6

The Portuguese in Brazil

In the mentality of humble people in the villages, someone going to Brazil signified, and still signifies, purely and simply the entry into the Land of Canaan.

(Guilhermino César) ¹

In the specific case of the Azores (as with the rest of Portugal generally) emigration was facilitated by the fascination which from early times was exercised by the colony of Brazil, at that time the “jewel of the Portuguese Crown”, a fascination which continued far beyond the independence of Brazil.

(Luís Mendonça and José Ávila)²

The settlement of Brazil

The story of the settlement of Brazil is the story of converging streams of migration: New and Old Christian settlers originating from Portugal and the islands merged with the slaves (forced immigrants) brought from Africa to form the population of coastal Brazil, which in turn formed fresh streams of migrants who mixed with the native Americans and explored and eventually populated the interior—the sertão.

The first Portuguese ships to arrive in Brazil were probably those of Pedro Álvares Cabral who sailed along the Brazilian coast on his voyage to India in 1500, and the first Portuguese individual to remain in Brazil must have been the convict who is reported to have jumped ship to join the Indians. For nearly thirty years thereafter Portuguese ships regularly visited the Brazilian coast to collect the much sought after Brazil wood. Temporary camps were formed ashore, some of which eventually became semi-permanent, while a few Portuguese, similar to the lançados of upper Guinea, built lives for themselves on the coast, took Indian wives and raised families. However, until about 1530, the numbers involved were very small.

In 1532 a township with a permanent population was created at São Vicente in the south, and between 1533 and 1535 Brazil was divided into fifteen ‘donatary captaincies’. The captains, few of whom were men of much substance, were supposed to organise the colonisation of their captaincies and had the right to allocate vacant land to settlers. The most successful captaincies were those of São Vicente in the extreme south, where a sugar industry was begun with capital invested by Netherlands sugar interests; and Pernambuco in the north, where sugar-growing was also started. In each case the success of the settlements was due to the active presence of the captain and his family and the good relations which were brought about by intermarriage with the local indigenous population.

It is of interest to note the prominent part played by women in these early settlements. When Martim Afonso de Sousa, the captain of São Vicente, departed for India in 1533, his wife, Ana Pimentel, who had remained behind in Portugal, sailed to take charge of the captaincy. She was officially named governadora in 1538 and governed the captaincy for ten years. When the captain of Pernambuco, Duarte Coelho, died in 1554, his captaincy was governed by his wife Dona Brites de Albuquerque until his son took over in 1560. Dona Brites resumed control in 1572 when her son returned to Portugal. And there were other similar examples. The careers of these formidable women have parallels on the other side of the Atlantic in the Portuguese settlements in São Tomé, Guinea and Cape Verde. What they have in common is the reality of life in the Portuguese maritime empire. Men were constantly on the move, captaining ships, taking up new appointments, serving the Crown in a variety of capacities. It was the women who often remained in one place taking control of family property and wielding local economic and political power.³

At first, although land was readily available, it proved difficult to attract migrants since the control which the families of the captains exerted over the territory proved a strong disincentive for settlers. As Euclides da Cunha wrote in his elegiac history of the colonising of the Brazilian backlands,

the Portuguese did not approach the northern seaboard with that vital strength which comes from dense migrations, great masses of invaders capable of preserving, even when uprooted from their native soil, all those qualities acquired in the course of a long historical apprenticeship. They were scattered, parcelled out in small bands of condemned exiles or counterfeit colonists, lacking in the virile mien of conquerors. They still were dazzled by visions of the Orient. Brazil was the land of exile, a huge garrison for the intimidating of heretics and backsliders, all those victims of the sombre let-him-die-for-it justice of those days.⁴

The French philosophe Abbé Raynal put it more succinctly:

After the Court of Lisbon had had the ports, bays, rivers and coasts of Brazil explored and believed that it was certain that there was neither gold nor silver there, it showed its contempt for them to the point of sending there men condemned by the law, and lost and debauched women. Every year two or three vessels left Portugal to carry criminals from the kingdom to the New World bringing back parrots, and woods used for dyeing and marquetry.⁵

Those Portuguese migrants who did settle in Brazil in the middle years of the sixteenth century tended to come from the northern province of Minho, where landholdings were small and villages and towns had surplus population.⁶ In this early phase of the diaspora, the people who left Portugal, whether as convicts, as religious exiles or simply as people seeking a better living for themselves and their families, showed a marked tendency to try to escape the control of royal government and the privileged nobility. In the same way, it had been the very informality of the lançado settlements in western Africa and, in the East, the opportunities to live their lives beyond the control of the viceroys that had the greatest capacity to attract emigrants.

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century the economy of Brazil began a period of rapid growth as the sugar industry became firmly established along the northern coast. Sugar-growing was dependent on supplies of labour, which was obtained from Indians, either as slaves or as wage labourers, and from African slaves. The sugar estates, usually referred to as engenhos (sugar mills), were owned by Portuguese of mixed social origin who soon constituted an informal aristocracy. Most lived on their estates, in contrast to the landowners of the Atlantic Islands who were frequently absentees, but the actual growing of the sugar was leased out to smallholders and sharecroppers known as lavradores da cana—for the most part also Portuguese immigrants. This stratification of Portuguese society meant that, over time, poor whites, free blacks (whose free status was the result of manumission and black-white cohabitation), the ubiquitous pardos (people of mixed African, Indian and European descent) and Indians came to form a racially mixed lower class of artisans, smallholders, cattle men and traders. As a result the niches available for new poor white immigrants were few and their number, in consequence, less than might otherwise have been the case. However, one feature of the new colony did prove attractive to immigrants. No branch of the Inquisition was established and this meant that Brazil offered a favourable environment for New Christian settlement, though most of those who came to Brazil were merchants involved in the sugar and slave trades rather than settlers seeking a permanent home.

