2
Throughout the seventeenth century, colonists from São Paulo and neighboring towns attacked hundreds of indigenous villages in various regions, bringing thousands of Amerindians from different societies to their estates and farms in a state of “compulsory service.” These expeditions into the interior provided a growing mass of indigenous manual labor on the Paulista plateau, which, in turn, enabled the production and transport of an agricultural surplus, linking – albeit modestly – the region to other parts of the Portuguese colony and even to the commercial circuits of the South Atlantic. Without these constant infusions of new captives, the fragile servile population would have soon disappeared, since, as with the institution of African slavery in the plantation zones, the reproduction of the labor force was absolutely dependent on a continuous supply of fresh captives. Unlike the slaveholding planters of the coast, however, the Paulistas turned away from the commercial circuit of the Atlantic as a source of labor. Instead, employing distinctive organizational techniques, they tackled the issue of labor supply on their own.
In attempting to secure a prominent place for their ancestors in the pantheon of national history, traditional Paulista historians – ironically enough – overlooked the local context in their interpretations of the evolution and meaning of so-called bandeirantismo. It became historical convention to divide this movement into stages characterized by distinct objectives: defending the fledgling settlement from the attacks of hostile indigenous groups, hunting for Tupi captives to sell as slaves on the coast, expanding outward from the earliest settlements, serving as Crown mercenaries against indomitable indigenous groups and fugitive African slaves, and prospecting for mineral wealth.1 While the Paulistas’ expeditions into the wilderness did vary in their pretexts and outcomes, the basic motivation behind them remained unchanged throughout the entire seventeenth century: the chronic need for Indian labor in local agricultural enterprises.
What did change over time were conditions of supply, which were determined by such variables as geographic bearings, distances travelled, outfitting costs, and the differing reactions of the indigenous peoples they encountered. Until the 1640s, Paulistas filled their needs with prodigious infusions of Guarani laborers, the scale of which closely accompanied the expansion of commercial agriculture on the plateau. Once large numbers of new Guarani captives were no longer to be had, the colonists faced a crisis that had profound repercussions on local structures, as it became difficult to maintain the labor pool at the level reached up to that point. To make matters worse, a smallpox epidemic in the mid-1660s exacerbated the shortage. In response, the settlers changed their slaving strategies, developing new kinds of expedition into the interior. Although these expeditions achieved some success, they unexpectedly altered the ethnic composition and sex ratio of the labor force. Ultimately, while slaving expeditions reflected the demand for labor on the plateau, their outcomes came to determine the economic options available to the settlers. This complex relationship between slaving and the local economy of São Paulo is this chapter’s central concern.
The Riches of the Wilderness
Slaving expeditions to the interior and the Indian slave trade in São Paulo date back to the remote origins of the colony, but in the seventeenth century they began to assume new qualitative and quantitative dimensions. The experience of the sixteenth century had introduced diverse methods of acquiring Indian labor, ranging from resgate (barter), to saltos (raids), to the larger-scale punitive expeditions of the 1580s and 1590s. These models were perfected and expanded by the settlers to meet the demands of the new century. While the small-scale barter and raiding activities of the sixteenth century had been restricted to the Tietê River valley and nearby areas, expeditions now projected themselves over greater distances and became integrated with an emergent intra-colonial trade network. And while the punitive campaigns of the 1590s manifested defensive and territorial goals, the larger-scale expeditions became more explicitly tied to a program of colonial development.
The development project of Dom Francisco de Sousa provided powerful incentives for the intensification of Portuguese incursions into the backlands. As Governor-General of Brazil between 1591 and 1601, Dom Francisco doggedly focused on the search for mineral wealth, a fixation stimulated by the Tupinikin legend of Itaberaba-açu, a shining mountain range supposedly located at the headwaters of the São Francisco River. In the Portuguese imaginary, the legendary range was transmuted into a single peak of silver studded with emeralds, and its name was corrupted to Sabarabuçu. In 1596, Dom Francisco outfitted three expeditions, which departed simultaneously from Bahia, Espírito Santo, and São Paulo in search of the source of the São Francisco. The Paulista expedition, led by João Pereira de Sousa Botafogo, had in its ranks at least twenty-five settlers, each with his own retinue of Indians. The explorers marched along the Paraíba Valley, crossed the Mantiqueira Range, and believed that they had reached their destination at a point some 70 or 80 leagues (approximately 400 kilometers) from São Paulo. One part of the group continued on to Salvador bearing samples of precious stones, and another went on to explore the region of the Paraupava (Araguaia-Tocantins), but the majority returned to São Paulo satisfied with the Tupinambá they had captured in the Paraíba Valley.
Encouraged by the results of the Sousa Botafogo expedition, Dom Francisco turned his attention to the south, where he assembled an entourage of practical miners from Germany, Holland, and Spain. Subsequent expeditions to the São Francisco River region yielded little in terms of mineral wealth, but during Dom Francisco’s time in São Paulo gold and iron deposits were discovered not far from the town. After his mandate as governor of Brazil came to an end, Dom Francisco traveled to Portugal, where he lobbied the King to obtain the requisites that would allow him to follow through on an ambitious plan for the development of the southern captaincies of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Espírito Santo. By 1608, he was once again in São Paulo, armed with the titles of Governor of the South and Marquis of the Mines.2
Dom Francisco’s plan was to create an economy made up of interlinked mining, agricultural, and industrial sectors, each of which would rely upon a solid base of Indian workers. His proposal was perhaps inspired by the model then in place in Spanish America, where the Indian masses, laboring in an integrated network of agricultural and mining enterprises, generated large fortunes for Spanish settlers while filling the royal coffers. However, in Brazil the plan soon failed. Unlike the Spanish in Andean South America, who found a seemingly inexhaustible source of silver ore at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, the Portuguese under Dom Francisco made only the modest discoveries of the Jaraguá, Parnaíba, and Voturuna mines, which yielded disappointingly small amounts of gold. At the same time, in spite of the establishment of an ironworks in Santo Amaro around 1609 and the supposed founding of a town near where the city of Sorocaba would be founded years later, and where significant deposits of iron ore did in fact exist, the plan’s industrial aspects failed as well.3 Even so, the attempt by Dom Francisco and his associates to transform the backcountry of southern Brazil into a lively and dynamic hub of European enterprise affected the organization of the local economy of São Paulo. On the one hand, as we shall see, the growth of commercial agriculture was stimulated and, on the other, the enslavement of Indian laborers reached unprecedented proportions.
Between 1599, when he arrived in São Paulo for the first time, and 1611, when he died, Dom Francisco authorized several expeditions in search of mines and Indians, some of which he also outfitted. Only one of these journeys – led by André de Leão in 1601 and backed by Dom Francisco’s inner circle – returned to the Sabarabuçu region, spending nine months in a futile search for silver that produced little beyond the fascinating account of the Dutch practical miner Willem Jost Ten Glimmer.4 In view of the high cost and negligible success of this excursion, Dom Francisco and his coterie began to concentrate on the potential of the São Paulo region. Expeditions into the interior now sought the indiscriminate capture of Indians of the sertões that surrounded São Paulo. Indeed, early seventeenth-century expeditions produced identical returns: large numbers of captives and no mineral wealth. In 1602–1603, an expedition led by Nicolau Barreto, with about 100 settlers in its ranks, captured around 2,000 Tememinó while scouring the Paranapanema River valley.5 Four years later, an expedition under the command of the mamaluco Belchior Dias Carneiro returned to São Paulo with hundreds of captives from the Sertão dos Bilreiros, despite the attacks of the southern Kayapó, who slaughtered several colonists. The band captained by Martim Rodrigues Tenorio de Aguilar met a similar fate at the hands of the Kayapó a couple of years later. But the slavers found greater success to the south and west, where there were dense populations of Tememinó and Guarani. Two expeditions of 1610, connected with the exploration of iron mines near Sorocaba, took many captives belonging to those two groups. Finally, in 1611, on the last journey sponsored by Dom Francisco, Pedro Vaz de Barros succeeded in enslaving 500 Guarani from the region of Guairá.6
Settlers who took part in these expeditions may have harbored vague hopes of striking it rich with the discovery of silver, but the vast majority enlisted in these ventures because they offered the opportunity to create or expand slaveholdings. The search for mineral wealth thus provided a veil of legitimacy for the explorers’ real intentions. The importance of this artifice should not be underestimated, as once the Crown began to enact legal restrictions on Indian slavery, settlers sought any pretext that might safeguard their slaving activities. Afonso Sardinha, for example, setting out for the sertão in 1598 with “other young men and more than 100 Christian Indians,” alleged that his only intention was to search for “gold and other metals.”7 The Municipal Council of São Paulo, always ready to defend the interests of prominent settlers, made use of another ploy at the time of the Nicolau Barreto expedition, requesting the governor’s authorization for incursions to the sertão to recapture runaway Indians.8
Whatever the pretexts employed by the settlers to justify their incursions, their principal goal was clearly the acquisition of Carijó, or Guarani, who inhabited a vast territory to the south and southwest of São Paulo. During the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Paulistas concentrated their activities in two regions, which came to be known as the Sertão dos Patos and the Sertão dos Carijós. The Sertão dos Patos, located in the interior of what is now the state of Santa Catarina, was inhabited almost exclusively by Guarani speakers, identified using such terms as Carijó, Araxá, and Patos, among others.
The Sertão dos Carijós included vast stretches of territory beyond the banks of the Paranapanema River, to the southwest of São Paulo, inhabited primarily by Guarani, though also by various non-Guarani groups. While the exact geographic location and dimensions of the Sertão dos Carijós are not clear, the term most likely referred to Guairá, an area circumscribed by the Piquiri, Paraná, Paranapanema, and Tibagi rivers. Because of its relatively easy access, at a forty to sixty day march from São Paulo, Guairá soon became the principal destination of the expeditions that set out from São Paulo.9
But this trek inevitably brought the Paulistas into contact with other indigenous groups occupying the lands between São Paulo and Guairá, particularly in the Paranapanema Valley. Two groups, the Tememinó and the Tupinaé, appear in the documentation of the era as the major victims of the expeditions that set out during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Little is known about relations between the Portuguese and these groups besides the fact that large numbers of Tememinó were introduced into São Paulo at two points: following the expedition of Nicolau Barreto of 1602–1604, and in 1607, when Manuel Barreto “peacefully” persuaded a large group, which he encountered on his return from Spanish Guairá, to move their village to his estate northwest of the town of São Paulo.10
Whereas wills and inventories from the early seventeenth century identified a wide variety of indigenous groups, beginning in the 1610s this diversity gave way to the predominance of Guarani captives in Paulista slaveholdings. This suggests that during the first decade of the new century the Paulistas occupied themselves mainly with preparing the way for the large-scale assaults on the Guarani that characterized the period 1610–1640. At that point, the most important aspect of the expeditions against the Tememinó lay precisely in building up the ranks of the Paulistas’ Indian warriors, who would later play a key role in the Paulistas’ raids against the Guarani of Guairá. It is possible that these Tememinó were the “Tupi” that appear in sixteenth-century chronicles as traditional enemies of the Guarani inhabiting the region between São Paulo and Paraguay. If so, they were also the Tupi frequently cited by Spanish Jesuits as the faithful auxiliaries of the Paulistas in their assaults on the missions. Manuel Preto, one of the principal leaders in the destruction of the Guairá missions, supposedly led a force of 999 archers, probably an inflated reference to warriors belonging to the the Tememinó group he had acquired in 1607.11
The mobilization of native warriors for the purpose of enslaving their traditional enemies, who would then serve the colonists, was nothing new in Portuguese–indigenous relations, but it took on entirely new proportions and characteristics in seventeenth-century São Paulo. Before they launched their large-scale, militarily organized assaults on the Guarani, the Portuguese acquired slaves primarily by dealing with Indian intermediaries. As in the sixteenth century, trade and alliance continued to play important roles in the strategies of settlers seeking to bring captives into the European sphere. Still novices in their knowledge of the sertão at that point, and with their paramilitary forces still in formation, the Paulistas depended upon these intermediaries, especially as they ventured further from São Paulo. In 1612, explaining why the Paulistas were so successful in the capture of Indians in Guairá, the governor of Buenos Aires informed the Spanish Crown that their success was due to the collaboration of certain Guarani chiefs, who “serve them as guides on these forays.”12
All expeditions to the sertão were outfitted with copious supplies of trinkets and tools for bartering with Indians encountered along the way. Indeed, the Jesuits were not above trafficking in such articles. In providing an account of expenses incurred on a mission to the Patos region, the Jesuit Pedro Rodrigues noted that he spent 12 milréis on “barter goods of knives, fishhooks, glass beads, mirrors and other things of this sort, which I twice took to distribute in the villages of the southern captaincies, giving prizes to the male and female Indians who best knew Christian doctrine.”13 Among the scarce possessions of Francisco Ribeiro listed in an inventory hastily scribbled in the wilderness were “six scissors for barter” and “nine combs for barter.”14 A few years later, Manuel Pinto noted in his will that he once outfitted Fernão Gomes with “a red cap and some beads for barter in the Patos.”15 Each of these items was assessed at an exceedingly low value in Portuguese terms. It is impossible to assess, however, the returns such items brought the Portuguese or, from the opposite point of view, the destructive impact these objects had on the traditional practices of indigenous societies. For their part, the Portuguese harbored no illusions about the nature of barter: it was to serve short-term purposes and was often carried out with the cynical assumption that today’s friends might become tomorrow’s slaves. This position was especially clear when sugar-cane brandy was added to the array of barter goods. Describing trade with the villages of the south, a mill-owning planter from Rio de Janeiro is supposed to have said: “These people are very fond of sugar-cane brandy; consequently, we make them a present of it in order to please them all the more.”16
The case of the southern Kayapó, or Bilreiros, a Gê-speaking group that occupied an extensive stretch of territory to the northwest of the town of São Paulo, offers a good example of the fate of an intermediary group. Early on, the Paulistas did view the Kayapó as potential captives; in fact, experience showed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the enslavement of Kayapó was very difficult. A Jesuit observer described the Kayapó as fearsome warriors, known for striking down their foes with unerring blows to the head. In their battles, he continued, they took many prisoners with the intention of eating them.17 Though this last allegation is false, since the Kayapó did not practice cannibalism, the acquisition of captives may have been the key to the early, amicable relations between the Portuguese and this indigenous group. Several expeditions that set out for the Sertão dos Bilreiros in the early years of the seventeenth century brought back non-Kayapó captives, suggesting that these prisoners were acquired through trade with the Kayapó. Friendly relations, however, were short-lived. Two major expeditions were destroyed by the Kayapó between 1608 and 1612. From that point on, the Kayapó became the objects of Portuguese hostility. Threatened with enslavement or extermination, it was only by seeking refuge in remote sertões that the Kayapó were able to avoid new conflicts for more than a century thereafter.18
