3

The Granary of Brazil

Late in the eighteenth century, writing to congratulate the governor of São Paulo on the opening of a new road connecting São Paulo and Santos, the chronicler Frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus evoked the captaincy’s better days, “when, as Sicily was to Rome, it was called the granary of Brazil, since wheat, meats, and many other provisions were sent from here to all of the settlements of the State, when navigation from the Port of Santos to the Kingdoms of Portugal and Angola was frequent.”¹ In another work, Frei Gaspar elaborated upon this nostalgic reflection, identifying the fundamental bases of the Paulista economy:

The old Paulistas did not lack for servants because, as the captivity of Indians captured in just war and the administration of the same were permitted to them by our laws, and those of Spain, when we were subject to her, according to the circumstances prescribed in the same laws, so they had large numbers of Indians, as well as black slaves from the coast of Africa, with which everyone had many lands cultivated and lived in opulence.²

This vital connection between Indian slavery and colonial production – so evident to the chroniclers and genealogists of the eighteenth century – has been relegated to oblivion by modern historians. By uncovering the essential link between so-called bandeirantismo and the agrarian evolution of the plateau, demonstrating the interdependence of the process of slave-hunting and that of production, we may view the seventeenth-century history of São Paulo in a different light. The emergence of commercial agriculture on the plateau, particularly in wheat production, explains a good deal about the constitution of colonial society in the region, as the presence of large numbers of captive Indians enabled the articulation of the economy of the plateau with that of the coast, while at the same time resulting in an extremely unequal distribution of wealth in that society.

A Space for Development

The definitive conquest of the Indians of the plateau in the late sixteenth century opened the way for a new phase in the development of the colony. No longer restricted to the immediate environs of the town of São Paulo, the colonists began to occupy and exploit surrounding lands. At the same time, as we saw in the previous chapter, they sought to establish a permanent, bonded labor force of Guarani Indians brought forcibly from areas to the south and southwest.

As the seventeenth century began, these new patterns of settlement and labor recruitment were spurred by two external impulses. First, the rapid growth of the sugar economy after 1580, particularly in the captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia, and, to a lesser extent, Rio de Janeiro, led to the emergence of new opportunities for cattle ranchers and producers of basic foodstuffs in other areas.³ The growing plantation market, as well as the port towns from which sugar was shipped, with their growing slave and free populations, faced the threat of serious food shortages. In response, Paulista agriculturalists, along with those of southern Bahia, Espírito Santo, and, later, Maranhão, redirected their activities toward this incipient intra-colonial trade circuit. Second, and more immediately, Crown efforts to create an integrated agricultural and mining economy in the captaincies of the south beginning in the last decade of the sixteenth century had the dual effect of stimulating production for the market and intensifying the recruitment of Indian labor.

In short, the objectives that had lain behind the settlement of the plateau a half-century earlier only began to be realized at the beginning of the seventeenth century. While Indian slavery had developed slowly and unsteadily over the first century of the Portuguese presence in South America, now it could flourish in all its plenitude, since it was connected to a collective project of development involving colonists and the Crown. In a general sense, settlers and royal authorities recognized the intimate relationship between Indian labor and the production of a surplus, which, even when not oriented toward the commercial economy, at least could sustain a non-producing class of settlers, bureaucrats, and ecclesiastics.

By the final decades of the sixteenth century, settlers had already begun to look to the coastal market as a potential source of income. Initially focusing their efforts on raising cattle on the outskirts of the town of São Paulo, the settlers supplied the small market provided by the plantations and mills of São Vicente, the latter working once more following the end of the Tamoio War. It would seem, however, that much of the cattle that roamed the plateau belonged to coastal entrepreneurs, a matter that concerned members of the Municipal Council of São Paulo. In 1583, Council members complained that in spite of the abundance of livestock in the region, there was a shortage of meat, since all of the cattle was brought to market in Santos and São Vicente.⁴ On several occasions, the Council also had to reprimand cattle-drivers whose herds damaged croplands on their way to the trail leading to the coast. In these years, the Council registered numerous cattle brands, while tithes were paid in hides and cured meats.⁵

In the 1580s, the settlers began to occupy the lands beyond the Tamanduateí and Anhangabaú rivers, which had marked the limits of European occupation up to that point. One motive for the expansion was the exhaustion of local resources: as much is suggested by the town council’s ban on fishing using the tingui method, an indigenous technique that used a poisonous substance to kill fish, since it was leading to the extinction of the Tamanduateí’s piscifauna.⁶ In addition, the demarcation of mission-village lands in 1580 established an unmistakable legal distinction between the collective property of these reconstituted Indian communities and the private property of Portuguese settlers, opening the way for permanent white occupation. The process was slow, however. Until the end of the sixteenth century, colonists who dared settle too far from town still faced the threat of annihilation. But the major restriction on the expansion of settlement was the scarce supply of available labor, which in these years was limited to the precarious population of the three mission villages belonging to the town.

It is thus no surprise that the early settlement of new lands was limited to areas immediately abutting the town and its mission villages, at least until the early seventeenth century, when new methods of recruiting Indians and new forms of labor came to allow wider-ranging territorial expansion. Indeed, much of the land distributed between 1580 and 1600 belonged, at least in theory, to the Municipal Council of São Paulo. Although the rocio (commons) of the town was not clearly defined until 1598, the Council began distributing parcels concentrated in three areas beginning in 1583.⁷ The first soon became the bairro (rural neighborhood) of Ipiranga, situated alongside the trail linking São Paulo to the coast; the second, which lay between the town’s initial center of settlement and the Tietê River, came to be known as Guaré or Piratininga;⁸ and the third was concentrated along both banks of the Pinheiros, or Jerubatuba, River, and was closely linked to the mission village of Pinheiros. Settlers of these lands received plots of public land ranging in size from 3,000 to 48,000 square meters.⁹ The first settlers of Ipiranga, for example, each received homesteads of 12,100 square meters, which was enough for living quarters for family and slaves, as well as for planting subsistence crops.

From the outset, this first wave of territorial expansion was closely tied to the coastal economy. One of the founders of Ipiranga, Antonio de Proença, previously had settled in Santos, moving to the plateau in the early 1580s to raise cattle for the coastal market.¹⁰ It was along the Pinheiros River, though, that the strongest signs of a well-articulated commercial economy emerged. Inventories of its early settlers record the constant movement of salted meats and produce from establishments along the Pinheiros to the coast. At the same time, the regular appearance of coastal merchants in the debt and credit lists of these inventories indicates the creation of solid ties between the more prosperous producers of the São Paulo region and mercantile interests in Santos and Rio de Janeiro.¹¹

While the growth of the coastal market offered new incentives to Paulista producers, a second impulse for the economic development of the region came from the Crown, in the person of Dom Francisco de Sousa. As we saw in the previous chapter, Dom Francisco and his entourage of practical miners from Europe sought to implant a model of integrated mining, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors. In spite of efforts at exploiting placer mines at Voturuna and Jaraguá and the first experiments with iron foundries, it was in the agricultural sphere that Dom Francisco’s plan advanced furthest, if not exactly in the way he had projected. One of his explicit aims was the transformation of São Paulo into the “granary of Brazil,” in which wheat-growing estates, organized on the model of the Spanish American hacienda, would provision cities and mines. Some of his entourage introduced technical elements necessary for wheat production and processing, installing the first flour mill in 1609. The first major wheat farmers founded some of the most important lineages in São Paulo, including the Taques, Pedroso de Barros, and Arzão families, all of them initially associated with Dom Francisco.

The expansion of the labor force, stimulated by Dom Francisco de Sousa in the first decade of the seventeenth century, was another decisive element in the development of Paulista agriculture. While defending the principle of Indian liberty, Dom Francisco sought to revive the old mission-village plan. Indians brought from the sertão were to be placed in mission villages belonging to the Crown, from which they would be drafted into temporary, remunerated service to settlers and the state. To this end, Dom Francisco sponsored the establishment of the mission village of Barueri, located to the west of the town of São Paulo, relatively close to the recently discovered mines of Jaraguá and Voturuna. Initially, it would seem, the Jesuits were charged with administering the sacraments to its largely Carijó and Guaianá residents, while control over the distribution of labor remained with the Crown. These stipulations were never defined clearly, though, and so Barueri became the object of permanent conflict between private, municipal, ecclesiastical, and royal interests.¹²

By the time of his sudden death in 1611, Dom Francisco and his followers had planted the seeds for the agricultural economy that would develop over the course of the seventeenth century. They had encouraged the growth of the labor force with the creation of the mission village of Barueri, stimulated the occupation of lands beyond the Tietê and to the west of the town of São Paulo, and introduced a new staple crop that could be brought to market on the coast. But the new model soon revealed its limitations, as the expansion of agriculture made clear that local demands for labor could never be satisfied by the mission-village plan. As a result, and as the frontier of settlement extended further into the interior, the settlers came to appropriate for themselves the Indians they brought from the sertão, especially after Dom Francisco’s death, instead of handing them over to the mission villages.

Even so, since the transformation of the labor force was a cumulative process, settlement in the early part of the century remained relatively close to the mission villages. Dom Francisco and his successors may have accelerated the distribution of land through official grants known as sesmarias (the term may refer to both grants by Crown officials and the lands so bestowed), but exploitation of these lands depended upon access to Indian labor, without which they were worthless in monetary terms. Land in itself had little intrinsic value in the seventeenth century, as demonstrated by inventories of probated estates during this period: in these it was rare for lands to be assigned any monetary value at all, while records of land sales show that prices were generally quite low.¹³ Notwithstanding that fact, the existence of vast tracts of apparently unoccupied lands was a compelling attraction to settlers, one that resulted in generally dispersed settlement patterns. Still, the land question must be placed in the ideological and economic context of colonial Brazil, in which the occupation of successive agricultural frontiers – at least in areas where settlers aspired to more than mere subsistence – depended ultimately on the expansion of forced labor.

