1
Indians, Portuguese, and Mamelucos
The Sixteenth-Century Colonization of São Vicente
In 1628, the lady widow Suzana Dias lay sick in her bed in her son's house in a tiny hamlet known as Santana de Parnaíba. The village was located on the edge of the Brazilian wilderness, several leagues to the west of the town of São Paulo. Fearing her death, Suzana summoned a scribe to her bedside to record her last will and testament and a priest to perform the last rites. First, she asked the priest to "commend her soul to God our Lord who created her" and prayed that "through the death and suffering and worthiness of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ, that he have mercy on her soul and pardon her sins." She begged for the intercession of the Holy Virgin, the apostles, and all the saints before God so that she might attain the rewards of glory.[1] Suzana declared that she believed in everything that was and is the Holy Mother Church of Rome and that she would die a loyal and true Christian. Then, having taken care of salvation, she turned her attention to her temporal life, to the family she had reared, the property she had accumulated, and the settlement she had founded on the remote edge of the Portuguese empire.
Suzana had married twice and bore seventeen children. She owned Indian slaves who served her and who would serve her heirs after she died, even though as she herself knew, these Indian slaves were legally free according to the laws of the Portuguese empire. A shawl, a skirt, a cloak, and the material for a skirt were important enough to be mentioned in her will as special bequests for her daughters and granddaughters. Suzana asked her two sons to have thirty masses said for her soul "so that God Our Lord might have mercy on her" and stated that she wished to be buried in the chapel of St. Anne that she had founded and around which the
settlement had grown. Last, she asked the priest to sign the will for her, as she did not know how to read or write.
This seemingly simple document marks the end and the beginning of the history of Santana de Parnaíba. When Suzana Dias was born, Santana de Parnaíba did not exist. The area was wilderness, as yet unsettled by the Portuguese or by those of Portuguese and Indian descent, known as mamelucos . By the time Suzana died, however, the Portuguese had claimed and colonized this area of the wilderness.
Who was Suzana Dias? According to historical and genealogical reconstruction, she was one of the granddaughters of Tibiriá, the Indian chief of the Piratininga plateau when the Portuguese first landed on the coast of Brazil in 1500.[2] ç The Piratininga plateau, site of modern São Paulo city, is nearly 800 meters above sea level. It is drained by the Tietê River, which flows west, deep into the interior, to the Paraná River. The climate is mild, with an average temperature of 68.4 degrees Fahrenheit and an average rainfall of 52.2 inches per year.[3] Tibiriçá first met the Portuguese through João Ramalho, a Portuguese sailor or convict who had been shipwrecked or dumped ashore during the early years of the sixteenth century, probably between 1511 and 1513.[4] Although Tibiriçá could not know what his encounter with this Portuguese castaway portended, it was the first step in a long chain of events that would radically transform the world he knew.
In Spain and Portugal, the last years of the fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth century were heady times. When Christopher Columbus "discovered" islands in the Caribbean in 1492, Portugal was on the verge of achieving a long-sought sea route to India. In anticipation of this, in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the non-Christian world in half, with the east going to Portugal and the west to Spain. Six years after Columbus's attempt to reach India by sailing west, the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, rounded Cape Horn and sailed into India. In 1500, Cabral set off for India intending to lay the foundation for trade between India and Portugal. Cabral set his course slightly different from that of Vasco da Gama, and blown farther west, he reached Brazil by accident. Unlike Columbus, Cabral had not left Lisbon on a voyage of discovery and did not have any rights to lands that he might discover. The discovery of
Brazil thus held no immediate reward for him. He would not become the viceroy and governor over any lands he discovered, nor would he be known as the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," privileges promised to Columbus by Ferdinand and Isabella.[5] Instead, this remarkable discovery was treated as an unexpected delay on the more important voyage to India. Far more interested in the opening of trade to India, the Portuguese made no immediate plans to explore or colonize Brazil, although it clearly lay within Portugal's sphere, according to the treaty.
Cabral remained in Brazil only eleven days, but the first Portuguese impressions of Brazil were captured by Pedro Vaz de Caminha, a royal clerk on the expedition bound for Calicut. In a letter written to the king of Portugal, Caminha described a vast new land and people of "good and of pure simplicity." "From point to point," he wrote, "the entire shore is very flat and very beautiful. As for the interior, it appeared to us from the sea very large, for, as far as the eye could reach, we could see only land and forests, a land which seemed very extensive to us."[6] He described the inhabitants of this land as "dark, somewhat reddish, with good faces and good noses, well shaped. They go naked, without any covering; neither do they pay more attention to concealing or exposing their shame than they do to showing their faces."[7] Caminha marveled at the innocence and beauty of the Indians. He wrote, "They are well cared for and very clean, and in this it seems to me that they are rather like birds or wild animals, to which the air gives better feathers and better hair than to tame ones. And their bodies are so clean and so fat and so beautiful that they could not be more so."[8]
Caminha's observation of the Indians convinced him that they had no religious beliefs and that they could be easily "tamed" and "stamped" with "whatever belief we wish to give them."[9] While Caminha saw the possibility of using the new land for agriculture, he thought the evangelization of these people would, in and of itself, be a noble achievement for the king of Portugal to undertake, even if the new land proved to be not much more than a stopping place on the way to India.
