2
Town, Kingdom, and Wilderness

From the earliest days of colonization, the Portuguese and mameluco colonists of Santana de Parnaíba lived in three worlds: the town, the kingdom, and the wilderness. Each affected families in profound ways. How families interacted in these areas largely defined their future wealth and social position. Moreover, the way that some families in Parnaíba dominated all three worlds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explains how social classes emerged and perpetuated themselves in the town.

Everyone in Santana de Parnaíba belonged to the vila, or "town," a legally established community within the Portuguese American empire.^[1] The culture created in the vila drew from both old and new world traditions. The laws of Portugal, European Catholicism, and Iberian municipal institutions each shaped the town, just as the Indian diet, language, and farming methods became part of daily life. Santana de Parnaíba boasted all the outer trappings of a Portuguese town: it had its mother church (igreja matriz), a town council (câmara), a militia (ordenança ), common lands (rossio ), and the officials who represented Portuguese society—priests, aldermen, militia captains, and notaries. Yet, placed as it was in colonial Brazil, a town such as Parnaíba contained many attributes of the wilderness, such as uncut forests and a large population of Indians. In many ways, the town became the synthesis between the kingdom and the wilderness: for in the town, a hybrid, mameluco culture formed in the seventeenth century. A Brazilian town did not completely replicate a Portuguese town but merely certain of its institutions. It became a new and different world.

The word reino , "kingdom," when used in colonial Brazil referred to Portugal.^[2] From Portugal came the impetus for colonization, the policies that structured the colonial empire, and the

dominant cultural values. The kingdom represented the home base of Portuguese civilization—the place where authority in matters spiritual and temporal lay. It was the source of political power, the laws that governed the colony, religious institutions, and the traditions that shaped family and community life.

Not everyone in the town understood the meaning and significance of the kingdom. Only a handful of Parnaíba's residents ever visited Portugal. But for a small minority who comprehended the relationship of the town to the kingdom, the reino provided a source of power. Those who upheld the sovereignty of the kingdom over the town and those who marketed Parnaíba's agricultural products for the kingdom recognized that their ties to the kingdom increased their authority and status in the town.

The word sertão designated the frontier, the unknown, the vast wilderness.^[3] On maps, sertão specified the interior of Brazil, the territories under Indian control, and the virgin forest that might still exist around and between Portuguese settlements. If the reino represented one pole on a continuum that extended from the Old World to the New World, the sertão epitomized the opposite—America in its natural state. Tall rugged forests, only sparsely inhabited by Indian tribes, covered most of the wilderness. Rivers that rose in the mountain ranges, meandered through the forests, and eventually emptied into the Atlantic Ocean provided the only reliable entrances to the wilderness. Virtually everyone in Parnaíba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had firsthand experience with the wilderness. For Indians, the wilderness was a familiar world. Mamelucos easily moved between the wilderness and the town. But to a newly arrived man from Portugal, the wilderness appeared incomprehensible. To the Portuguese, the wilderness begged to be colonized, exploited, and transformed.

For 250 years, the history of the town of Santana de Parnaíba unfolded in relation to the ebb and flow of the competing influences of kingdom and wilderness. In the sixteenth century, the wilderness to the west of the town of São Paulo included what would later become Santana de Parnaíba. As the town grew in the seventeenth century, the values of the kingdom took root. By the eighteenth century, Parnaíba had lost its frontier identity, and more and more of its families emulated Portuguese attitudes and traits. After independence in 1822, Parnaíba came to resemble a

small Portuguese town populated largely by peasant farmers who produced for the nearby city of São Paulo. But although a very gradual evolution from the characteristics of the "wilderness" to those of the "kingdom" took place in the town of Santana de Parnaíba, it was not a complete progression. Parnaíba never perfectly replicated a Portuguese town, because it did not share the same historical past. Rather, colonists successfully transplanted certain Portuguese cultural institutions into this (and many other) Brazilian towns.

In 1625, Santana de Parnaíba formally became a town. A small town center began to take shape along the banks of the Tietê River. On the steeply sloping central square, Indian laborers began to build the mother church in the 1640s. Using large blocks of pressed earth, they constructed a simple one-story sanctuary. Along one side, a tower went up which later held the three bells that summoned the people to mass. Inside the cool and dark church was the main altar, five smaller altars along the sides of the sanctuary, and a baptismal font made of wood.^[4] Across from the church stood the chambers where the town council met. These two institutions, one representing the religious heritage of the town's founders and the other the civil traditions of Portuguese local government, symbolized the identity and aspirations of the first colonists.

Yet, beyond the tiny urban core extended the vast forests of the town which dwarfed the small urban nucleus. Here and there, families cleared small patches of land and built farms (sitios ). The great distances made it virtually impossible for the town council's aldermen to enforce edicts from the kingdom, especially if unpopular. The priest of the mother church found it difficult to summon the people of the huge rural town to mass. The majority of the population spoke the Indian language, Tupi. In the beginning, the wilderness far eclipsed the influence of the kingdom in Santana de Parnaíba.^[5]

The wilderness not only dominated the character of life in Parnaíba in the early seventeenth century but the entire economy of the town rested on its exploitation. Colonists depended on the free land and labor found in the wilderness to create and make possible the growth and prosperity of the town.