This situation was apparent to the settlers of late sixteenth-century São Paulo, and this led to an increase in the number of slaving expeditions sweeping through the vast wildernesses of Brazil. Thereafter – the year 1600 may serve as an approximate marker – territorial expansion assumed new characteristics, with modest grants of municipal lands giving way to immense sesmarias as the principal means of distributing rural landholdings. In general, a settler seeking definitive title to lands he already occupied as a squatter would petition the highest authority in the captaincy, who would most often authorize the grant in the terms of the petition. In theory, the grantee was to improve the lands granted him within a fixed period of time (usually five years) and to pay the ecclesiastical tithe on any fruits the land yielded. But these provisions were not strictly observed in Brazil. And, despite the condition that unimproved lands would revert to the Crown as idle public lands (terras devolutas), many grants remained uncultivated for generations.

Though the records of these grants for the São Paulo area are far from complete, a few conclusions can be drawn from the evidence that is available for the first half of the seventeenth century.¹⁴ Between 1600 and 1644, at least 250 grants were made, covering the townships (termos) of São Paulo, Mogi das Cruzes, and Santana de Parnaíba (lands that at that point included the territories that would become the termos of the towns of Jundiaí, Itu, and Sorocaba, which would be founded between 1655 and 1661). Of these, a significant portion measured one half-league of frontage by one-half league of sertão, for a total area of about 750 hectares. However, it is difficult to assess the exact size of a fair portion of the grants as the petitions themselves are unclear. Usually, only the size of the property’s frontage was mentioned, while its extension was described as “the sertão that is found there.” Still other petitions resorted to unusual units of measure: for example, Pedro da Silva requested a “piece of countryside that is about one arrow’s flight, a little more or a little less.”¹⁵

The uneven frequency of grants, which often appeared in concentrated clusters, is another important characteristic of the way in which lands were distributed. This clustering owed as much to successive waves of settlement as to the infrequency of visits to the plateau by the captaincy’s governors, who resided on the coast until the 1680s. One notes, for example, a cluster of grants in the Mogi das Cruzes area between 1609 and 1611, which were directly related to the founding of that town. Similarly, the great concentration of grants in 1638–1639, when Governor Antonio de Aguiar Barriga distributed large amounts of land between the Juqueri and Atibaia rivers, reveals a different strategy on the part of the settlers: much of this land was only effectively occupied in the 1660s. At the same time, significant stretches of land were given out near the mission village of Conceição dos Guarulhos, an area that was only settled by whites beginning in the 1650s. One may thus conclude that settlers also acquired sesmarias for future use.¹⁶

However, if the granting of sesmarias can elucidate the process of land alienation, it cannot satisfactorily explain patterns of settlement and territorial expansion, which were more closely linked to agricultural practices and the availability of native labor. Dispersive agricultural techniques, which followed indigenous models to some extent, led to the opening of successive areas of settlement. In the early seventeenth century, according to probate inventories, the only item of any significant value in the colonists’ property holdings was the roça planted in corn or manioc.¹⁷ The productive life of these plots rarely exceeded three years, when they would have to be abandoned in favor of virgin forest (matos maninhos) or plots that had been left fallow for several years and were now covered in secondary growth (capoeiras). Frequently, applicants for sesmarias would allege that their lands were no longer productive and that therefore it was necessary for them to expand onto an adjacent plot. Francisco de Alvarenga, among others, justified his need for new land by affirming that his current landholdings were “tired.”¹⁸ This process of abandonment and reconstitution of agricultural lands – closely resembling Indian practices – troubled royal authorities in São Paulo, who considered the constant mobility of the settlers to be excessive. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the crown judge Manuel Franco, for one, criticized the slash-and-burn technique because it compelled the settlers to constantly “move about like gypsies” (se azingaram), which presented obvious problems for a colonial bureaucracy organized to deal with permanently settled populations.¹⁹

The process of settlement also reflected different stages in the development of labor recruitment strategies. Once a well-defined system of forced native labor freed the settlers from their dependence on the mission villages, they were able to expand onto more distant lands. A new wave of settlement, which by the 1620s reached beyond the Serra da Cantareira, included the principal sites for wheat production and the largest concentrations of Indian slaves in the region. Petitions from the period are illustrative of the relationship between labor and landholding: Antonio Pedroso de Alvarenga, later one of the principal producers in the region, stated in 1638 that “he had some Indians and did not have any land on which to farm.”²⁰ Sebastião Fernandes Camacho, like Pedroso de Alvarenga a future wheat farmer, as well as the “son and grandson of settlers and conquerors of the captaincy,” outlined the relationship between labor and landholding in his own explicit terms: “he, the supplicant, is married with a wife and sons and daughters and has many heathen in his service, and he has no lands to farm and raise his livestock, from which must result much profit to the Royal Treasury.”²¹

Finally, in addition to agricultural practices and the labor issue, demographic growth was a third major factor influencing the settlement patterns of Portuguese colonists, though the available demographic data is too sparse to support definitive conclusions. It is clear that the total population of the captaincy grew rapidly during the first half of the seventeenth century. While this growth was primarily due to the great influx of Guarani captives through 1640, the European population increased as the result of two waves of immigration, the first of new Portuguese elements at the beginning of the century, the second of Spanish-Paraguayan colonists between 1620 and 1640, with the latter becoming integrated into the Bueno, Camargo, and Fernandes families.²² It is very likely that this general pattern of population growth was reversed in the later seventeenth century with the decline of slaving expeditions and out-migration by both the white and indigenous population.

In the first half of the century, however, population growth put a strain on existing resources, stimulating territorial expansion. In spite of the presence of seemingly infinite stretches of unoccupied territory, some documents indicate that there was a shortage of land available to settlers, particularly beginning in the 1640s. By that point, the flood of sesmaria grants distributed in the late 1630s had placed the best lands in the hands of a few settlers. Though much of this land remained unused, its owners defended their property rights energetically, including by taking legal action against squatters, neighbors, and other potential intruders. Joana do Prado, for example, sued the widow of Salvador de Oliveira in 1680, requesting damages amounting to 300 milréis because Oliveira had invaded her property, “forcibly felling virgin forests of good land [and] planting on them stands of cotton, wheat fields, plots of corn…” Prado justified this unusually high sum, “for their being the best lands there are in the district and close to the town.” At that point, she owned 2,200 meters of frontage in the rural neighborhood of Juqueri, bounded on either side by the prosperous estates of Oliveira and the “matron” Inês Monteiro de Alvarenga.²³

The establishment of new municipal jurisdictions on the plateau also illustrates the relationship between the appropriation of land and the demand for labor. The first new towns to be established in the region since the chartering of São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga in 1560, Mogi das Cruzes and Santana de Parnaíba, founded in 1611 and 1625, respectively, emerged alongside reconstituted indigenous communities. The area of Mogi, to the east of the town of São Paulo along the Tietê River, was settled at the end of the sixteenth century after the annihilation of the indigenous people who had lived there. During the first decade of the new century, under the governorship of Dom Francisco de Sousa, several sesmarias were distributed and in 1611 a group of twenty colonists drew up a petition requesting that their settlement be raised to the status of a town.²⁴ At about the same time, the reconstituted Indian village of Nossa Senhora da Escada was established nearby, to the northeast of the site of Mogi, on the banks of the Paraíba River. Unlike other such villages, Escada was neither founded nor controlled by Jesuits. According to most accounts, it was Gaspar Vaz, the founding captain of the town of Mogi, who created the village; according to an ecclesiastical census from the 1680s, however, Escada had been established “by the Indians.”²⁵

The transformation of Santana de Parnaíba into an independent town, meanwhile, occurred more slowly. According to historiographical convention, the Portuguese Manuel Fernandes Ramos and his mamaluca wife, Suzana Dias, had founded the settlement in 1580, when they erected a rural chapel named for Santo Antônio. This seems unlikely, however, since the area was still considered “sertão” when a slaving expedition was wiped out there in 1591.²⁶ In any case, several colonists staked mining claims in the area and settled in the environs of the future town in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth, by which time it was a flourishing rural bairro of São Paulo. It would seem that Suzana Dias, by then a widow, established the rural chapel of Santana around 1609 along with her sons and sons-in-law.²⁷

The two or three decades’ delay between the effective occupation of the area and its elevation to the status of town, it would appear, was due in large part to the resistance of the Municipal Council of São Paulo, wary of its potential loss of control over the mission village of Barueri, also established during this period. The settlement of Santana de Parnaíba lay only 39 kilometers from São Paulo and a mere 8 from Barueri. The settlers of São Paulo thus invoked royal legislation prohibiting the creation of new towns near established ones. The truth, however, was that the São Paulo settlers were on guard against losing the Indians of Barueri to the settlers of Parnaíba, accusing several of the latter of using force in recruiting mission-village residents. Antonio Furtado, for example, a son-in-law of Suzana Dias and pioneer wheat grower, at one point was ordered by the Municipal Council of São Paulo to return the Indians he had wrested from the mission village and pressed into service. A few years later, upon Furtado’s death, his widow Benta Dias confessed that most of the Indians in their service belonged to the mission village and that “she could not place them in inventory in good conscience.”²⁸ Even the principal colonist of Parnaíba, André Fernandes, son of Suzana Dias and co-founder of the original chapel, had an uncounted number of Indians from the mission village in his personal service, in addition to the more than one hundred captives who also worked on his estate in Parnaíba.²⁹

The mixed slaveholdings of Furtado and Fernandes clearly illustrate the character of the transition that the economy of São Paulo was undergoing at that point. The emergence of new population centers, increasingly distant from the first towns, accompanied the development of slave-hunting as a way of meeting the need for labor. Indeed, the fragmentation of administrative units increased in pace at mid-century, together with the rapid reproduction of the basic social, economic, and institutional structures that the colonists implanted in new settlements and towns further inland.

