[9] _The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_, edited by Frederic G. Kenton, 2 vols., Macmillan, New York and London, 1898. Vol. I, p. 21. [10] _Letters_, I, 23. [11] _I. e._, Franklin Pierce. [12] _Letters_, II, 110. [13] _Letters_, II, 183. [14] Quoted from _Browning Society Papers_, Part XII, by Elizabeth Porter Gould in _The Brownings and America_, p. 55. [15] Mrs. Sutherland Orr, _Life and Letters of Robert Browning_. 2 vols. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1891. Vol. I, p. 8. PALMARES: THE NEGRO NUMANTIA One of the most glorious achievements in the history of the Iberian Peninsula was the long and desperate defence of Numantia against the Roman legionaries sent to effect the destruction of the city. When the beleaguered inhabitants could no longer maintain themselves, owing to the shortage of food supplies, they burned the city, and those who were not killed in battle with the Romans committed suicide. Scipio AEmilianus, the Roman leader, entered Numantia to find nothing but burning embers and piles of corpses. This incident has an almost exact parallel in the history of Brazil--only this time the heroes were Negroes, defending the capital of one of the earliest and one of the strangest Negro republics in the history of the world. The Portuguese, who were the first to introduce Negro slavery into Europe, did not long delay in carrying the institution to their colony of Brazil. It was in 1574 that the first slave ship reached there. Thereafter, great numbers of Negroes were brought, especially to northern Brazil, in the equatorial belt, to work in the profitable sugar fields. No region of the Americas was so accessible to the slave trade, for the Brazilian coast juts out into the Atlantic Ocean directly opposite the Gulf of Guinea in Africa, whence most of the slaves were procured. It is profitless here to go into the question of the treatment of the slaves by their Portuguese masters. Some were badly treated, and took the chance of flight to the interior forest lands, rather than submit any longer. Various causes prompted yet others to escape from the colonial plantations. Thus many a _quilombo_, or Negro village of the forest, was formed. By far the most famous of these was the _quilombo_ of Palmares, whose history is the subject of this article.