From the first days of settlement in Parnaíba, men from this town made war against the Indians of the wilderness, submitting

those whom they captured to a life of slavery. The Indians from the wilderness created the wealth that sustained the first generations of colonists.^[6] Bands of men entered the wilderness to attack Indian tribes at war with the Portuguese, the Jesuit missions to the south and west, and individual tribes.^[7] Like the early Spanish conquests of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, these military expeditions assaulted Indian tribes, plundered Indian villages, and abducted men, women, and children for war booty and personal slaves.^[8] Just as the Spanish conquistadors invested their lives and meager resources in such expeditions with the expectation of being rewarded with large grants of Indians (encomiendas ) or the spoils of conquest, so, too, did the men of São Vicente seek Indians for their estates on the Piratininga plateau.^[9]

Men from the established mameluco families of the Piratininga plateau organized bandeiras , large companies of armed colonists and Indian warriors,^[10] From São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba, most of the bandeiras marched south after the Guaraní Indians. The slave hunters sought the Guaraní, known in Sã>o Vicente as "domestic" and "civilized" because of their skill as agriculturalists.

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, expeditions left the plateau and headed southwest to the region then known as Guairá (today the state of Paraná in Brazil) where the Guaraní lived. In Guairá, the Jesuits had launched their great evangelization drive, first envisioned by Father Nóbrega. There the Jesuits congregated the Guaraní Indians into large agricultural missions. The bandeira soldiers, or bandeirantes , coveted the Indians in these prosperous but poorly defended missions. In the 1620s, the bandeirantes began frontal assaults against the missions and enslaved the Indian neophytes. By the 1630s, repeated offensives had destroyed thirteen Jesuit missions in Guairá.

The sacking of the missions of Guairá and the inability of the Jesuits to effectively halt the slave hunters convinced the Jesuits to move their missions. The Indians of the two surviving missions of Guairá and their Jesuit fathers relocated in 1631. Sailing down the Paraná River, they portaged past the Guairá Falls and reestablished their missions in what is today Rio Grande do Sul, the Missiones Province of Argentina, and southern Paraguay. The Jesuits rebuilt a few missions much farther north along the Paraguay River at Ita-

tín, now part of Mato Grosso do Sul, the far western province of Brazil.^[11]

These migrations bought the Jesuits only time. The slave hunters stalked the Jesuits and their Indians, following them to their new locations. Slaving expeditions ventured into the Tape province (Rio Grande do Sul) in the mid-1630s and destroyed three missions there. These attacks fueled a counterattack by the Jesuits, who finally received permission from their superiors to arm their Indians. Later bandeiras to Tape met armed resistance, and in 1641, the mission Indians repulsed an expedition of 300 colonists and 600 Tupi Indian allies.^[12] The defeat of this and other bandeiras in Tape brought to an end the years of the large organized slave-hunting bandeiras against the Guaraní and the Jesuit missions.

Men from Parnaíba participated in and led many of the infamous bandeiras. André, Domingos, and Baltezar Fernandes, the mameluco sons of Manoel Fernandes Ramos and Suzana Dias, participated in the pillaging of many Guaraní missions. Of the three, the Jesuits regarded André as a particularly ferocious and brutal Indian hunter. The Indians whom the three sons claimed as their booty from these raids became the basis of their estates in Parnaíba and the area, initially part of Parnaíba, that later became the towns of Itú and Sorocaba, farther west.^[13] Pedro Vaz de Barros, also from Parnaíba, commanded one of the companies on the expedition led by veteran slaver Antonio Rapozo Tavares, which left São Paulo in 1628 and returned with many Indians. Pedro Vaz de Barros's estate became the nucleus of one of the parishes in Parnaíba, São Roque.^[14] Paschoal Leite Pais and Fernão Dias Pais, two other Indian hunters from Parnaíba, laid the foundation for their agricultural estates in Parnaíba by joining and leading bandeiras.^[15]

For the Indians of the wilderness, life in the towns on the plateau spelled slavery. The majority went to work on the large wheat estates in the towns of São Paulo and Parnaíba.^[16] The colonists did not consider these Indians slaves—they called them servants (servos ) or free slaves (peças forras )—yet Indians clearly lived in an institution similar to slavery. Colonists in Parnaíba, as elsewhere on the plateau, subjected the Indians to a kind of labor service known as "obligation" (obrigação ). In return for being fed, clothed, and catechized, Indians were "obliged" to give their labor

São Vicente in the Age of the Bandeiras

to their masters. In the eyes of the colonists, this represented service, not slavery. Still, colonists described Indians as property in their wills and divided them among heirs at inheritance.^[17] But unlike slavery elsewhere in Brazil, colonists in São Vicente rarely sold their slaves, nor did they supply Indian slaves to other regions of Brazil.^[18]

The attacks of the bandeiras against the Jesuit missions created a state of war between the colonists and the Jesuits. At stake was the control of the Indian population. The colonists sought the Indians for labor; the Jesuits wanted to save their souls. Literate, educated, and articulate, the Jesuits vociferously complained to the

king and pope about the de facto enslavement of Indians, illegal according to royal law.