Each new rural community followed an administrative trajectory that was to accompany the transformation of sertão into settled territory. The more populous bairros quickly became parish seats, while most of the parishes created in the seventeenth century became towns sooner or later. These transformations could take generations to occur, requiring prolonged periods of demographic growth to justify the fragmentation of older municipal units and the creation of new ones. In mid-seventeenth-century São Paulo, however, this process was accelerated in a number of cases, as new towns sprang up in the interior with astonishing rapidity.³⁰

This second phase of town-founding, which began in the 1640s, also had much to do with access to Indian labor and patterns of its recruitment. Responding to the crisis in the supply of Guarani captives that emerged after 1640, the colonists of São Paulo, Santana de Parnaíba, and Mogi das Cruzes began to redirect their slaving expeditions to the Paraíba Valley, east of the so-called Paulista plateau, where the towns of Taubaté (1643), Guaratinguetá (1651), and Jacareí (1653) were established. Subsequent expansion on the plateau resulted in the founding of the towns of Jundiaí (1655), Itu (1656–1658), and Sorocaba (1661) to the northwest and west of São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba. With their small-scale agricultural production based on Indian labor, these new towns provisioned expeditions passing through in search of new sources of Indian labor and served as staging grounds for further slaving parties mounted by local settlers.

The raising of a bairro or informal settlement to the status of a town was not always the result of a cumulative process of demographic or economic growth, since there were other reasons for the fragmentation of municipal units and the founding of new ones. In effect, the creation of a new town brought into being the administrative apparatus necessary for the organization of a new cycle of pioneer settlement. As in the case of the town of São Paulo, the founding of a new town often preceded the settlement of the outlying rural areas belonging to it. The importance of the town lay precisely in the basic institutions it provided, the most important of which were the Municipal Council, the notarial office, and the probate office. Together with religious and private institutions (which were also based in the town seat), each of these institutions played an important role in the creation, protection, and transmission of property rights, the latter including property in land and moveable assets as well as rights of control over and ownership of the Indian labor force.

Until royal justice became more firmly established in the region in the early part of the eighteenth century, an elected municipal body (the Municipal Council) wielded broad judicial and administrative powers within the township, though subject to periodic inspection by a visiting judge, a process that was called a correição (literally, “correction”). As an institution of government, the Council functioned on two levels. In the context of the Portuguese empire, it served as a royally sanctioned representative body that voiced collective settler interests before the colonial authorities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Lisbon. Within the local context, it was a political forum for divergent factions or class interests. Control of the Council could represent the consolidation of wealth and power for these factions or interests, which led to bitter disputes in local elections throughout this period.³¹

Indeed, as the administrative functions of the councils expanded in the seventeenth century, conflicts between local factions became more intense, stimulating the creation of new municipal units. From the beginning, the councils exercised a prominent role in almost every sphere of economic life, controlling the distribution of municipal lands and of the labor of the mission-village Indians. With the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1640, they likewise came to administer the lands held by the mission villages, which were often leased to private settlers. They also regulated trade by setting prices, farming out monopoly contracts, and levying taxes. Finally, the task of investigating and punishing offenses in civil and criminal law fell to the councils, which afforded local factions an institutional apparatus that could bolster their interests.

The notary’s office, in turn, was particularly important in safeguarding property rights, since the formal registration of transactions, of delegations of power of attorney, and even of pardons for murder constituted the legal basis for any commercial or litigious action. Each town had at least one notary, who would carefully transcribe all business in a record book. São Paulo, the largest town, did not have a second notary’s office until 1737, a development that would not occur in the other towns of the region until the nineteenth century.

Although little studied by historians, the probate office was another fundamentally important institution. As the authority responsible for the partition of the estates of deceased colonists, the probate judge (or, in his absence, a member of the Municipal Council acting as juiz ordinário, or “ordinary judge”) had the arduous task of guaranteeing the strict observance of inheritance law.³² In seventeenth-century São Paulo, the legal processing of inventories was especially significant because it was through this medium that the existing supply of Indian labor was redistributed. Along with this function, the probate judge had another, perhaps even more important one: to lend at interest the equivalent value of properties belonging to orphaned minors or dependent heirs, which was one of the colonists’ principal sources of credit. Indeed, throughout colonial Brazil, though especially in small towns and remote regions where religious institutions were poor and wealthy merchants were few, many settlers resorted to the “orphans’ fund” (cofre dos órfãos) for loans. In São Paulo, colonists paid a hefty 8 percent annual interest on probate loans, which was justified as “practice and custom of the land.”

Along with the services performed by these essential municipal institutions – services that expanded as the town grew – in the years immediately following a town’s founding, its Council had the central function of distributing property in land among settlers. As we have seen, the municipal lands of the town of São Paulo were divided up quickly in the late sixteenth century. Throughout the following century, most of the grants made by the Municipal Council were tiny urban allotments, at least until the Council began the distribution of Indian lands belonging to the mission villages. This means of access to land was one of the most obvious reasons for colonists to petition for the establishment of new towns, since each new municipality would have a given amount of public land belonging to the Municipal Council that could be divided up among the first settlers. At least that is what one may conclude from the petition that the settlers of Mogi das Cruzes presented to the governor of São Vicente in 1611. By that time, the settlers claimed, there was not enough land available in the township of São Paulo for their numerous offspring, which was why a new town needed to be founded.³³

The mid-century founding of Jundiaí provides another example of the importance of municipal land grants in the development of a new community. The area along the Jundiaí River was first settled around 1640, by a group of colonists led by Rafael de Oliveira. A bairro soon grew around Oliveira’s estate, bolstered by the in-migration of former residents of the neighboring settlement of Juqueri, each with their own holdings of Indian captives. In 1651, Oliveira and the widow Petronilha Antunes, both of them supposedly fugitives from justice at that point, established the rural chapel of Nossa Senhora do Desterro, which soon became the center for the bairro’s social and religious activities and the nucleus of the parish and town it would become. In 1655, the bairro’s settlers sent a petition to the proprietor of the captaincy requesting the creation of a municipality with the none-too-modest name of Vila Formosa da Nossa Senhora do Desterro de Jundiaí, a request that was granted later the same year.³⁴

According to what one can gather from a municipal record book that has survived the ravages of time, the founding of the town of Jundiaí represented a response to the perceived need to distribute lands among the settlers.³⁵ The book lists eighty-five municipal land grants distributed between December 1656 and April 1657, alongside the minutes of the Municipal Council. Thus, it would seem that the central function of the Council in its earliest years was the distribution of the town’s public lands. A second book, used to record municipal business in the following decade, shows that by the 1660s the distribution of lands was no longer a concern of the Municipal Council, which had decided that meetings should take place only once a month because of the lack of important business to be discussed.³⁶

The Jundiaí land grants, in addition to defining the boundaries of deeded properties, indicate the reasons cited in petitions for lands. Most of the petitioners – nearly 60 percent – claimed to have been among the earliest settlers or to be somehow related to someone belonging to this select group. This fact reveals something of the spirit of town-founding, in that most colonists apparently felt that having been involved in the original settlement of the area meant they merited an award of land. It would seem that some settlers regarded such grants as a nearly exclusive privilege, since two of the earliest settlers, Francisco da Gaia and Manuel Preto Jorge, addressed petitions to the Municipal Council complaining of outsiders requesting lands “under the guise of coming to settle.”³⁷ Notwithstanding, some municipal lands were settled by recently arrived colonists, since approximately 36 percent of grantees indicated no justification for their petitions beyond their alleged lack of property in land.

In sum, expanded access to land and Indian labor was a critical factor in the economic development of the São Paulo region in the seventeenth century. However, for agricultural production to become a source of income for settlers, its commercialization was required. In response to a growing market for provisions on the coast, the colonists of São Paulo embarked on an experiment with commercial agriculture yoked to a system of forced Indian labor, an experience that would prove significant in shaping the evolution of Paulista society.

Pathways of Paulista Agriculture

The golden age of wheat production in the São Paulo region spanned the years 1630–1680. It was during this period that the concentration of Indian captives reached its highest levels (see Table 2, in Chapter 2). The vital connection between an abundance of Indian labor and commercial agriculture was the cornerstone of a peripheral economy linked to the market of coastal Brazil, itself on the fringe of the Atlantic world. Around 1640, the Municipal Council of São Paulo described this relationship in a letter to the Pope, writing that with the labor of the Indians the colonists

raise the grains, the meats, and produce for their everyday sustenance and with it feed much of the state of Brazil, because from this town and settlement every year are sent many thousand alqueires of wheat flour and great quantity of Meats and produce to feed said state, and even for the conquest of Angola, and all this would have been lacking were the Indians not in our service.³⁸

In the early years of the seventeenth century, wheat was integrated into the regular output of Paulista agriculturalists as a lesser product. Even so, it was clearly distinguished from other crops because it was produced exclusively for the market. At no point in the seventeenth century was it produced to sustain the local population. Production for local consumption revolved around the cultivation of manioc, beans, and, above all, maize, the population thus forming part of what Sérgio Buarque de Holanda called the “maize civilization” of indigenous southern Brazil.³⁹ Wheat, on the other hand, was destined to feed the European population of the cities and towns of the coast and the Portuguese fleets, for which it was requisitioned by the colonial government on several occasions throughout the century. An incident that occurred on the estate of Valentim de Barros is revealing in this sense. After Barros’s death, his Indians consumed much of the wheat on the estate, to the evident surprise and displeasure of his executor, who anticipated sending it to market on the coast.⁴⁰

The records of the Municipal Council attest to the commercial orientation of wheat production, as in various meetings Council members complained of a lack of wheat for local consumption in spite of its abundance in the region.⁴¹ This orientation is also evident in wills and inventories from the period. In the early years of the century, the products grown on subsistence plots (roças) generally were not evaluated in monetary terms, and served explicitly for the sustenance of the Indians on the property. In contrast, wheat fields (searas) and stocks of harvested grain always had their commercial value declared. Throughout the century, wheat-flour credits circulated as a form of payment, frequently making up part of dowries and even serving as a means to liquidate gambling debts.⁴²

Specialized production of wheat became widespread in the 1620s, with wheat farms and flour mills soon assuming a pattern of geographical concentration. Three areas became centers for wheat farming: the rural neighborhoods of Santana de Parnaíba, to the west of São Paulo; the settlement of Cotia, to the south of Parnaíba; and the region called Juqueri, bathed by the river of the same name, to the north of São Paulo and Parnaíba. By the 1640s, almost every rural estate or farm probated in Parnaíba showed signs of wheat production, though in many cases these were quite modest. At about the same time, the first large-scale estates emerged, above all in the neighborhood of Juqueri, having grown out of the sesmarias granted there between 1617 and 1639. This growth in the scale of production was duly accompanied by the development of Indian slavery, as beginning in this period several estates emerged with holdings of over 100 Indians.

