleries, and the complexities of imperial finances between the later sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. Without question this is a unique collection, one destined to be consulted by students for decades to come.Engel Sluiter was a scholar of exceptional drive and talent. He will be missed not only by Shirley, their two daughters, Mary Alice, and Nancy, grandson Joey, and son-in-law, the well-known historian Donald Pisani, but also by those of us who were privileged to have worked with and learned from him

Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy

• Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585-1641

  Engel Sluiter•Pacific Historical Review•1942

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• Dutch-Spanish Rivalry in the Caribbean Area, 1594-1609

  Engel Sluiter•Hispanic American Historical Review•1948

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• Report on the State of Brazil, 1612

  Engel Sluiter•Hispanic American Historical Review•1949

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