This state of war came to a head in 1639 when the Jesuits persuaded the pope to issue a bull that reiterated the freedom of Indians and penalized with excommunication by the church those who kept Indians in servitude.^[19] In response, the town council of São Paulo formally expelled the Jesuits from São Vicente in 1640.^[20] In a petition to the pope, the town council expressed the position of the colonists of the plateau. The Indians from the wilderness who served the colonists, they argued, were not slaves but free men. Moreover, when Indians lived with them, in their households, they maintained, colonists could oversee their Christian spiritual education and cure their illnesses. If left free, the Indians might rise up in rebellion. The papal bull should be revoked, the letter concluded, "because it is against the common good, spiritual and temporal."^[21]

Pope Urban VIII's bull coincided with the end of the bandeiras, for after 1640, large expeditions rarely left São Paulo or Parnaíba. But the years of Indian hunting were not yet over. Men from the towns of the plateau continued to hunt for Indians in the wilderness to the north and northwest, but in smaller groups. These expeditions, commonly referred to as armaões ,^[22] ç were smaller, more compact, and more frequent than the bandeiras. Financed from the towns, the Indians brought back on these expeditions went to the estates of the backers, known as armadores , and to the men on the expedition. For example, Antonio Gomes Borba of Parnaíba stated in his will, "[I] came on this expedition with an armação of Francisco de Alvarenga Ribeiro with the [understood] division that of the Indians which I brought from the wilderness, I would pick two and the rest we would divide equally between us, and for this he gave me three blacks and a black woman and all the accessories that I needed."^[23]

The crown had passed laws to regulate armaões. A royal edict of 1570 stated that such expeditions must be licensed by royal governors, that two or three Jesuit fathers should accompany each to persuade Indians to come voluntarily into Portuguese society, where they would be paid for their work by colonists, and that when Indians were divided, royal officials must be present to en-

sure that Indians would not be forced to serve colonists against their will.^[24]

Inventories and wills from Parnaíba reflect the fact that armaoes more nearly resembled economic ventures and military expeditions of conquest than peaceful expeditions to "persuade" Indians to come down to the towns of the plateau. In small companies led by a captain, the bands made their way through the wilderness. The colonists and their Indian guides and porters lived off the land and the stores of manioc flour they carried with them. They ported gunpowder, shot, and long metal chains with collars, used to overpower the Indians unwilling to be lured down to the Portuguese towns. Life on these campaigns was hard for colonists as well as for Indians. With crude maps, the men made their way down the rivers and the Indian trails largely from memory. Some expeditions disappeared without a trace. Men died from hunger and sickness. When one of the men died, his companions buried him in the wilderness and auctioned off his possessions among themselves. Antonio Gomes Borba, a resident of Parnaíba, died in the wilderness in 1645, and to his captain fell the responsibility of conducting an inventory of his possessions. Antonio had with him a hammock, a blanket, a leather fighting jacket,^[25] ç two shirts, a pair of breeches, some thick stockings, a hood, a pillow, several lengths of cloth, a butcher's knife, and a shotgun. Deep in the interior, the captain assigned high monetary values to them, and his companions willingly paid the high prices.^[26]

The Indians of the wilderness, hunted, captured, and subjected to a life of service, provided the labor that built the town of Santana de Parnaíba and its agricultural economy in the seventeenth century. Although Indians knew the wilderness intimately, they did not share in the wealth it brought to the town. Instead, the colonists of Parnaía transformed the Indians of the wilderness into property.

A second seemingly limitless resource of the wilderness that also underlay the growth and prosperity of the town was land. The colonists easily obtained land in the seventeenth century. The agents of the proprietor (donatário) of São Vicente handed out land grants, usually one league square, or 43.56 square kilometers, to those who had the means to farm them. These grants, sesmarias , carried few obligations for the colonist beyond cultivating them

and paying the tithe, a 10 percent tax on agricultural production given to the church. Since the Indians who had once used the lands around Parnaíba for hunting, fishing, and planting small gardens had been decimated by disease, slavery, and conquest, there were few, if any, Indian tribes who could challenge the allocation of lands to the colonists. Moreover, the policy of the crown with respect to the Indians was to congregate them into villages (aldeias) and give each village a grant of land. This provided the Indians with access to land but freed up the rest of the land for colonization.^[27] Thus, colonists quickly became the owners of large tracts.

