Brazil
Page 9
Maurice of Nassau created a large ‘recreation garden’ in Recife, which was also an orchard for rare plants, with 852 orange trees, 5 lemon trees, 80 sweet lime trees and 66 fig trees. Seven hundred coconut palms were planted specifically as habitat for animals brought from all over the world. These included many types of birds: Alagoas currasows,37 parrots, peacocks, pigeons, turkeys, ducks, swans and guinea fowl. There were also spiders, tortoises, coatis, anteaters, howler monkeys and marmosets, large cats including tigers and pumas, goats from Cape Verde, sheep from Angola, as well as fish, for which two breeding tanks were built. The park was used as a kind of laboratory by the scientists who were part of Nassau’s retinue. Among these was the doctor Willem Piso – who studied the natural environment, the tropical climate and disease – and the botanist and cartographer Georg Marcgrave. In his palace the count built up a collection of curiosities that included bows, arrows, spears, hammocks, indigenous ornaments made from feathers, furniture made from jacaranda and ivory – all of which were made in Brazil.38
Nassau was extremely popular in Brazil, nicknamed ‘The Brazilian’ due to his fascination with the colony. Nonetheless, he was pressured by the Dutch authorities to return to Europe in 1644, the same year that marks the beginning of the decline of Dutch Brazil – a colonial project conceived to last forever.
The following year the so-called guerras brasílicas against the Dutch started once again. These wars that were known as ‘The Reconquest’ were to continue until 1654, with Portuguese and Brazilian troops once again joining forces to expel the ‘invaders’. The terms coloniseres and invadors are indicative of the mood and the local temperature. During peacetime, the Dutch had been referred to as ‘colonizers’; now they once again became ‘intrusive invaders’. The international situation was also extremely complex: in 1640 the Portuguese had risen up against the Spanish Crown and restored the Portuguese monarchy. John IV,39 the first monarch of the House of Bragança, was placed on the throne and acclaimed by the Cortes.40 Although this marked the end of the Iberian Union, relations between Portugal and Holland continued to be hostile; the peaceful relations between the two nations that had existed before 1580 were not to be re-established. The Dutch had occupied a considerable part of Brazilian territory and gave no indications that they intended to leave. A revolt was organized in Pernambuco under the leadership of André Vidal de Negreiros and João Fernandes Vieira, one of the most prosperous landowners in the area, and they were joined by the Afro-Brazilian military leader Henrique Dias and the Indian Filipe Camarão.
The two battles of Guararapes, fought between 1648 and 1649, ten kilometres south of Recife, are seen as a sort of cornerstone for the creation of the Brazilian nation, above all in Pernambuco. The story was further elaborated by future generations, glorifying the multi-ethnic people of the region who had united to fight for Brazil’s emancipation. With time the term ‘Reconquest’ acquired an emotive force, and even today the event is celebrated by Portuguese and Brazilians as a triumph of ‘the just’.41 Most of the time history is written by the winners, and, in this case, the Dutch were the losers. Today we know that, in addition to Calabar, many sugar-mill owners, cane-cutters, New Christians, black slaves, Tapuia Indians, poor mestizos and others among the poorest classes supported the Dutch. The forces that confronted the Dutch in no way demonstrated a united front made up of the country’s three races: Indians, blacks and Portuguese.
The wars continued for several years: while the insurrectionists occupied the interior, the Dutch maintained control of Recife. The uprising of the Brazilians was not, however, the only reason for the collapse of the Dutch: the West India Company itself was in crisis and could no longer find investors. Besides the lack of funds, there was also a culture shock: while the Portuguese tended to be dogmatic about religion, and rather unorthodox when it came to politics and economics, the Dutch were the exact opposite. They were tolerant in religious practices, but extremely harsh when dealing with landowners in debt. In the end, after so many years of conflict, the resources required for financing the military operation in Brazil were simply no longer forthcoming.
The Dutch finally capitulated in 1654, when a Portuguese squadron arrived and blockaded Recife. The Portuguese resistance movement, which became known as the ‘War of Divine Freedom’, concentrated on making alliances throughout the region, especially with landowners who were discontent with the high taxes demanded by the Dutch. On 6 August 1661, with the intervention of the British monarchy, the details of the Treaty of The Hague were finally agreed: the Portuguese would keep all the invaded territories in Africa and America and would pay the Dutch compensation of four million cruzados. The Brazilian government introduced a tax to help pay for it; to have an idea of how long a shadow was cast by this tax, it remained in force until the nineteenth century (although the sum had been fully paid off long before). The Pernambucans were indignant at the idea of having to pay for a war that they had won. Perhaps the seeds had already been sown for the future uprisings that were to take place in this state, most ferociously in the nineteenth century.42
But, at least for the time being, peace had been re-established and the captaincy of Pernambuco could get back to the laborious task of producing sugar. The war against the Dutch was just one example of the warlike atmosphere in Brazil during this period, ‘everyone against everyone’. In addition to the fear of another foreign occupation, there was also the smouldering anger of the Amerindians and the enslaved Africans.43 In such a society every citizen carried a weapon and never laid it down.
IN THE LAND OF FORCED LABOUR
Brazil had now established a major enterprise based entirely on the monoculture of sugarcane. Other minor activities developed around the plantations, such as the production of subsistence food – especially manioc – and cattle-raising. Cattle were indispensable for the cultivation of the land, the grinding and transportation of sugarcane, as well as for providing food for the population. Alongside the sugar-based society, a ‘leather society’ developed in the interior of the northeast, due to both the abundance of cattle and of men available for work.
