By 1530 it was already evident to Dom João III28 that the papal sovereignty legitimizing the treaty would not be enough to scare away the French corsairs who were settling with increasing frequency in his American domains. The solution was to create a number of colonizing fronts, basically independent, that frequently communicated more with Lisbon than between themselves. The administrative system adopted was that of hereditary captaincies, which the Portuguese had already successfully used in their colonies of Cape Verde and the island of Madeira. The concept was simple: as the Crown had limited financial and human resources, so it delegated the task of colonizing and exploiting vast areas of territory to private citizens, granting them tracts of land with hereditary rights.
In 1534 the Portuguese government began the process of dividing Brazil into fourteen captaincies that were granted to twelve men, known as donees. Since the interior of the country was completely unknown, it was decided to imagine parallel strips of coastline that stretched inland as far as the sertão.29 All the beneficiaries were members of the minor nobility; seven had served with distinction in the African campaigns and in India, and four were high-ranking court officials. The system granted them jurisdiction over their captaincies with supreme powers to develop the region and enslave the Indians. The extreme isolation, however, proved to be highly detrimental. So much so that in 1572 the Crown divided the country into two departments: the Northern Government, with its capital in Salvador, was responsible for the region that went from the captaincy of the Bahia de Todos os Santos to the captaincy of Maranhão. The Southern Government, based in Rio de Janeiro, was responsible for the region that stretched from Ilhéus30 to the southernmost point of the colony. In this way territories within territories were created, regions that barely recognized each other as belonging to a single political and administrative unit.
Actually, once this strange world, along the route to the Indies, had been ‘discovered’, it was decided it should at least be named. For many years the Portuguese did not quite know what to make of this new territory, and there was plenty of indecision. To offset this, after 1501 the expeditions sent to explore the coast had started to name geographical features and to measure and classify latitudes, based on the premise that it really was a new continent. Despite their lack of interest in the territory – especially because, at the outset, they had failed to find the vast quantities of silver and gold that had gladdened the hearts of the Spaniards – they needed to give it a name.31 In their letters both Mestre João and Vaz de Caminha called it Vera Cruz or Santa Cruz. But there was no general agreement; after 1501, at times the territory was called Terra dos Papagaios (Land of the Parrots), in a reference to the multicoloured birds that could talk (even though no one understood what they said), and at others Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross). This latter was used by Dom Manuel I in the letter he sent to the King of Spain. It was also the name of the place where the first Mass had been celebrated, described at length by Vaz de Caminha and seen as the location of the military and Christian inauguration of the territory. According to the contemporary report of João de Barros, Cabral had dedicated the possession of Santa Cruz to the cause of the Holy Cross, and associated the celebration of the Mass to the sacrifice of Christ, transported to the land they had ‘found’. It should, therefore, be entirely dedicated to God, to whom the greatest service would be the conversion of the heathens.
The rumours and conflicting reports of the early days were followed by a growing awareness of the need to protect the new territory from foreign attacks. It had to be peopled and colonized and some sort of economic activity had to be stimulated. Apart from parrots and monkeys, the only tradable product was a ‘dye wood’, well known in the East as a valuable pigment that could fetch high prices in Europe. Thus, shortly after Cabral’s expedition, other Portuguese navigators set sail to explore the new territory and extract this native plant.
Brazilwood,32 which grew abundantly along the coast, was originally called ‘Ibirapitanga’ by the Tupi Indians. Often growing as high as 15 metres, the tree has a large trunk, sturdy branches and thorn-covered pods. It was in high demand for making quality furniture, and for its reddish resin that was used for dyeing cloth. It is thought that about 70 million of these trees existed when the Portuguese arrived. In the years that followed, the species was decimated by Portuguese loggers, with the aid of Indian labour, which they bartered. As early as 900 CE the wood can be found in the records of the East Indies, listed among a number of plants that produced a reddish dye. Both the tree and the dye went by many different names: brecillis, bersil, brezil, brasil, brazily, all of which were derived from the Latin word brasilia, meaning a glowing red, ‘the colour of embers’. The first recorded arrival of a ‘kerka de bersil’ in Europe was in France, as far back as 1085. During Gaspar de Lemos’s expedition in 1501, Amerigo Vespucci had noted a cargo of this beautiful wood.