Land grants transformed the forests of the wilderness into lands "possessed" by individuals according to the rules of Portuguese law. Some of these grants went to the sons and daughters of the founders of Parnaíba—Vicencia, Benta, André, Domingos, and Baltezar Fernandes—but others went to early settlers of no relation to the founders.^[28] To receive a land grant, one petitioned the donatário. The petitioners often cited their long-term residence in the captaincy, their family ties to early colonists, their ability to cultivate land, and their need for land to support themselves as reasons for deserving land.^[29] To use one such petition as an example, João Missel Gigante stated that he was a son and grandson of settlers and conquerors of the captaincy, that he had a wife and children to support, and that he had not yet received any land. He specifically asked for two tracts in Parnaíba: one piece lay between the lands of Jeronymo de Brito and Jorge Fernandes, one league (6.6 km) deep, and the other was the usual one square league. Gigante received the lands "for himself, his wife, and his children... forever" with the sole obligation of paying the tithe.^[30]

Colonists who did not receive land grants still participated in the transformation of the wilderness. Most residents of Parnaíba simply occupied lands in the Indian way—owning the fruits of their labor rather than the land itself. These families cleared and planted the unclaimed or unoccupied lands of the town.

Once the wilderness land began to be claimed and owned by settlers, other forms of land tenure emerged, more reminiscent of Portuguese practices. For example, the mother church and the small chapels of the town owned lands, bequeathed in perpetuity to them by their founders, that were rented out at nominal sums

to local residents.^[31] Also, land could be purchased, inherited, and received as gifts or in marriage dowries. These transactions became increasingly common as the second and third generations of settlers in Parnaíba sought land.

With the labor provided by the Indians captured from the wilderness, and the lands along the Tietê River, the settlers of Parnaíba created their town. In the seventeenth century, families lived simply, with few material possessions. One of the first inventories conducted in the town depicts the fragility of the early farms entirely surrounded by wilderness. The inventory recorded a straw house, a field of cotton and a field of manioc, thirty-four Indian servants, basins for panning for gold, gunpowder and shot, and trading goods for barter with the Indians.^[32] Twenty years later, in the 1640s, the inventories reflect the growth of a farming community. At the time of his death in 1642, Ambrosio Mendes had beans, corn, and wheat stored in his barn. Twenty Indians worked for him, growing wheat, cotton, and foodstuffs and raising pigs and chickens on his farm.^[33] Still, life on these farms remained simple, as Manuel de Lara's inventory makes clear. Manuel owned virtually no furniture. He slept in a hammock with a blanket (a custom adopted from Indians), and in his house could be found only several large chests that doubled as tables and storage bins.^[34]

The largest estates of the seventeenth century had dozens of Indians and larger houses and produced ample harvests of wheat that were traded in the port of Santos for items not produced in São Vicente. Only these families could trade for the woolen cloth, silk, taffeta, fine cottons, thread, buttons, braid and trim, hats, soap, wine, paper, salt, gunpowder, iron chains, and lead imported from Portugal. The accounts kept between Antonio Castanho da Sylva, a resident of Parnaíba, and Diogo Rodrigues, a merchant in Santos, illustrate the high costs of such goods. Antonio's purchases, nearly 30,000 reis, reached 66 percent of the total value of his property when it was evaluated at his death.^[35]

While the resources of the wilderness, land and Indians, provided the two basic underpinnings of Parnaíba's economy in the seventeenth century, the property inventories of the colonists rarely reflected their true value. Land and Indians invariably received minimal appraisals in the inventories in the first century of colonization.^[36]

Grants of wilderness land usually received no valuation at all in property inventories.^[37] Assessors appraised only land that had been improved, that is, cleared and planted. For example, the two cotton fields of Antonio Furtado de Vasconcellos were evaluated in 1628 at 5,000 reis and 2,000 reis, respectively, while his two land grants, which would have measured 43.56 square kilometers each, received no value at all in the inventory.^[38] Only land that could produce, particularly crops like wheat, had value in the early seventeenth-century inventories.

Late in the seventeenth century, as Parnaíba ceased to be a frontier outpost, land began to acquire value in the inventories. In 1664, assessors estimated the value of Paschoal Leite Pais's farm, which consisted of his house and one square league of land, at 150,000 reis. The very next year, in 1665, appraisers rated Maria de Oliveira's very similar farm, described as "one square league of land, most forested, some cleared, and its cotton fields, sugar mill, and houses," as worth 100,000 reis.^[39] Thus, the evaluations of farms increased in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in the most settled areas of the town, as the population of Parnaíba grew and competition increased for land.

Assessors also neglected to measure the monetary value of the Indians, whose labor made possible the town's growth. Like grants of wilderness land, colonists viewed Indians as their property—but as a kind of property that could not be measured according to monetary standards. This stemmed from the custom on the Piratininga plateau of calling Indians "servants" and not "slaves."^[40] Since legally Indians could not be enslaved, appraisers could not evaluate Indians in property inventories, because to do so would be to acknowledge that the law had been broken. Instead, the Indians appeared in the inventories as "servants" who "freely" served the succeeding generations. Assessors simply named each Indian in the inventory, and later the probate judges divided the Indians among the heirs of the deceased.