The principal intermediaries of the incipient trade in Indian slaves were to be found in the Patos region, where the so-called Port of Patos served as the main center in the organized traffic in Guarani captives.19 According to the Jesuits who visited the region in the late sixteenth century, a few villages on the coast specialized in Portuguese–Guarani trade, while the main settlements of the region lay in the interior, 20 to 30 leagues away.20 A few years later, trade having developed considerably, another priest outlined the methods of trade: “there are some villages of heathens friendly to the Portuguese to whom the latter carry barter goods of tools and clothing and in exchange they give up their own friends and relatives.” At the Port of Patos, these captives were shackled and shipped to the captaincies of São Vicente or Rio de Janeiro.21
While the allegation that the Indians of the coast turned their own relatives and friends over to the Portuguese seems to be an exaggeration, there is no doubt at all that the Portuguese manipulated intercommunal and family relations in order to achieve their aims. By the same token, some Indian leaders strayed from custom and took advantage of their position as intermediaries, accumulating power and even wealth. Such was the case of a certain Tubarão, or Shark, who along with his three or four brothers, all supposedly shamans, became the main supplier of Guarani captives in the Patos region during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Once again, it falls to the Jesuits to describe, in rich detail, the system of supplying Indian slaves. Arriving in the Patos Lagoon in ships laden with tools, cloth, and other barter goods, Portuguese merchants would summon Tubarão and his brothers. These intermediaries, for their part, would furnish Araxá captives, taken by the Carijó in internecine conflicts, in exchange for the European goods. In addition to these war captives, Tubarão and his brothers would also bring “unattached people” – orphans and widows, for example – from the Carijó villages of the interior and trade them as well. Finally, other Indians would come on their own account to barter with the Portuguese, offering local products, such as the sturdy hammocks that were widely used in European settlements. According to the Jesuit account, these ingenuous peddlers would also be enslaved by the insatiable Portuguese.22
This maritime slave trade, probably quite small in scale before the 1630s, was also facilitated by royal officials acting in collusion with the settlers of São Vicente, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro. The Jesuits of southern Brazil, themselves interested in moving the Carijó of the Patos region to mission villages near Portuguese settlements, complained repeatedly that civil authorities were deeply involved in the unjust enslavement of the Guarani. According to one priest, the Crown officials who were supposed to assist the Jesuits in the establishment of mission villages acted duplicitously, collaborating with the priests in transporting Guarani to the coast, but then turning the Indians over to settlers to serve them as slaves. Referring to an expedition that took place around 1619, the same priest explained that the original objective was to bring together a large number of Araxá and Carijó Indians, already brought from the interior by both Jesuits and backwoodsmen, and to transfer them to mission villages in São Vicente, Rio de Janeiro, and Cabo Frio in a ship outfitted by Antonio Mendes de Vasconcelos, a Rio de Janeiro merchant. However, when the expedition arrived in São Vicente, the Jesuits’ participation ended abruptly, as the Indians were turned over to private traders and sent on to the slave markets of Bahia, Pernambuco, and even Portugal.23
As the demand for slaves increased, violence became an increasingly important tool in the acquisition of captives. As in the case of the Kayapó, alliances and trade relations, even when strengthened by kinship ties between colonists and Indians, degenerated to the point where former allies were reduced to captivity. In the Patos region, barter between the Portuguese and the Guarani gave way to unprovoked attacks on the latter by the Europeans and their Indian henchmen. Pedro Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary familiar with the region, related a specific case in which Portuguese traders arrived at the Port of Patos with the apparent intention of bartering with local headmen whom they had already engaged in “friendships and exchanges.” Enticing the Indians to the port in order to trade, the Portuguese “in bad faith took an Indian headman with others who accompanied him, which would be about forty all told, and put them all in irons and took them by force to the ship and soon they arrived at the captaincy of São Vicente.”24
Such acts of violence were not always preceded by the artifice of exchange. A rare criminal investigation, which inquired into the death of the Guarani chief Timacaúna, offers an exemplary account of straightforward enslavement. In this case, Timacaúna was in the process of moving his village to a site not far from São Paulo when he was suddenly attacked by “pombeiros negros” belonging to some Paulistas. Having murdered Timacaúna, these hostile Indians enslaved the remaining Guarani, who were brought to São Paulo and divided up among their masters.25 The use of the term pombeiro in this context is noteworthy, it being a word of African origin referring to Africans or half-castes who were charged with providing slaves from the interior of that continent for the Portuguese merchants of the coast. The “black pombeiros” in this case were colonial Indian slaves who specialized in the enslavement of Indians from the sertão.26 If this practice was indeed widespread, as it appears to have been, it would reflect a trend toward the internalization of the organizational aspects of slaving, as the Paulistas came to depend less on independent intermediaries and more on their own slaves. This represented a transformation in relations between whites and Indians, contributing significantly to the redefinition of captives as slaves.
This change in the organization of slave recruitment resulted in an immediate increase in the flow of Guarani captives to São Paulo. While it is difficult to assess the aggregate scale of the trade for this period accurately, somewhat more precise information on the composition and distribution of the captive population does exist for much of the seventeenth century. In 1615, for example, a detailed list was composed of Carijó recently brought from Guairá by an expedition authorized by Diogo de Quadros, Dom Francisco de Sousa’s successor as superintendent of mines. In this case, rather than place them in mission villages, the authorities divided them among 78 settlers. Each settler assumed the responsibility of caring for the captives assigned to him, signing an agreement that recognized that the Indians were free (forros), though obligated to work “for the benefit of the mines.” In reality, the list represented the distribution of the expedition’s spoils, as the vast majority of the settlers in question were not involved in mining.27
Table 1Distribution of Indians in the Registry of 1615
|
Size of the holding |
(N)* |
Men |
Women |
Children |
Total |
|
1 to 5 |
(29) |
33 |
51 |
16 |
100 |
|
6 to 10 |
(29) |
75 |
93 |
59 |
227 |
|
11 to 15 |
(13) |
45 |
61 |
62 |
168 |
|
More than 15 |
(7) |
41 |
40 |
52 |
133 |
|
Total |
(78) |
194 |
245 |
189 |
628 |
*(N): Number of owners within given range of holding size.
Source: CMSP-Registro, 7:115–157.
At first sight, the most prominent feature of the list was the preponderance of women and children among the captives, representing almost 70 percent of the total. This apparent preference for Guarani women reflects, to a certain degree, the division of labor adopted in early settler agriculture, in which women and children performed the planting and harvesting functions, which reflected the sexual division of labor in many indigenous societies. In the colonial context, this division had the additional advantage, as far as the settlers were concerned, of making adult male captives available for other specialized functions, such as portage and participation in slaving expeditions. Nevertheless, the development of the slave system across the seventeenth century led to important changes in this division of labor, which made post-conquest labor increasingly different from its precolonial antecedents, while from the beginning the recruitment of captive women and children had represented a sharp break with precolonial patterns of captivity, in which the vast majority of captives were warriors taken in battle. In effect, this new colonial pattern of slaving appears to have reinforced the Portuguese strategy of imposing relations of domination upon the Indians: while the sexual division of labor on rural estates presented a certain measure of continuity with pre-conquest times, the discontinuity in how captives’ roles were defined weighed more heavily in the composition of the Paulista slave population.28
By the late 1620s, when thousands of Guarani captives were driven to São Paulo, the local slave population had increased markedly. Due to the growth of the colonial economy of the plateau, the town of São Paulo became the main center of slaving activities; at the same time, the overland Guairá route generally came to be preferred over the maritime Patos connection. Nonetheless, the southern coast continued to be the target of increasingly large raids into the 1630s. Writing in 1637, a priest in Rio de Janeiro reported that in the previous ten years between 70,000 and 80,000 souls had been taken from the Patos region by the Paulistas, though few of them survived the journey to the Portuguese captaincies. Of the 7,000 enslaved in the Río de la Plata region, he further noted, only 1,000 had survived. Finally, to demonstrate the alarming proportions that the trade had begun to assume, the Jesuit claimed that in a single expedition 9,000 Indians were captured and delivered to Portuguese America in chains.29
The Portuguese of São Paulo and the Destruction of Guairá
Most of the large expeditions had as their destination the numerous Guarani villages of Guairá. By the late sixteenth century, the native inhabitants of this region found themselves caught up in the conflicting interests of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Jesuits. Both the Spanish settlers of Paraguay and the Portuguese of São Paulo competed for access to Indian labor in the vast, vaguely defined borderlands that separated the frontier outposts of the two Iberian empires. However, neither group appeared interested in the permanent settlement of the territory, seeking rather to take Guarani captives while avoiding conflict with other indigenous groups living in the borderlands, who were well known for their aggressiveness. In other words, instead of behaving like Iberian rivals, the Paraguayans and the Paulistas shared common interests, reinforced by the prospect of mutually beneficial commercial relations, with the Paulistas supplying European articles and even African slaves in exchange for Indian slaves and silver. During the period of the Iberian Union (1580–1640), despite royal prohibitions on trade between Portuguese and Spanish America, the members of the Municipal Council of São Paulo saw nothing wrong with opening a trail between São Paulo and Paraguay: “It seemed good to all due to the benefits expected of the opening of this trail and us having friendship and trade as we are all Christians and of a common King.”30
If the Paraguayans and Paulistas had indeed succeeded in forging a harmonious relationship in the borderlands – at the expense of the Guarani, of course – their relations were unsettled by the Jesuit missionaries who arrived in the region beginning in 1609, when fathers Giuseppe Cataldino and Simon Maceta established the first reductions.31 From the start, the Jesuits cultivated poor relations with both sets of settlers, neither of which looked kindly upon the arrival of a new contestant in the competition for Guarani labor. In Paraguay, the settlers counted on the support of the secular clergy and local Crown officials in their campaign against the Jesuit presence, fearing that the latter would severely limit the labor supply by taking Guarani captives out of circulation. That prospect threatened the precarious economic base of Spanish colonial society in the region, which depended upon Guarani labor in agriculture, particularly in the cultivation, harvesting, and transport of the tea-like leaves of the mate plant.32
For the Paulistas, who continued to take captives in Guairá without coming into direct conflict with the priests, the Jesuit presence was less threatening, at least during the early years. After all, Guairá extended through a vast territory and the unreduced population continued to outnumber that of the missions into the 1620s. Even on the eve of the Paulista invasion of 1628, the Jesuits only counted on fifteen reductions in Guairá, some of which were inhabited by non-Guarani catechumens. The picture had begun to change by then, however, as the cumulative effects of the slaving expeditions, missionization, and epidemic disease limited the numbers of Guarani available to slavers, who turned their gaze to the relatively larger proportion of the total population that was concentrated in the missions. Indeed, the reductions may have been seen by the Paulistas rather as amplifications, since the population density of the missions was much greater than the free villages of the Guarani, Guaianá, and Gualacho (Kaingang). Thus, the Paulistas attacked the missions not for moral or geopolitical reasons – as one strain of Paulista historiography would have it – but simply because considerable numbers of Guarani were to be found there. According to a Jesuit, at first the Paulistas respected the priests, but “with the growth of their greed” they began to attack the reductions. The problem, he continued, was that the Paulistas considered the region to be their exclusive preserve for the hunting of Indian captives. But the main reason for the attacks, the Jesuit concluded, was that the settlers simply wished to acquire “cheap” Indians.33
Historians have long claimed that the Paulistas attacked the reductions because these missions offered labor already transformed and disciplined by the Jesuits, thus better conditioned to the work rhythms demanded by Brazil’s sugar plantations. This notion underestimates, on the one hand, the pre-contact importance of Guarani horticulture, while overestimating the efficacy of the Jesuits’ cultural project on the other.34 In fact, the Portuguese had been interested in the Guarani since the first half of the sixteenth century precisely because the Guarani were known for having practiced agriculture going back to precolonial times. Furthermore, even after the arrival of the Spanish Jesuits in Guairá, the Paulistas continued to raid independent villages as well as the missions. Finally, evidence from Jesuit documents written on the eve of the Paulista invasion clearly shows that the reductions of Guairá were not the prosperous, disciplined utopian communities that later came to characterize the Jesuit enterprise of Paraguay. In fact, the periodic raids by Paulistas and Spaniards were only one among many problems impeding the development of the mission system.
At the time of the largest Paulista raids on Guairá, which began in 1628, most of the missions were precarious and isolated communities that had been recently founded and were struggling to find a viable economic base that would ensure their survival. An account from 1625, referring to the material conditions of the Jesuit enterprise in the province of Paraguay, reported that the five reductions along the Paraná were in an impoverished state, entirely dependent upon a meager 400-peso stipend from Rome, since few subsistence plots had been planted. In Guairá, according to this report, the catechumens did not even produce enough to cover the barest expenses of the Church.35 In 1628, with the Paulistas already camped on the banks of the Tibagi, Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, superior of the Guairá missions, wrote of other obstacles to the success of the missions in his annual missive. Outlining the situation of the province’s eight reductions, Ruiz added disease, hunger, factional rivalries, and intertribal warfare to the slave raids by the Paulistas and Spaniards as their population’s principal woes.36 Of these, disease and intertribal warfare had certainly taken the greatest toll. Father Diego Salazar, charged with overseeing two of the largest missions, observed that most of the reductions “are filled with contagion”; in 1631, a violent epidemic raged between the Paraná and Paraguay rivers, which “peopled the heavens with new Christians.”37 Inter-ethnic conflict was present in nearly all of the missions, and spelled real disaster on a few occasions, as in the case of Candelária, which soon after its founding was destroyed by “an army of infidels.”38
The intensification of Paulista raids must thus be seen within this context of instability and uncertainty. The first of the large-scale enterprises, led by Antonio Raposo Tavares, set out from São Paulo in 1628, and though historians have taken this expedition to be a model for the organization of bandeirante slave raids, it was far from typical in its scale and structure. The size of Raposo Tavares’s expeditionary force was disproportionately large when set against the scores of slaving missions that took place in the seventeenth century. Most accounts claim that 900 Paulistas (including Portuguese and mamalucos) and 2,000 Tupi warriors took part in the movement. However, the number of Paulistas was probably far lower, as only 119 can be identified from other sources, and because the ratio of two Indians for each Paulista seems exceedingly low when compared with other expeditions. At the same time, its disciplined military organization was atypical of the slaving expeditions that took place over the course of the century, which tended to be of a far more informal character. Testifying against the Paulistas in 1630, the Rio de Janeiro priest Pedro Homem Albernaz drew an interesting parallel between the Raposo Tavares expedition and the prevalent form of military organization in the colony: “and thus for these journeys they raise captains and militia officers with banners and drums,” pointing out that this violated the law.39 Indeed, the expedition had been organized in four companies, each with a standard and led by the principal leaders of the rural districts of São Paulo and Parnaíba. Raposo Tavares’s company was further divided into advance and rear guards. While such tactical innovations were not incorporated into subsequent slaving expeditions, the great bandeira did represent a rupture with the past in that force and violence definitively replaced exchange and alliance as the predominant mode of labor recruitment in the sertão.