In 1502 the colonizers were already starting to exploit brazilwood more systematically. Although it was not considered as valuable as the merchandise from the East, it generated considerable interest: indirectly, the Portuguese had gone back to the spice trade. The Portuguese Crown immediately declared it a royal monopoly, only permitting its exploitation via the payment of taxes. The first concession was granted in 1501 to Fernando de Noronha,33 who was also granted an island, the island of São João, later converted into a captaincy that took the donee’s name. Labour was provided by the Indians in exchange for trinkets. They cut down the trees and carried them to the Portuguese ships anchored near the shore; in return they received knives, penknives, pieces of cloth and other knick-knacks. The first ship carrying brazilwood to Portugal, the Bretoa, sailed in 1511, with five thousand logs, as well as monkeys, cats, a large quantity of parrots, and forty Indians, who excited great curiosity among the Europeans.34
In 1512, or thereabouts, with the product established on the international market, the term Brazil became the official name for Portuguese America. But other names, or combinations of names, remained in parallel use. These included both Terra Sante Crusis de lo Brasil and Terra Sante Crusis del Portugal. Behind this divergence in terminology lay a more complex dispute, between the secular and the spiritual powers. The cross erected on that distant hilltop had experienced a short reign; it was the Devil who now held sway. Christian chroniclers deplored the fact that, as the shiploads of merchandise increased, material interests were replacing those of the Holy Cross in this new kingdom. João de Barros, for example, lamented that more importance was given ‘to the name of a wood for dyeing cloth’ than to ‘that wood that gave its colour to the Eucharist by which we were saved, dyed in the blood of Christ that was shed upon it’.35
Thus began the struggle between the red ‘blood of Christ’ and the ‘red dye’ that would become increasingly associated with the Devil. This was further fuelled by the work of Pero de Magalhães Gândavo,36 who was probably a copyist at the National Archive in Lisbon.37 In his História da província de Santa Cruz, published in 1576, he called for a return to the original name, arguing that trying to extinguish the memory of the Holy Cross was the work of the Devil. It was an uphill struggle; colonization was well under way, with the colonizers increasingly linking the role of trade with the Church’s religious and catechizing mission. Although the Devil might continue to be present, they argued their work was also that of the Lord. The new colony’s contested name captures an ambivalence and discomfort that came to be reflected in the expression of deeper concerns about the place.
It was at this time that reports on the New World began to cease distinguishing between the land, its products and the native people. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, in Visão do Paraíso,38 recalls an ancient Celtic myth that could provide an alternative explanation for the origin of the name. According to the myth, there were islands in the Atlantic that were lost in space and time and covered in lichens and other dye-producing plants such as ‘Dragon blood’, both of which produced a red-coloured resin. The historian conclude
s that the name has its origins in the Irish expressions Hy Bressail and O’Brazil, meaning ‘Island of Good Fortune’.