Caminha finished his letter on May 1, 1500, the night before the fleet set sail for India. That day, two sailors stole a boat and deserted from Cabral's command, disappearing somewhere along
the coast. In addition to these, Cabral left behind two prisoners to learn the Indian language to facilitate further encounters with the Indians, should there be any. Then without further ado, Cabral weighed anchor and headed east for Africa and India. Caminha's letter, along with the parrots, bows, arrows, headdresses, and the like, collected from the new land, were sent directly back to Portugal on one of the ships of the fleet. Perhaps no one who witnessed this simple eleven-day visit realized how dramatically it would change the future of the land the Portuguese now called "Santa Cruz."
At the moment when Spain and Portugal first made contact with the vast New World, each country had very different ideas about how to proceed with colonization. The Spanish had completed the work of centuries, known as the reconquest, when they defeated the Moors of Granada in 1492. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabella of Castile began the process of the unification of Spain. The religious zeal with which the Spaniards conquered the Moors and allotted their lands to military commanders overflowed into the New World. Spain embarked on a similar quest to spread Christianity, to make vassals of the Indians, to reward the conquerors who delivered this new empire, and to strengthen the power of the crown.[10]
Portugal was a trading nation that for decades in the fifteenth century had pioneered the navigation of the southern Atlantic and the charting of the African coast in pursuit of a sea route to India. The Portuguese sought to enter the profitable spice trade from the Orient, a trade completely controlled by Arab traders across land routes through the Middle East. In 1498, they succeeded in establishing the long awaited sea route, and thus for the first time, Europeans had direct access to the spice trade.[11] Cabral's discovery of Brazil, therefore, was treated differently in Portugal than Columbus's discovery was treated in Spain. Portugal saw the value of trade with the newly discovered natives of Brazil, not colonization. For this reason, Portugal made no immediate plans to colonize Brazil.
For thirty years after the discovery of Brazil, from 1500 to 1530, the Portuguese saw Brazil as simply another entrepôt, similar to the many trading posts along the coast of Africa where Portuguese ships stopped on the way to and from India to trade for slaves. At
the few coastal trading posts in Brazil, the Portuguese traded with local Indian tribes for the pau brasil , or brazilwood, a tree trunk much in demand in Europe because of the deep red color that could be extracted from it and used to dye cloth. Each of the trading posts had a factor and a small garrison of soldiers to protect it. The factor conducted trade with the Indians, bartering iron tools, combs, mirrors, beads, and the like, for brazilwood. The Indians cut, carried, and stacked the logs at the trading post so that cargoes would be ready for ships to load when they put into port.
The Portuguese were not the only ones to trade in Brazil. The French were also active in the brazilwood trade, arguing that since Portugal had not colonized Brazil, she could not prevent others from trading with the Indians. Thus, while Portugal claimed Brazil by virtue of Cabral's discovery, she exercised virtually no sovereignty over it.
During these early years of the sixteenth century, only a handful of Europeans, like João Ramalho, lived in Brazil. Convicts left ashore by sea captains, shipwrecked sailors, and the factors who manned the small trading posts were the only Portuguese there.[12] Many went "native" to survive. Such was the case of Ramalho.