Though it is clear that the Raposo Tavares expedition left São Paulo with the explicit intent of capturing thousands of Guarani, its leaders did not state that they planned to raid the missions of Guairá. As in earlier collective expeditions, such as the punitive raid of 1585 and Nicolau Barreto’s expedition of 1602, Raposo Tavares and his captains carefully developed pretexts for their warlike operation. According to the Jesuits Maceta and Mansilla, authors of a detailed denunciation of the Paulistas’ activities, one of the principal participants, Francisco Paiva, went so far as to obtain a writ from the Holy Office of the Inquisition authorizing him to penetrate the sertão in pursuit of a heretic.40 Dom Luiz Cespedes y Xería, the Spanish governor of Paraguay who joined one of the companies for part of the trek, was told that the Paulistas sought to recapture the many Tupi, Tememinó, Pé Largo, and Carijó slaves who had fled and sought refuge in Guairá. Backing up this justification, the company leaders André Fernandes and Pedro Vaz de Barros carried legal authorizations to recapture these fugitives.41
More substantive and palpable motives for the expedition emerged in a public meeting at the Municipal Council of São Paulo in late 1627. Leading citizens, among whom Raposo Tavares was especially vociferous, complained that the Spaniards of Villa Rica were encroaching on lands belonging to the Portuguese Crown, “taking all of the heathen of this Crown[’s land] for their repartimentos and personal services.”42 It was a grave accusation to make amid the labor crisis facing the settlers in the 1620s. Less than three years earlier, the superintendent of the mission villages surrounding São Paulo, Manuel João Branco, had complained of their depopulation, as the colonists were transferring the inhabitants of the villages to their own properties.43 Even the Governor-General of Brazil recognized the dearth of labor in São Paulo “due to the many deaths,” which probably were the result of epidemic disease.44
The bandeira of 1628 began its activities cautiously, with Raposo Tavares setting up camp on the banks of the Tibagi, at the entrance to Guairá territory. From this base, the Paulistas began to raid independent Guarani villages and enslave their inhabitants, then turned their attention to the reductions. Their ends were achieved through naked violence. According to one Jesuit, the Paulistas’ usual method was to surround a village and persuade its inhabitants, by force or by trickery, to accompany the settlers back to São Paulo. Villages that resisted met a terrible fate. In such cases, the Portuguese “enter, kill, burn, and destroy … and there have been cases in which they burned entire settlements merely to [instill] terror and awe in neighboring villages.” The overland trip to São Paulo promised further horrors, “such as killing the sick, the aged, cripples and even children who delay their relatives or the others from continuing the journey with the haste and expediency that they [the Paulistas] expect and demand sometimes with such excess that they will cut off the arms of some and use them to whip the others.”45 Another priest accused the Paulistas of acting “with such cruelty that they do not seem to me to be Christians, killing the children and the old people who cannot keep up and giving them to their dogs to eat.”46
By 1632, successive raids had destroyed many independent Guarani villages and virtually all of the Guairá reductions. Thousands of Guarani slaves were marched to São Paulo, a small number of which were traded to other captaincies. Precisely how many, though, remains a difficult question, given the wide variation of estimates in contemporary accounts, some swollen by the ulterior political motives of Jesuit witnesses. Total figures as high as 300,000 are cited by historians; this unlikely sum may derive from a faulty transcription by a scribe in the court of Philip IV.47 Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya stated that the Paulistas had destroyed eleven missions, each with a population of 3,000 to 5,000 souls, which would mean that anywhere from 33,000 to 55,000 Indians were enslaved, assuming that all inhabitants were captured.48 Manuel Juan de Morales, a Spanish merchant resident in São Paulo, noted the destruction of fourteen reductions with an aggregate population of 40,000, of which 30,000 were enslaved.49 Finally, Father Lourenço de Mendonça of Rio de Janeiro, citing a certificate passed by Spanish Jesuits, reported that 14 reductions with 1,000 or 2,000 families each fell victim to the Paulistas, who brought 60,000 Guarani captives to São Paulo.50 We may add a fourth contemporary account, by the governor of Buenos Aires, based on information from Ruiz de Montoya, which asserts that the Paulistas took 60,000 Indians from the province of Paraguay between 1628 and 1630.51
These figures are probably not very far from the truth, especially considering that the Paulistas preyed on independent communities as well as the reductions in their attacks on the Indians of Guairá. As for the missions, there were fifteen in Guairá in 1628, thirteen of which were destroyed, while the remaining two were moved in 1631 to safer locations to the south, along the Uruguay River. The vast majority of the missions – twelve of them – had been established less than four years before the Paulista invasion. The only two reductions founded at a substantially earlier date, Loreto and San Ignacio, both set up in 1610, were the two that survived the onslaught. These two reductions were fully integrated into the Spanish economy of Guairá, which may explain their ability to hold off the invaders. But even they suffered significant misfortunes, including a major epidemic in 1618.52 The other missions fell to the Paulistas rather rapidly, although the exact chronology of these events is unclear. According to a 1629 document, Raposo Tavares himself commanded the destruction of Jesús María, San Miguel, and at least one other reduction at the head of eighty-six other Paulistas.53 It seems likely that the other missions were dismembered by other columns of the 1628 expedition, specifically those of André Fernandes and Manuel Preto.54
Once the Guarani population of Guairá was destroyed, the Paulistas turned their attention back to the Guarani further south. They began to attack the missions of Tape and Uruguay, located in what is today the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The situation in Tape Province resembled that of Guairá, in that the missions had only recently been founded (1633–1634) at the time of the Paulista attacks (1635–1641). Of the six reductions founded by the Jesuits, three were destroyed by 1638, with Raposo Tavares and Fernão Dias Pais leading the most intense raids, in 1636 and 1637 respectively, while other groups found their leaders among the backwoodsmen who had acquired valuable experience in the Guairá campaigns. Nonetheless, this time the Paulistas faced major resistance on the part of the Indians. Raposo Tavares’s expedition, reputed to have had an estimated 140 Paulistas and 1,500 armed Tupi in its ranks, struggled to overrun the Jesús María reduction, where 300 warriors put up stiff resistance. Shortly thereafter, fearing a general uprising as the inhabitants of San Cristóbal, Santa Ana, and San Joaquín grouped together in the Natividad mission, the raiders decided they had no choice but to retreat.55
A series of factors converged around 1640 to complicate the Paulista quest for Guarani captives. First, the Jesuits, who obviously counted on the support of powerful forces in the colonies and in Europe, began to fight back through legal channels, taking the problem of the missions to the Governor-General of Brazil, to Philip IV, and finally to the Pope, thereby securing the first successes in their counter-offensive against the Paulistas. After a fierce campaign in defense of the missions, the Spanish Jesuits convinced the Pope to hand down a strongly worded brief condemning the activities of the Paulista and Paraguayan slavers.56 While publication of the brief provoked unrest in São Paulo, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro, it was not enough to discourage the Paulistas from continuing their assaults on Jesuit-run villages, for they returned to attack again in 1648 and 1676. In this context, the relocation and defensive organization of the missions was aimed at diminishing the threat posed by the Portuguese. As the Jesuits began to concentrate the reductions in less accessible locations, particularly along the Uruguay and Paraguay rivers, slaving expeditions had to face greater distances, harsher terrain, and the challenges of other indigenous groups – such as the Paiaguá and the Guaikurú – in their pursuit of Guarani labor. In addition, though the Spanish Crown prohibited the use of firearms by Indians, evidently as a precaution against native rebellion, the Jesuits began to arm and organize their wards to defend the missions against the attacks of Paulistas and enemy Indians. In some cases, the priests equipped the Indians with firearms, though it seems that most resistance depended upon traditional weaponry.57
The militarization of the Jesuit missions, more than any other factor, determined the end of large-scale raids on the Guarani. Unaccustomed to defeat, the Paulistas suffered major setbacks in Uruguay Province. In 1638, Guarani warriors killed nine backwoodsmen from São Paulo and took another seventeen prisoner at Caçapaguaçu, repelling the expedition led by Pedro Leite Pais (Fernão Dias’s brother).58 A more crushing defeat came in 1641, when the large bandeira of Jerônimo Pedroso de Moraes ran up against indigenous resistance at Mbororé. According to a Jesuit eyewitness, 300 Paulistas and 600 Tupi in 130 canoes attacked Jesuits and Indians in their camp on the banks of the Mbororé River, a tributary of the Uruguay. After a fierce riverine and land battle, the Paulistas were forced to retreat. Beaten on the field of battle, the expedition was subsequently annihilated by hunger and disease, an ironic twist that apparently delighted the Jesuit observer.59 The following year, the Indians of Mbororé regaled a Jesuit visitor with a play recreating their heroic victory over the “Lusitanos,” emphasizing the symbolic importance of the event.60 Although a few, scattered expeditions returned to Guarani territory, for all practical purposes the Mbororé “disaster” marked the end of an era.
The Large-Scale Bandeiras and the Paulista Economy
The bandeirante surge of 1628–1641was intimately connected to the expansion of the local economy of São Paulo, and not, as most traditional Paulista historians have supposed, to the need for slave labor on the sugar plantations of the northeast. Without a doubt, some – perhaps many – of the Indian slaves taken by the Paulistas came to be sold in other captaincies, but such limited trade seems insufficient to explain the motives underlying the bandeirante enterprise, let alone its scale. Evidence indicates that the sale of captive Indians to the sugar planters of the coast was exaggerated by the Jesuits in order to build a stronger case against the Paulistas, since selling Indians who were not taken in just wars constituted a manifestly illegal act, even within the vague contours of Indian legislation. Using these arguments, one priest alleged that 11,000 to 13,000 souls had been sold at public market during a four-year period.61 Even if that were so, it would still represent a small fraction of the total number of Indians taken captive.
In fact, the only categorical evidence linking the Raposo Tavares campaign with the inter-captaincy trade comes from a public investigation carried out in Salvador in 1629 in response to a complaint made by fathers Mansilla and Maceta.62 According to the witnesses, a few Carijó captives had been shipped from Santos to be sold in Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, and Bahia. One caravel carried forty-seven captives, most of whom were disembarked in Espírito Santo, while two small boys, aged eight or nine, were sent on to Salvador. A second vessel, chartered by Domingos Soares Guedes, a Portuguese merchant resident in Salvador, transported ten or eleven Carijó, leaving four captives in Rio de Janeiro. Finally, a third ship, belonging to the Benedictine order, carried twenty-five Indians, all of them from the missions raided by Raposo Tavares, to be delivered to the convent of São Bento in Salvador.
Despite the instances cited above, little in the evidence from other parts of Brazil would indicate that a growth in demand for Indian labor in the sugar-growing regions stimulated slaving in the south. Historiographical convention in Brazil once held that the large-scale campaigns against the reductions responded to the labor crisis in the sugar-growing northeast provoked by the Dutch invasions and the interruption of the African slave trade caused by the loss of Angola. However, this argument is chronologically inconsistent, as the Raposo Tavares expedition set out before the seizure of Pernambuco and well before the capture of Luanda.63 That said, the sugar industry did depend on Indian labor for particular tasks and there is evidence that the supply of Indians dwindled in the early seventeenth century. In response to this situation, the Portuguese of Bahia organized slaving expeditions similar to those that set out from São Paulo, though without achieving the same measure of success. At the end of the sixteenth century, for example, a Jesuit wrote of a large expedition of 300 Portuguese and 600 Indians that, despite its size, brought back few captives.64 In the same year as the invasion of Guairá, the Bahian Afonso Rodrigues Adorno led a large contingent of slave-hunters into the interior of Bahia, also with little success.65 It would seem that during the seventeenth century a significant part of the Indian labor recruited for the sugar industry came from Maranhão. Indeed, Portuguese involvement in Maranhão was a response to the expanding sugar industry of the northeast, as the new colony was to supply foodstuffs and supplementary slave labor to the plantations, especially those of Pernambuco and the other captaincies of the north. This incipient connection is clear in Dutch documentation on Pernambuco, as the “Flemings” began to show an interest in the traffic in “Tapuia” slaves between Maranhão and Pernambuco.66 It was perhaps in this way, ironically, that the Dutch invasion affected demand for Indian labor in the northeast.