Islands are ideal places for projected utopias. The Irish ‘Isle of Brazil’ was originally a phantom island, lost in time, that re-emerged near the Azores in the fifteenth century. It was also associated with Saint Brendan’s ‘Isle of the Blessed’. The paradise Vaz de Caminha described recalls the utopian ‘Isle of Brazil’. This would also explain why the name Obrasil appears on a number of maps from the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Irish myths were part of a religious and Edenic tradition that greatly appealed to the cartographers of the period. The name first appeared in 1330, as the designation of a mysterious island, and in 1353 it was still present on an English map. At any rate, during the period of the ‘discoveries’ there was a clear association between the Indians, their longevity and Edenic living conditions, and these other mysterious lands. And the mystery was to remain untouched for a long, long time, just like the ambivalence regarding the (glowing coal) red brazilwood and the wood of Christ. Perhaps the best thing to do was to light one candle for God, and blow out another for the Devil.39
HEAVEN OR HELL: NATURE AND NATIVES IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ACCOUNTS
Along with its chosen name, whether it be Brazil, Land of the Holy Cross, Land of the Parrots, or Portuguese America, there came a certain ambivalence, but there was also one certainty: the place had taken on the role of an ‘other’, both its nature and its natives.40 And while its natural surroundings were seen as a paradise – an eternal spring inhabited by harmless animals – its peoples were increasingly becoming a cause for concern. Soldiers, commanders, corsairs, priests and the merely curious avidly traded florid stories. These fantasies built on the venerable tradition of travellers’ extravagant accounts, tales going beyond what the eye could behold or what the intellect could accept, like those found in Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis,41 Aethicus Ister’s Cosmographia,42 Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi,43 The Travels of John Mandeville44 and other writings popular in the early sixteenth century.45
In such traveller’s tales, these wonderful regions were sometimes described as earthly paradises, with fertile plains and fountains of youth; at other times, they were portrayed as godforsaken terrains populated by misshapen monsters. Such was the insistence of the literature that these places were inhabited by men with four arms or one eye at the centre of the forehead, by hermaphrodites, pigmies and enchanted mermaids, it is hardly surprising that in one of his first letters home, Columbus, relieved but a little disappointed, admitted to having seen no human monsters and that, to the contrary, the natives’ bodies were very well formed.46 Nevertheless, monsters were still depicted in drawings and maps and associated with the practice of cannibalism. This in turn led to philosophical and religious discussions about the nature of these pagan peoples. For some they were the descendants of Adam and Eve; for others they were ferocious beasts.
This kind of literature was to proliferate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In European thought, this meeting with America was to be the most grandiose achievement in modern Western history, considered with both trepidation and wonder. This explains in part why travel narratives recreated within the New World a myth that had once been held to be true: the presence of a heaven on earth. Still, the customs of the heathens were hardly compatible with a terrestrial paradise. Although the impact of negative images was perhaps on balance not as strong as the Edenic portrayals, nevertheless fantasies about the natives came close to depicting them as the inhabitants of an anti-paradise, or even hell. These people, with their cannibalism, witchcraft and uncontrolled lust, must be condemned.47
From the sixteenth century onwards this new frontier for humanity was the subject of numerous texts. Since the concept of authorship did not really exist, often one report was reproduced and expanded by another, reinforcing fanciful notions and spreading them wider afield. The first letter about the country, written by Pêro Vaz de Caminha in 1500, was to remain unpublished until 1773. However, Amerigo Vespucci’s letters to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici mentioned not only the Land of the Holy Cross but also its inhabitants. These documents were based on the thoughts expressed in the first of Columbus’s diaries, which in turn revealed the influence of Marco Polo’s and Mandeville’s travel narratives. The idea began to spread that heaven on earth and the fountain of youth were located somewhere close by, as were the brave female warriors, the Amazons, who dwelt there. The travellers of various nationalities who visited the country were already well acquainted with the writings of the Italian Pigafetta,48 who in 1519 summarized his findings as follows: ‘Brazilian men and women go about naked and live to be 140.’