Men like Ramalho adapted to a radically different world than they had known in Europe. The huge area of Brazil, covered largely by forests, was sparsely inhabited by hundreds of Indian tribes. While it is difficult to estimate the size of the Indian population of Brazil in 1500, John Hemming presents a reasoned estimate of 2.4 million.[13] These tribes belonged to four major language groups: the Tupi, the Gê, the Carib, and the Arawak. The Tupi lived primarily along the Atlantic seaboard, the Gê lived in the central plateau, the Arawaks inhabited the upper Amazon, and the Caribs lived in the lands to the north of the lower Amazon River delta. Despite differences among these major groups, the Indians of Brazil shared some common lifeways. They lived in independent tribes composed of several villages ruled by councils of elders, chiefs, and shamans. They fed themselves by hunting, fishing, gathering fruits and other edibles, and simple agriculture. In small clearings made by cutting trees and burning the brush, they planted the basic staples of their diet: corn, manioc, pumpkins, beans, squashes, and peanuts. A clear division of labor separated men and women: the men hunted, fished, and fought, while
the women farmed, prepared the food, and cared for the children. The tribes moved their villages frequently to take advantage of new hunting grounds and new land for farming. Possessions were few, easily packed, and carried on tribal migrations. Compared to the large and complex Indian civilizations of central Mexico and Peru, the Indian tribes of Brazil were mobile, autonomous, and egalitarian.[14]
Among all tribes, but especially among the Tupi, warfare was a common occurrence and an unquestioned part of tribal life. Competition over hunting grounds often sparked intertribal wars. Among the Tupi, intertribal feuds caused a virtual state of war between hostile tribes, such as that between the Tupiniquin and the Tupinambá. These wars often began over the need to avenge the honor of the tribe because of atrocities committed against them in the last war. Usually these insults centered on the practice of ritual cannibalism, committed with prisoners of war. In an elaborate ceremony, prisoners were killed and their flesh "tasted" by the tribe. In return, the tribe of the prisoner would retaliate by performing a similar ceremony with a prisoner from the guilty tribe. This created an unending cycle of warfare between the Tupi Indians.[15]
Because few Portuguese lived in Brazil during the thirty years following Cabral's discovery, the vast majority of the Brazilian Indians had little contact with the Portuguese. Those who did either assimilated individual men or had limited, intermittent contact with the traders. On the Piratininga plateau, Ramalho became a part of the extended family of Tibiriá. He married one of the chief's daughters and became a respected and powerful member of the tribe. Since the Portuguese did not establish a trading post near Piratininga, Tibiriçá's people did not go to work for the Portuguese cutting brazilwood.
This isolation changed in 1530 when, concerned over the increasing interest in Brazil by French traders, the Portuguese king directed Martim Afonso de Sousa to establish Brazil's first colony. Martim Afonso's expedition, charged with patrolling the coast of Brazil and exploring the southern coast in addition to founding a colony, left Portugal toward the end of 1530. Royal officials, soldiers, priests, gentlemen, mechanics, laborers, settlers (some with their wives), and sailors made up the expedition, which numbered about 400 persons and four ships. Martim Afonso sailed along
the coast of Brazil attacking French ships before heading south to establish a colony. He selected an island at a latitude of 24º30" and there ordered his men to erect a fort and construct the rudimentary beginnings of Brazil's first colony, São Vicente. Leaving behind the colonists, Martim Afonso continued on with his soldiers to reconnoiter the southern coast of Brazil, particularly the Rio de la Plata. On his return, Martim Afonso distributed the first land grants to the colonists. Later he imported sugarcane and built the first sugar mill. The colony quickly spread from the island onto the narrow shelf of land, covered with a dense tropical forest, between the steep mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.[16]
Martim Afonso envisioned a colony dedicated to the production of sugar, similar to the Portuguese colony of Madeira, and to the extraction of precious minerals, should any be found. Thus, he built São Vicente on the coast so that it would remain closely linked by sea to Portugal. Above the colony, on the Piratininga plateau, lived Tibiriá's tribe of Tupiniquin Indians, known as the Guaianá. They lived in several villages near the present-day city of São Paulo. The Indians preferred the plateau, which had a cooler and drier climate than the coast, and only descended to the sea at certain times of the year to fish and hunt. Hence, as long as the Portuguese remained on the coast and allowed the Indians to fish, the relations between the colonists and the Guaianá progressed smoothly, aided by the intercession of Ramalho. Greatly outnumbered by Indians and isolated from Portugal, the colony was extremely vulnerable to Indian attack. Ramalho persuaded his father-in-law, Tibiriçá, to protect the fledgling Portuguese colony. Indeed, Tibiriçá allowed himself to be baptized, adopting the name Martim Afonso Tibiriçá to emulate the colony's leader, and married several of his daughters to Portuguese men. One of his daughters took the name Beatriz at baptism and married a Portuguese man, Lopo Dias. These were the parents of Suzana Dias.[17] ç The good relations between Portuguese and Indians in São Vicente played a major role in the early success of this colony. Uninterested in the interior and determined to make the sugar economy work, Martim Afonso prohibited his colonists from visiting the plateau without his permission.[18] To Ramalho, he gave the monopoly of supplying the colony with Indian slaves from the plateau.[19]
Very soon after Martim Afonso founded São Vicente, the crown
of Portugal decided to pursue further colonization in Brazil. The crown wanted to reinforce its claim to Brazil, but it did not wish to expend the funds necessary to establish royal colonies. Thus, between 1533 and 1535, regardless of the nearly two and a half million Indians who lived in Brazil, the Portuguese crown divided Brazil into fourteen horizontal strips and granted each to an individual to colonize at his own expense. Each of the recipients of these grants (donatários ) had extensive legal powers. Each could appoint officials, administer justice, create towns, license mills, and grant land to colonists. Each received extensive tracts of land for himself, and each received the right to collect rents from his colonists. These grants were hereditary and followed the principle of primogeniture, passing intact from father to oldest son. The crown expected the holders of these grants to raise the capital to colonize the region and that in time, such colonization schemes would generate handsome incomes for the holders and their heirs.[20] Martim Afonso received the grant of the colony he had founded, São Vicente. Although he spent little time there himself, the colony survived under the stewardship of his wife and lieutenants.