Most likely, the Indians slaves who were “exported” from São Paulo represented a surplus in the economy of the plateau. Beyond the modest maritime traffic connecting the Patos region with markets to the north, it seems improbable that many captives were sent directly from the sertão or reductions to the sugar plantations. A baptismal register from a rural district of Rio de Janeiro in the 1640s reveals the existence of Indian captives who, instead of displaying Guarani origins, carried such tribal denominations as Guaianá, Guarulhos, and Nhambi (possibly a reference to Anhembi, the indigenous term for the Tietê River).67 These Indians were thus from the immediate region of São Paulo, which makes some sense when one considers the risks involved in the long-distance Indian slave trade. As we shall see, Indians recently brought from the sertão had very low values because of the reduced chances of their survival in their new environment. This, coupled with legal restrictions on Indian slavery, made the slave trade a poor business proposition, restricting it to the transfer of small groups or individuals whose values justified the cost of the voyage.68
Thus, almost all of the Indians captured in this period were integrated into the flourishing economy of the plateau. The Paulistas’ own documentation indicates as much: one sees the increasing concentration of Indians listed in property inventories in the towns of São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba (see Table 2). In this key moment in the development of commercial agriculture, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the large-scale expeditions proved effective as a way to constitute an aggregate stock of Indian labor. It is noteworthy that many if not most of the participants in the Guairá expeditions cut short their careers as backwoodsmen upon returning to the São Paulo region, turning to the more settled pursuit of wheat farming in the 1630s and 1640s. Raposo Tavares himself, despite several subsequent returns to the sertão, established a prosperous estate on the Tietê River at Quitaúna, between São Paulo and Parnaíba, which had a labor force of 117 Indians in 1632.69 The other leaders of the Guairá raids also boasted large slaveholdings and became leading landowners on the plateau. Such was the case of the brothers André, Domingos, and Baltasar Fernandes, whose shares of the captives were the bases for the development of the towns of Parnaíba, Itu, and Sorocaba, respectively.
Table 2Proprietors and Indians, São Paulo Region, 1600–1729
|
Decade |
Proprietors |
Indians |
Average holding |
|
1600–1609 |
12 |
154 |
12.8 |
|
1610–1619 |
49 |
863 |
17.6 |
|
1620–1629 |
38 |
852 |
22.4 |
|
1630–1639 |
99 |
2,804 |
28.3 |
|
1640–1649 |
111 |
4,060 |
36.6 |
|
1650–1659 |
142 |
5,375 |
37.9 |
|
1660–1669 |
148 |
3,752 |
25.3 |
|
1670–1679 |
138 |
3,686 |
26.7 |
|
1680–1689 |
159 |
3,623 |
22.8 |
|
1690–1699 |
71 |
1,058 |
14.9 |
|
1700–1709 |
63 |
948 |
15.0 |
|
1710–1719 |
100 |
927 |
9.3 |
|
1720–1729 |
40 |
435 |
9.9 |
|
1600–1729 |
1,174 |
28,537 |
24.3 |
Sources: Inventories of probated estates, São Paulo and Parnaíba. IT, vols. 1–44; AESP-INP, cxs. 1–40; AESP-IPO, various cxs.; AESP-IE, cxs. 1–6.
The Reorganization of Slaving
Beginning in the 1640s, large-scale expeditions gave way to new forms of organizing the pursuit of Indian slaves. In general, treks to the sertão became smaller, more frequent, and more geographically dispersed.70 The most significant shift was in the geographical orientation of the expeditions, as the Paulistas sought a viable substitute for the Guarani captives that had impelled earlier operations. Initially, in spite of the distances involved, some expeditions set out for the very center of the continent, the Araguaia-Tocantins region, known as the Sertão do Paraupava. The Paulistas already knew of the region, since at least two expeditions had already traversed these backlands. The second of these two expeditions, in 1613, was the subject of a chronicle by a Jesuit who received a firsthand account from the backwoodsman Pedro Domingues. After a 120-day march, the Paulistas arrived at the island of Bananal, finding it inhabited by the non-Tupi Carajaúna and the Tupi-speaking Caatinga. They were favorably impressed by the region, which from then on was identified as an inexhaustible source of Indian labor.71
Although some captives from the Paraupava area appear in probate records, it would appear that few expeditions to the region were successful in satisfying the Paulistas’ hunger for labor. The material and human costs of expeditions to such distant destinations meant that they generated little or no profit. Nonetheless, a few wealthier settlers were able to lead or commission slaving parties to that region, most notably the sons of Pedro Vaz de Barros. One, Sebastião Pais de Barros, traveled at least twice to the Tocantins, on his second expedition reaching Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, where he died. Whatever the costs, he did manage to leave an inheritance of more than 370 Indians as part of his estate in Santana de Parnaíba. The variety of ethnic distinctions that appear in the inventory drawn up when his widow died suggests that a large part of his stock of slaves had been captured in central Brazil.72
The ambitious adventure that Antonio Raposo Tavares set out on in 1648 may also be seen in this light. Jaime Cortesão, among others, characterized the expedition as “the greatest bandeira of the greatest bandeirante,” and insisted that it was driven by the geopolitical motives of exploring and expanding Portuguese claims in the interior of the continent. More likely, Raposo Tavares and his companions, most of them from Santana de Parnaíba, sought to recreate the successes of the Guairá raids by investigating the possibility of attacking the Itatim missions of the Paraguay River valley. In spite of being repelled by the Jesuits and their Indians, persecuted by the indomitable Paiaguá, and weakened by the maladies of the backlands, Raposo Tavares continued his voyage along the Madeira River to the Amazon, reaching Belém after three years spent wandering in the wilderness. Others of his party, unwilling to risk such a long journey, returned directly to São Paulo from Itatim with captives from the missions, which encouraged further expeditions in that direction. By the standards of the times, though, the “greatest bandeira” must have been viewed as a failure, as Raposo Tavares returned to São Paulo a shattered, impoverished man, and, according to some, so disfigured that his own relatives could not recognize him.73
Most settlers, who did not have the resources of Raposo Tavares or the Vaz de Barros family, restricted their pursuit of captives to regions closer to São Paulo. Several expeditions set out for the Paraíba Valley, a region neglected by the Indian slavers of the previous generation. This movement led to the founding of new towns in the region by Paulista pioneers in the 1640s and 1650s. At the same time, adventurers from the town of Parnaíba set out to the west and south, eventually founding the towns of Itu, Sorocaba, and Curitiba. To the northwest, residents of São Paulo founded the town of Jundiaí. The settlement of each of these towns reflected new directions in the search for Indian labor. The Paraíba Valley towns of Jacareí, Taubaté, and Guaratinguetá served as bases for incursions into the Mantiqueira Range and the vast area that would become Minas Gerais, where a predominantly Tupi population attracted the Paulistas. Jundiaí, in turn, lay on the so-called general trail of the sertão, the overland path that settlers took to the Indians and mines of Goiás, while the western towns of Itu and Sorocaba became starting points for expeditions to the westernmost reaches of the southern captaincies.74
The expansion of settlement, which was of course closely connected to the search for new sources of labor, reintroduced Guaianá and Guarulhos Indians to the Paulista labor force. Though these peoples had always been within reach of the slave-hunters, they were spared for a half-century because the Paulistas had tended to shun them in favor of the coveted Guarani. However, with the declining supply of Guarani, the enslavement of the Guaianá and Guarulhos emerged as a temporary solution to the crisis in labor recruitment. The expeditions of João Mendes Geraldo, Antonio Pedroso de Barros, and Fernão Dias Pais revisited what had been the Guairá region to capture the remaining Guaianá, returning in 1645, 1650, and 1661 with many captives. The expeditions of Jacques Félix and Jerônimo da Veiga enslaved many Guarulhos in the early 1640s, while more of the same ethnicity were taken in the mid-1660s along the Atibaia River.75
The largest post-1640 slaving enterprise, the bandeira of 1666, also was associated with a significant wave of settlement.76 It would appear that the expedition penetrated the sertão of what would become Minas Gerais, perhaps to the headwaters of the São Francisco River, since scattered documents referring to the movement mention the capture of Amboapira (Tememinó) and Apuatiyara (Tobajara), groups that inhabited the region. Confirming this hypothesis, in 1682 one of the expedition’s participants, Bartolomeu Bueno Cacunda, testified that he had established a subsistence plot along the Sapucaí River sixteen years earlier.77 Further information emerges from the little-known will of Manuel Lopes, drawn up in 1666 on the Sertão dos Abeiguira. In this document, the dying man stated that he found himself “in this desert,” listing twenty-four prominent backwoodsmen as witnesses.78 The leader of the expedition was Jerônimo de Camargo, who shortly afterward established a prosperous estate in Atibaia, with 600 Indians and a chapel. Other participants, such as Francisco Cubas Preto, Baltasar da Veiga, Salvador de Oliveira, Antonio Bueno, and Bartolomeu Fernandes Faria likewise settled on good lands lying between the Juqueri and Atibaia rivers, each of them with holdings of more than one hundred Indians. These extensive slaveholdings, the last in São Paulo of any great significance until the sugar boom of the late eighteenth century, became the base for rural bairros in the area to the northwest of Jundiaí.79
The expeditions that sought Guaianá and Guarulhos captives resulted in a profound change in the ethnic composition of the slave population. Because of the massive infusion of captives during the first half of the century, the Guarani continued to make up the bulk of the Indian population, though they now shared the slave quarters with increasingly significant numbers of Guaianá and Guarulhos. Describing his vast holdings in his 1658 will, José Ortiz de Camargo left a forthright record of the resulting diversity: “I declare that I have in my service heathens of all nations.”80
An important development related to this change in ethnic composition was a shift in the sex ratio of the slave population. Table 3 shows that women outnumbered men during the period of heaviest Guarani recruitment. But in the 1650s, precisely because of the increasing inflow of Guaianá captives, the number of men surpassed that of women for the first time. These general characteristics gain further meaning when the ethnic composition of the adult population is taken into account (Table 4). The sex ratio of the population identified as Guarani remained at around 80 men for every 100 women, while for the Guaianá there were around 112 men per 100 women.
Table 3Males per 100 Females among Adult Indigenous Population, São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba, 1600–1689
|
Decades |
São Paulo |
Santana de Parnaíba |
|
1600–1619 |
82.7 |
– |
|
1620–1629 |
88.0 |
– |
|
1630–1639 |
92.8 |
65.6 |
|
1640–1649 |
90.0 |
75.5 |
|
1650–1659 |
108.7 |
82.0 |
|
1660–1669 |
92.7 |
108.6 |
|
1670–1679 |
98.1 |
114.9 |
|
1680–1689 |
99.5 |
84.4 |
Sources: Inventories of probated estates, São Paulo and Parnaíba. IT, vols. 1–44; AESP-INP, cxs. 1–40; AESP-IPO, various cxs.; AESP-IE, cxs. 1–6.
Table 4Sex and Age Distribution of Indigenous Population by Ethnic Group
|
Group |
Men |
Women |
Children |
M/100 W* |
|
Carijó |
194 |
242 |
205 |
80.2 |
|
Guaianá |
66 |
59 |
26 |
111.9 |
|
Guarulhos |
17 |
21 |
11 |
80.9 |
|
Total |
277 |
322 |
242 |
86.0 |
*M/100 W: Rate of men per 100 women in the adult population.
Source: Inventories of probated estates, São Paulo and Parnaíba. IT, vols. 1–44; AESP-INP, cxs. 1–40; AESP-IPO, assorted cxs.; AESP-IE, cxs. 1–6.
The predominance of Guarani women and the disproportionate presence of men among Guaianá captives owed much to the conditions that the Paulistas encountered in the process of enslavement. Since the demographic density of the Guaianá, who were primarily hunters and foragers, was far lower than that of the Guarani, the Paulistas rarely captured many at one time. The absence of detailed descriptions of Guaianá villages suggests that the Paulistas preyed on hunting or war parties operating at a distance from the domestic sphere. In any case, whether due to their low population density or greater resistance to capture, the difficulties involved in Guaianá recruitment effectively raised the costs of supplying the European settlements with Indian labor. Indeed, several Paulistas recorded losses in the expeditions of the second half of the seventeenth century. Domingos de Góis, for example, testified that in the three expeditions undertaken by his son “he received more losses than profit due to the death of his Indians.”81
That newly enslaved Indians were particularly susceptible to epidemic disease and less likely to submit to forced labor entailed further risks. Many soon succumbed to European and African diseases; among those who survived the initial immunological peril, some resisted the new work regime. For their part, the Paulistas, thoroughly accustomed to Guarani labor, faced significant obstacles in trying to communicate with non-Tupi speakers, let alone in attempting to transform them into productive workers. Captain Antonio Raposo Barreto of Taubaté, writing to a commercial correspondent in Rio de Janeiro in 1680, expressed the fear that he would lose the forty slaves (possibly Puri) that his son had brought him from the Mantiqueira Range since they were suffering from an outbreak of a flu-like illness. But Captain Barreto’s greatest frustration was the difficulty of communicating with them, which left him unable to understand “what they are suffering, because there is not an interpreter who understands them.”82
This new situation had serious implications when it came to social control on Paulista estates. The incidence of rebellion and flight increased markedly beginning in the 1650s, and this trend was closely related to shifts in the ethnic composition of the slave population, as Guaianá and Guarulhos captives made up most of the participants in all of the major revolts of this period. The vicissitudes of recruitment thus clearly influenced the formation of the Paulista variant of colonial slave society.
A Remedy for Poverty?
Facing the challenge of the uncertainties of the sertão, the Paulistas began to favor small expeditions – called armações (which may be translated literally as “armatures,” but can also refer to nautical tackle and outfitting) – designed to fill specific labor needs. Unlike the great bandeiras, whose essential function was the reproduction of the aggregate labor force of the plateau, these new expeditions sought to reproduce the basic units of production more than anything else. Embarking on journeys to the interior, many young men wrote or dictated wills in which they expressed the need to penetrate the sertão in order “to seek a remedy for my impoverished state.” Lucas Ortiz de Camargo, for example, declared that “he was presenting himself to go and Seek Remedy in the sertão which is the ordinary business of this land.”83
Throughout the seventeenth century, the much sought-after “remedy” was holdings of captive Indians, which would help young male colonists establish their place in settler society, as well as offer a base for productive activities and some sort of income. Remarking on how driven young men were to risk their lives on these expeditions, a Governor-General of Brazil observed: “He whose great poverty does not permit him to have someone to serve him will subject himself to wander through the sertão for many years in search of someone to serve him, rather than serve someone else for a single day.”84 Indeed, in the economic context of seventeenth-century São Paulo, so dependent on Indian labor, opportunities for young settlers were restricted to winning a handsome dowry upon marriage, receiving a large inheritance, or participating in a profitable slaving expedition. With few exceptions, however, dowries included only a handful of “pieces of the heathen of the land,” as Indian slaves were often called, while inheritances had to be shared equitably among all heirs. For most settlers seeking to establish their place in local society, slaving was the only option that offered any hope of establishing a reasonably large productive base.