It was only in the 1550s that a wider range of literature about Brazil began to appear: on the one hand, the Iberian writers whose focus was on colonization; and on the other, the ‘non-Iberians’, mainly the French, whose interest lay in reflecting on Native Man. Among the Portuguese texts, the best known was by the previously mentioned Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, Servant and Knight of the Royal Chamber of Sebastião I,49 Secretary of the Royal Treasury and (probably) copyist of the National Archive, who made what was generally considered to be the most authoritative contribution to the debate that had begun with Vaz de Caminha and Vespucci. Was Brazil a heaven or a hell? Were its inhabitants innocents or degenerates? While Gândavo praised the fertility of the land with its temperate, hospitable climate, he was also one of the first to describe its people as a ‘multitude of barbarous heathens’. In the 1570s he wrote his Tratado da Terra do Brasil and in 1576 História da província de Santa Cruz.50 Both were works intended to encourage the Portuguese to emigrate to and invest in their American colony, much as the British had done in Virginia. Whereas the attention of the Portuguese was still focused on the East, that of the Spanish, English and French was now directed towards the New World,51 albeit to different regions: Peru and Mexico were to become the America of the Spanish; Florida that of the English; and Brazil that of the French.52
Gândavo was effusive in his praise: ‘This land is so delightful and temperate that one never feels either excessive heat or cold.’ It was indeed the land of abundance and eternal spring. He was less encouraging, however, about the Indians of the land: ‘The language of these people who inhabit the coast is simple to describe: it lacks three letters. There is no F, no L, no K,53 something worthy of astonishment; there is therefore neither Faith, Law nor King, and thus they live without justice or order.’54 The native peoples were encapsulated not by the values they had, but by those they lacked. Although the natural abundance was paradisiacal, the customs of the natives were, at the very least, strange: they lived in villages ‘crowded with people’ and used hammocks where ‘they all slept together without the existence of rules’. What is more, according to Gândavo, they were ‘extremely bellicose’, killing and eating their prisoners ‘more out of vengeance and hatred than to satisfy their hunger’. As the book progresses, the writer shows less and less sympathy for these ‘savages’. ‘These Indians are extremely inhuman and cruel, they are never moved by pity. They live like wild animals without order or harmony, are very dishonest and give themselves over to lust and vice as if they possessed no human reason.’55
Gândavo repeated these arguments in his História da província de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil.56 Here he describes ‘natives of the land’ at length; with their copper-coloured skin and straight black hair, their flattened faces and ‘Chink-like’ features. He insists that ‘they live lazily and are fickle and erratic’, and ‘worship nothing, having no respect for their king or any kind of justice’. Their laziness and lustfulness were symbolized by the hammock, always present in engravings of the period, as if the Americans had awaited the arrival of the Europeans lying down. In the eyes of the Church, their rituals were idolatrous, full of practices such as human sacrifice; these were false religions, practised by these devil-worshipping peoples, in complete opposition to the mess
age of salvation and sacrifice of the Son of God, who had redeemed mankind. Indigenous beliefs were regarded as a serious instance of retrogression; they were dangerous and perfidious for the moral state of these recently conquered peoples.57
While Portuguese accounts of the natives were generally unfavourable, they were extremely positive when promoting the territory’s natural abundance; after all, they were often written with the intention of encouraging immigration. The travellers’ journals left by the French, on the other hand, created more of a commotion. Although the question of ‘lack of faith’ was mentioned in the texts of Norman navigators who prospered from trading in brazilwood and bartering with the Tupinambá, the French in general seemed little concerned with the natives’ lack of rules and religion. Pierre de Ronsard,58 in his Complainte contre Fortune (1559), describes a Golden Age of America, where he wanted to settle, and ‘Where the uncultured people wander innocently about, always naked; without malice, without virtues, without vices …’59 Here the word ‘without’ refers to the presence of qualities rather than to a lack of them. The heathens of Brazil had captured the French imagination.
An example of this was a fête brésilienne that was held in Rouen in 1550, in the presence of the French king, Henri II,60 and his wife, Catherine de’ Medici.61 The city planned a magnificent reception for the royal couple, erecting grandiose monuments, including obelisks, temples and a triumphal arch, to celebrate the New World. It had been half a century since the Portuguese had arrived in America, and presenting ‘the men of Brazil’ – the courageous Tupinambá who fought alongside the French – was the height of fashion. Fifty Tupinambá simulated combat on the banks of the River Seine observed by the local aristocracy. To make the display more impressive, 250 ‘extras’, dressed as Indians, joined the performers, who presented hunting expeditions, love trysts and scenes of war, as well as appearing loaded down with parrots and bananas.62
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