Of the fourteen donatários, only ten were actually colonized, and of these, only two, São Vicente and Pernambuco, met with any immediate success. All of the settlements faced many obstacles. Poor leadership, the difficulty of attracting settlers, the lack of capital, and wars with neighboring Indian tribes doomed many of the early colonies. The economies of these early settlements rested on the cutting of brazilwood and early attempts to establish sugar plantations. Labor was a perennial problem. Most of the brazil-wood trade continued to be conducted through barter with the Indians. As the coastal stands of brazilwood were cut, however, it became progressively harder for the Indians to cut and carry the wood from the forests of the interior. Barter with the Indians broke down when the Indians no longer needed or desired Portuguese trading goods or when they resented the ceaseless demands placed on them. The labor problem was even more acute on the sugar plantations and sugar mills that needed a reliable work force. Increasingly, the Portuguese began to enslave Indians, especially for work on the sugar plantations. Indians who were captured by other tribes in tribal wars and exchanged for goods with Portuguese traders became the slaves of the Portuguese, and any In-
dians captured by the Portuguese in wars between the Portuguese and Indians also became slaves.[21] As Indian slavery emerged as the solution to the colonists' labor problems, conflicts between the colonists and Indians intensified.[22]
In São Vicente, one of the two successful donatários, sugar plantations expanded along the coast. By 1548, the colony had six sugar mills, 600 Christian "souls," and 3,000 slaves.[23] The majority of these slaves were Indians from the plateau captured and sold by Ramalho and his allies to the Portuguese.[24] Yet Martim Afonso's dream of creating a Brazilian Madeira proved illusive. The Portuguese settlers were increasingly drawn to the plateau, the source of Indian labor. In 1544, when Martim Afonso was in Portugal, his wife formally revoked his order against visiting the plateau without permission.[25] As more and more colonists went there, the Portuguese began to alter the economic focus of the colony. The Portuguese settlers became enamored with the temperate climate inland and began to establish wheat and cattle estates. Thus, while sugar continued to be produced in São Vicente, it did not remain the central driving force of the economy of this southernmost colony.
The failure of most of the donatários in Brazil caused the crown to rethink its colonization policy. By the middle of the sixteenth century, it realized that private initiative alone could not colonize Brazil. Thus, in 1549, the crown appointed the first royal governor of Brazil, Tomé de Sousa. The new governor's primary task was to aid the faltering colonies by giving them military assistance. In addition, he was to increase the crown's revenues and to build the colony's capital, Salvador da Bahia. With Tomé de Sousa came the first Jesuits, the order chosen by the king of Portugal to evangelize and pacify the Indians.
During the second half of the sixteenth century, the quickening pace of Portuguese colonization began to devastate the traditional lifeways of the Indians. All of the Portuguese had plans for the Indians of Brazil. The Jesuits hoped not only to convert the Indians to Christianity but to replace their traditional life-style with one more in keeping with European notions of religious, family, and community life. The Jesuits established aldeias , or Indian missions, where they moved Indian tribes to facilitate their conversion. There they taught the Indians new cultural values and new forms
of subsistence and introduced them to new social institutions. The congregation of Indians into these villages, their conversion to Christianity, and their exposure to a new life-style all began to unravel the fabric of Indian tribal society in the areas of Portuguese colonization.[26]
The Portuguese colonists saw the Indians as the solution to their labor problem. Slavery and forced labor on their sugar plantations destroyed Indian tribal society even more rapidly than the Jesuit missions. Indian slavery was considered legal by the Portuguese crown if the Indians were captured in "Just Wars" or if they practiced cannibalism.[27] These restrictions, liberally interpreted by the colonists, led to numerous slaving expeditions into the interior.
All Europeans unknowingly brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no natural immunity. The great epidemics that decimated Indians elsewhere in the Americas also ravaged the Indians of Brazil. Beginning in the 1550s, influenza, dysentery, smallpox, and plague swept through the Indian villages, killing many. Indians who lived among the Portuguese, as well as those in the forest, contracted the diseases and died in great numbers. Famine followed on the heels of disease, further weakening the survivors.[28]
These changes in the first half of the sixteenth century forever altered the history of the indigenous peoples of Brazil and paved the way for Portuguese colonization. As Indian society disintegrated following contact with the Portuguese, Portuguese society took root. While the Portuguese saw this transformation as unbearably slow, Indian groups had virtually no time to adapt to or to prevent these changes that would eventually destroy their way of life.