In general, the young men who embarked in search of captives were outfitted by their fathers or fathers-in-law, who risked small outlays of capital and some Indians in the expeditions in the hope of expanding their own slaveholdings. The outfitter, called the armador, provided money, equipment, and Indians, and assumed all the resulting risk in exchange for one half of the captives eventually obtained on the journey. The armação, or expedition, was usually a family enterprise, for in the absence of institutional guarantees on such investments, it no doubt seemed safer to trust a kinsman. Nonetheless, the outfitter–backwoodsman relationship almost always took the shape of a contractual agreement. An example of this contractual relationship is provided by the will of Antonio Cordeiro of Jundiaí:
I declare that I have an armação in the sertão with Antonio da Costa Colaço [and] that I gave him two blacks [Indians] and a chain of four and a half braças with ten collars and a canoe and one arroba of lead with powder and everything else needed so that we will divide in half between us whatever God gives for which I have a receipt in my power.85
As should be evident, the principal contribution of the outfitter was lead, gunpowder, chains, and, most importantly, Indians, essential elements for a slaving expedition. In effect, lead and powder were the greatest expenses, since it was necessary to procure these items in other markets. In 1647, for example, the merchant Antonio Castanho da Silva sent Diogo Rodrigues to Rio de Janeiro to buy ammunition for a journey into the sertão.86 Toward the end of the century, to judge by the account book of Father Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida, the greatest part of the money spent on the outfitting of expeditions went to the purchase of arms and ammunition.87 These cases demonstrate not only the need for venture capital, but also the violently aggressive strategies used by the slavers.
Agreements between fathers and sons, however, were more common than contractual arrangements, and generally reached verbally. Francisco Borges, for example, declared in his will that “I have outfitted my sons Gaspar Borges and Francisco Borges with all that is needed to go to the sertão, so that of the people they bring back from said sertão they will give me half and they will keep the other half for themselves.”88 It seems that sons expected financial and material assistance from their fathers for these journeys. Paternal help for the armações was so standard that its absence was noteworthy, as is shown by Domingos da Rocha’s statement: “I have fourteen pieces of heathen of the land which I brought from the sertão without help from my parents.”89 It is worth pointing out that this was a prudent distinction to make while drawing up a will, for otherwise Indians could become the object of litigation after the death of their owner.
Typically, expeditions were composed of one or more experienced backwoodsmen, who guided a handful of young settlers on their first trek to the sertão. The composition of slaving parties thus shows that the conventional idea that all male residents of São Paulo were career bandeirantes has little basis in fact. To be sure, a few specialists, gifted interpreters knowledgeable of the ways of the wilderness, repeatedly penetrated the sertão. However, most male residents did not participate in more than one or two expeditions in their lifetimes. Fathers outfitting their sons often had them join up with a wilderness-bound expedition rather than organize one of their own. In 1681, for example, Luís Eanes Gil stated in his will that he had sent his son, Isidoro Rodrigues, to the sertão“with someone else’s outfit.” In fact, Isidoro had set off in 1679 with several young settlers led by captains Mateus Furtado and Antonio de Morais Madureira, both experienced backwoodsmen.90 Other expeditions of known composition point to a basic structural similarity in their organization. The armação of Captain Fernão Bicudo de Brito and his uncle Antonio Bicudo Leme, mounted in the Paraíba Valley in 1673, had in its ranks seven young settlers of no relation to the Bicudo family.91
Expeditions to the sertão also received material support from sources other than fathers interested in launching their sons’ careers by providing a few captives. Contractual agreements between unrelated parties were quite common, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. The best surviving examples of such agreements come from the records of the Carmelite order, as at several junctures the friars contributed Indians, provisions, and even money to backwoodsmen who would bring them Indian slaves. A contract drafted in 1648, for example, read: “In view of the limited wealth of this convent, and that the remedy for this depends on the service of Indians, of which the convent is in great need, for which, it seems convenient to send some [Indian] youths to the sertão in support of a white man, paying him for all of the necessary costs and equipment.” Likewise, in 1662 the Carmelites decided that “because of the lack of people on the estates, it seemed important to us that we send eight youths to the sertão in the company of Captain José Ortiz de Camargo, so that with the goodwill of Our Lady they can bring us some people, for without them not only the estates but the convent would be ruined.” They resolved on that occasion to send four Indians from their Embiacica estate for that purpose. Finally, in 1665, the convent became the principal outfitter of the large-scale expedition led by Jerônimo de Camargo, Antonio Bueno, and Salvador de Oliveira. These three captains signed an agreement to turn over fifty of the first one hundred captives taken, in return for the services of Brother João de Cristo, who would represent the interests of the convent while he accompanied the expedition. Captives taken beyond the first hundred would be shared in the same proportion “among the other soldiers of the bandeira.”92
Another way of participating in slaving was for settlers to send Indians or weapons either in the care of an expedition’s leader or with one of the other participants. Maria Bicudo, for example, sent thirteen Indians to the sertão with her son Salvador Bicudo de Mendonça in 1660, while also “wagering a few pieces [of heathen of the land] with Manuel Veloso” on the same expedition.93 Such a practice, though, was risky. While it is true that the outfitter assumed all the risk for the venture capital he invested in an expedition, it was never altogether clear up to what point the backwoodsman could be held responsible for losses. Some outfitters sought legal protection in the drafting of the contract, stipulating that they would receive half of the captives brought to the settlement, so that the backwoodsmen would share in the losses that occurred on the return journey. This was a prudent strategy, since the captives were usually divided among the participants at the point of capture. If the outfitter or the expedition’s leader died during the trek, from that point onward their captives traveled at the risk of their heirs. Confined to his hammock, dying and wary of the chance his heirs might be cheated, the backwoodsman Manuel Correia de Sá sought to guarantee the integrity of his portion of the slaves taken in the sertão by dictating in his will that his wife and son in São Paulo should receive either the captives or their monetary value.94 To judge from the frequent litigation over possession of Indians brought from the sertão, even precautious backwoodsmen were left without sufficient guarantee.95
Along with young colonists and the experienced backwoodsmen who led the expeditions, a significant portion of the Indian population of the plateau participated in resupplying the stocks of captives. Lists of Indians in inventories often included the annotation “absent in the sertão” next to particular names. Mostly, though not exclusively, men, these Indians made up the rank and file of the expeditions, performing essential functions as guides, porters, cooks, and warriors. Settlers might be accompanied by anywhere from one to fifteen Indians, depending on how many they wanted to risk in the uncertainties of the sertão or how many captives they expected to obtain. Manuel Correia de Sá, for example, the owner of forty Indians, took ten along with him, including two women and a small boy, on the canoe flotilla led by his compadre João Anhaia de Almeida.96
It is difficult to establish a clear correlation between the size of an expedition and its return in captives. In 1675, the brothers Francisco and Domingos Cardoso, assisted by eleven Indians belonging to their father, spent several months in the sertão and, when they returned, delivered thirty Indians to the executor of their father’s estate, their father having died in their absence. If one assumes that this expedition was carried out according to the typical agreement of the time, in which the total number of captives was split between expeditionaries and outfitters, this would indicate a return of sixty slaves.97 For his part, another settler, Francisco Cubas Preto, evinced his uncertain expectations regarding a slaving expedition: “I declare that I thus also made an agreement with an Indian of the village of Marueri by the name of Marcos, whom I gave equipment, all supplies and two blacks of the heathen of the land to bring me all the people that he could acquire with this, for which I gave him a musket for him to have, whether he brings people or not, and nothing more for not one or another thing.”98
In the search for captives in places never before explored by whites, the active participation of Indians in the expeditions was essential. For the settlers, exposed to fevers, wild animals, and unknown indigenous groups, their survival depended on the knowledge that these Indians had of the sertão.99 On relatively short expeditions, slavers subsisted on game, fruit, and wild honey collected by the Indians. For longer expeditions, small camps or subsistence plots were established at strategic points in order to supply the backwoodsmen. Sometimes, advance parties of small numbers of Indians were sent ahead to plant crops with which to feed the principal body of the expedition and, on the return, the captives. A few of these camps eventually developed into towns, particularly on the routes to what later became Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso.
As expeditions cutting across the same territory became increasingly frequent, enterprising colonists set up subsistence plots along the way, tended by trusted Indian servants. In the 1670s, for example, there were the so-called Plantas do Urucujá, maintained by Ana Tobajara on a trail to the Minas Gerais area.100 Another example is Batatais (literally, potato fields), situated north of São Paulo on the trail to Goiás, possibly at a junction with another trail headed east toward the region of the Sapucaí River. The Camp of Batatais was probably first established in the 1660s, when numerous expeditions began to cross that area; the first documentary evidence of its existence dates to 1663. According to the eighteenth-century chronicler Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme, the wealthy Portuguese merchant Manuel Lobo Franco, related to the Bueno family by marriage and a frequent investor in slaving expeditions, received a land grant in 1678 in the incredible amount of 18 leagues near the Mogi River, “along the trail to Batatais, which was a shelter for heathen in 1678.”101 Batatais appears in the documentation again in 1683, in a fascinating lawsuit involving Manuel Lobo Franco’s cousin, Francisco Bueno de Camargo. Camargo owned João, a crioulo Indian born in São Paulo who was charged with tending the subsistence plots at Batatais, who was also a carpenter and a “very great backwoodsman.” According to Bueno de Camargo, João’s responsibilities were “to plant and order to plant and to keep an account of all the supplies that [his owner] had ordered for the sertão convoy on the journey that he the Author was undertaking.” However, before the “convoy” arrived, another slaver, Manuel Pinto Guedes, passed through Batatais and “took the said black to the sertão without permission or authorization of the Author, leaving his plots and plantings untended, which caused him great damages, in supplies as well as in the great loss of people that the Author had at his disposal due to the absence of said black and the supplies from Recolhida.” Neither Pinto Guedes nor João ever returned, probably dying in what is today Goiás. In his lawsuit, Camargo sought to have Pinto Guedes’s heirs compensate him for the value of the Indian he lost.102
If the establishment of subsistence plots on the way to the sertão represented an innovation in the organization of slaving expeditions, it also reflected an imminent crisis faced by the colonists. Projecting their incursions deeper and deeper into the vast continent’s unknown wilderness, the settlers’ hopes of encountering new sources of labor were increasingly frustrated. A simple equation held true: longer distances meant decreasing returns, for a number of different reasons. First, the time and outfitting costs involved tended to limit the size of expeditions, which limited the number of captives that could be taken. Second, these smaller bands were more vulnerable to the dangers of the backland, particularly those presented by previously uncontacted indigenous groups. Though they avoided the more lethal groups, such as the Paiaguá, Kayapó, and Guaikurú, slavers could not help but stumble upon warriors disinclined to cooperate with outsiders. Finally, greater distances increased the risk of mortality on the return voyage, for backwoodsmen as much as for captives. In sum, the acquisition of large numbers of new captives was quickly becoming an uneconomic proposition, even for the wealthiest settlers.
New Directions
While the reorganization of slaving presented itself as a partial solution to the crisis in the labor supply, the settlers also sought to maintain the influx of captives through other stratagems. By cooperating with the Crown’s plans to intensify the search for precious metals and offering their military services in defense of the sugar-growing and cattle-raising riches of the northeast, the Paulistas opened up a new range of economic options. The continued expansion of the sugar industry and the rapid growth of cattle ranching created serious conflicts between settlers and Indians, first in the area around the Bay of All Saints and later throughout the entire northeastern interior. European expansion threatened the alteration or even the destruction of indigenous social formations and thus it engendered a series of indigenous responses, most of them violent. In turn, any act of violence on the part of the Indians was construed by the Portuguese as sufficient grounds to condemn all Indians to enslavement or extinction. Though several groups were spared for the moment because they collaborated with the settlers, by the end of the century much of the backlands of the northeast had been transformed from Indian territory into huge cattle ranches.103
At various points, governors, planters, and municipal councils called on São Paulo’s backwoodsmen to wage “disinfestation” campaigns against indigenous peoples in revolt. Drawn by seductive promises of honorific titles, land, and money, Paulistas were mobilized to serve as mercenaries for determined periods. Well known for their warlike activities in the backlands, the Paulistas had previously been called upon to participate in the Luso–Dutch conflict of the late 1640s. But the column organized by Antonio Pereira de Azevedo at that time ended up following a different trajectory, accompanying Raposo Tavares to the Itatim missions in 1648.104 The Portuguese of São Paulo showed somewhat greater enthusiasm when they were called upon to fight Indians in Bahia ten years later. In 1657, Governor-General Francisco Barreto decided to take decisive action against the so-called Bárbaros (“barbarians”) who were terrorizing outlying settlements and sugar plantations in Bahia. Writing to the governor of São Vicente, Barreto observed: “I believe I understand that only the experience of the backwoodsmen of that captaincy will be able to overcome the difficulties that those of this one find in completely destroying those [indigenous] villages…” Sweetening his offer, the governor promised the Paulistas that “all whom they capture in this conquest they will take as their captives to that captaincy as described in the resolution that this Government made with the Bishop, Theologians, and Ministers who formed a council in which it was declared to be a just war, given the deaths, robberies, conflagrations and other hostilities,” the Paulistas thus being able “to use them as slaves without the slightest scruple on their consciences.”105 In the following year, with the aim of pacifying the backlands of Bahia, Domingos Barbosa Calheiros embarked for Salvador, “on the current trade winds,” with a band of 500 men, including Portuguese and Indians.106
Despite these measures, unrest persisted in the backlands of Bahia, such that in 1670 the Paulistas were once again summoned to fight “the very barbarous Indians who infest the vicinity of the Bay of All Saints.”107 Initially, Governor Alexandre de Sousa Freire invited Pedro Vaz de Barros – the feared “Vaz Guaçu,” or “Great Vaz” – to lead an incursion, giving heed to “the good accounts that Dr. Sebastião Cardoso de Sampaio gave me of Your Worship’s person, experience, and valor, and of the great knowledge that you have of Indians.108 Notwithstanding, it fell to Estevão Ribeiro Baião Parente, Manuel Rodrigues de Arzão, Henrique da Cunha, and Pascoal Rodrigues – at the time the captains of the four mission villages of São Paulo – to sign a contract with the governor in which they agreed to carry out the conquest of the backlands on the condition that they would be authorized to legally enslave the prisoners of war, who would be transported to São Paulo at the royal treasury’s expense.109 One participant in the expedition, Feliciano Cardoso, indicated clearly in his will that his interest in fighting in Bahia derived from the desire to enslave Indians to add to his holdings in São Paulo.110
The result of the campaigns was somewhat different than what the Paulistas expected. Although thousands of captives were taken, very few reached the estates and smaller properties of the plateau, as many died of diseases contracted from the Europeans, which were aggravated by the conditions of the forced marches from the sertão to the settlement. Some indication of this immense waste of human life is found in a 1673 account by Governor-General Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonça. Lauding the Paulistas for their success against the Bárbaros, the governor noted that they “extinguished” the threat in one area by burning villages, killing many Indians, and taking 1,450 prisoners, 700 of whom died of a “quasi plague” in the sertão, many others dying after arriving in Salvador. A few months later, Mendonça reported the capture, by Estevão Ribeiro, of another 1,200 Maracá “souls” from three villages north of Salvador.111 However, in spite of the governor’s enthusiasm with the success of these forays into the sertão, his government lacked sufficient resources to ship the remaining captives to São Vicente, as too much had already been spent supplying the Paulistas in the martial phase of the conquest of the sertão. For their part, the Paulistas sought to make up for this violation of their contract by bringing the captives to market in Bahia: Estevão Ribeiro himself was accused of setting up a slave market across the Bay of All Saints from the colonial capital of Salvador. According to the written accusation, the Paulistas had spent most of their time and much public money in the capture of “friendly” Indians identified as Tupi, whom they then claimed were legitimate captives taken in a just war authorized by the royal government.112
In 1677, mercenaries from São Paulo were summoned to combat the Anayo of the São Francisco River valley and once again clear the way for cattle ranching. As in the previous invitation, the colonial government pledged to provide weapons and provisions, while temporarily revoking prohibitions on slaving. On this occasion, colonial authorities appealed to the principal settlers of São Paulo: Jerônimo Bueno, Fernão de Camargo, Baltasar da Costa Veiga, Bartolomeu Bueno, Antonio de Siqueira, and Father Mateus Nunes de Siqueira, who possessed more than 100 Indians apiece.113 Though none of these men agreed to make the journey, a few bands of Paulistas did answer the call, eventually destroying the Anayo.