In 1574 the total population of European origin numbered about 17,000, and by the end of the century this had doubled to around 30,000 with probably the same number of Indians and Africans living in the Portuguese settled areas.⁷ By 1625 the number of people of European origin had doubled again to 60,000, though not all of these were from Portugal, and by 1700 natural increase had pushed the total to around 100,000, rather more than those who inhabited the New England colonies at the same time.⁸ Between 1532 and 1650 six cities and thirty-one towns were established in Brazil, by far the most important being Salvador de Bahia which, already in the 1580s, had a population of 15,000, and in 1620 boasted 62 churches, already well on the way to the fabled 365 churches it would one day be able to claim.⁹

The prosperity of the sugar industry in the period 1580–1660 attracted economic migrants, and when sugar went into decline in the latter part of the seventeenth century a new economy based on tobacco and gold-mining continued to bring in settlers, so that ties with Portugal remained close. As in the previous century, immigrants mostly came from the northern part of Portugal.¹⁰ As Schwartz and Lockhart explained, ‘a study of Bahia in the period 1680–1740 shows that nearly all the merchants and two thirds of the artisans were European-born … about one third of the sugar planters were born in Europe and another third were first-generation Brazilians’.¹¹ Merchants in particular tended to remain close to their Portuguese roots and to return home after making their money in the colony. As no university, nor even a printing press, was established in Brazil, all posts requiring an educated person had to be filled by people who had received their education in Portugal, and this helped to guarantee a continued flow of migrants in both directions, the children of the well-off going to Portugal to be educated and the educated heading for Brazil to take up posts in the church or government.

A characteristic of Portuguese emigration, which was to persist into the twentieth century, was the comparative lack of women among the migrants. Many of the men who left Portugal did so with the idea, however vaguely formulated, of returning home to their families; in the meantime they formed unofficial liaisons with Indian, African or mulatto women, leading to a significant increase in the free coloured population. Those who did take their wives with them to Brazil often sent their daughters back to Portugal rather than risk unsuitable marriages in Brazil. Although this tendency lessened in the eighteenth century when a white Portuguese population became more firmly established in the country, the social and family ties of Brazilians to the Portuguese homeland remained very strong.

As in Africa and the Estado da Índia, Portuguese society in Brazil had institutions which enabled immigrants quickly to find a place for themselves in the diasporic community. Membership of religious brotherhoods cemented social relations while at the same time upholding distinctions of status. Each Portuguese community, even quite small ones isolated from direct links with Portugal, established a Misericórdia which provided a range of social services and acted as a bank with which people could deposit money or other assets. It was a prestigious institution to which people aspired to belong and it powerfully upheld Portuguese identity and social cohesion. Local self-government was also well developed, though the formation of a Senado da Câmara depended on obtaining a charter from the king, which had the effect of restricting the spread of this particular institution. The town councils tended to represent the interests of the moneyed classes, but these interests were often closely tied up with the prosperity of the town itself, making the council an effective instrument for the welfare of the population as a whole. Where there was no council there were often informal bodies that met to represent the interests of the more important citizens.

The slave trade and the Portuguese Atlantic

Over five centuries Brazil has been the principal destination for emigrants from Portugal, leading to the dominance of the Portuguese language and the Catholic church in what is today one of the largest, most populous and economically successful countries in the world; but the immigration of Africans has been hardly less important. In no part of the world is the interdependence of these two streams of migration more clearly demonstrated.

Slaves from sub-Saharan Africa began to be obtained by the Portuguese from about the 1440s. At first they were brought to Portugal or the Atlantic Islands, but about 1520 a market began to open up in the New World, and by the seventeenth century slaves were being imported into Brazil and Spanish America in very large numbers. Although some were coming from the Cape Verde and upper Guinea region of Africa, the overwhelming majority were shipped from the Portuguese-controlled ports of Kongo and Angola. Most of the slaves were bought at fairs in the interior, though some were war captives as there was an almost unbroken series of wars in the interior during the seventeenth century. Most of the slaves shipped at Luanda or Benguela were sent directly to Brazil, and Brazilian Portuguese played a significant role in developing the trade. When the Dutch invaded Brazil and occupied the sugar-producing north of the country between 1630 and 1654, they decided that producing sugar in Brazil would be impossible without the supply of slave labour from Angola; so in 1641 an expedition was sent to occupy Luanda and São Tomé island. When the Brazilians staged a revolt against the Dutch in 1646, this was extended across the Atlantic and in 1648 an expedition organised in southern Brazil expelled the Dutch from Luanda. Brazilians now, in effect, took over the running of the slave trade in Angola. Soldiers from Brazil were sent to fight in the Angolan wars and Brazilian governors were appointed to Luanda. Increasingly also Brazilian tobacco became a commodity of choice in West African markets.