In São Vicente, moreover, it is clear that the characteristics of this very early stage of colonization set the stage for the future development of the region. How the Jesuits, the Portuguese colonists, and the growing group of mamelucos survived in São Vicente in the sixteenth century influenced the behavior of subsequent generations who carried those survival techniques deeper into the interior. Patterns visible in the sixteenth century on the coast could be found deeper in the interior one hundred years later. The colonization of São Vicente was a repeating cycle of events that gradually rolled west. The key aspects of this coloniza-
tion cycle were first enacted on the plateau in the middle of the sixteenth century.
The Jesuits played a major role in the early colonization of São Vicente. In 1553, Father Manuel da Nóbrega, leader of the Jesuits in Brazil, arrived in São Vicente. At that time, seven Jesuit brothers had built a church and a house on the coast near the settlement founded by Martim Afonso de Sousa. They had begun to teach a community of between fifty and sixty Indian children.[29] Nóbrega reported great initial success with "the Indians of this land," the "sons and daughters of Christians, mamelucos, of whom there are many, and slaves." He wrote of their "great fervor" at confession when many came "crying" and "in great pain." Moreover, he observed that the Indian catechumens "know the doctrines better than many Old Christians" and "discipline themselves with such great fervor that it creates confusion among the whites."[30] In the school, the Jesuits taught the boys to read and write, to sing, and to play the flute. The more able studied grammar. Some boys learned trades. But life was difficult for the Jesuits, who lived off the alms given to them by the Indians.
Despite the fact that the Jesuits had little income with which to care for the children (most were still naked, as the mission was too poor to clothe them), Nóbrega envisioned a great future in São Vicente. He saw that from São Vicente the Jesuits could spread up onto the plateau and from there into the interior, where they could bring the Indians salvation. The Jesuits had heard of the Guaraní Indian civilization located beyond São Vicente, toward the Spanish settlements of Paraguay. There the Jesuits hoped to establish missions. For Nóbrega, São Vicente would be the great base for the Jesuit evangelization of Brazil.
To this end, Nóbrega wished to establish a Jesuit mission above the small coastal settlement on the plateau of Piratininga. The Jesuits created their plateau mission, which they called São Paulo, with the help of Tibiriá, in 1553. As on the coast, they opened a school for the children and traveled into the wilderness to preach to Indian tribes.
Uplifted and yet weighted with the responsibility for saving the Indians, the Jesuits alternated between hope and despair. Invariably optimistic after surviving the terrifying sea voyage to arrive at São Vicente, and the dangerous ascent up the steep escarpment
to Piratininga, the new brothers delighted in the plateau. José de Anchieta described it as "a healthy land where men lived to be old and robust,"[31] while Balthezar Fernandes wrote in 1556 that "it is land like that of the Kingdom [Portugal], cold and temperate" and that "this land is like the best that there is in the Kingdom and it produces everything which can be produced there."[32] Yet, Nóbrega, discouraged, reflected, "We are in a land so poor and miserable that nothing can be gotten from it, because it is the people who are so poor, and poor as we are, we are richer than they.... Here there is neither wheat, nor wine, nor vinegar, nor meat (except by a miracle); that which there is in the land is fish and the food from roots, and as much as we have, we are still poor."[33]
Driven by a faith and a responsibility that few understood, the Jesuits clearly suffered in their work. José de Anchieta described the travail of missionary work among the Indians as the Jesuits "harvested many souls in Brazil for Christ."[34]
In the Captaincy of São Vicente it is sometimes so cold that we find Indians frozen along the trails. One cannot sleep in the forest because of the intense cold. Without shoes or socks and with no fire, our legs are frequently frostbitten. Continuous and heavy rains flood the rivers, and many times we wade up to our waists or chests through stretches of very cold water. After an entire day in the rain and rivers, we spend most of the night drying our garments by a fire, since we have no change of clothing.[35]
While the Jesuits had one idea for the way Brazil should be "harvested," the Portuguese settlers in São Vicente had another. Many identified with the mameluco culture—a blend of Portuguese and Indian ways. A growing number of mamelucos and Portuguese settlers lived on the plateau by the 1550s. In the small village of Santo André lived Ramalho, his mameluco kin, and a few Portuguese settlers. Far from seeing Ramalho as an ally, as Martim Afonso de Sousa had in 1530, Nóbrega felt him to be an obstacle to the Jesuit vision for Brazil. He wrote of Ramalho in 1553:
In this land there is a João Ramalho. He has been here many years and his life-style and that of his children is Indian and is a petra scandali for us, because his life is a great hindrance for the Indians we have; he is well known and well connected by kinship to the Indians. He has many women. He and his sons have relations with sisters and have children by them.... They go to war with the In-
dians and their festivals are those of the Indians and they live naked as the Indians.[36]
Ramalho had become powerful on the plateau not only because of his ties to the Indians but because Portuguese officials recognized his power. The royal governor of Brazil in 1553, Tomé de Sousa, ordered Portuguese settlers on the plateau to live in Ramalho's town of Santo André and made Ramalho their captain.[37] Twenty years before, Martim Afonso also acknowledged his authority on the plateau and had given to Ramalho the monopoly of supplying slaves to the Portuguese settlers on the coast. Ramalho's years of slave trading, which consisted of selling Indians captured in traditional tribal wars as well as out and out slave raiding, provided the Portuguese settlers and their mameluco descendants with laborers for their fields and servants for their homes. Mamelucos followed Ramalho's example and became slave traders. They excelled at Indian slaving because they could negotiate both the Indian and the Portuguese worlds. The increasing scope of the Indian slave trade reverberated throughout the interior of São Vicente and destabilized Indian intertribal relations.