In the 1680s, when the situation in the cattle lands of the captaincies of the north became critical, the Governor-General recruited more Paulista troops. With the so-called Bárbaros of Rio Grande do Norte having slaughtered more than 100 people (“between whites and slaves”), while destroying more than 30,000 head of cattle and defeating the expeditions organized by local residents, royal authorities resolved to seek a solution in the vast experience of the settlers of São Paulo. Brother Resurreição, Bishop of Bahia and acting Governor-General of Brazil, remarked on the usefulness of the Paulistas in these circumstances:
And if the Paulistas are so accustomed to penetrating the backlands to enslave Indians against the provisos of Your Majesty which prohibit it, I am certain that now that they may do so in the service of their King as your loyal vassals, and to such public benefit of those captaincies, they will do so with even greater willingness, not only to add to their fame, and [in] hope[s] of remuneration for which they work, but also for the value of the Bárbaros they take prisoner, who justly are captives according to the laws of the Lord my King.114
Several outfits were organized in São Paulo, including that of Domingos Jorge Velho – which would become famous for destroying the escaped-slave redoubt of Palmares – and the column led by Manuel Alvares de Morais Navarro. Though facing stiff opposition from the Janduim and other indigenous groups up in arms over the expansion of cattle ranching onto their lands, the Paulistas once again found the path to victory through alliances with select Indian groups, destroying most of the indigenous population of the captaincies of Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará, and Piauí over a thirty-year period ending in 1720.115
More than any other moment in Brazilian history, the northern campaigns demonstrate the wantonly destructive side of Indian policy in areas of unchecked economic growth. As in the conquest of the Bahian backlands, the Paulistas did not receive the return they had anticipated in Indian captives, and so they began to measure their success on a different scale. Attempting to make up for their dashed expectations with military victories, the Paulistas’ slaving expeditions in these backlands soon assumed the sad character of pitiless massacres. Commenting on one of these episodes, Governor-General João de Lencastre wrote that a Paulista column “just now achieved a victory against the Indians, of whom they killed 136 and took 56 prisoner, not counting others who drowned in the River as they fled.”116 According to another crown official, the practical difficulties of battling the Tapuias compelled the Paulistas to opt for extermination rather than enslavement.117 The Crown itself promoted a similar strategy, recommending that enemy peoples be driven into the state of Maranhão, where they would be annihilated by local indigenous groups.118 In spite of all this, it must be acknowledged that these strategies achieved the goals of the government and met the needs of large-scale cattle ranchers.
The northern campaigns had important effects on the economy of the Paulista plateau, though not the ones participants had originally envisioned. On the one hand, in spite of the appearance in São Paulo of a few “pieces of heathen with straight hair” classified in estate inventories as legitimate slaves, the lengthy expeditions did not produce the flow of captives needed to supply the labor pool in the late seventeenth century. On the other, many of the Paulistas who participated in these campaigns did not return to São Paulo. Unable to bring back captives for their properties in the south, many soldiers ended up settling on newly conquered lands in the valleys of the São Francisco and the Açu, or even in the remote hinterland of Piauí. Many received land grants, which became the main form of compensation for mercenaries.119 Paulista veterans and renegades were to be found throughout the interior of various captaincies, founding informal settlements and dedicating themselves to cattle raising.120
If some Paulistas collaborated with the policy of extermination promoted by colonial authorities and the large landholders of the northeast, others yoked slaving to the Crown project of searching for new sources of mineral wealth. Facing an increasingly severe fiscal and commercial crisis in the second half of the seventeenth century, Crown ministers pursued various mercantilist solutions, including more intensive prospecting in the hinterlands of its tropical colonies of Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique. In the São Paulo region, the renewed search for silver, gold, and emeralds was fundamentally tied to the pursuit of indigenous captives. Once again the convergence of local and international factors had important effects on the economy of the plateau.
As in the early seventeenth century, though, avowed intentions and outcomes were not always aligned, since the Paulistas continued to enslave Indians under the cover of searching for mineral wealth. One settler, justifying the petition for lands he addressed to the Municipal Council of São Paulo, alleged that he had gone to the sertão“with the intention of making some discoveries for the aggrandizement of the royal crown, of which he found nothing but heathen of diverse nations.”121 For most Paulistas, Indians were the true riches to be extracted from the interior – “red gold” in the apt expression of Antonio Vieira. Interestingly, on various occasions the Crown itself acted to make the analogy less purely figurative by levying the royal fifth on captives, thereby applying a tax associated with the extraction of mineral riches.
The search for mineral wealth led to innumerable journeys to the sertão, some of them financed by the Crown, such as the expeditions of Jorge Soares de Macedo to the far south in 1679 and of Dom Rodrigo Castelo Branco to Sabarabuçu in 1681. Most, however, were privately funded because the Crown proved little disposed to make large outlays on searches that turned up more Indians than gold or precious stones, preferring to encourage such expeditions with promises of honorific titles.122
The most significant of these private expeditions was, without a doubt, that of Fernão Dias Pais, which set out from São Paulo in 1674 and remained in the backlands until its leader’s death in 1681. Setting up camp near what was believed to be Sabarabuçu, Fernão Dias and his followers sought deposits of emeralds and silver in the very hills that would begin to yield copious amounts of gold as the century came to an end. Despite Fernão Dias believing he had discovered an emerald mine, the principal return of his protracted sojourn in the sertão was the flow of captives sent on to São Paulo, which explains why the mining areas were thoroughly depopulated by the time of the gold rush of the end of the century.123 Like the adventurers who left São Paulo to fight the Bárbaros, not all of Fernão Dias Pais’s companions returned to the plateau. Some of them became the first white settlers of what would become Minas Gerais, while others moved on to more distant regions, such as the Bahian portion of the São Francisco Valley. In short, as the century came to a close, the business of backcountry slaving – so fundamentally important to a once flourishing economy – was coming to a slow end of its own.
The process of recruiting indigenous labor thus came full circle over the course of the seventeenth century. The century had begun with the convergence of mining interests and the search for captives, and so it ended. Until the end of the century, when slaving was definitively supplanted by mining, the frequent expeditions to the wilderness both reflected and affected the needs and structure of the economy of the plateau. At the beginning, before the wholesale destruction of the Guarani, the colonists were restricted to small agricultural endeavors and to sending modest quantities of cured meats and quince paste to market on the coast, activities that required little labor. The rapid growth of the captive population due to the attacks on the Guarani missions and villages made possible larger, more labor-intensive agricultural enterprises. The crisis in the labor supply, which began in the 1640s and became more acute thereafter, compelled many colonists to take up other economic activities, such as cattle raising, in order to maximize the little labor available to them.
Ultimately, the principal function of the expeditions was the physical reproduction of the labor force and not, as historiographical convention would have it, to supply plantations along the coast, though some unfortunate victims were delivered to sugar planters. Thus, unlike other systems of slaving and labor supply – the African slave trade being the most noteworthy example – the Paulistas did not function as middlemen in the trade in captives, but were both suppliers and consumers of labor generated within an integrated system. While on the one hand, the Paulistas’ peculiar pattern of appropriating indigenous labor was influenced by institutional constraints on Indian slavery; on the other, it was always the most economical means of fulfilling their needs. The viability of this scheme began to decline when distances, indigenous resistance, and outfitting costs increased. The result of this process was, inevitably, a steep decline in the returns on expeditions. Slave-hunting on the sertão, then, was not a business in the same sense that the African slave trade was. But even if the two colonial enterprises were organized quite differently, each played a fundamental role in the creation of a slave society.
Notes
1.For a well-executed summary of the traditional interpretation, see Myriam Ellis, “O bandeirantismo na expansão geográfica do Brasil,” in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (ed.), História geral da civilização brasileira, t. 1: Época colonial (São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1960), vol. 1, 273–296
2.Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, entry “Sousa, Francisco de.” On these early, practical experiences, see Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme, Informações sobre as minas de São Paulo: a expulsão dos jesuítas do Colégio de São Paulo, ed. Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1946); Myriam Ellis, “Pesquisas sobre a existência do ouro e da prata no planalto paulista nos séculos XVI e XVII,” Revista de História 1 (1950): 51–71; Lucy de Abreu Maffei and Arlinda Rocha Nogueira, “O ouro na capitania de São Vicente nos séculos XVI e XVII,” Anais do Museu Paulista 20 (1966): 7–136.
3.On Santo Amaro, see Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, “A fábrica de ferro de Santo Amaro,” Digesto Econômico, Jan.–Feb. 1948, 78–81. The hypothesis, doubtful at best, of the founding of a town called São Felipe, is discussed in Aluísio de Almeida, “A fundação de Sorocaba,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal 57 (May 1939): 197–202, and Neme, Notas de revisão, 341–350.
4.Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, 393–396; Orville Derby, “As bandeiras paulistas de 1601 a 1604,” RIHGSP 8 (1903): 399–423. Interestingly, this expedition was on the right track, since 70 leagues’ further march would have put them in the area where emeralds and gold were found in the 1670s and 1690s; this distance falls far short of the headwaters of the São Francisco, though.
5.These Tememinó should not be confused with the Tememinó of Guanabara Bay, who were allies of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. The name turns up in different places at various points in early Euro–indigenous encounters. It meant something like “grandson” or “descendant,” offering an interesting point to the term Tamoio, which meant “grandfather” or “ancestor.”
6.Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, offers the best overview of the expeditions, while Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay’s chaotically organized História geral das bandeiras paulistas, 11 vols. (São Paulo: H. L. Canton, 1924–1950) remains useful as well. For a summary listing of seventeenth-century expeditions and a note on sources, see John Monteiro, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century: Economy and Society” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1985), 416–426.
7.CMSP-Atas, 2:46–47, Nov. 14, 1598.
8.CMSP-Atas, 2:112–115, Nov. 24, 1604.
9.Hélio Abranches Viotti, “A aldeia de Maniçoba e a fundação de Itu,” RIHGSP 71 (1974): 389–401. On the trail to Paraguay in the sixteenth century, called Peabiru (among other names), see Neme, Notas de revisão, passim. This path may have followed a route used by Guarani migrants in precolonial times.
10.CMSP-Atas, 2:184–185, Jan. 7, 1607.
11.Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana histórica e genealógica, ed. Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay, 5th edn., 3 vols. (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1980 [1926]), 1:79.
12.Governor Diego Negrón to the King, Jan. 8, 1612, AMP 1, pt. 2: 156–157. These intermediaries were sometimes referred to as mus. An interesting discussion may be found in Jaime Cortesão, Raposo Tavares e a formação territorial do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1958), esp. chap. 3; see also Carlos Henrique Davidoff, Bandeirantismo: verso e reverso (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982).
13.Account of Dec. 9, 1594, ARSI Brasilia 3(2), fol. 358.
14.Inventory of Francisco Ribeiro, 1615, IT, 4:13.
15.Will of Manuel Pinto Suniga, 1627, IT, 7:336. The beads mentioned in the will, called avelórios, probably made of glass, were also used in the African slave trade. More details on the goods exchanged in southern Brazil are found in “Processo das despesas feitas por Martim de Sá, no Rio de Janeiro, 1628–1633,” Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 59 (1937): 5–186.
16.“Descripção que faz o capitão Miguel Ayres Maldonado e o capitão Jozé de Castilho Pinto e seus companheiros dos trabalhos e fadigas das suas vidas, que tiveram nas conquistas da capitania do Rio de Janeiro e São Vicente, com a gentilidade e com os piratas n’esta costa” (1661), Revista Trimensal do Instituto Historico e Geographico Brazileiro 56, pt. 1 (1893): 352.
17.Jácome Monteiro, “Relação da província do Brasil, 1610,” in Leite, História, 8:396.
18.Earlier accounts also showed a favorable view of the Kayapó, also known as “Ibirajaras.” See, for example, José de Anchieta to Loyola, Sept. 1, 1554, MB, 2:117–118. For a well-reasoned assessment of the transformation of relations between the Portuguese and the Kayapó, see Mário Neme, “Dados para a história dos índios caiapó,” Anais do Museu Paulista 23 (1969): 101–147.