The custom of treating Indians as property but not evaluating them as slaves can be seen in Antonio Bicudo's will and inventory. He stated to the notary in his will, "I have several slaves [peas] of the people of this land, these are free and as such I ask them to serve my heirs because of the good treatment that I have always given them ... and likewise, I ask my heirs ... to treat them

well."^[41] These Indians nevertheless found themselves distributed among his heirs after he died. This suggests that Antonio knew his Indians were not slaves but that he expected his heirs would benefit from their labor after he died, as he had done. Colonists thus perpetuated the custom of de facto Indian slavery in Parnaíba.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, appraisers increasingly valuated Indians, especially for individuals who died with large debts. In such cases, heirs sold Indian servants to repay creditors, royal laws notwithstanding. In one such situation, which occurred in 1697, the average value of an Indian servant was 16,000 reis. The highest valuation went to an Indian weaver (22,000 reis) and the lowest to a sick Indian (10,000 reis).^[42]

Compared to Indians and land, property from the kingdom received extremely high valuations in property inventories. Assessors evaluated Paschoa Leite's black silk dress, for example, at 21,000 reis, nearly the value of an Indian weaver. They estimated her taffeta shawl at 6,000 reis and her red wool slip at 3,000 reis. Yet the assessors decided that her farm, which consisted of three houses and land that extended one and a half kilometers along the road and back two and a half kilometers into the wilderness, was worth only 16,000 reis, less than her black silk dress.^[43] Similarly, the assessors described a bed belonging to Paschoal Leite Pais as "one bed of blue taffeta with curtains and a canopy with an embroidered silk fringe,... two mattresses,... a silk comforter,... four linen sheets." This amounted to 68,000 reis and was equal to almost half of the value they assigned to his farm, which contained 43.56 square kilometers of land and was worked by more than two hundred Indians.^[44]

Fine clothing and bedding, then, were among the most precious items that individuals could own, even more valuable than land, houses, and Indian servants. The valuations assigned to property suggest how the colonists perceived their material possessions in the seventeenth century. What came from the wilderness and appeared to exist in abundance, they considered less valuable and perhaps less "ownable" than what came from the kingdom. Residents of Parnaíba held this view consistently, even though the land and Indians that came from the wilderness formed the productive base of their economy.

To be sure, these attitudes reflected the matter of the availability

of goods in a small town on the fringes of the Portuguese empire. Items from Portugal, transported over great distances and at great cost, must have been treasured precisely because they were so scarce. Land and Indians, however, existed in abundance, even overabundance, in the eyes of the early colonists. Although the resources of the wilderness provided the means by which the first families of Parnaíba survived, families did not perceive them in this way, at least not in their property assessments.

The extremely high valuations given to property from the kingdom conveys how important the kingdom was to the early colonists of Parnaíba. Although the colonists rejected some of the laws of the kingdom—such as those that outlawed Indian slavery—some did seek, nevertheless, to acquire at great cost clothing and furniture from Portugal. Such items symbolized the ties between the town and the kingdom. Those that could purchased such luxuries to reinforce their Portuguese descent.

The majority of the population in the seventeenth century did not attempt to identify themselves with the kingdom. They could not afford the costly silks and beds from Portugal which marked the status of those who claimed Portuguese ancestry. But like the wealthy, the poor depended on the free resources of the wilderness. Venturing into the world of the wilderness became the key strategy used by families to survive in Santana de Parnaíba in the seventeenth century.

During these first one hundred years, Parnaíba's ties to the frontier and to the larger colonial world created the twin axes on which life in the town revolved. Commercial links to other towns and cities in the Portuguese empire provided markets for Parnaíba's major products and supplied luxuries and tools. The frontier yielded the Indians and the lands that produced the town's livelihood. Thus, Parnaíba's orientation was both inward toward the wilderness and outward toward the kingdom. Both were essential to the town's survival.

By the end of the seventeenth century, not only had most of the lands of the town been handed out to colonists but the number of Indians living in the town began to decline rapidly. The Indians captured by the slaving expeditions suffered not just from the virtual slavery to which their captors subjected them but also from disease and the loss of their cultural heritage. The common cycle

of contact between Europeans and Indians, played out virtually everywhere the Portuguese went in colonial Brazil, also occurred in Parnaíba. Conquest soon followed contact, slavery followed conquest, and disease, cultural loss, and death came with slavery.^[45]

A glimpse of the alarming mortality rate for Indians in Parnaíba can be seen in Isabel de Barcelos's inventory. Since she died when her husband was in the wilderness, the probate judge conducted her inventory in his absence, in December 1648, and turned the property over to Isabel's mother until her husband reappeared from the wilderness. When Isabel's husband arrived seven months later, seven Indians had died in the interim. A receipt appended to the inventory matter-of-factly reported the losses suffered because of these deaths:

Afonso is dead. He belonged to the share of the heir Manuel Favacho. His daughter is dead. A girl named Aniceta is dead. She belongs to the same heir. Maria is also dead. She belongs to the same heir. The black woman Luiza is dead. Two young children of hers are dead and two more are alive.^[46]

Put simply, the town was a death trap for the Indians of the wilderness.

With the claiming of wilderness lands and the decline of the Indian population, it would seem that the traditional strategy of looting the wilderness for the benefit of the town had run its course, but this was not to be so. In the last decade of the seventeenth century, the first discoveries of gold in the Brazilian wilderness had a profound impact on all of São Vicente and especially on the towns of the plateau, such as Santana de Parnaíba. This new rich resource of the wilderness revitalized the economic life of the town as men made their way into the wilderness in search of gold and precious minerals.