The Indians of the plateau found themselves caught between many worlds—their traditional society, the strict religious ways of the Jesuits, and the mameluco culture. Some Indians and many mamelucos passed back and forth between the Indian and Portuguese cultures. Nóbrega wrote of Indian boys who studied with the Jesuits but who, when adults, returned to the Indian ways of their parents. Then, he reflected, having returned to nudity, the Indians were too ashamed to go to church. Nóbrega understood that although they once wore clothes, they had no means of making the clothes they needed to be respectable in Christian society.[38] Anchieta lamented that "of our old pupils with whom we worked with so much toil and pains we have no news. Dispersed in various localities where they cannot be taught, they soon lapse into the ways of their fathers."[39] He remarked approvingly, "Our Savior, however, has punished many with sickness and death."[40]
While the Indians attempted to understand what was happening to their world and culture, the first plagues broke out in São Vicente. In 1554, Jesuit Pero Correia wrote that among the Indian converts, "death struck three chiefs and many other Indians" and
that "almost every day we lost some."[41] Others described the fever: "it struck with such violence that as soon as it appeared it laid them low, unconscious, and within three or four days it carried them to the grave."[42]
In 1562, another epidemic erupted, this time, smallpox. Not understanding the disease, Anchieta bled the feverish victims, cut away their rotting flesh, and attempted to nurse them back to health. He described the disease as a "malignant type, frightful, covering the entire body from head to foot with a leprous eruption similar to sharkskin."[43] But the Indians, possessing no immunities, frequently died.[44]
Between the epidemics that swept across the plains hung the threat of annihilation from war. The small Jesuit settlement at São Paulo, the surrounding Indian villages, and Ramalho's village of Santo André were all vulnerable to attack by hostile Indians. These included the traditional enemies of the Tupiniquin as well as disaffected Indians who resented the colonists and the Jesuits. In 1561, these two groups attacked São Paulo. One of the leaders of the rebellion, Jagoanharo, or "Fierce Dog," was Tibiriá's own nephew and a former pupil of the Jesuits. Fed up with plagues and Indian slaving, he led many Indians in revolt. The rebels were joined by the Tamoio, a federation of Tupinambá tribes allied with the French along the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The Tamoio were traditional enemies of the Tupiniquin Indians of the Piratininga plateau. The siege of São Paulo very nearly succeeded. But Tibiriçá, loyal to the Jesuits, fought off the attack and saved the settlement.[45] ç
The conflict between these traditional Indian enemies had become entangled with the larger imperial rivalry between Portugal and France over Brazil. France had established a small colony on an island in the Guanabara Bay in 1555. Both the governor of Brazil, Mem de Sá, and the Jesuits wanted the French out—Mem de Sá because the presence of the French challenged Portuguese hegemony and the Jesuits because the colony included Protestants whom the Jesuits viewed as capable of spreading heresy among the Indians. While Mem de Sá and the Jesuits dislodged the French from their colony in 1560, the hostilities between the Tamoio and the Portuguese continued. Numerous expeditions harassed the Tamoio until they were virtually extinct by the end of the sixteenth century.[46]
After the rebellion, the Portuguese and mameluco settlers of the plateau moved from the village of Santo André to a new site alongside the Jesuit college, creating the town of São Paulo. The old chief, Tibiriá, died from an outbreak of dysentery in 1562. Ramalho, his son-in-law, now accepted by the Jesuits, took over the chief's role of defending the Portuguese settlement of São Paulo. The town grew to become a small walled settlement of 120 households inhabited by Portuguese, mamelucos, and a multitude of Indian slaves. The Jesuit mission consisted of five or six brothers and their Indian catechumens. Surrounding the town lay a sweep of fields that produced wheat, corn, olives, wine, and fruits. Cattle, horses, and pigs grazed freely on the open plains.[47] ç