This African diaspora began and developed at the same time that the Portuguese themselves were emigrating to set up diasporic communities across the world. A comparison of the numbers involved puts both streams of migration into a context that helps to explain the forces at work in the movement of population in the early modern period. Between 1500 and 1850 around 4.67 million slaves were brought to Brazil (78 per cent in the last hundred years of the trade) while 2.9 million Portuguese emigrated (to all destinations not just Brazil) during the same period.

In considering the demographic impact on Africa and on Portugal, it is relevant that in both cases the overwhelming majority of migrants were male, while migration from Portugal certainly came from a much smaller population pool than did the slave trade from Africa.

Table 2: Numbers of Emigrants/Slaves Per Annum (Total emigration from Portugal/export of slaves to Brazil)

Portugal	1500–1580	3,500
Slaves	1500–1575	846
Portugal	1580–1640	5,000–6,000
Slaves	1576–1650	7,464
Portugal	1640–1700	2,500
Slaves	1640–1700	9,034
Portugal	1700–1760	8,333–10,000
Slaves	1700–1750	20,222
Portugal	1760–1850	16,666
Slaves	1750–1850	36,624

Source: Magalhães Godinho, ‘L’Emigration portugaise (XV^e-XX^e siècles), une constante structurale et les réponses aux changements du monde’; and Slave Trade Database: http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces

The millions of African slaves landed in Brazil played a major role in developing the Brazilian economy and in the formation of Brazilian society, partly by providing the labour for the mines and plantations but also by contributing to the emergence of a free black working class. Because so few white Portuguese women migrated to Brazil in the first two centuries of settlement, their place was taken by African and Indian women, with the result that a large part of the Brazilian population, until the nineteenth century, was racially mixed and formed a distinctly creolised society. Robert Southey, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thought that therein lay the vital difference between Brazil and the Spanish colonies.

The seeds of civil war had not been sown there [Brazil] by that wicked distinction of cast[e]s, which has produced so much evil in Spanish America, and must produce evil wherever it prevails. This was the result of necessity… not of wiser councils. Portugal with its limited territory and scanty population, could not pursue the unjust and jealous policy of the Spaniards, and depress the Creoles for the sake of holding them more completely in subjection. The Mameluco [person of mixed European and Indian race] was as much respected, and as eligible to all offices, as the man of whole blood, or as the native of the mother country. There are no laws to degrade the Mulatto, or the free Negro, nor were they degraded by public opinion. And thus that amalgamation of cast[e]s and colours was silently going on which will secure Brazil from the most dreadful of all civil wars, whatever other convulsions it may be fated to undergo.¹²

Robinson Crusoe in Brazil

Some Portuguese have maintained that the original idea for writing about a man stranded alone on a desert island was derived from the story of Fernão Lopes who was marooned on the island of St Helena in the sixteenth century and lived there until his death. There is no real evidence for this but it is significant that Daniel Defoe made his hero an immigrant planter in Brazil and decided to use a Portuguese character as Crusoe’s saviour and patron. In marked contrast to the image, beloved of seventeenth-century travellers, of the proud, effete, luxury-loving Portuguese, ennobled simply by passing the Cape of Good Hope, Defoe drew a portrait of a simple, honest and God-fearing Portuguese captain who rescued Robinson Crusoe after his escape from slavery in Morocco and subsequently helped him regain his fortune. Much of the story of Robinson Crusoe, though the part that is seldom read, is in fact located within the Portuguese world of Brazil where the hero makes his living building up a plantation where he grows tobacco. When Crusoe returns from his lengthy exile as a castaway on the island, he meets the Portuguese captain again. From him Crusoe receives an account of the profits of his Brazilian plantation, and an offer to pay over the money that was owing.

I was too much mov’d with the Honesty and Kindness of the poor Man, to be able to bear this; and remembering what he had done for me, how he had taken me up at Sea, and how generously he had used me on all Occasions, and particularly how sincere a Friend he was now to me, I could hardly refrain Weeping at what he said to me.¹³

Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, by which time Britain’s relations with Portugal had radically altered. The suspicions and downright hostility that had sometimes marked their relations in the seventeenth century had now given way to a highly profitable commercial partnership. Portugal was rapidly becoming one of the most important markets for Britain’s manufactures, with Britain providing a captive market for Portuguese wines. In the process a considerable quantity of Brazilian gold found its way to Britain to settle commercial payments. Portugal had now indeed become the ‘sincere Friend’ of Defoe’s imagination.

The golden century

In the years 1693 to 1695 gold was found in the Brazilian interior and a gold rush was soon underway. The first large-scale emigration from Portugal and the islands had begun. Whereas, at the most, there had been net migration to the Estado da Índia during the sixteenth century of around 1,024 per annum, now many thousands of Portuguese were arriving annually in Brazil (Godinho thought that the numbers were as high as 8–10,000 per annum during the first two-thirds of the century).¹⁴ In the first half of the eighteenth century between 500,000 and 600,000 Portuguese arrived in Brazil, and the main new centres of population were to be found no longer on the coast but in the mining regions of the interior. By 1775 20 per cent of the total population of Brazil was settled in Minas Gerais.

Most of the European immigrants, according to Schwartz, ‘were young bachelors from the overcrowded northern province of Minho… [who], although of all ranks and conditions, [were] heavily weighted towards peasants and others of lower status’.¹⁵ The Italian Jesuit Giovanni Antonio Andreoni, who published an account of Brazil in 1711, using the pseudonym Andre João Antonil, wrote that ‘the insatiable thirst for gold tempts so many to leave their lands and to take to roads as hard as those of Minas that it is difficult to be able to count the number of persons who are there’. Nevertheless, he thought that already there were more than 30,000 persons working the gold mines. The mining camps were lawless and chaotic places.