While it is clear that most of the wheat produced in São Paulo was destined for markets outside the region, the lack of precision that characterizes contemporary documentation makes it difficult to capture the mechanisms or scale of this intra-colonial trade. In the 1650s, for example, the Jesuit Antonio Pinto described the town of Santos as “a great port for carracks, much frequented by navigation, for the abundant foodstuffs that depart from there for all of Brazil.”⁴³ While this description evokes the image of a bustling emporium, in reality seventeenth-century Santos was little more than a small town with a very irregular maritime traffic. Nevertheless, it did serve as the principal outlet for goods from São Paulo, linking Paulista producers and merchants to other captaincies and to the mother country.

Although there is evidence of commercial ties between Paulistas and merchants in Bahia, Pernambuco, and even Angola, the major market for the wheat of São Paulo seems to have been Rio de Janeiro, with its growing white population of planters, merchants, and bureaucrats.⁴⁴ Portugal, a grain importer since the late Middle Ages, was unable to supply the colonies with wheat, while the output of the Azores was destined first for the metropolis and later for the North Atlantic commercial circuit. The population of the Brazilian coast therefore depended upon the São Paulo region to supply its needs.⁴⁵ In the years 1630–1654, the Royal Treasury was a particularly eager buyer of wheat from São Paulo, as it fell to the Crown to supply the fleets and troops involved in the struggles against the Dutch in the northeast and in Angola. Throughout these years, colonial authorities sent several requests to the Municipal Council of São Paulo requesting provisions to feed Portuguese combatants.⁴⁶ Without a doubt, various Paulistas responded to this opportunity, among them João Martins de Sousa, whose inventory shows that he sent 70 alqueires of wheat flour to Pernambuco in 1652, entrusting them to the merchant João Rodrigues da Fonseca, also a resident of São Paulo.⁴⁷

While it is clear that most of the wheat produced in São Paulo was destined for markets outside of the region, the volume of this intra-colonial trade remains unknown due to the spottiness of colonial-era sources. For two isolated moments in the seventeenth century, however, there exist sufficiently precise indicators to allow estimates of the total output of commercial agriculture in São Paulo. The first can be found in the sharply critical survey of the Paulista economy drawn up in 1636 by the Spanish merchant Manuel Juan de Morales, a resident of São Paulo. He wrote: “from sixteen years to the present all of this captaincy has had an abundance of wheat and not only in São Paulo.” This abundance, according to Morales, was responsible for the growth of tithes in the captaincy, which evolved from a modest 70,000 maravedis (c. 82 milréis) in 1603 to 3,600 cruzados (1,440 milréis) in 1636. “And if in this land there were justice, which enforced the payment of tithes, they would amount to 4,500 cruzados [1,800 milréis] each year.” In a given year, Morales calculated, the Paulistas produced as much as 120,000 alqueires of wheat, which would correspond to a tithe revenue in the order of 1,920 milréis, taking as the value per alqueire the average price at that time, which was 160 réis.⁴⁸

More than anything else, these figures reflect the precariousness of relying on tithes as a source for statistical estimates of production. Tithe revenues never corresponded faithfully to the actual volume of production, as they were set by contract at three-year intervals. In addition, the evasion of tithe payments was widespread, which was due as much to the inefficiency of tithe collection as the failure of many rural producers to meet their obligations. It was in this context, in 1661, that a colonial administrator evaluated tithe returns in the southern captaincies: “These evasions have also been the cause of the lack of increase in tithes from the captaincy of São Vicente, which has many products and good ones, and a good output of them.”⁴⁹

A second indicator of the total output of the captaincy comes from the tithes gathered in 1666. Lourenço Castanho Taques, holder of the tithe-collecting contract for the town of São Paulo, led a protest by all of the captaincy’s collectors, asking that the sums they were obligated to pay be reduced because an outbreak of smallpox in Santos had forced the Municipal Council of São Paulo to close the road to the coast, cutting off commerce. The value of tithe returns for that year was set at 5,200 milréis, while the loss caused by the interruption of trade was estimated at 2,800 milréis. For the purposes of calculation, keeping in mind that the main product sent down to Santos was wheat, we may take the latter figure as an approximate value of total wheat production. Annual output, then, would amount to 175,000 alqueires, nearly 50 percent more than in 1636.⁵⁰

Such growth was not beyond the means of local producers, particularly if one considers the notable expansion of their productive base in the 1640s and 1650s, when the concentration of Indians on rural estates reached its peak. Few constraints on the production of wheat existed in seventeenth-century São Paulo, which explains the widespread cultivation of the crop, including by relatively poor farmers. While creating a unit of agrarian production required access to land and labor, these two factors of production remained abundant for much of the seventeenth century, though their distribution was highly unequal. Little capital was needed to outfit a farm, leaving aside the larger investments made by wealthy Paulistas who installed flour mills on their estates. The foice de segar (a sort of hand sickle) was the only specialized instrument used in wheat farming, and not only was it assigned little value when listed in estate inventories, it represented little technical advance on the tools wielded by indigenous peoples before the conquest.⁵¹

When compared with sugar-cane agriculture, with its constant demand for intensive labor, the planting and harvesting of wheat involved relatively little labor. Nonetheless, the scale of production could be increased in proportion to the expansion of the workforce, especially at two points in the agricultural cycle: in the dry months, during the clearing of areas to be planted, and later, during the harvest, as the entire crop had to be reaped and milled almost all at once. Thus, a small labor force would limit the amount of wheat that could be planted and harvested.⁵² Even so, unlike in sugar-cane cultivation, it is difficult to establish a clear correlation between output and the size of a unit’s labor force, especially since we have so little information on the size of areas planted in crops. Planted areas were measured in alqueires, but the size of that unit in the seventeenth century is unknown; in the early seventeenth century, the Jesuit Jácome Monteiro stated that each alqueire under cultivation yielded 100 alqueires of grain. But the ratio of a hundred to one does not match the evidence from inventories, in which small productive units might be listed as having as many as fifteen alqueires under cultivation, while large estates rarely produced more than 1,000 alqueires in a single year.⁵³

The organization of labor in wheat farming also differed from that adopted in sugar-cane cultivation, even when the latter relied upon Indian labor.⁵⁴ To a certain extent, the Paulistas adopted a division of labor characteristic of the indigenous societies they had attacked in their search for captives, though they would impose significant modifications of this scheme over the course of the century. The predominance of women in agricultural activities in São Paulo reflected the sexual division of labor in the production of basic foodstuffs among Tupi-Guarani peoples, which had the added advantage of making men available for other specialized functions, such as transporting goods to the coast and participating in slaving expeditions in the interior. For example, in the inventory of a wheat farm belonging to Pedro de Miranda, most of the male Indians on the list of “compulsory servants” were described as absent in the sertão, which suggests that the cultivation and harvest of the crop fell to the women who remained on the estate.⁵⁵ The significant presence of children in slaveholdings may have further contributed to this continuity in the division of labor, preserving, to a certain degree, the role played by youths in production in Guarani societies.⁵⁶

An analysis of the inventories of wheat-producing properties in the township of Parnaíba offers a clearer picture of the composition of the Indian labor force (Table 5). It is worth emphasizing, however, that these figures provide only a partial view. To a certain extent, the demands of the organization of production favored continuity in the sexual division of labor. But, at the same time, vicissitudes in the supply of captive Indians, which changed radically after 1640, also profoundly influenced the makeup of the laboring population. In any case, a different tendency can be found on the largest, most specialized estates, where men in many cases outnumbered women (Table 6). This pattern suggests an attempt, on the part of some of the largest Paulista producers, to create plantation structures resembling those of the sugar-growing coast, in which men always outnumbered women among the enslaved population, with planters displaying a marked preference for young male slaves. This would have meant a significant rupture with the indigenous past and thus an important step in the making of a well-defined slave society.⁵⁷ At this point a few wheat producers, including Paulo Proença de Abreu, Domingos da Rocha do Canto, and Pedro Fernandes Aragonês, had already begun a transition to African slavery, shifting some of the resources accumulated in the exploitation of Indian labor into the purchase of “tapanhunos,” or African slaves. In 1661, on the estate of Domingos da Rocha do Canto, for example, twenty-four African slaves worked alongside ninety-two Indians.⁵⁸

Table 5Distribution of Indians in Wheat Production by Sex, Age, and Size of Holding, Santana de Parnaíba, 1628–1682

Size of holding	(N)*	Men	Women	Children	Total
1 to 10	(12)	39	41	12	92
11 to 25	(22)	137	177	60	374
26 to 50	(24)	272	345	285	902
Over 51	(18)	688	772	514	1,974
Total	(76)	1,136	1,335	771	3,342

^*(N) = Number of estates within given range of holding size.