Outside of São Paulo, the Jesuits had established a ring of satellite Indian villages such as Pinheiros, São Miguel, M'Boi, and Guarulhos. In these aldeias, the Indians lived a regimented life of work and catechism punctuated by the ringing of the mission's bell. At dawn, the bells summoned the girls for religious teaching, after which they spun and wove cloth so that the Indians could have clothes to wear. Then the Jesuits taught the boys their lessons, after which they were dispatched to hunt and fish. The adults worked in the fields during the day, but before sunset, a bell rang for them to come have their religious instruction.[48]
Beyond São Paulo, its surrounding fields, and the ring of Jesuit aldeias lay the wilderness. There, deep in the interior of Brazil, Indian tribal society remained intact.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had forever altered the coasts and plains of São Vicente. Portuguese institutions and mameluco lifeways had taken root and had choked out the original indigenous ways. The mameluco culture freely borrowed from the Portuguese and the Indian. It was a frontier culture, created by the need to survive in a world only recently linked to Portugal. While the independent and self-sufficient tribes of the plateau no longer lived as they had in 1500, many of the Indian lifeways continued on the plateau. The mamelucos spoke Tupi, ate a predominantly Indian diet, and adopted only the outward manifestations of Christianity.
In between the world of the interior, where Indian tribal society remained intact, and the established Portuguese colonies of the coast lay a buffer zone—a frontier—where colonization was still in
progress. There Jesuits, mamelucos, and Portuguese colonists met new Indian tribes and set into motion once again the events that had already transpired in the settled coastal areas. The conquest and colonization of Brazil thus occurred in cycles as each new frontier became part of Portugal's colonial empire.
The colonies created by the Portuguese in Brazil varied from region to region. In northeastern Brazil, the settlements of Bahia and Pernambuco began to flourish by the 1570s. The growing and milling of sugarcane drove these areas. The first sugar plantations used Indian slaves, but as disease, mistreatment, and overwork decimated Indian tribes, the Portuguese planters turned to Africa as a source of labor.[49] By the end of the sixteenth century, the African slave trade, controlled and developed by the Portuguese, supplied the sugar regions with a steady stream of laborers. In the middle of the 1580s, approximately one-third of Pernambuco's slaves were African.[50] Africans held the skilled positions in the sugar mills, replacing Indians as the sugar masters, purgers, blacksmiths, kettlemen, and craters.[51] The transition to African slavery gave the Indians a respite. Indians lived in Jesuit aldeias and grew food crops for the Portuguese towns. They became a free peasantry.[52]
The climate, the availability of labor from Africa, and the demand for sugar in Europe all caused the sugar economy to flourish in the northeast. By 1570, Brazil had 20,000 Portuguese or white inhabitants and sixty sugar mills. Most of the mills (41) and the majority of the population (60%) could be found in the captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia.[53] The sugar economy brought a prosperity to the northeast unknown in São Vicente. In 1593, whites in Pernambuco earned on the average 9,660 reis, while in São Vicente they earned only 2,770 reis.[54] Pernambuco produced a gross product of 116,000,000 reis in 1593, all subject to the royal tithe, while São Vicente produced only 5,000,000 reis.[55] São Vicente had the distinction of being Brazil's first permanent settlement, but it was not a wealthy one.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese colonization of the northeast rested on a plantation model—that is, the exploitation of land and labor to produce sugar for sale in European markets. In other areas, however, this plantation society developed more slowly or never fully took root. São Vicente is one such region.
Several factors set São Vicente apart from the northeast of Brazil. High on a temperate plateau, the major settlements of São Vicente were cut off from the Atlantic by a very steep coastal range that could be virtually impassable. Since the inland town of São Paulo lacked easy access to the sea, it made the transport of sugar to Portugal difficult. As a result, the economy there became more self-sufficient. Lacking the capital to buy slaves from Africa, the Portuguese and mameluco settlers of the plateau continued to enslave Indians from the interior and put them to work on their agricultural estates. In São Vicente, unlike Bahia and Pernambuco, the free Indians of the plateau remained the allies of the Jesuits, the colonists, and the mamelucos. Their cultural contribution, therefore, was far greater to the society forming in São Vicente than it was in the northeast.