Each year numbers of Portuguese and foreigners come in the fleets to pass on to Minas. From the cities, towns, reconcavos and backlands of Brazil come whites, mulattos, blacks and many Indians who are enslaved by the Paulistas. It is a mixture of persons of every condition, men and women, youths and old men, the poor and the rich, nobles and plebeians, seculars, clerics and religious of various orders, many of whom do not have a monastery or house in Brazil.¹⁶

The arrival of immigrants, known as Emboabas, at the mines led to extreme social tensions and eventually to civil war in which the original discoverers of the gold, the Paulistas, lost control of the mining regions. It took a decade at least for effective royal government to be imposed, and even then an open frontier continued to exist with many Paulistas and immigrant Portuguese pushing westwards to try to find new goldfields. Eventually gold-mining began also in Goias and Cuiaba, each of these areas attracting fresh waves of migrants, in spite of the extreme hardships these encountered in arriving at the goldfields and in surviving in the interior. In 1726 Cuiaba had a population of 7,000 immigrant miners and 2,800 slaves.¹⁷

Whether these immigrants originated in the rural society of Portugal or the Azores, in Brazil they did not behave like peasants intent on making a living from the land. Euclides da Cunha described the destructiveness of the gold digging pioneer who

attacked the earth stoutly, disfiguring it with his surface explorations, rendering it sterile with his dredges, scarring it with the point of his pickaxe, precipitating the process of erosion by running through it streams of water from wild torrents. And he left behind him, here, there, and everywhere great melancholy and deserted catas, tracts forever sterile…¹⁸

Gold-mining peaked around 1750 with fifteen tons a year being produced. In that year the total population of Minas Gerais was estimated to be 227,000. In 1776, the year of the first Brazilian census, there were 75,800 white people in the region¹⁹ and, although there was no overall growth in the following decade, Minas continued to attract immigrants even after the output of gold went into steep decline. Once the main deposits had been worked out, small operators known as faiscadores continued to work the spoil heaps and small surface veins. In a census taken in 1814 there were nearly 6,000 small-scale prospectors, two-thirds of them men of European origin and one-third slaves working on behalf of their masters.²⁰ For poor white immigrants and black slaves to work alongside each other was typical of some phases of the peopling of Brazil.

Few Portuguese women moved to Minas and by 1804 only a third of household heads in Vila Rica, the main town, were married. On the other hand the large number of people of mixed race, amounting to 40 per cent of the population in 1808, told a story of a century of sexual relations between whites and free or enslaved black women. As early as 1711 Andreoni had lamented that the gold obtained by successful miners enabled them ‘to buy a negro trumpeter for a thousand cruzados and a mulata of bad conduct for double that sum in order that with her [they can] continue to multiply their scandalous sins’, the gold that was mined ending up as ‘hat bands, earrings and other trinkets which today you see adorning the mulatas of ill repute and the negresses rather than the ladies’.²¹

Informal empire in the backlands

As Brazil established itself, in many respects as an extension of Portugal, dominated by the church, a landowning aristocracy and the familiar institutions of metropolitan society and royal government, it also generated its own onward migration. While the sugar economy had boomed there was employment in the coastal regions, but with the decline in the prosperity of the sugar plantations after 1660 the coastal economy went into decline. This prompted pioneers to start to explore the vast tracts of the interior that extended all the way to the Andes, and to seek out the potential riches of the Amazon basin. This vast ‘frontier’ region attracted diverse migrants—slavers seeking Indians for service on the coast, Jesuit missionaries, prospectors looking for precious metals, contraband traders and cattlemen looking for land on which to establish cattle ranges. For these groups the sertão, for all its dangers and privations, offered economic opportunity and freedom from the social hierarchies of Portuguese society and the increasingly stifling dead hand of royal government. The political status of the sertão was uncertain. The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed with Castile in 1494, had drawn a longitudinal line between Spanish and Portuguese territory, but no one could calculate accurately where the line ran. Therefore, a treaty that should have established clearly defined frontiers and jurisdictions became instead an added source of uncertainty and confusion, presenting ideal opportunities for the entrepreneurial skills of the backwoodsman to exploit. The coastal settlements of Brazil, therefore, generated their own diaspora, their own ‘informal’ empire with self-governing, autonomous communities but, unlike the informal empire in Asia, on its own doorstep rather than overseas. Eventually, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, royal government would catch up with the backwoodsmen and the sertão would be properly incorporated into Brazil, but not until the character of the frontier had imposed itself on Brazilian society.