Sources: Inventories of probated estates, Parnaíba. IT, vols. 7–44; AESP-INP, cxs. 1–40; AESP-IPO, various cxs.; AESP-IE, cxs. 1–6.

Table 6Composition of Indigenous Population on Selected Wheat Farms, São Paulo Region, 1638–1682

Owner	Year	Men	Women	Children	Total
Cornélio de Arzão	1638	34	36	28	98
Francisco Bueno	1638	36	37	8	81
Clemente Alvares	1641	43	42	38	123
João Barreto	1642	57	57	38	152
João de Oliveira	1653	18	22	10	50
Diogo C. de Melo	1654	60	42	n/a	102
Gaspar de G. Moreira	1658	64	38	25	127
Paulo P. de Abreu	1658	37	33	39	109
Domingos da Rocha	1661	49	28	15	92
João Pires Monteiro	1667	47	51	49	147
Francisco de Camargo	1672	25	19	14	58
Garcia R. Velho	1672	41	38	33	112
João R. Bejarano	1672	48	37	7	92
Pedro F. Arangonês	1682	41	47	27	115
Total	–	600	527	331	1,458

Sources: Inventories of Cornélio de Arzão (Embu), 1638, IT, 12; Francisco Bueno, 1638, IT, 14; Clemente Alvares, Parnaíba (Jaraguá), 1641, IT, 14; Dona Maria (Juqueri), 1642, IT, 28; João de Oliveira, Parnaíba (Pirapora?), 1653, AESP-INP, cx. 1; Diogo Coutinho de Melo, Parnaíba (Japi), 1654, IT, 15; Gaspar de Godoi Moreira (Carapicuíba), 1658, AESP-INP, cx. 3; Benta Dias, Parnaíba, 1658, AESP-INP, cx. 1; Domingos da Rocha do Canto, Parnaíba, 1661, AESP-IE, cx. 3, doc. 17; João Pires Monteiro (Juqueri), 1667, AESP-INP, cx. 9; Francisco de Camargo e Isabel Ribeiro (Tremembé), 1672, AESP-INP, cx. 10; Garcia Rodrigues Velho (Juqueri), 1672, AESP-IPO, 13.768; João Rodrigues Bejarano, Parnaíba, 1672, AESP-AC, cx. 1, doc. 12; Pedro Fernandes Aragonês (Juqueri), 1682, AESP-INP, cx. 12.

Another feature that distinguished small producers from the owners of large estates was ownership of or easy access to flour mills. In São Paulo, flour mills variedly greatly in terms of size and value, but properties with mills were always worth a great deal more than those without. Even so, the most valuable farm with a mill in Parnaíba, belonging to Domingos Fernandes, was purchased by his brother-in-law Paulo Proença de Abreu, for only 350 milréis, about one-tenth the value of a mid-sized sugar mill in Rio de Janeiro at that time. However, one must bear in mind that the sale price did not include the estate’s Indians, while the value of sugar mills usually included African slaves as well as fixed capital in equipment.⁵⁹

In spite of the relatively low cost of milling equipment, there were few mills in the region. The establishment and operation of flour mills depended upon the authorization of the proprietor of the captaincy, who usually delegated the task to the municipal councils. In turn, the councils distributed land and water rights to qualified applicants, who in return would pay an annual fee, called pensão.⁶⁰ The exact qualifications are not specified in the surviving documentation, but apparently it was a guarded privilege, limited to a few persons. In 1628, Pedro Gonçalves Varejão suffered legal action for operating a mill without the authorization of the proprietor of the captaincy of São Vicente.⁶¹

Though in Europe at that time ownership of a mill did not confer much status, mill-ownership in seventeenth-century São Paulo correlated with the power and prestige of certain individuals, families, and religious institutions. The Fernandes family, made up of descendants of the first European inhabitants of the plateau, controlled the wheat business in Parnaíba, while the Pires, Bueno, and Camargo families dominated different rural settlements to the north of the town of São Paulo. The correlation between wheat production, holdings of captive Indians, and the concentration of wealth is clear in tax rolls from 1679 and 1682, which show the incommensurate share of total wealth held by these families. Among residents of the township of São Paulo in the highest decile of total wealth-holding, half belonged to the Bueno or Camargo families.⁶²

This inequality was reflected in relations between mill-owners and wheat farmers. In the early seventeenth century, the mill-owner had the right to at least one-eighth of the wheat processed in his mill, though some charged as much as one-fifth. Profiteering led the Municipal Council to intervene in 1619 and to set the rate, called the maquia, at one of every seven alqueires that were milled.⁶³ In many cases, especially as the century wore on, producers chose to sell their grain to the mill-owners rather than be left in a state of dependence upon them, which spared individual producers the trouble, risk, and cost of placing the grain on the Santos or Rio de Janeiro market. Over the long term, this trend had the effect of concentrating even greater wealth and power in the hands of a few families.

Perhaps the greatest constraint on the commercial production of wheat was transportation, which further separated producers who held large holdings of captive Indians from less privileged ones. Internal transport, from farms to mills and from mills to towns, generally depended on Indian laborers, as porters and as the crews of freight-bearing canoes. Rural roads, most no more than trails, precariously connected farms, estates, settlements, and towns. Colonial documents distinguished between three types of road: royal, neighborhood, and private. Royal roads, which included trails between towns, such as the Caminho do Mar linking São Paulo and Santos, were maintained by the municipal councils. The maintenance of trails providing access to rural settlements fell to local residents, led by the captain of the neighborhood. Private trails were built on some of the larger estates at the initiative of their owners, such as Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida and Pedro Vaz de Barros, whose properties became rural neighborhoods after their deaths.⁶⁴ The region’s rivers also played an important role in short- and medium-range transport, especially in the towns to the west of São Paulo along the Tietê River. Scattered references to the “ports” of Parnaíba and Barueri testify to the use of riverine transport. In Parnaíba, several inventories included specialized canoes used in wheat transport, some of which could carry up to 120 alqueires of flour.⁶⁵

The route down the Serra do Mar from São Paulo to Santos, linking the plateau to the coast, also combined overland and riverine transport. The first and most difficult stretch, from São Paulo to Cubatão, was traveled on foot, while the rest of the journey to Santos was completed by canoe. Cubatão, at the base of the coastal escarpment, functioned as a toll site and, at least in the 1620s, as a location for warehousing grain.⁶⁶ In the second half of the century, the Jesuit College of São Paulo controlled the toll contract, establishing a large estate there to provision travelers. The contract, however, never provided the priests with much revenue, as the Municipal Council of São Paulo set the rates low, allowing them to charge little more than 1 percent of the value of each load.⁶⁷

The trail from São Paulo to Cubatão was the most costly stretch of the route between São Paulo and Santos. The historiography on São Paulo has made much of the difficulties involved in scaling the coastal escarpment, but these accounts are almost entirely based on the observations of Portuguese newly arrived in Brazil, who were subjected to an uncomfortable ride in a hammock, borne by Indians or African slaves. Certainly, the trail to the coast remained a “rugged path,” in the words of a seventeenth-century nobleman, at least until the end of the following century, but this hardly isolated the Paulista economy from the rest of the colony.⁶⁸ Indian porters overcame its obstacles with great frequency and speed, completing the trip from São Paulo to Cubatão in two to four days.

It was precisely in transport that the need for Indian captives was most acute, as their work as porters was the only means by which the produce of the plateau could be brought to market on the coast. During the seventeenth century, as long as Indian labor was abundant, the Caminho do Mar sustained a regular traffic in grains, cured meats, and even cattle. The steady flow of commerce was interrupted only twice, once during the smallpox epidemic of the mid-1660s, and on another occasion due to the fear instilled in merchants and Indian porters by a particularly ferocious jaguar. On both occasions, it should be noted, producers and merchants alike showed great concern over losses resulting from the interruption of traffic.⁶⁹

Long-distance transport fell almost exclusively to Indian porters, and for this reason continued access to Indian labor proved especially critical to the survival of commercial agriculture. Indeed, transport was one of the basic occupations of captive male Indians in São Paulo, as suggested by one Paulista slaveholder in his will: “I have in my power two old blacks of the heathen of the land one already incapable of portering.”⁷⁰ In the wheat trade, Indians carried their loads in baskets – each load (carga) was measured at 2 alqueires and weighed around 30 kilograms – strapped onto their backs in the Guarani fashion.⁷¹ Porters were almost always men, which again indicates an attempt to modify the division of labor characteristic of indigenous societies, or at least of Guarani societies, in which women usually did the work of transport. Cargo parties, in their structure, resembled slaving expeditions: an experienced man leading a group of younger men or boys to the coast. For example, in a letter to a mill-owner in Parnaíba, a wheat merchant explained that he sent a ladino (acculturated Indian) to Cubatão with ten young men laden with flour.⁷²

Human carriers, who required only rudimentary trails, offered a clear advantage over pack animals. From the settlers’ point of view, as long as Indian labor was relatively abundant, porterage provided the most economical option, which explains its use through much of the century. It is the case that other solutions were sought at certain junctures, as in the very beginning of the seventeenth century, when Indian laborers were still relatively scarce. At that point, Governor Francisco de Sousa proposed to introduce 200 “pack sheep like those used to carry the silver of Potosí” (i.e., alpaca) and “to breed them and never want for them.”⁷³ Likewise, toward the end of the century, when the influx of Indian captives began to decrease noticeably, some producers began to raise pack animals, as is shown by their increasingly frequent appearance in inventories beginning in the early 1670s.⁷⁴