The family of Manoel Fernandes Ramos, a Portuguese immigrant, and Suzana Dias, one of Tibiriá's granddaughters, suggests how families lived on the plateau in the late sixteenth century. The couple married in 1570 and lived in São Paulo, where Suzana bore seventeen children. Manoel, being Portuguese and therefore fluent in that language and familiar with Portuguese civil institutions, held several positions in São Paulo's municipal government.[56] ç In 1580, Manoel left São Paulo and followed the Tietê River downstream some seven leagues west (about 40 kilometers). There he reached a waterfall known to the Indians as "paranaiba."[57] Presumably, he was looking for land to claim and farm, for he petitioned the governor of São Vicente for the hilly lands around the river. Manoel died several years later, but this area, which his wife later received in a royal land grant, became the nucleus of a new settlement, Santana de Parnaíba.[58]
The basic contours of this family suggest some of the survival strategies used by the people of São Paulo in the late sixteenth century. Manoel married a mameluca, Suzana. Since the plateau was not suited for sugar production, he did not seek to establish a sugar plantation as his compatriots did in Pernambuco and Bahia. Rather, he wanted virgin forest lands on which to begin a farm worked by his Indian slaves. He set off into the interior to find suitable lands. He thus entered the buffer zone between the unknown Brazilian wilderness and the known Portuguese town of
São Paulo. He began again the process of colonization that would bring a new area into the Portuguese colonial world.
It is unclear exactly when the family developed the lands, but in 1597, discoveries of gold were made outside of São Paulo, some of them in a place called Vuturuna in Parnaíba.[59] Certainly by 1597, then, the area was well known in the town of São Paulo. Mining claims were soon staked out and a settlement of sorts must have begun. Suzana Dias and her son constructed a small chapel, dedicated to St. Anne, near the waterfalls called "paranaiba." Thus, the settlement became known as Santa Anna de Paranaiba, which over the years became Santa Anna de Parnaíba, Sant'anna de Parnhyba, and today, Santana de Parnaíba. Despite high hopes for gold mining, the alluvial deposits never yielded much. But the area grew as an agricultural site, using the Indians living in the nearby aldeia of Baruerí, which was founded in the early seventeenth century and had a population of 500 or 600 Guaraní Indians by 1612.[60] In 1625, the settlement of Santana de Parnaíba was large enough to be raised to a town, which gave the settlers the right to create their own town council to take charge of local government.[61]
Three years later, in 1628, Suzana Dias wrote her will. From her will we realize how far Portuguese colonization had progressed during the sixteenth century. Suzana, a devout Christian, identified with Portuguese society, despite her Indian mother and her own mameluco ethnicity. From her will we know that she wore clothes, that she lived in a house, that she confessed to a priest, that she married in a Christian ceremony. We may surmise from the names of her children that they were baptized by a priest and from Suzana's discussion of her daughters' marriage dowries that they married according to Christian doctrine. Cognizant of her responsibility as a Christian woman in the wilderness of Brazil, she founded a chapel. But in other aspects of her life, she may have retained Indian customs. She undoubtedly spoke Tupi, the common language of the plateau. Possibly she slept in a hammock, for although her will begins with the phrase "sick in bed," beds were scarce and valuable.[62] Most probably, her diet followed Indian rather than Portuguese traditions. Into her Catholicism, too, probably crept vestiges of her mother's tribal beliefs and superstitions.
Thus, Suzana Dias, like her uncle, João Ramalho, straddled the
Portuguese and Indian worlds. Carrying this dual heritage, she, with her Portuguese husband, made her way into the Brazilian wilderness. In so doing, she began the colonization of the region to the west of São Paulo.
While historians usually hold up Pernambuco and Bahia as the classic examples of the Portuguese method of colonization in the New World, it is important to remember that not all of Brazil can be understood through their experience. As the most important and richest centers of Portuguese colonization, Pernambuco and Bahia dominated the attention of the crown. Yet, compared to the vastness of the colony, these two captaincies were, in a sense, islands surrounded by a much less developed, more frontierlike colony. Colonization in other regions of Brazil, like São Vicente, took different forms. Colonization outside the zones of plantation agriculture depended on a fluid interaction between the settlement and the wilderness. Families compensated for their inability to create sugar plantations by exploiting a vast frontier. These actions, in turn, encouraged the settlement of the west in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Fifty years after Martim Afonso founded Brazil's first European colony, Manoel Fernandes Ramos and Suzana Dias brought the area that would become Santana de Parnaíba into the orbit of the Portuguese colonial world. At that time, the small settlement lay on the edge of the wilderness. Over the next two hundred years, as the town grew, the descendants of Manoel and Suzana would, like their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, move farther and farther west. The experience of Santana de Parnaíba provides important clues about how that frontier was settled. Let us look more closely, then, at the role of a frontier town in the conquest of the Brazilian wilderness.