São Paulo, the main town in the southern captaincy of São Vicente, was the area from which migrant backwoodsmen most persistently pushed into the interior, away from the control of captains and royal government. São Paulo was a poor settlement and, as with Portugal itself, it was poverty rather than wealth and disposable capital that was the motor of expansion. The population of São Paulo was very mixed and spoke the lingua geral, a creole dialect of Portuguese and Tupi-Guaraní. As sugar-growing became concentrated on the plantations in the north, the Paulistas increasingly turned for their economic survival to cattle ranching and slaving. Both activities led them into the interior and resulted in constant conflict with the Indian inhabitants of the region and their missionary protectors. The bandeiras, the armed expeditions which they organised, were funded by themselves and not only were they not authorised by the Crown, they were frequently undertaken in direct conflict with royal orders. The bandeirantes were migrants escaping the control of government, establishing their own informal communities in the interior, winning and controlling land for themselves and pushing further into the sertão, raiding for slaves or prospecting for precious metals. The slaving activities of the bandeirantes led to direct conflict with the Jesuit missionaries and also, in the years 1690–1730, to rich discoveries of gold and diamonds. It was these activities, in their eyes the successful outcome of their entrepreneurial initiatives, that prompted the government to extend its authority in order to rein back their activities. The comparison with the subsequent expansion of settlers in the United States and in South Africa is clear. Governments, often with reluctance, felt compelled to follow their frontiersmen to try to establish stability and order but also to gain a share of the wealth that was being created.

In the seventeenth century the region south of São Paulo stretching as far as the Río de la Plata, the area that would one day form the province of Rio Grande do Sul, attracted smugglers who were prepared to breach the trade monopolies of the Spanish Crown, and coastal settlements grew up to service the extensive contraband trade which used the Río de la Plata as its highway. The Portuguese Crown largely ignored these communities but in 1680 took a major initiative, establishing the Colónia do Sacramento, a formal settlement on the Río de la Plata itself. This dramatic development, uncharacteristic of a monarchy still very much on the defensive, was an attempt to establish royal control over the main contraband trade route from the Andes down the Paraguay river. Early in the eighteenth century the Crown took further measures to impose its control over the largely autonomous communities in the southern frontier region, in 1733 completing a highway to link the various coastal settlements.

In 1750, after yet another frontier war, a formal agreement with Spain laid open the vast sertão to the west to Portuguese settlement; and almost at the same time the control exerted by the Jesuits over their missions was finally brought to an end with the suppression of the order in Portugal in 1759. Land was now available for the pioneer who could brave the hardships of the journey into the interior. The occupation of the interior of Brazil was every bit as destructive as the expansion of Europeans in other parts of the world would prove to be. Euclides da Cunha wrote:

Those explorers who … set out from the left bank of that river [the São Francisco], carrying with them their indispensable provisions of water in leathern pouches, made use of the same sinister pathbreaker—fire—which at once opened up and illuminated the way for them, laying bare the earth ahead of them as they went; and for months afterward, of a night, the ruddy glow of conflagrations was visible in the western skies. One can imagine what the results of such a procedure would be when carried on uninterruptedly for centuries.²²

The planting of settlements in the interior was facilitated by the expansion of livestock farming. Cattle were raised to feed the sugar-growing areas of the coast and the mining regions, while horses and mules were bred to support the transport networks necessary in such a vast country. As N. P. Macdonald wrote:

the livestock industry … was created and maintained by free men. Almost alone in the colonial economy this market was largely domestic and the profits remained at home; above all it had largely made possible the settlement of the colony beyond the narrow coastal fringe. The industry also provided, firstly, a framework within which one part of the colony came to some extent to depend on another and, secondly, in the shape of the horse and mule, the links with which that dependence was maintained.²³

The nineteenth century

Although the gold rush was long over, Portuguese migration to Brazil continued in the first half of the nineteenth century, with estimates of the numbers involved ranging from 100,000 to 400,000 during that period.²⁴ For a brief thirteen-year period, between 1807 and 1821, the government of the kingdom of Portugal moved from Lisbon to Rio. This opened the way to the migration of substantial numbers of the Portuguese upper class, between 15,000 and 20,000 people having left with the Queen and the Prince Regent on board the fleet in November 1807—possibly the largest single departure of emigrants from Portugal ever recorded. Although Brazil broke away from Portugal in 1822 and established itself as an independent state, immigration continued as commercial and family ties remained close. However, there was no coordinated policy for attracting immigrants from Europe and, until the slave trade was finally banned in 1851, the Brazilian economy continued to depend on the import of large numbers of black slaves. As many as 500,000 may have entered Brazil in the last twenty years of the trade alone.

Incentives for Portuguese to emigrate to Brazil were strengthened by the political disruption caused by the cycle of social unrest and civil war in Portugal between 1827 and 1851. These disturbances particularly affected the Azores (in the 1830s) and northern Portugal, the areas from which traditionally most of the migrants had been drawn. Although in the 1830s Portuguese contract workers were being actively recruited to replace slave labour in the Caribbean, Brazil still remained the favourite destination for Portuguese of all classes. In colonial times Portuguese immigrants had often been officials with government appointments or people involved at some level in commerce, and after independence many Portuguese continued to look for work in retail business in Brazil. During the period 1844–48 there were frequent riots and demonstrations against Portuguese immigrants, who seemed to some Brazilians to dominate the retail trade; the Portuguese in Brazil preferred to employ their own countrymen rather than, as Gilberto Freyre put it, local youths who were ‘accustomed to idleness and the easy life of the “white” or those wealthy enough to pass for white in a slave owning land’.²⁵

In 1851, under pressure from Britain, the legal importation of slaves into Brazil ceased and the Brazilian authorities began actively to promote immigration from Europe, ‘contributing to the spread of the idea of Brazil as a land of easy wealth, an idea that had ancient roots in the popular imagination’.²⁶ The nature of Portuguese migration to Brazil now underwent a marked change. Between 1850 and 1870 215,000 European immigrants arrived, probably at least half coming from metropolitan Portugal or the islands. Numbers, as usual, are very difficult to establish as at least 20 per cent of all migrants moved without passports and escaped being recorded officially, while the rates of return migration were also certainly high.²⁷