19.The so-called Port of Patos, often confused with the Patos Lagoon of present-day Rio Grande do Sul, actually refers to the locale subsequently occupied by the town of Laguna (in the present-day Brazilian state of Santa Catarina). See “Informação do mestre-de-campo Diogo Pinto do Rego,” Sept. 16, 1745, IT, 27:317, where Laguna is clearly identified as the Patos Lagoon of earlier colonial-era documents. Also, Hermann von Ihering, “Os indios patos e o nome da Lagoa dos Patos,” Revista do Museu Paulista 7 (1907): 31–45.
20.Pedro Rodrigues to João Alvares, June 15, 1597, ARSI Brasilia 15, fol. 425.
21.Anonymous, “Relação certa do modo com que no Brasil se conquistam e cativam os indios,” n.d. ARSI-FG, Missiones 721/I. The context suggests that this document was written by Father João de Almeida, S. J.
22.Jerônimo Rodrigues, “Relação sobre a missão dos Carijós, 1605–1607,” in Serafim Leite (ed.), Novas cartas jesuíticas (São Paulo: Nacional, 1940), 196–246. Similar accusations were made some years later against the cacique Parapopi, probably in the same region. Letter of Francisco Ximenes, Feb. 4, 1635, in Mss. de Angelis, 3:100. The cultural and demographic effects of the trade in indigenous slaves has been the object of an interesting ethnohistorical literature; see, among others, Linda A. Newson, The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras under Spanish Rule (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986); David R. Radell, “The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua During the Sixteenth Century,” in William M. Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Mary W. Helms, “Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in an Expanding Population,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39/2 (1983): 179–197; Nádia Farage, As muralhas dos sertões: os povos indígenas do Rio Branco e a colonização (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991); David G. Sweet, “A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Amazon Valley, 1640–1750” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974). See also my article comparing São Paulo and Maranhão: “Escravidão indígena e despovoamento: São Paulo e Maranhão no século XVII,” in Jill Dias (ed.), Brasil nas vésperas do mundo moderno, (Lisbon: Comissão dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1992), 137–167.
23.Simão Pinheiro, “Informação das ocupações dos padres e irmãos do Rio de Janeiro,” c. 1619, ARSI Brasilia 3(1), fols. 199–201v. It is worth noting that similar accusations of corrupt authorities’ connivance in the illegal trade in indigenous captives were made in colonial Maranhão. See Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” and Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena e despovoamento.”
24.Pedro Rodrigues to João Alvares, June 15, 1597, ARSI Brasilia 15, fol. 424v.
25.“Devassa tirada sobre a morte de um indio principal, Timacaúna, por uns pombeiros dos brancos,” June 5, 1623, AHU-SP, doc. 3.
26.On pombeiros in the context of Portuguese colonialism, see Cortesão, Raposo Tavares, 194, and Edmundo Zenha, Mamelucos (São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 1970), 52–53.
27.“Matrícula da gente carijó,” 1615, CMSP-Registro, 7:115–157.
28.According to Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, this pattern emerged as early as the sixteenth century, following the cuñajazgo (female labor) structure of Spanish Paraguay. Holanda, “Expansão paulista em fins do século XVI e princípios do século XVII,” Boletim do Instituto de Administração 29 (1948): 3–23 (at 14–15). The Portuguese Jesuit Francisco de Oliveira, assessing the character of the Paulistas in a public inquest, explained the sexual imbalance thus: “[The Paulistas] go about in concubinage with the heathen women, from whom they bring children to the settlement, and to be able to do this at greater ease, they kill the husbands.” Sworn statement of Francisco de Oliveira, June 5, 1630, ARSI-FG, Collegia 203/1588/12, doc. 2.
29.Lourenço de Mendonça, “Súplica a Sua Magestade,” 1637, IHGB, lata 219, doc. 17. This is a nineteenth-century copy of a document held probably in Spain. On the author of the “Súplica,” a controversial figure in Rio de Janeiro in his time, see Cortesão, Raposo Tavares, 253. The immediate impact of this complaint in São Paulo may be judged by the proceedings of the Municipal Council meeting of Mar. 4, 1635 (CMSP-Atas, 4:245). The author probably was referring to the expedition of Luís Dias Leme, which indeed was uncharacteristically large. In 1635, with the authorization of the governor of São Vicente, Dias Leme led around 200 Portuguese and their Indians to the Patos region. There, with the assistance of the cacique Aracambi, the Portuguese took many Carijó and Araxá captives. Dias Leme, Fernão Dias Pais’s uncle, built seagoing vessels for regional trade in Santos. On the expedition, see the proceedings of May 12, 1635 (CMSP-Atas, 4:252–253); Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, 212; Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, chap. “Lemes,” vol. 3; Luiz Gonzaga Jaeger, As invasões bandeirantes no Rio Grande do Sul, 1635–1641 (Porto Alegre: Ginásio Estadual Anchieta, 1940); and Aurélio Porto, História das missões orientais do Uruguai (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1943).
30.CMSP-Atas, 2:138–139, 1603. Or, as Richard Morse put it: “It may well even be that except for its Jesuit missionary enclaves the Paulista-Paraguay region had a roughly homogenous society and culture in colonial times.” Morse, introduction to Richard M. Morse (ed.), The Bandeirantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders (New York: Knopf, 1965), 25. For an economic analysis of commercial relations during this period, see Alice P. Canabrava, O comércio português no Rio da Prata: 1580–1640, 2nd edn. (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1984 [1944]).
31.The Spanish term reducciones derived from the notion that non-Christian groups had to be “reduced” to live according to the civil and ecclesiastical codes of a Christian society – ad ecclesiam et vitam civilem reducti, as it were. Clovis Lugon, A república comunista-cristã dos Guaranis, 1610–1678, trans. Álvaro Cabral (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1968), 30.
32.For a general, though superficial background on the Guairá region, see Ramón Indalecio Cardozo, El Guairá: historia de la antigua provincia, 1554–1676 (Asunción: El Arte, 1970). Interesting discussions of the Paraguayan economy during this era may be found in Elman R. Service, Spanish–Guarani Relations in Early Colonial Paraguay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954); Regina A. Fonseca Gadelha, As missões jesuíticas do Itatim: um estudo das estruturas sócio-econômicas do Paraguai, séculos XVI e XVII (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1980); Juan Carlos Garavaglia, “Um modo de produção subsidiária: a organização econômica das comunidades guaranizadas durante os séculos XVII–XVIII na formação Alto-Peruano-Rio-Platense,” in Philomena Gebran (ed.), Conceito de modo de produção (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978), 247–275; Bartomeu Melià, El Guaraní conquistado y reducido, 2nd edn. (Asunción: Universidad Católica, 1988 [1986]); and John Monteiro, “Os Guarani e a história do Brasil meridional, séculos XVI–XVII,” in Cunha (ed.), História dos índios no Brasil, 475–498. Ample evidence of the conflicts between Jesuits and Spanish royal and ecclesiastical authorities in Paraguay can be found in ARSI Paraquaria 11.
33.Anonymous, “Daños que han hecho los portugueses de la villa de San Pablo del Brasil a los indios de la provincia del Paraguay y su remedio,” c. 1632, in Pablo Pastells, Historia de la Compañía de Jesus en la provincia del Paraguay, 8 vols. (Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1912–1949): 1:471–472.
34.A useful discussion of this theme can be found in Davidoff, Bandeirantismo, 55ff.
35.Catalogus Rerum, ARSI Paraquaria 4 (1), fols. 109–109v. This report may be biased, in the sense that it attempted to show the inadequacy of the stipend, and because other accounts of the era paint a more optimistic picture.
36.Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, “Carta anua,” 1628, in Mss. de Angelis, 1:259–298.
37.Diego de Salazar, “Carta anua,” 1626–1627, AMP 1, pt. 2 (1922): 213; Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire du Paraguay 3 vols. (Paris: Chez Didot, 1756), 2:309–310.
38.Charlevoix, Histoire, 2:221.
39.Sworn statement of Pedro Homem Albernaz, Apr. 18, 1630, ARSI-FG, Collegia 203/1588/12, doc. 2. It is noteworthy that several companies of troops were organized in São Paulo during these years in response to the Dutch invasion, but few ever saw action in the northeast, their members turning their attention to slaving instead. On the organization of four companies under the leadership of the backwoodsman Antonio Pedroso de Alvarenga, see CMSP-Registro, 2:6, Mar. 23, 1638. For a general study of the captaincy’s military organization, see Nanci Leonzo, “As companhias de ordenanças na capitania de São Paulo, das origens ao governo do Morgado de Matheus,” Coleção Museu Paulista. Série de História 6 (1977): 123–239.
40.Justo Mansilla and Simon Maceta, “Relación de los agravios,” AMP 1, pt. 2 (1922): 247–270. This is the best account of the Raposo Tavares expedition. Davidoff, Bandeirantismo, provides a fine discussion of the role of violence in this and other expeditions.
41.D. Luis Cespedes y Xeria, “Testimonio de una relación de los sucesos ocurridos durante un viaje desde que salió del rio Paranapane [sic],” c. 1628, AMP 1, pt. 2 (1922): 211.
42.CMSP-Atas, 3:282, Oct. 2, 1627. This more aggressive posture on the part of the Municipal Council has bolstered Cortesão (in Raposo Tavares) and others in their belief that genuine geopolitical motives underlay the movement, but in reality it reflected more specifically the collective fear of losing the principal source of labor for São Paulo. The term “repartimento” refers to the Spanish American mode of forced indigenous labor known as repartimiento.
43.CMSP-Atas, 3:76, Jan. 13, 1624.
44.CMSP-Registro, 1:446–447, Oct. 27, 1624. In fact, the seventeenth century was punctuated by periodic outbreaks of disease, above all measles and smallpox. Significant epidemics were reported in 1611, 1624, 1654, 1666, 1676, 1695, and 1700. See Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1957), 105; Hemming, Red Gold, 139–146; Dauril Alden and Joseph C. Miller, “Out of Africa: The Slave Trade and the Transmission of Smallpox to Brazil, 1560–1831,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18/2 (1987): 195–224.
45.Anonymous, “Relação certa,” ARSI-FG, Missiones 721/I.
46.Nicolas Durán to Francisco Crespo, Sept. 24, 1627, AMP 2, pt. 1 (1925): 169–171.
47.Real cedula, Sept. 16, 1639, in Pastells, Historia, 2:32–34. For a discussion of these figures and their economic significance, see Roberto Simonsen, História econômica do Brasil, 1500–1820, 8th edn. (São Paulo: Nacional, 1978 [1937]), 245–246.
48.Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, “Primeira catechese dos indios selvagens feita pelos padres da Companhia de Jesus,” Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 6 (1878–1879): 91–366 (at 235–236).
49.“Informe de Manuel Juan de Morales de las cosas de San Pablo y maldades de sus moradores,” 1636, Mss. de Angelis, 1:182–193.
50.Mendonça, “Súplica,” IHGB, lata 219, doc. 17, fol. 8.
51.Governor Avila to Crown, Dec. 10, 1637, in Pastells, Historia, 1:547.
52.Nicolás del Techo, Historia provinciæ Paraquariæ Societatis Jesv (Liège: Joan. Mathiae Hovii, 1673), 41.
53.“Relación de los portugueses que en compañía de Antonio Raposo Tavares deshicieron tres reducciones de indios carios,” n.d., AMP 2, pt. 1 (1925): 245–246.
54.André Fernandes and Manuel Preto were held to be the scourge of the missions in subsequent Jesuit correspondence. The testimony of two Guarani headmen, taken in Buenos Aires nearly thirty years later, attributed much of the destruction of their people to Manuel Preto. “Declarações de indígenas, relativas a prisioneiros mulatos ou portuguêses de São Paulo, 28-IV-1657 [sic]” (Apr. 28–29, 1656, according to transcribed documents), in Mss. de Angelis, 4:326–333. On the life and times of Manuel Preto, see Victor de Azevedo, Manuel Preto, “O Herói de Guairá” (São Paulo: Governo do Estado, 1983). The map presented in Hemming, Red Gold, xx–xxi, provides the approximate locations of individual missions, as well as information on when they were founded and destroyed.
55.Letter of Diego de Boroa, Mar. 4, 1637, and account of Pedro Mola, Mar. 24, 1637, in Mss. de Angelis, 3:143–152.
56.The brief is summarized in Thomas, Política indigenista, 191.
57.For an excellent discussion of the militarization of the missions, see Arno Alvarez Kern, Missões: uma utopia política (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1982), 149–207.
58.Report of the Cabildo Eclesiastico of Asunción, Apr. 18, 1639, in Mss. de Angelis, 3:269.
59.Claudio Ruyer, “Relación de la guerra y victoria alcanzada contra los portugueses del Brasil, año 1641 en 6 de abril,” RIHGSP 10 (1905): 529–553. It would appear from the documents that the defenders of Mbororé were not Guarani but in fact Itatim, a group described by the Jesuits as Tememinó. See, for example, Diego Ferreira, “Carta anua,” Mss. de Angelis, 2:29–49.
60.Lupercio Zurbano, “Carta anua,” 1642 (Pastells, Historia, 2:342).
61.Francisco Ferreira, “La causa del Brasil estar en el triste estado en que está son las injusticias notables que en el se hacen contra los indios,” n.d., ARSI-FG, Missiones 721/I.
62.“Información sobre los excessos que cometieron en las reducciones,” Sept. 17, 1629, AMP 1, pt. 2 (1922): 239–246.
63.The best general treatment of these international events and their impact on local societies is Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (London: Athlone, 1952).
64.Inacio de Tolosa to General Acquaviva, Aug. 19, 1597, ARSI Brasilia 15, fols. 433–433v. On the use of Indian labor in the sugar economy, see Schwartz, “Indian Labor,” esp. 72–78.
65.Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, 9.
66.Adriaen van der Dussen, “Relatório sobre as capitanias conquistadas no Brasil,” in José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello (ed.), Fontes para a história do Brasil holandês, vol. 1: A economia açucareira (Recife: Museu do Açúcar, 1981), 186. Before the Dutch invasion, a Jesuit wrote that the main activity of the settlers in Maranhão was enslaving Indians to supply Pernambuco. Ferreira, “La causa,” ARSI-FG, Missiones 721/I.
