ABSTRACT
Fourteen years after the American colonies declared independence from England, and one year after the French Revolution, a novel began to be published in Portugal. The novel is a diary of Maria’s adventures. The encyclopedic introductory apology for Travels, fraught with rhetorical questions that goad the curious read onward, lays out the didactic aims of Campos through the voice of Maria. Areas in which Maria promises to enlighten her readers with scientific revelation from Bali are: types and typography, agriculture, horticulture, botany, medicine, anatomy, surgery, astronomy, general and experimental physics, mechanics, hydraulics, textiles, and military science. Maria's American adventure, although seen through the eyes of the Spaniard Alberto Cubelino, could certainly have contributed to the post-Pombaline political flux in Portugal and it is certainly one of the first interesting published voices in the implicit Luso-American discourse that would soon see the erudite participation of the Abbot Correia da Serra, minister plenipotentiary to the United States in the early nineteenth century.