Many Portuguese, often young boys, were recruited as contract labourers to work on coffee plantations. According to Caroline Brettell, ‘those who went to the Brazilian fazendas (plantations) were badly fed, treated like slaves and punished like dogs’.²⁸ Many of these boys were sent abroad by their families to avoid conscription into the army and with the expectation that they would send home the wages they earned to supplement family income. The flow of remittances came to assume great importance for the families left behind, but for this to continue the illusion that the emigrant would one day return to rejoin the family was essential and had to be maintained at all costs. Although in parts of Germany, the authorities at this time banned the departure of men to Brazil under binding contracts, the Portuguese government did not stop the contracting of children and limited itself to trying to ensure that contracts of employment contained acceptable working conditions. Whenever the Portuguese government tightened the regulations covering contracts or the issue of passports, there was a corresponding rise in clandestine emigration.²⁹

How was this new wave of mass migration organised? Those who travelled legally paid for passports and for their sea passage to Brazil and moved within already established networks of relations and friends. However, contractors were also at work. As early as the 1830s recruiting companies and individual engajadores (labour recruiters) were operating in the Azores. Recruiters specifically sought Portuguese from northern Portugal or the islands because, as the Portuguese Consul in Pernambuco explained in a letter written in 1856, with Portuguese immigrants there was ‘similarity of language, religion and customs, and the natives of Minho and the Azores islands are the most suitable for rural work’.³⁰ These engajadores would often control where the emigrants went by drawing up contracts binding them to specific employers. Such contracts were particularly dubious in the case of those travelling without passports and without funds. The engajador, often in league with the ships’ captains, many of whom were French or British, would advance the cost of the fare to Brazil. On arrival the contracted labourer would be detained on board ship until specific employers had been contacted to whom the immigrant was then delivered. The employer would pay off the engajador and the ship’s captain (often to the tune of many times the actual cost of the passage) and the immigrant would then be bound to work off the debt, which might take many months if not years. There were cases of newly arrived immigrants being advertised in the newspapers and even being auctioned off just as slaves had been in the not too distant past.³¹

Such exploitation was made easier by the fact that immigrants were often only children of eight to fourteen years old. Minors were supposed, by law, to have guardians and only to travel with the written permission of the parents, but frequently the engajador was designated as guardian. For the fazendeiros, engaging minors was cheaper than buying slaves. Children earned little and there was no initial expenditure of capital to obtain them. Towards the end of the slave trade the cost of a slave had been around 1,500–2,000 milreis, but the payment that had to be made for the sea passage of an immigrant was only 120 milreis.³² As the Portuguese Consul General pointed out in 1872, the Portuguese who worked on the fazendas were often not able to pay off the debts they owed to the ships’ captains and the labour contractors and were forced to renew their contracts after three years.³³ ‘Free’ labour was now proven to be much cheaper than slavery!

It is one of the great ironies of history that at the very time that these poor migrants from Portugal were facing the virtual slavery of contract labour in Brazil, the Portuguese were imposing the same conditions on Africans they contracted to work on the cocoa plantations of São Tomé, a system which the international community denounced as a continuation of slavery.

The Portuguese government wished to control emigration as there were fears that the supply of labour in Portugal itself would dry up and that young men would evade their military service. However, the refusal to issue a passport was the only means of control available to the government and this was easily avoided. Clandestine migrants could travel to Spain and leave from a Spanish port, those interested in engaging contract labour having few qualms about whether the migrant had a passport of not.³⁴ The Portuguese government, torn as always between the desire to stop illegal emigration and protect its citizens and the concern to safeguard the lucrative flow of remittances, tried to legislate to prevent faulty contracts and to make sure that migrants signed up to acceptable working conditions. However, these measures were largely ineffectual since, in any dispute, the Brazilian authorities almost always supported the employers, while juries in Portugal seldom convicted any engajadores who were prosecuted. In Brazil the Associação Central de Colonização was established as an official agency to handle immigration but it acted largely outside the law, often contracting workers to non-existent enterprises and then holding them imprisoned on the island of Bom Jesus off Recife to be sold off to the highest bidder.³⁵

Portuguese immigrants would often come to Brazil to join relatives or friends but, until 1888, the continued existence of slavery and an internal slave trade acted as a disincentive to non-Portuguese migrants to come to Brazil. As George Reid Andrews put it:

until the slave labor force was replaced, and free European workers no longer had to compete against coerced Africans and Afro-Brazilians, the immigrants were not inclined to come to Brazil, especially when they had the more attractive options of going to the United States or Argentina … their fear was that employers who made slaves of black folks would make slaves of white folks too. And such fears were amply supported by widely publicized consular reports from European officials in São Paulo, who described working conditions for immigrants on São Paulo plantations as little better than slavery.³⁶

