| Summary: | To rule over the vast territories beneath their jurisdiction, the Governors of Pernambuco’s Captaincy, majorly adventitious to America, relied on the daily action of clerks to produce, circulate, and record the documents through which they knew and bridged the captaincy’s inner distances. In this article, we discuss the importance of these officers from two approaches. At first, we drew up a spatial and therefore quantitative inventory of the Captaincy’s clerks from the second half of the seventeenth century to the middle of eighteenth century, explaining how the various patterns of access to the offices of clerks, notaries and the Secretary conditioned the making of the local archives. In the second part, we highlight the importance of the Secretários de Governo to manage the Governors paperwork, as well as their active role in governance, arguing that it went far beyond the mere record of administrative routines. Thus, we intend to demonstrate that, in contrast to the tendencies towards a certain dispersion of most local archives, the Secretaria worked as a repository focused on the centralization of "memory" and information concerning governance, serving to counterweight the Governors frequent departures and arrivals.
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