The Brazilian gold rush occurred in three phases. The first discoveries of gold surfaced in Minas Gerais with the major excavations at Sabará, Vila Rica, and São João del Rei. Men from São Paulo, Parnaíba, and other nearby towns prospected in these fields until many lost their claims there in the civil strife known as the War of Emboabas of 1708.^[47] The second phase of the gold rush took place in Mato Grosso, where prospectors found gold along the Cuiabá River in 1718 and then along the Guaporé River in 1734.

These fields were very remote, and travel to them was hazardous. The third phase of the gold rush transpired in Goiás, in the highlands to the north and west of Minas Gerais. Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva of Parnaía discovered gold there in 1722. These three phases prolonged the gold rush, for just as gold production began to wind down in one area, prospectors discovered gold anew somewhere else. Individuals and families from Parnaíba prospected in all three regions.^[48]

Parnaíba, like other towns on the Piratininga plateau, easily took advantage of the gold rush of the eighteenth century because of its historic ties to the interior. Men from Parnaíba who had formed armaíões or participated in bandeiras readily made the transition from Indian hunter to gold prospector and merchant. From Parnaíba, Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva and his two partners petitioned the crown in 1720 before embarking on their famous search for gold in Goiás. They argued that their experience as bandeirantes had prepared them to undertake the expedition, for which they wanted to receive in advance certain favors from the crown. They stated that they "had cultivated and explored part of the American wilderness on various expeditions; that wilderness being populated by the villages and kingdoms of various tribes of savage Indians ... which first they must conquer so that they can discover mines of gold and silver." The men asked the king to grant them the right to control the passage along the rivers and to collect tolls from those who would enter the region as well as "the honors and favors which Your Majesty is willing to grant in remuneration."^[49] Convinced that the men did know the wilderness, the crown granted them permission to undertake the expedition and awarded them the right to collect tolls for themselves and their heirs. Fernão Dias Pais, another well-known Parnaíba bandeirante turned prospector, spent the last years of his life on a quixotic quest for gold and emeralds in the wilderness.^[50]

The discovery of gold in the interior drew new generations of men from Parnaíba into the wilderness. Because it was near all three principal routes to the mining regions—the fluvial route to Mato Grosso,^[51] the overland trail to Goiás, and the old road from São Paulo to Minas Gerais—Parnaíba functioned as a gateway into the interior during the Brazilian gold rush. Men from Parnaía became merchants, sending tobacco, cane brandy, slaves, horses,

São Paulo and the Gold Rush

cattle, and other goods to the mining camps. Wealthy families established ranches in Rio Grande, near where their fathers and grandfathers had once hunted the Guaraní Indians, to raise cattle, horses, and mules for the mining towns. Others staked out mining claims that they worked in addition to maintaining their farms in Parnaíba. The very wealthy loaned money to men in the mining towns, collecting interest. The mining boom also provided a market for the produce of Parnaíba's large estates. Families began to plant sugar, construct sugar mills, and distill cane brandy (agua ardente ) for sale in the mining areas.^[52]

Parnaíba still remained the home base for many families. Rather than picking up and moving to the mining regions, men of the family periodically left Parnaíba to do business in the interior. Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, these men spent many years of their lives outside of the town. When Francisco Bueno de

Camargo wrote his will in 1736, he stated he had sent his son to the Guirixas mines with eighteen slaves. Similarly, Domingos Rodrigues de Fonseca Leme's son was in Goiás with twenty-seven slaves when his father died in 1738. Luis Pedrozo de Barros alluded in his will to the fact that his son returned from Cuiabá owing five kilograms of gold. To settle the debt, he sent his son out again with a cattle drove to be sold in Goiás.^[53]

Just as the elite had financed the slaving expeditions into the wilderness in the seventeenth century, so, too, did the wealthy back the ventures to the mining frontier. Father Guilherme Pompeo de Almeida, a wealthy priest, acted as a financier based in Parnaíba. According to his detailed account book, in one year alone, he received 90 kilograms of gold sent by more than twenty men from the mining regions.^[54] Similarly, Domingos Rodrigues de Fonseca Leme lent sums to many men who sought their fortunes as miners, merchants, and prospectors in the mining regions.^[55]

The infusion of gold into Parnaíba, the third great resource of the wilderness, profoundly affected the town. The decline of the Indian population forced the elite to look for new sources of labor, and the availability of gold made it possible for them to purchase Africans, who, unlike Indians, could be legally owned as slaves.^[56] Father Guilherme sent five shipments of gold to a merchant in Bahia in a two-year period specifically for African slaves.^[57] African slaves began to replace Indians as the labor force of choice in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Indians still continued to live in the town, many as wards (administrados ) of colonists. As wards, they lived in the homes of the colonists where they worked in exchange for food and religious instruction. Other Indians became independent subsistence farmers.