Indian porters were ultimately the cheapest form of transport, since they were swifter, could survive on less food, and could carry considerable amounts of goods at the lowest cost relative to the value of their loads. The Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, in one of his many denunciations of the Paulistas, condemned the use of Indian porters, declaring that the colonists used the Indians “as if they were mere animals.” Summing up the principal function of Indians in the Paulista economy, he observed: “Upon their shoulders are placed enormous loads, [the settlers] continually making them carry to other settlements the things that they deal in, tiring them with the burden of their property and their merchandise.”⁷⁵ Antonio Vieira also observed that the Paulistas sought to maximize their gains through the relentless exploitation of their Indian porters: “In the cáfilas [caravans] from São Paulo to Santos they not only went burdened as men but overburdened like pack animals, almost all naked or covered by a rag and with an ear of corn for each day’s ration.”⁷⁶ As a Jesuit visitor noted in 1701, even the priests of the College of São Paulo availed themselves of this service, neglecting to pay the Indians for their “comings and goings with loads to Santos, and from Santos to São Paulo.”⁷⁷

Freight rates, insofar as they can be calculated in monetary terms, remained low in the first half of the century, when the supply of Indian captives was large, which indicates that the availability of surplus labor was critical in determining whether commercial agriculture was viable or not. After all, wheat was not the only product borne on the backs of Indian porters, who also carried products of much lesser value to the coast, showing just how low transport costs were. For example, Pedro Nunes sent a dozen Indian porters to the coast laden with beans in 1623.⁷⁸ And, in 1647, another Paulista sent twenty-eight loads of manioc to Santos, with a declared value of only 50 réis per load.⁷⁹

Most Paulistas did not themselves possess the surplus labor necessary for transportation and thus had to rent Indians from the region’s larger slaveowners or from the mission villages. Rental rates varied throughout the century, but the general tendency was toward higher fees by the end of the century, which corresponded to the increasing scarcity of labor. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the supply of Indian labor was still relatively low, freight rates were high. In 1613, for example, Domingos Luís paid 3 pesos (960 réis) for the rental of three Indians to carry goods to the coast, or 320 réis each.⁸⁰ By mid-century, the rate had dropped in half, to 160 réis, as when Gaspar Correia paid 3,200 réis to rent 20 Indians.⁸¹ Shortly thereafter, the rate rose to 240 réis, where it remained until late in the century, when the labor shortage reached crisis proportions, exacerbated by the gold rush that began in the 1690s, provoking rate hikes that were considered scandalous. By 1700, the Jesuits were charging 1,280 milréis round trip, plus provisions for the Indian, while by 1730 the rate reached 1,600 each way.⁸²

The relationship between transport costs and profit rates depended ultimately on the price fetched by wheat flour in Santos or Rio de Janeiro. Only the maintenance of a delicate balance between fluctuating transport costs and insecure, occasionally volatile market conditions on the coast allowed profitable trade to occur. In the 1630s, both Jesuits and private settlers were charging between 200 and 240 réis per porter for the trip from São Paulo to Cubatão. However, in 1633 the Municipal Council of Santos set the price of flour at 200 réis per alqueire, which, according to the councilmen of São Paulo, was a disincentive to trade. In response, the São Paulo Council demanded that its Santos counterpart raise the price of wheat flour to 320 réis per alqueire.⁸³

In sum, Indian porters provided settlers with a generally efficient and economical mode of transport. At mid-century, even producers with relatively little Indian labor at their disposal could send their wheat flour to market in Santos. This situation began to change in the last decades of the century, when the wheat trade, due mainly to the crisis in the supply of Indian labor, began to decline dramatically. At the same time, the distances involved in the occupation and exploitation of new lands that were increasingly distant from the towns of São Paulo and Parnaíba restricted wheat production and transport in these areas to those producers who possessed large slaveholdings or who had sufficient resources to meet rising freight costs. Concurrently, the Santos market began to reveal its limitations. In 1672, for example, the accounts of one producer showed losses on an unspecified amount of “wheat flours [sic] that were in the Port of Santos, to be sent to Rio de Janeiro because they could not be sold in the Port of Santos.”⁸⁴ Wheat sellers could thus find themselves in an increasingly precarious state of dependency on the irregular flow of intra-colonial trade.

While one consequence of these new conditions was an increase in the concentration of wealth in the region, a more serious, generalized effect was the abandonment of wheat growing by most agriculturalists. A survey of inventories from the period indicates that in the 1670s rural producers began to show a renewed interest in cattle raising, particularly in older areas, where one or two generations of farming had adversely affected soil productivity. This suggests a transfer of resources to activities that were less labor-intensive. Even so, the region’s dependence on forced Indian labor persisted, despite most settlers having given up on commercial agriculture.

A noteworthy example of the transfer of resources – and of the decline of the seventeenth-century Paulista economy – is provided by the personal trajectory of Fernão Dias Pais. An experienced backwoodsman, beginning in the 1650s Fernão Dias dedicated himself to wheat farming on his vast estate near Santana de Parnaíba, populated by a large parcel of Indians he had brought from the sertão. According to the Municipal Council of Parnaíba, at one point he turned annual profits of 2,000 to 3,000 cruzados (800–1,200 milréis). However, perhaps due to the epidemics that ravaged the indigenous population of the plateau in the 1660s, Fernão Dias shifted practically all of his wealth to the search for emerald mines in the interior beginning in 1674. With the Indians he enslaved there, he was indeed able to establish a populous camp (arraial) in the area that later became Minas Gerais. However, by the time of his death in 1681, his prosperity was only a memory. At that point he owed nearly 3,000 milréis to his cousins Fernão Pais de Barros and João Monteiro, and to Gonçalo Lopes, the wealthiest merchant in São Paulo at the time.⁸⁵ His case, among many others, shows how quickly the wheat trade was losing ground in the second half of the century, destined as it was to disappear along with the once numerous population of captive Indians.

The rapid rise and no less sudden decline of commercial wheat production in São Paulo is a little-known episode in the economic history of colonial Brazil, no doubt due to the apparently modest amounts of revenue it generated. Some estate-owners and merchants grew rich from the surpluses generated by Indian labor, but no great, lasting colonial fortunes were made in this way. In comparative terms, the aggregate wealth produced in the captaincy of São Vicente at the time of its greatest commercial output placed it a distant fourth among Brazilian captaincies, as indicated by the assessments of the Donativo Real tax for 1662, which established an obligation of 32,000 milréis for Bahia, 10,400 for Rio de Janeiro, 10,000 for Pernambuco, and only 1,600 for São Vicente.⁸⁶

Nevertheless, a comparison of the aggregate wealth of the regional economy of São Vicente to that of major sugar-producing regions that were thoroughly integrated into the Atlantic economy reveals only one side of the story. Examined in its local and regional contexts, the experiment with commercial agriculture had a fundamental role in the creation of the structures that defined colonial São Paulo and the world that the Paulistas made.

Notes

1.Frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus to Governor Lorena, Mar. 6, 1792, BNL-Pombalina, cód. 643. Here, once again, the “State” referred to in the documentation encompassed Portugal’s New World colonies as a unit, rather than the captaincy of São Vicente/São Paulo, embryo of the federal state of São Paulo.

2.Frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus, Memórias para a história da capitania de São Vicente, hoje chamada São Paulo, 2nd edn. (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1975 [1797]), 83.

3.On the growth and development of sugar-cane agriculture in colonial Brazil, see Stuart B. Schwartz’s excellent study, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. parts I and II.

4.CMSP-Atas, 1:211–212, June 15, 1583.

5.CMSP-Atas, 1:99–100, 106–107, and passim, Sept. 30, 1576.

6.CMSP-Atas, 1:421–422, June 15, 1591. For a discussion of the tingui method, see Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 81–82. A similar conflict emerged in Sorocaba in the early eighteenth century, when its Municipal Council launched an investigation into the contamination of local rivers by tingui. “Auto de inquirição,” AESP-AC, cx. 26, no. 440.

7.The grants of these lands are published in Cartas de datas de terra, vol. 1, passim.

8.In 1603, the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Luz was transferred from Ipiranga to its current location, near the historic center of the city of São Paulo, then called Guaré. “Auto de tombo,” Sept. 4, 1603, AMDDLS, Livro de tombo da paróquia da Sé, 1747. This document clearly equates Guaré to Piratininga, though historians have identified the latter with other locations. Wilson Maia Fina, for example, in his meticulous work O chão de Piratininga (São Paulo: Anhambí, 1965), places Piratininga to the north of the Tietê River, near what is now the Tremembé district of the city.

9.Municipal lands were usually measured in braças, which I have converted at 2.2 meters per braça. See Joel Serrão (ed.), Dicionário de história portuguesa, 5 vols., published in various edns., entry “Pesos e Medidas.”

10.Paes Leme, in his Nobiliarquia paulistana, 1:113, indicates that Proença was married in Santos.

11.Solid examples from the first decade of the seventeenth century include the inventories of Fernão Dias (1605), Francisco Barreto (1607), and Isabel Fernandes (1607), in IT, vols. 1, 2, and 5. Barreto had been tithe collector for the captaincy, which means that his relocation to São Paulo may be seen as evidence of the shift in the productive focus of the colony from the coast to the plateau. The extent of Fernão Dias’s influence in the areas along the Pinheiros River may be appraised from the beautiful maps made by Nicolau Alekhine in his exhaustive, but unpublished and practically unknown, work on public lands in the municipality of São Paulo, held by the regional archive of the SPHAN/Pró-Memória.

12.These conflicts are treated in greater detail in Chapter 4.