By the 1870s it was becoming increasingly uncertain that slavery in Brazil would continue much longer and the Brazilian authorities began to take further measures to encourage the immigration of free labour to replace the slaves. As the Portuguese Consul General in Rio explained in 1871, ‘it is a fact that the fazendeiros try by every means to obtain white people for their fazendas, in order, as they say, to defend themselves against any aggression by the slaves and to get them used to substituting for them’.³⁷ That year for the first time provincial funds in São Paulo had been set aside to subsidise European immigration, and in 1884 a Society for the Promotion of Immigration was set up in the province. Many, possibly most, of the migrants came on assisted passages, as part of a deliberate policy by Brazilian provincial and state authorities to flood the labour market with cheap labour. ‘Supply and demand would now replace the violence and coercion of slavery as a means of organizing production.’³⁸

After the emancipation of Brazilian slaves in 1888, their replacement by European workers was achieved rapidly and decisively. In the decade after emancipation (1890–99) 1.2 million immigrants arrived, more than half of these Italians who concentrated in the provinces south of Rio de Janeiro, while Portuguese immigrants continued to go to the long-established destinations in Rio itself and to the north. The authorities encouraged the immigration of Italian families, which added an element of stability to the labour force as well as providing a pool of even cheaper ‘family’ labour. Portuguese immigrants by contrast were still usually single males following the long-established pattern of migration from Portugal and the islands.³⁹

The nature of Portuguese emigration to Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

For Portuguese who planned to emigrate, Brazil was overwhelmingly the most popular destination. Between 1855 and 1960 80 per cent of all official migrants from Portugal went to Brazil, and this figure rose to 93 per cent during the two decades 1891–1911.⁴⁰ Only in the 1960s did European destinations, and especially France, come to be preferred to Brazil. Between 1872 and 1972 Brazil received a total of 5,350,889 immigrants. Of these 1,662,180 were from Portugal—a yearly average of 16,622. However, the bulk of this emigration (62.3 per cent) took place between 1890 and 1930. The figures are as follows:

Table 3: Portuguese Emigration to Brazil, 1872–1972

	1872–79	55,027
	1880–89	104,690
	1890–99	219,353
	1900–09	195,586
	1910–19	318,481
	1920–29	301,915
	1930–39	102,743
	1940–49	45,604
	1950–59	241,579
	1960–69	74,129
Total	1872–1972	1,662,180

Source: Merrick and Graham, Population and Economic Development to Brazil 1800 to the Present, 91.

Most Portuguese who came to Brazil in the nineteenth century headed for the capital. The 1890 census showed that 24 per cent of the population of Rio were Portuguese.⁴¹ ‘Rio de Janeiro (both province and city) recorded the highest relative concentration of foreign immigrants in the 1872 census, reflecting the traditional regional focus of earlier Portuguese immigration’,⁴² and as late as 1920 it is estimated that 39.8 per cent of all registered Portuguese immigrants lived in Rio.⁴³ São Paulo also attracted Portuguese immigrants who constituted 11 per cent of the city’s population in 1920.

Portuguese migration to Brazil had some well-marked characteristics. Throughout the nineteenth century most of the migrants were young, single males. In the years 1835–60 60 per cent of migrants from Alto Minho were under 20 years (48 per cent under 18), while 97 per cent of Portuguese entering Rio between 1827 and 1829 were under 30 (50 per cent 15–19 years old).⁴⁴ Large numbers of children under 14 arrived and soon disappeared into the ‘easy life of the vagabond, filling the prisons and occupying the benches of the guilty in the law courts’. Those who found their way into the interior were employed on the fazendas where they were ‘subjected to hard labour which not all of them could endure’.⁴⁵ Even when an immigrant was married he seldom brought his wife with him.

In 1872 the Chamber of Deputies in Portugal arranged for the Portuguese consuls in Brazil to be sent a questionnaire covering a wide range of issues linked to emigration. Figures based on the replies recorded 49,610 migrants entering the port of Rio between 1861 and 1872. Of these, 35,740 were men, 22,500 of whom were single. Only 4,280 were women, of whom a mere 920 came with a family.⁴⁶ Most of the immigrants were illiterate. In Amazonas 98 per cent of immigrants were men, 75 per cent were minors and 87 per cent were said to be without any profession. Not more than half a dozen family units were recorded. Such figures suggest something of the dire conditions in Portugal and the islands which the emigrants were leaving behind.

In spite of the fears expressed by Portuguese consular officials that Portuguese migrants were being treated like slaves on the plantations, most Portuguese did not work in the agricultural sector. Of those who came with passports, most were looking to work in the commercial sector as caixeiros—employees in small family businesses—and Portuguese presence in the retail sector of the economy in the major cities remained a factor of Brazilian life which was greatly resented. A survey carried out in 1856–57 revealed that Portuguese controlled 35 per cent of all commercial establishments in Brazil.⁴⁷ The immigrants from the Azores, however, unlike their compatriots from mainland Portugal, did not go into commerce but established a tradition of working in horticulture and market gardening.⁴⁸

Another distinguishing feature of Portuguese immigration was the high incidence of return migration. Portuguese emigrants traditionally clung to a firm belief that they would one day return to Portugal having made their fortunes, and the figure of the Brasileiro who returned rich to his native village was familiar in the writing of the period.⁴⁹ However, estimates of the numbers of those who actually did return vary greatly. The consuls who replied to the questionnaire in 1872 thought that very few ever returned to Portugal—the Rio consul estimating that around 400 returned annually ‘because of illness or destitution’. On the other hand some estimates suggest that between 1864 and 1872 around 30–40 per cent of emigrants returned; and figures for the years 1913–14 record 55,697 returning and 88,739 leaving.⁵⁰ If such figures are anywhere near accurate, they radically alter the whole significance of migration—both its effects on Brazil and on Portugal itself. However, here as elsewhere in the story of Portuguese migration, figures quoted can differ widely and do not appear to be obtained using any consistent methodology.