Like the Indian slaves before them, Africans interacted in both the town and the wilderness. The majority of the Africans slaves worked in the town on the large farms of the richest families. The wilderness was not a familiar world for Africans, but sometimes it brought them a measure of wealth and autonomy. Some accompanied their masters to the gold fields where they dug and panned for gold. Because of the scarcity of labor in the mining areas, slaves successfully negotiated with their masters for control over some aspects of their lives there. They might accumulate gold, for example, and purchase their freedom.^[58] In the south, slaves worked on

the cattle and horse ranches owned by wealthy families in Parnaíba. Runaway slaves sought shelter in the deep forests of the wilderness. Although slaves might have more autonomy and independence in the wilderness than in the town, the wealth of the wilderness rarely benefited them.

The pursuit of gold and the new economic ventures inspired by the gold rush made agriculture less important to elite families in Parnaíba. They abandoned the large wheat farms of their forebears, which needed substantial numbers of workers, in favor of smaller farms with fewer workers which produced basic subsistence crops (corn, beans, and manioc) and sugarcane for cane brandy. The largest slave owners of the eighteenth century owned fewer African slaves than their seventeenth-century Indian slave-owning counterparts. The size of their lands also diminished as families divided their original land grants between their heirs every generation. Still, the extensiveness of the original grants precluded any immediate land shortage, for heirs simply cultivated a greater proportion of the lands. Domingos Rodrigues de Fonseca Leme's will conveys these changes in the productive base of elite families. He stated in his will that he owned three parts of a land grant—the first, which was his by inheritance, the second, which belonged to his brother and for which he had traded five slaves, and the third, inherited by his other brother who sold it to him for 1.4 kilograms of gold. On his farm, he grazed cattle and horses and planted sugarcane. But he had invested most of his capital in the nearly one hundred African slaves he owned and in the mines of Minas Gerais and Goiás where he sent his slaves, loaned monies, and financed trade.^[59]

Parnaíba's rich families became more worldly and more integrated into the Portuguese colonial economy in the eighteenth century. They accumulated property unknown to their grandparents in the seventeenth century. What would have been considered positively luxurious in the seventeenth century became the norm in the eighteenth. The homes of residents in Parnaíba lost their frontier simplicity. A typical home of a rich family, such as that of Jozé Madeira Salvadores, by no means the wealthiest man in Parnaíba, shows the newly found comforts of town life. At his death in 1733, his farm consisted of a league of land (probably a square league, thus 43.56 sq. km), fifteen slaves, and all the necessary

farm implements and tools. In his house could be found books, such as two books of sermons by the Jesuit, Father Vieira, a painted wooden buffet, two leather trunks, several wooden chests with strong locks, two cots, wooden benches, eight pewter plates, three tablecloths with table napkins, three pairs of silk stockings, and a black wool suit.^[60] By the early eighteenth century, the elite families of Parnaíba had moved closer to the kingdom. They adopted a more European life-style. The influence of Indians over their daily life had waned.

The poor families of Parnaíba, however, remained tied to a world more reminiscent of the seventeenth century. On the fringes of the town where dense forests still stood, the poor farmed small cleared fields and lived in simple houses constructed from sticks and mud. They had little contact with the affairs of the town or the kingdom. The captain of the militia of Parnaíba tried to explain the lifeways of the poor in a reply he wrote after receiving an order to prepare his company for a military campaign in 1736. He wrote that "the majority of my regiment is made up of bastards^[61] descended from Indians" who "desert the small farms on which they live, and with their wives and children go into the forest." "By no means can I have them ready for royal service," he complained, because they do not live in one place, "but are divided, each in his place within forests so thick" that "I do not know how to bring them together, since they flee before they are even called."^[62]

Thus, while the elite became more a part of a Portuguese colonial world in the eighteenth century—active in the economic opportunities it offered the poor remained isolated and distant. They lived as the first settlers of Parnaíba had, in a mameluco world where the influences of the wilderness still outweighed those of the kingdom. But whether poor or rich, the bounty of the wilderness still supported the colonists of Santana de Parnaíba in the eighteenth century.

During the eighteenth century, the old captaincy of São Vicente passed out of the hands of its proprietor and into those of the crown. The crown renamed it "Silo Paulo and the Mines of Gold" and included within it not just the old territory of São Vicente but also the new mining regions. Thus, the orientation of the captaincy continued to face west, to the wilderness. But as time passed, the crown gradually cut the mining regions from Silo Paulo, making

each a separate captaincy to facilitate the collection of taxes on gold. São Paulo became a mere southern appendage to the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro in 1748.^[63] These acts deprived São Paulo of its vast wilderness. Many historians see this as a time of decline and decadence in São Paulo. Lacking the mining regions of the interior and even a royal governor, they argue, São Paulo became a poor and distant backwater of the Portuguese empire.^[64] But as Mafia Luiza Marcílio clearly shows, the eighteenth century was a time of growth there. Not only did the population increase but towns throughout the region continued to lay the foundation for a modest prosperity. This is certainly true in Santana de Parnaíba.^[65]