13.Property transfers were registered in the Livros de notas, the few surviving seventeenth-century examples of which are in terrible condition. The most complete series consulted for this study were those of Parnaíba (AESP-Notas Parnaíba) and Jundiaí (Cartório do Primeiro Ofício, Jundiaí).

14.For a more or less comprehensive list of the sesmarias granted in the first half of the century, see Monteiro, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century,” 398–415. See also the incomplete listing by João Batista de Campos Aguirra, “Relação das sesmarias concedidas na comarca da capital entre os anos de 1559 a 1820,” RIHGSP 25 (1927): 493–567.

15.CMSP-Registro, 1:364. With the passage of time, measurements assumed greater precision, and in the 1630s the Municipal Council found it necessary to name Pedro Rodrigues Guerreiro “surveyor of all the lands seeing that he is a man of the sea and understands the bearing of the needle since it is a post necessary for the common good of this people.” CMSP-Atas, 4:306, July 19, 1636.

16.Discussion of this issue continues in Chapter 6.

17.IT, esp. vols. 1–7.

18.Sesmaria of Feb. 19, 1617, in Departamento do Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Sesmarias, 3 vols. in 5 (São Paulo: Archivo/Arquivo do Estado, 1921–1940), 1:225.

19.CMSP-Atas, 5:365–366, Mar. 16, 1649.

20.Quoted in sesmaria of Aug. 28, 1639, in Departamento do Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Sesmarias, 1:392.

21.Sesmaria of Oct. 10, 1641, in Departamento do Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Sesmarias, 1:471.

22.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 1:269.

23.Joana do Prado v. Antonio Pais de Queiroz, Auto civil de 1680, AESP, cx. 357, no. 107.

24.“Petição dos moradores e povoadores para a formação da vila,” Registro do foral da vila de Mogi das Cruzes, Arquivo da Prefeitura de Mogi das Cruzes. This volume contains copies of various documents that refer to the founding of Mogi das Cruzes that were transcribed in 1748 from originals that have since been lost. See also Isaac Grinberg, Gaspar Vaz, fundador de Mogi das Cruzes (São Paulo: by the author, 1980).

25.Ecclesiastical Census of the Bishopric of Rio de Janeiro, n.d., ACMRJ, uncatalogued. I am grateful to Wanderley dos Santos, formerly director of the Arquivo da Cúria Metropolitana de São Paulo, for providing me with a summary of this important document.

26.CMSP-Atas, 1:423–424, July 7, 1591.

27.The early history of the town is covered in Paulo Florêncio da Silveira Camargo’s História de Santana de Parnaíba (São Paulo: Conselho Estadual de Cultura, 1971), which remains noteworthy despite its many errors. See also Alida Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), which – its subtitle notwithstanding – focuses on the eighteenth century.

28.CMSP-Atas, 2:486, Oct. 15, 1622; inventory of Antonio Furtado de Vasconcelos, Parnaíba, 1628, IT, 7:23.

29.Will and inventory of Antonia de Oliveira, Parnaíba, 1632, IT, 8:309–334.

30.In seeking to explain the rapid emergence of new towns in seventeenth-century São Vicente, historians have identified different motivating factors. Traditional Paulista historiography characterizes the founding of these new towns as “expeditions of colonization” (bandeiras de colonização) that followed logically upon the collective enterprises that focused on slave-hunting prior to 1640. See, for example, Myriam Ellis, “O bandeirantismo.” Without completely breaking with this tradition, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda sought an explanation for seventeenth-century shifts in settlement in demographic factors in his magisterial, if misleadingly titled, essay, “Movimentos da população em São Paulo no século XVIII,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 1 (1966): 55–111. More recently, in Household Economy and Urban Development: São Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), Elizabeth Kuznesof provides an interesting interpretation that associates the migration that lay behind the founding of new towns with the unstable character of settlement and the factional disputes that punctuated the colonial history of São Paulo, though she makes the mistake of identifying the founding of Parnaíba with the struggle between the Pires and Camargo families. See also the interesting approach in Metcalf, Family and Frontier, which highlights the importance of family strategies in the settlement of the region.

31.On the municipal councils, a topic still wanting for innovative studies, see the exploratory essays by Charles R. Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macau, Bahia, and Luanda, 1510–1800 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 72–109; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Local Government in Portuguese America: A Study in Cultural Divergence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16/2 (Mar. 1974): 187–231; and Edmundo Zenha, O município no Brasil, 1552–1700 (São Paulo: Progresso, 1948).

32.On inheritance and the division of estates among eligible heirs (partilha) in colonial São Paulo, and Parnaíba in particular, see the excellent study by Alida Metcalf, “Fathers and Sons: The Politics of Inheritance in a Colonial Brazilian Township,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66/3 (Aug. 1986): 455–484; as well as A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Women and Society in Colonial Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 9/1 (May 1977): 1–34.

33.“Petição dos moradores,” 1611 (1748 transcription), Arquivo da Prefeitura de Mogi das Cruzes.

34.The circumstances surrounding the founding of Jundiaí have been the subject of much controversy among Paulista historians. In the nineteenth century, when the chronicler Azevedo Marques reprinted a section of the parish’s livro de tombo that attributed the founding of the original chapel in 1651 to the fugitives Rafael de Oliveira and Petronilha Antunes, a typographical error inverted the date to 1615, an error that was reproduced in the official emblems adopted by the city Jundiaí in the twentieth century. As far as the crime that supposedly led the founders to flee from justice is concerned, scholars hold that it was a reference to the “crime” of hunting indigenous captives, a crime of which almost all Paulistas were guilty. It is worth emphasizing, however, that Jundiaí was a known refuge for various criminal fugitives, including Pedro Leme do Prado and Fernão “o Tigre” (the Tiger) Camargo, the killers of Pedro Taques, and maintained that reputation until the middle of the eighteenth century. It is possible that Pedro Leme do Prado – who was related to Rafael de Oliveira by marriage – participated in the founding of the chapel, as Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana (3:13) indicates that he was the founder of a chapel with the name Nossa Senhora da Estrela (perhaps a faulty transcription of Desterro) around 1645. In any case, the origins of the town were without a doubt linked to the factional conflicts that characterized São Paulo in the 1650s, which supports Kuznesof’s general hypothesis (see note 30, above, this chapter). Azevedo Marques, Apontamentos históricos, entry “Jundiahy”; Mário Mazzuia, Jundiaí e sua história (Jundiaí: Prefeitura Municipal, 1979); and “Documentos sobre a fundação de Jundiaí,” manuscript collection of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo.

35.“Cartas de datas de terras,” 1656–1657, Museu Histórico e Cultural de Jundiaí, uncatalogued.

36.“Atas da Câmara Municipal de Jundiaí,” 1663–1669, Museu Histórico e Cultural de Jundiaí, uncatalogued.

37.“Cartas de datas de terras,” Jundiaí, fols. 43v–44.

38.Municipal Council of São Paulo to the Pope, n.d., ARSI-FG, Missiones 721/I. In general, wheat cultivation has attracted little scholarly attention to this point. See, for example, Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay, Trigaes paulistanos dos seculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Secretaria da Agricultura, Industria e Commercio, 1929); Sérgio Milliet, “Trigais de São Paulo,” in his Roteiro do café e outros ensaios, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1982 [1939]), 147–151; and Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 205–214. In a revised edition of a classic study first published in 1945, Holanda re-evaluated his earlier position on Paulista agriculture, but he maintained the conclusion that “wheat … did not reveal itself to be here [in São Paulo] the dynamic element that sugar would later become, and coffee much later.” See Monções, 3rd edn. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1990 [1945]), 177.

39.Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 215–225.

40.Inventory of Valentim de Barros, Parnaíba, 1651, IT, 15:226. Other sources suggest that the Indians, particularly the Guarani, refused to eat wheat bread, preferring corn. In the missions of Guairá, for instance, the Jesuits attempted to introduce wheat to support the reduced population, but faced with the resistance of the Indians they began to produce the grain on a commercial basis, sending modest amounts to the European outposts of the Platine region. See Magnus Mörner, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata Region: The Hapsburg Era (Stockholm: Institute of Ibero-American Studies, 1953). This assertion is echoed by Holanda, in the revised edition of Monções, 172.

41.See, for example, CMSP-Atas, 3:63, Dec. 2, 1623; 4:336–337, Feb. 22, 1637; and 6a:127, Apr. 12, 1659.

42.Among others, see the dowry that André Fernandes provided for his niece Suzana Dias, Jan. 27, 1641, AESP-Notas Parnaíba, 1641; the gambling debts appear in the inventory of Pascoal Neto, 1637, IT, 11:139.

43.Antonio Pinto, cited in Leite, História, 6:282. Carracks (naus in Portuguese) were large, three- or four-masted sailing ships, built to carry sizeable loads of merchandise while armed for war.

44.The inventory of Maria Bicudo (1660, IT, 16) shows credits for wheat sales in Bahia. While it is unlikely that wheat was ever shipped to Angola, Paulistas did send other local products, such as cured meats and cane brandy. For example, about one-third of the estate of Manuel de Oliveira was tied up in shipments of goods to Angola. Inventory of Isabel Borges, 1655, AESP-IE, cx. 3, doc. 7.

45.Provisioning the colony with wheat remained a problem through the entire period of Portuguese rule. In the eighteenth century, after the collapse of production in São Paulo, the Crown attempted to solve the problem with a colonization scheme involving Azorean couples, who were to cultivate wheat in southern Brazil and provision the rest of the colony. For details, see Charles R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 246–254. On the production of wheat in Rio Grande do Sul during the eighteenth century, see the interesting study by Corcino Medeiros dos Santos, Economia e sociedade do Rio Grande do Sul (São Paulo: Nacional, 1984).