The replies to the 1872 questionnaire show that urban employment ranged from being a cashier or bookkeeper to more humble artisan employment. Though some immigrants came with the tools of their trade, none of them had capital or money to cover more than the most basic expenses, and few of those on contracts ever made any savings. In answer to the question whether immigrants found it easy to find employment, the Rio consul waxed lyrical about the opportunities in Brazil: ‘It is a country that is still unpopulated which possesses land among the most fertile in the world, an abundance of water and all the other conditions for the prosperity of the immigrant.’⁵¹ But the consul in Amazonas was more measured in his reply, contrasting the great demand for unskilled agricultural and domestic labour with the scanty opportunities for artisans and skilled workers.

Immigrants suffered from severe health problems, particularly from fevers. In the coastal cities there was some charitable support but, as the Amazonas consul pointed out, ‘in the interior there is nothing in the way of charitable institutions’.⁵² In Ferreira do Castro’s novel Emigrantes, the aspiring emigrant, Manuel da Bouça, expresses his fears to the agent arranging the passage:

‘I always have fears about some fever…’

‘What fever, man, what a story! This was formerly. Today the guarantees of health are so firm that the man who does not remain sound and healthy does not walk the earth.’⁵³

To the question whether contract labourers were subject to corporal punishment (it is revealing that such a question was asked at all), the Amazonas consul stated that only the punishments set out in the Brazilian penal code could be administered, but that in the case of minors, as in Portugal, ‘the tradition of palmatoadas, and sometimes of whippings with cords continues here in force in serious cases’.⁵⁴ The use of the palmatoria in the Portuguese African colonies was seen by many critics as one of the crimes of the colonial regime, though it seems it was a regular part of the experience of the Portuguese emigrant in Brazil.

Why were Portuguese immigrants preferred to those of other nations in Brazil, was the final question. They are preferred, said the Rio consul, echoing views commonly expressed, because they had ‘identical language, religious beliefs and customs and principally because of their sobriety and love of work’.⁵⁵

The profile of the Portuguese immigrant community in Brazil changed slowly in the course of the twentieth century. The large majority continued to be men coming from a rural background who married as far as possible with other Portuguese. Illegitimacy rates were high in the Portuguese community compared with other national groups, possibly as a result of the high proportion who settled in the cities.⁵⁶ Second- and third-generation Portuguese became more integrated, marrying more often outside their national group and gradually moving from being agricultural labourers to owning their own small coffee fazendas. According to Herbert Klein, a striking feature of Portuguese immigrant society in Brazil was its institutional life.

The Portuguese were the first to establish a host of voluntary institutions, going all the way from basic mutual aid societies for workers to hospitals, literary societies and libraries for the middle and upper class emigrants … a very strong sense of community identity guaranteed that these institutions would be both among the earliest and the longest lasting voluntary institutions in modern Brazilian history.⁵⁷

In his study of Portuguese emigration, Joel Serrão pointed out that one of the consequences of the continued emigration of so many Portuguese, even after Brazil had became independent, was the continued economic interdependence of the two countries. The Portuguese established a kind of dominance in Brazil’s retail commerce, partly through the preference of Portuguese immigrants for imported Portuguese goods. This dominance was still apparent in the 1930s, while, as a result of Portuguese immigration, ‘huge sums drained away to the former metropole either carried in the baggage of those emigrants who were returning as rich men or in the remittances sent to the families who had remained at home’.⁵⁸ Either way, Portugal and Brazil were locked in an economic embrace from which it was difficult to escape.

In the 1930s Portuguese emigration to Brazil declined drastically, not to recover until after the Second World War. In December 1930 the Brazilian government published Decree 19,482 banning immigration on the grounds that it had ‘taken into consideration the situation of unemployment in which a large number of workers found themselves in the urban areas and that one of the causes of this situation was the uncontrolled influx of foreigners’.⁵⁹ In 1945 a quota system was introduced and the lid was lifted on further immigration only in 1946.

Conclusion

Brazil occupies exactly half the continent of South America; its population constitutes three-quarters of those who use Portuguese as their official language, and probably half of all those in the world who recognise a Portuguese origin or identity. From the seventeenth century onwards emigration to Brazil dominated the thoughts of those in Portugal and the islands who planned to emigrate. Brazil was the land of riches and opportunities, the land from which wealthy migrants returned to build ostentatious houses in Portugal and to luxuriate in their newly acquired social status. Brazil was the land to which you emigrated to make your fortune and from which you hoped to return. It was this that bound the Portuguese migrants so strongly to their mother country and strengthened the complex networks of kinship between motherland and former colony.

In the twenty-first century Brazil is a burgeoning world power, the fifth largest country in the world with an expanding economy buoyed up with oil wealth and vast territorial resources, but it is very largely the creation of the Portuguese diaspora, the planters, merchants, cattle ranchers, miners and frontiersmen who brought millions of slaves from Africa to form the lower strata of a new Lusitanian society and who maintained economic and cultural networks that linked the islands, the west coasts of Africa and the new world in what has been aptly described as the Portuguese South Atlantic.