In 1765, the crown restored the captaincy of São Paulo and set about to encourage economic development in the area as a way of protecting Brazil's southern frontier from the territorial designs of the Spanish. The actions of the crown, particularly those of a series of royal governors, intensified the pace of the region's integration into the Portuguese empire. Dom Luís Antonio de Souza, known by his title as the Morgado de Mateus, came to São Paulo as the new royal governor in 1765. He immediately saw the tension in São Paulo between the wilderness and the kingdom. The vastness of Brazil and the isolation in which the population lived amazed him. From his perspective, the small towns of São Paulo were but frail barriers against the power of a vast wilderness that threatened to impede the development of São Paulo. He wrote in 1766, his second year in São Paulo:

There are 38 parishes in this Captaincy. Of these, there are some that consist of 12, 20, and more leagues... and in this area the parishioners are dispersed.... Rare is he who hears mass, nor can the parishioners come to Church.... They fail to keep lent... and the young are baptized as adults, all because of the impossibility of the distances in which they live.^[66]

For the governor, who sought to transform São Paulo into a prosperous province tightly interwoven into the Portuguese empire, the wilderness represented backwardness and savagery, not avenues for wealth. "When men live away from villages, off in the forest," he wrote, "one cannot expect any usefulness from them, neither for the Kingdom of God nor for that of your Majesty."^[67]

The governor's vision for the future of São Paulo placed a high priority on the creation of a strong commercial agricultural econ-

omy. He ordered the planting of new crops, such as cotton and indigo, and demanded that each town produce a surplus to feed the army and to outfit territorial expeditions. He hoped to create a commercial infrastructure—roads, warehouses, and a port—that would allow São Paulo to export sugar, cotton, indigo, and hides to Portugal. The governor also had in mind the defense of Portugal's southern territories. He organized a new state militia, the auxiliaries, and strengthened the local militia in each town.^[68]

Stimulated by the reforms of the governor, the focus of São Paulo's economy in the late eighteenth century became agricultural products destined for export. By the end of the century, ships stopped regularly in the port of Santos to load the produce of the region. Sugar, cane brandy, rice, hides, coffee, cinnamon, wood, honey, and gum spirits were all products that one ship, the Mer-cúrio , carried from Santos in 1791.^[69]

In spite of the perception of São Paulo's governor that the wilderness hindered development, the rapid spread of the sugar economy in the last decades of the eighteenth century rested on the age-old pattern of exploiting the wilderness. Instead of searching for Indians or gold in the wilderness, families in Parnaíba groomed their sons as the colonizers of new lands into which the sugar economy would expand in future generations. Sons left Parnaíba for the towns of Itú, Sorocaba, and Campinas, an area that became the core of the sugar economy of São Paulo.^[70] Children of poor families also moved west where they claimed forest for their own farms. These farms produced subsistence crops with a surplus for trade in local markets.

Although Parnaía's families continued to rely on the frontier for their prosperity, by the end of the eighteenth century, they no longer lived in the world of the wilderness. The elite adopted the fashions of Europe. Men wore English shirts with ruffles, frock coats, silk stockings, and breeches. Women continued to dress simply, in long dresses with shawls, but their homes, once spare and plain, now housed beds, cupboards with china plates, pewter cutlery, and glassware, tables and chairs, razors, mirrors, and so on.^[71] Even the poor gradually accumulated property such as simple tables, benches, cots, and chests.^[72] Few spoke Tupi or identified with the customs of tribal Indians.

As the nineteenth century dawned, most of the lands in the

Towns of Colonial São Paulo

town were already being farmed, and the vast resources of the wilderness, which had guaranteed the prosperity of the town, were no longer in sight. Those who lived in Parnaíba reflected on their "poverty" compared to the days of yore.^[73] The wealthy did manage to stave off complete ruin by seeding a new cash crop, coffee. In 1820, farmers in Parnaíba harvested virtually no coffee, but by 1836, Parnaíba became the fourth largest producer—812,000 kilograms, or 9 percent of all the coffee produced in the province of São Paulo.^[74]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Parnaíba, well inside the coffee frontier, did finally lose its ties to the wilderness. For the first time in its history, families in the town no longer could exploit the wilderness. Those who remained in Parnaíba saw their

resources dwindle with each passing generation. The lands of the town became subdivided among many descendants. By the end of the nineteenth century, Parnaíba fell under the shadow of the burgeoning city of São Paulo. But as the coffee economy boomed in the nineteenth century, the old patterns of the colonial period did not die. The success of the coffee economy in the state of São Paulo rested on the old formula of looting the wilderness (now the far western virgin forest lands) for the benefit of the kingdom (now independent Brazil). Lacking virgin lands or a vital commercial or financial center, Parnaíba could not remain active in this nineteenth-century economy. But the city of São Paulo, so much like Parnaíba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to prosper by exploiting the wilderness.

As the history of Santana de Parnaíba in the colonial period shows, the ways that families interacted with the kingdom and the wilderness critically affected the development of the town. The most successful families knew how to use each of these worlds to their advantage. Whether it was exploiting the resources of the wilderness, or controlling the institutions of local government, or becoming representatives of the kingdom, elite families understood the importance of each of these spheres to their survival in Santana de Parnaíba. Poor families also took advantage of the wilderness. But as some families successfully developed strategies that combined all three worlds while others could not, an unequal division of power and resources occurred in the town which laid the foundation for the emergence of social classes.