46.Examples of these requests may be found in Salvador, Os cristãos novos e o comércio, 88–89. See also Antonio de Couros Carneiro (Governor of Ilheus) to the Conselho Ultramarino, Apr. 11, 1647, AHU-Bahia, doc. 1266; Pedro Vilhasanti to the Crown, Nov. 14, 1638, AHU-Bahia, doc. 810; Municipal Council of Rio de Janeiro to Municipal Council of São Paulo, June 12, 1648, AHMSP, Avulsos, cx. 4; Provisão of General Salvador de Sá, CMSP-Registro, 2:70–71; Provisão of Municipal Council of São Vicente, Nov. 20, 1654, BNRJ-DH, 4:33–34; and vol. 3 of BNRJ-DH, passim.

47.Inventory of João Martins de Sousa, Parnaíba, AESP-INP, cx. 9, 1666.

48.“Informe de Manuel Juan de Morales de las cosas de San Pablo y maldades de sus moradores,” 1636, in Mss. de Angelis, 1:182–193. The alqueire is a unit of dry measure equivalent to approximately 13.8 liters, as well as a unit of planted land, theoretically equivalent to the amount of grain a given plot could yield.

49.João de Gois e Araújo, “Informação sobre o rendimento dos dízimos do Brasil,” Aug. 19, 1661, BNL, cx. 208, doc. 16.

50.CMSP-Atas, 6a:485–487, Apr. 23, 1666. According to Maria de Lourdes Viana Lyra, “Os dízimos reais na capitania de São Paulo: contribuição à história tributária do Brasil colonial, 1640–1750” (dissertação de mestrado, Universidade de São Paulo, 1971), in 1665 Lourenço Castanho Tacques bought the contract for the township of São Paulo for 2,400 milréis.

51.In the inventories, foices de segar were assigned values of between 20 and 120 réis, though the most common value was 40. The technical aspects of colonial Paulista agriculture are explained in detail in Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 183–250, and Monções, 163–206.

52.Similar observations have been made in studies of wheat farming in colonial North America. See James Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815 (Lexington MA: D. C. Heath, 1973), 15–18, for a summary.

53.Jácome Monteiro, “Relação da província do Brasil, 1610,” in Leite, História, 8:396. A technique for estimating grain yields from estate inventories may be found in Mark Overton, “Estimating Crop Yields From Probate Inventories: An Example from East Anglia, 1585–1735,” Journal of Economic History 39/2 (June 1979): 363–378. Unfortunately, the data from São Paulo are vastly inferior to those for early modern England.

54.Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chaps. 2–3.

55.Inventory of Isabel de Proença, 1648, IT, 37:103–104. Another indication that this sexual division of labor was adopted by Paulista landowners comes from an eighteenth-century inventory, where on a medium-sized farm featuring African slave labor, the male slaves were listed as absent in the mines while female slaves were assigned to the roça. Inventory of Pascoal Leite Penteado, 1712, AESP-IPO, 14.020.

56.Egon Schaden, Aspectos fundamentais da cultura guarani (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1974), 74.

57.Schwartz shows that the composition of Indian slaveholdings on late sixteenth-century sugar plantations in Bahia was similar to that of their African counterparts of the following century, both of which were marked by the predominance of young males. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chap. 3.

58.Inventory of Domingos da Rocha do Canto, Parnaíba, AESP-IE, cx. 3, doc. 17. A similar process occurred in colonial Venezuela, where wheat farmers switched from the encomienda system of forced Indian labor to African slavery in the seventeenth century. Robert J. Ferry, “Encomienda, African Slavery, and Agriculture in Seventeenth-Century Caracas,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61/4 (Nov. 1981): 609–635. It should be noted, however, that the expansion of wheat production in São Paulo was accompanied by a rapid growth in the supply of indigenous labor stemming from peculiar strategies of labor recruitment, while in Venezuela the Indian population shrank as the economy grew, tightening the supply of indigenous labor and making African slavery more attractive.

59.“Escritura de venda de um sítio com moinho,” Baltasar Fernandes to Paulo Proença de Abreu, 1658, AESP-Notas Parnaíba, cx. 6076–28. Sugar mills sold in Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the seventeenth century usually commanded between 2,000 and 10,000 milréis. Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Notas Rio de Janeiro, cx. 1–2. In the 1630s, Bahia’s Engenho Sergipe do Conde, one of the colony’s largest, was valued at 40,000 milréis, while several mills in Pernambuco commanded similar sums. See “Descrezão da fazenda que o Collegio de Santo Antão tem no Brazil e de seus rendimentos, pelo Padre Estevam Pereira, S. J. (1635),” AMP 4 (1931): 778; and Mello (ed.), Fontes para a história.

60.Examples of licenses to operate mills (to João Fernandes Saiavedra, Cornélio de Arzão, Manuel João Branco, and Amador Bueno da Ribeira) may be found in CMSP-Atas, 2:363, 374–378. The Carmelites of São Paulo, Parnaíba, and Mogi das Cruzes also received licenses to mill wheat in the seventeenth century.

61.“Sentença sobre um moinho,” in Jaime Cortesão (ed.), Pauliceae lusitana monumenta historica, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, 1956–1961), 2:25–27, doc. 5.

62.On the distribution of wealth, see Chapter 6.

63.CMSP-Atas, 2:369, Dec. 26, 1615; 2:404–405, Feb. 9 and 23, 1619.

64.For a description of some of the trails within the township of Parnaíba, see “Auto de medição do rocio de Parnaíba,” AESP-AC, cx. 14, doc. 212.

65.The inventory of Pascoal da Penha included two canoes, one with a capacity of 40 cargas, the other with a capacity of 60 (one carga equaled two alqueires), while Paulo Proença de Abreu was the declared owner of three canoes with capacities of 30, 40, and 50 cargas at the time of his wife’s death. Inventory of Pascoal da Penha, Parnaíba, 1656, AESP-INP, cx. 3; Benta Dias, Parnaíba, 1658, AESP-INP, cx. 1.

66.Salvador, Os cristãos novos e o comércio, 95, affirms that Cornélio de Arzão (the Fleming who is credited with introducing wheat to the captaincy of São Vicente) received a sesmaria in Cubatão in the 1620s for the purpose of storing grain and other goods sent down from the plateau. Also in the 1620s, the inventory of Domingos de Abreu shows large amounts of cured meats “placed at Cubatão.” IT, 6:345.

67.CMSP-Atas, 6a:361, Apr. 7, 1664.

68.Antonio Raposo Silveira to the Crown, Dec. 1656, AHU-SP, doc. 12. On the reconstruction of the road in the late eighteenth century, see Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “The Role of the Merchants in the Economic Development of São Paulo, 1765–1836,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60/4 (Nov. 1980): 571–592.

69.CMSP-Atas, 6a:485–487, Apr. 23, 1666; CMSP-Atas, 6:13, Feb. 19, 1655. In addition to playing an important role in Indian beliefs, jaguars were a real threat to Indians and backwoodsmen alike, both in the wilderness and around settlements; indeed, one of the most feared Indian-hunters, Manuel Preto, escaped all of the arrows and curses that the Guarani and Jesuits aimed at him, only to end his career in a jaguar’s claws. See the interesting discussion in Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 108ff.

70.Will of Francisco Pinto Guedes, 1701, AESP-IPO, 13.998.

71.On the size of the carga, which may have varied slightly throughout the century, see IT, 37:107. In 1730, the governor of São Paulo noted that the Jesuits tended to underload their Indians at 2 arrobas, while charging excessive rates for their services as porters. Governor Pimentel to Conselho Ultramarino, May 1, 1730, AHU-SP, doc. 712.

72.Antonio Pompeu to Paulo Proença de Abreu, Feb. 20, 1639, in inventory of Antonio Furtado, Parnaíba, 1627, IT, 7:25. For images of Guarani baskets used in transport, see the photographs in Schaden, Aspectos fundamentais.

73.CMSP-Registro, 1:202; and Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, 150–151.

74.For example, inventories of João de Camargo Ortiz, 1672, AESP-INP, cx. 12; Domingos Leme, 1673, IT, 18; Felipa de Almeida, AESP-INP, cx. 15; and Ines Pedrosa, 1677, AESP-INP, cx. 22.

75.Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, “Primeira catequese dos indios selvagens,” BNRJ-Anais, 6:235–236.

76.“Voto do Padre Antonio Vieira sobre as dúvidas dos moradores da cidade [sic] de São Paulo,” July 12, 1692, IEB, Coleção Lamengo, 42.3.

77.Luís Mamiani, “Memorial sobre o Colégio de São Paulo,” ARSI-FG, Collegia 1588/203/12, doc. 6, fol. 1.

78.Inventory of Pedro Nunes, 1623, IT, 6:55–58.

79.Inventory of Isabel Fernandes, Parnaíba, 1647, IT, 35:107–108.

80.Inventory of Domingos Luis, 1613, IT, 3:87.

81.Inventory of Gaspar Correia, 1647, IT, 35:38.

82.CMSP-Atas, 7:545–546, Aug. 3, 1700; Governor Pimentel to Conselho Ultramarino, May 1, 1730, AHU-SP, doc. 712; also, AHU-SP, doc. 751.

83.CMSP-Atas, 4:153–154, Jan. 24, 1633. The councilmen’s argument was flawed, as they neglected to consider that each Indian could carry two alqueires in a single carga, and that ordinarily they returned laden with merchandise, the freight cost of which was absorbed by Santos merchants.

84.Partilha amigável (out-of-probate-court settlement) of João Rodrigues Bejarano, 1672, AESP-AC, cx. 1.

85.“Atestado da Câmara Municipal de Parnaíba sobre Fernão Dias Pais,” Dec. 20, 1681, in Azevedo Marques, Apontamentos históricos, 1:267–269. Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 3:64–65, describes Fernão Dias’s prosperous estate.

86.Provisão of Apr. 28, 1662, BNRJ-DH, 5:346.