67.“Assentos de batismos, casamentos e obitos feitos pelos padres jesuitas na igreja de São Francisco Xavier [Engenho Velho],” 1641–1759, ACMRJ, uncatalogued.
68.Transport costs were apparently quite high relative to the value of the slave. In 1701, for example, Father Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida registered in his account book that he had spent 11$000 to bring an African slave from Bahia; however, at the height of the trade in Indian slaves, in the 1630s, indigenous captives were sold in Rio de Janeiro for as little as 4$800. Even allowing for the fact that the trip from Bahia to São Paulo was more costly than that from the principal slaving sites of the 1630s to Rio de Janeiro, as well as the time elapsed between these two accounts, it seems clear that the Indian slave trade could not have operated on the scale suggested by Simonsen, among others. On prices in Rio de Janeiro, see Ruiz de Montoya to Juan de Ornos, Jan. 25, 1638, Mss. de Angelis, 3:291–293. On the African slave, see José Pedro Leite Cordeiro (ed.), “Documentação sobre o capitão-mor Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida, morador que foi na vila de Parnaíba,” RIHGSP 58 (1960): 510. It should be noted that Cordeiro wrongly attributes this document to the governor of São Vicente, but in truth it was the account book of his son and namesake, the priest Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida, one of southern Brazil’s richest merchants during the period.
69.Inventory of Beatriz Bicudo, 1632, IT, 11:89–96.
70.For a summary listing of these expeditions, see Monteiro, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century,” 419–425.
71.Antonio de Araújo, “Informação da entrada que se pode fazer da vila de São Paulo ao grande rio Pará,” in Serafim Leite, Páginas de história do Brasil (São Paulo: Nacional, 1937), 103–110. A detailed and measured discussion of the expeditions to the Paraupava may be found in Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, As bandeiras do Paraupava (São Paulo: Prefeitura Municipal, 1979).
72.Inventory of Catarina Tavares, Parnaíba, 1671, AESP-INP, cx. 12.
73.The best contemporary account is the letter of Antonio Vieira to the Provincial of Brazil, n.d. [1654], in Vieira, Cartas, 3 vols., ed. João Lúcio de Azevedo (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1925–1928), 1:383–416. See also Jaime Cortesão, “A maior bandeira do maior bandeirante,” Revista de História 22 (1961): 3–27; and Myriam Ellis, “A presença de Raposo Tavares na expansão paulista,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 9 (1970): 23–61.
74.The first expeditions to Minas Gerais are listed in Oiliam José, Indígenas de Minas Gerais: aspectos sociais, políticos e etnológicos (Belo Horizonte: Movimento-Perspectiva, 1965). Afonso Botelho de S. Paio e Sousa, “Notícia da conquista, e descobrimento dos sertões do Tibagi,” Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 76 (1956): 1–290 (at 76), presents an interesting account of a 1644 expedition to Sabarabuçu, written by Luís de Góis Sanches, which shows the new geographic orientation of slaving activities and the reproduction of violent patterns in new areas. On the westward movement, see Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s posthumously published O extremo oeste (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986) and, with particular reference to Sorocaba, Luiz Castanho de Almeida, “Bandeirantes no ocidente,” RIHGSP 40 (1941): 343–381. Antonio Pires de Campos, who was among the men who discovered the Cuiabá mines, left a description of the Indians who inhabited the area, enumerating several groups that are difficult to identify today: “Breve noticia que dá o capitão Antonio Pires de Campos do gentio barbaro que ha na derrota da viagem das Minas do Cuyabá e seu reconcavo,” RIHGB 25 (1862): 437–449.
75.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 3:223.
76.Despite its size, little is known about this expedition, which was considered by some to be a simple exaggeration on the part of Alfredo Ellis Júnior, who took as basis for its existence a passing mention in the documentation of the Municipal Council of São Paulo that states that “many Indians went to the wilderness in the company of some colonists.” CMSP-Atas, 6a:496, July 3, 1666; Ellis, O bandeirismo paulista e o recuo do meridiano, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Nacional, 1934 [1923]), 258. However, the discovery of new documentation, brought to light here for the first time, indicates that Ellis was on the right track.
77.Catarina do Prado v. Bartolomeu Bueno Cacunda, 1682, AESP-AC, cx. 1, doc. 14.
78.Will and inventory of Manuel Lopes, 1666–1668, AESP-INP, cx. 9.
79.These men were among the larger contributors on the lists of the Donativo Real of 1679–1682 (see discussion in Chapter 6). “Livro do rol das pessoas para o pedido real do ano de 1679,” AHMSP, CM-1-19. Further biographical information may be found in Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes; Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulista; and Luiz Gonzaga da Silva Leme, Genealogia paulistana, 9 vols. (São Paulo: Duprat, 1903–1905).
80.Will of José Ortiz de Camargo, 1658, AESP-INP, cx. 7. Despite having drawn up his will in 1658, shortly before a voyage to the sertão, Camargo would not die until 1663.
81.Domingos de Gois vs. Antonio da Cunha de Abreu, in inventory of João Furtado, 1653, AESP-INP, cx. 1.
82.Antonio Raposo Barreto to Pedro João Malio, n.d., in inventory of Antonio Raposo Barreto, Taubaté, 1684, Museu de Taubaté, Inventários e testamentos, cx. 1, doc. 10.
83.CMSP-Atas, 7:92, Feb. 1, 1681.
84.Letter of Antonio Pais de Sande, 1692, quoted in José Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos novos e o comércio do Atlântico meridional, com enfoque nas capitanias do sul, 1530–1680 (São Paulo: Pioneira, 1978), 99.
85.Will of Antonio de Oliveira Cordeiro, Jundiaí, 1711, AESP-INP, cx. 24. To a certain degree, the relationship between the armador and the backwoodsman resembled the relationship between outfitters and ship captains in the Portuguese trade in slaves in the South Atlantic, though the respective destinations of the captives involved was a major difference. For an interesting discussion of the organizational aspects of the African slave trade during this period, see Joseph C. Miller, “Capitalism and Slaving: The Financial and Commercial Organization of the Angolan Slave Trade, according to the Accounts of Antonio Coelho Guerreiro (1684–1692),” International Journal of African Historical Studies 17/1 (1984): 1–56.
86.IT, 36:122–123.
87.Cordeiro (ed.), “Documentação sobre o capitão-mor,” 528–529.
88.Will of Francisco Borges, 1649, IT, 39:89.
89.Will of Domingos da Rocha, 1683, AESP-INP, cx. 17 (my emphasis).
90.Inventory of Jerônimo de Lemos, 1679, AESP-IPO, 13.839; will of Luis Eanes Gil, 1681, IT, 21:143.
91.Inventory of Manuel Correia de Andrade, Taubaté, 1673, Museu de Taubaté, Inventários e testamentos, cx. 1, doc. 6.
92.Taunay, História geral, 4:271–274; Manuel Eufrásio de Azevedo Marques, Apontamentos históricos, geográficos, biográficos, estatísticos e noticiosos da província de São Paulo, 3rd edn., 2 vols. (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1980 [1879]), 2:341–343. Both date the last of these documents to 1685, though the context makes clear that it refers to the bandeira of 1666; Azevedo Marques was the last to transcribe the document from the original.
93.Will and inventory of Maria Bicudo, Parnaíba, 1660, IT, 16:72, 83–84.
94.Will of Manuel Correia de Sá, Parnaíba, 1677, AESP-INP, cx. 15.
95.See, for example, Domingos de Gois v. Antonio da Cunha de Abreu, in inventory of João Furtado, 1653, AESP-INP, cx. 1; João Rodrigues da Fonseca v. João Pires Rodrigues, AESP-AC, cx. 6033-1; and “Termo de concerto” between Manuel Varoja and his mother-in-law, Mariana Rodrigues, AESP-Notas São Paulo, Jan. 27, 1685.
96.Will of Manuel Correia de Sá, Parnaíba, 1677, AESP-INP, cx. 15.
97.Inventories of Manuel Cardoso and Catarina Rodrigues, 1674 and 1675, AESP-INP, cx. 14.
98.Will of Francisco Cubas Preto, 1672, IT, 18:324.
99.Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 13–148, offers a deep, stimulating discussion of this issue.
100.Catarina do Prado v. Bartolomeu Bueno Cacunda, 1682, AESP-AC, cx. 1, doc. 14; Sebastião Rodrigues v. heirs of Antonio Pedroso Leite, 1678, AESP-AC, cx. 6034–2.
101.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 1:103.
102.Francisco Bueno de Camargo v. heirs of Manuel Pinto Guedes, 1683, AESP-AC, cx. 6033-1. See also Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, 124, 433, for information on the 1663 expedition to Batatais.
103.Although Capistrano de Abreu identified the importance of the subject for the study of colonial history, there are few works of real value on the Indian wars of the late seventeenth century. A good, concise survey can be found in Stuart B. Schwartz’s introduction to Schwartz (ed.), A Governor and his Image in Baroque Brazil: The Funereal Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonça (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), while Ivan Alves Filho, Memorial dos Palmares (Rio de Janeiro: Xenon, 1988), presents new documents and interesting ideas, despite focusing more closely on episodes related to the destruction of the escaped-slave community at Palmares. As could not but be the case, the Paulista side of the story is told in Taunay, “A guerra dos barbaros,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal 22 (April 1936): 7–331, while the Indian angle is approached by Hemming, Red Gold, chap. 16, and in a more synthetic form by Beatriz G. Dantas, José Augusto L. Sampaio, and Maria Rosário G. de Carvalho, “Os povos indígenas no nordeste brasileiro,” in Cunha (ed.), História dos índios do Brasil, 431–456. An excellent study of the effects of the expansion of cattle raising on indigenous peoples may be found in Luiz R. B. Mott, “Os índios e a pecuária nas fazendas de gado do Piauí colonial,” Revista de Antropologia 22 (1979): 61–78.
104.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 1:235–236; Carvalho Franco, Dicionário de bandeirantes, 44–45; and Cortesão, Raposo Tavares, chap. “A bandeira em marcha.”
105.Governor Barreto to the Capitão-Mór of São Vicente, Sept. 21, 1657, BNRJ-DH, 3:395–398.
106.CMSP-Atas, 6a:81–82, Mar. 17, 1658.
107.CMSP-Atas, 6:206, May 26, 1670.
108.Governor Sousa Freire to Pedro Vaz de Barros, Nov. 15, 1669, BNRJ-DH, 6:135.
109.Cartas Patentes to Antonio [sic] Ribeiro Baião (São Miguel), Manuel Rodrigues de Arzão (Barueri), Henrique da Cunha Machado (Conceição), and Pascoal Rodrigues da Costa (Pinheiros), Oct. 5, 1671, BNRJ, 1.2.9, docs. 140–143; and “Portaria para o provedor mor fretar embarcação para os prisioneiros que tomaram na conquista,” Jan. 19, 1673, BNRJ, 7.1.30, doc. 815.
110.Will of Feliciano Cardoso, 1673, AESP-INP, cx. 7.
111.Governor Mendonça to Municipal Council of São Paulo, Feb. 11, 1673, and to Crown, July 10, 1673, BNRJ-DH, 6:239–241, 252.
112.“Papel feito a Sua Alteza contra Estevão Ribeirão Baião sobre as insolências que com outros de São Paulo fazia ao gentio para os cativar e vender,” n.d., Ajuda, cód. 50-v-37, doc. 80.
113.Governor (actually, an interim junta) to various Paulistas, Feb. 20, 1677, BNRJ-DH, 11:71–74.
114.Frei Ressurreição to Crown, Nov. 30, 1688, BNRJ-DH, 11:142–245; and Governor Matias da Cunha to the Municipal Council of São Paulo, BNRJ-DH, 11:139.
115.Hemming, Red Gold, 351–376.
116.Governor Lencastre to Crown, July 10, 1699, Ajuda, cód. 49-X-32, fol. 487v.
117.Report of José Lopes de Ulhoa, Mar. 22, 1688, AHU, Rio Grande do Norte, cx. 1, doc. 18.
118.Crown to Governor Lencastre, Mar. 10, 1695, AMP 3 (1927): 307.
119.Toward the end of the century, Crown authorities began to offer land instead of slaving privileges to the mercenaries (Governor Lencastre to Municipal Council of São Paulo, Oct. 19, 1697, BNRJ-DH, 11:254). Royal grants of land for cattle ranching were usually very large. For example, Francisco Dias de Siqueira received one measuring 1 by 5 leagues at Canindeí, near the São Francisco River in the interior of Bahia (AESP-Notas São Paulo, 1686).
120.Governor Camara Coutinho to Crown, 1692, Ajuda, cód. 51-v-42.
121.Land Grant by Municipal Council of São Paulo to Pedro de la Guarda, June 25, 1684, in Cartas de datas de terra, 20 vols. (São Paulo: Departamento de Cultura, 1937–1940), 3:167–168.
122.While the Crown spent large sums on the northeastern campaigns, expeditions to the south received relatively few resources. For example, the outfitting costs of the Jorge Soares Macedo expedition came to 3 contos de réis, while nearly 29 contos were spent keeping the Paulistas on the field in Rio Grande do Norte. CMSP-Atas, 6:495, Dec. 31, 1678; and “Relação das despesas do terço paulista,” Aug. 19, 1702, IEB, ms. 4–25.
123.It seems likely that this expedition discovered gold, which would explain the murder of D. Rodrigo Castelo Branco at the hands of Fernão Dias Pais’s son-in-law, Manuel da Borba Gato. Borba Gato spent the twenty years following the crime hiding out in the Mantiqueira Range, where he became the leader of an Indian group, maintaining a safe distance between himself and royal justice. When the principal deposits of gold ore were discovered, the Crown – in need of Borba Gato’s knowledge – pardoned him, and he soon became one of the wealthiest men in the new gold-mining region. The saga of Borba Gato is told in the Costa Matoso codex, Biblioteca Municipal de São Paulo. For details on the Dias Pais expedition, see Manuel Cardozo, “Dom Rodrigo de Castel-Blanco and the Brazilian El Dorado, 1673–1682,” The Americas 1/2 (Oct. 1944): 131–159; and Eduardo Canabrava Barreiros, Roteiro das esmeraldas: a bandeira de Fernão Dias Pais (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1979), which focuses on its geographic aspects.