In Bahia, the cultivation of tobacco was developed in Cachoeira and in the Recôncavo, as well as further north in the captaincy; combined, these areas were responsible for around 90 per cent of national production. A variety of tobaccos were produced, of which the most refined were exported to Europe. The coarser varieties were used as barter for slaves on the African coast. Tobacco production was to complement the production of sugarcane. It could be produced on a small scale, so that many smallholdings developed, mostly run by manioc farmers or Portuguese immigrants who had arrived in the colony with hardly any money. Tobacco also helped to stabilize Portugal’s trade balance, as its production in the colony was a Crown monopoly. There was no risk, however, of tobacco competing with sugarcane in terms of importance, or of funding the emergence of a landowning class who might rival the sugarcane planters.
For the sugar system to function, to keep the mill wheels turning, it was vital to maintain the supply of labour. As was noted, the use of indigenous workers had already become a thorny problem in the previous century around the production of brazilwood. In the era of sugarcane production, the situation became even more serious. The religious orders, above all the Jesuits, did all they could to discourage the use of slave labour. Among other arguments, they alleged that the indigenous people were ‘rebels’, ‘idle’, and refused to settle on the land. Today we know the Amerindians were no more rebellious nor ‘less inclined to work’ than any other human beings submitted to a system of slavery that presupposes the ownership of one man by another and uses violence as its modus operandi. But in truth the Church and the colonizers had widely diverging views when it came to policies regarding the treatment of Indians on the one hand and Africans on the other.
The fight between the settlers and the Church over the question of enslaving the Indians was never-ending, as were the myths surrounding the issue of forced native labour.
The Church’s argument, based on moral considerations, was that the Indians were ‘unsuited’ for agricultural work. However, this supposed ‘lack of ability to adapt’ actually revealed the very different ways in which Europeans and Native Americans conceived of their daily life. The Indians were entirely indifferent to the concept of ‘surplus’; their concern was for the welfare of the community, for reciprocity in cultivation and consumption. This was domestic production. In indigenous society, status was not derived from economic capacity. This different understanding of labour was interpreted by the Portuguese as a lack of energy or aptitude. In reality, it was the consequence of an entirely different concept of the world, of social relations, and of the management of life’s basic necessities.
Beyond these differences, diseases such as smallpox and even their deep knowledge of the land were contributing factors to the Indians’ fleeing from the advancing colonists. Above all, their goal was to avoid being seized and enslaved. Meanwhile the Church continued preaching that its evangelizing mission was a moral and Christian duty. The Indians were ‘flocks’ of potential converts to the faith of Reformed Christianity.
However, in contrast to the traditional view popularized by history books – that the demise of the Indians prompted the importation of African slaves – we now know that the Indians in fact continued to be enslaved for a very long period of time. For example, the Paulistas44 continued to imprison Indians until the eighteenth century, either selling them or using them as slave labour for plantations on the Piratininga plateau. The Paulistas not only attacked the Jesuit missions established in the region of the Paraguay river, but also, starting in 1640, they virtually decimated the Indian populations from the whole of the northeastern scrublands, before the advance of the colonizers into the region. This campaign against the Indian population, known as the Barbarians’ War, continued until the middle of the eighteenth century.45 The interests of the Paulistas and those of the Jesuits were diametrically opposed, leading to the constant undermining of each other’s initiatives.
In fact, the maintenance of a prosperous market, for an industry like sugarcane, required long-term, stable solutions, completely separate from religious and moral controversies. Thus, the marriage of the profitable trade in sugarcane with that of the traffic of human beings. On the one hand, the Portuguese Empire had trading posts along the entire western coast of Africa; on the other, by controlling the internal wars on the South American continent, the Portuguese traders could turn the conquered into captives, replicating the slavery of the African continent.46
It is true that various forms of slavery have existed in Africa. The critical difference, however, is the scale and systematic nature of the process, which involved the introduction of a mercantile system that generated enormous profits, first for the African negotiators, then for the Portuguese, and finally for the Brazilian traders. The purchase and distribution of slaves constituted a kind of advanced payment against the income generated by the colony. Both the supply of labour and the sale of sugarcane were monopolies of the Portuguese Crown. Almost none of the wealth remained in the colony: neither the sugarcane nor the profits it produced.
Gradually, more and more Brazilians began to traffic in slaves. Records show that around this time many slave traders began to be referred to as ‘Brazilian’, probably to distinguish them from colonists of Portuguese origin. On several occasions, particularly in the eighteenth century, the African slave markets controlled by the Dutch refused to trade with the Portuguese while continuing to trade with the Brazilians. The Brazilians, after all, were equipped with cachaça,47 tobacco and leather, with which they bartered for slaves.
Parodoxically, the long history of African slavery on the Iberian Peninsula, which increased during the expansion of the Atlantic sugar trade, had allowed the Portuguese to become very familiar with the Africans and for them to get to know their particular strengths. As early as the sixteenth century, the ability of many African peoples to learn the techniques of making sugar was carefully recorded in Portuguese documents. This is the reason why the first Africans to arrive in Brazil, coming from Angola and Guinea, were immediately assigned specialized tasks, such as purging and boiling the sugar and overseeing the production process. Actually, a number of slaves from western Africa were already experienced in blacksmithing, agriculture, and in branding and caring for cattle. This did not imply they were ‘willing slaves’: very much to the contrary.
As time passed, African slavery became increasingly associated with the process of sugar production, until the two phenomena were regarded as virtually inseparable. The embeddedness of slavery in Brazilian colonial culture at this time is reflected in the terms that were used – Indians were referred to as ‘natives’ or ‘negroes’, and Africans as ‘Guinea’ negroes or ‘native’ negroes. The word negro had thus become a generic term that signified ‘slave’, marking the polarity between black and white on which the economy of the colony depended. The range of words adopted by the Portuguese language to indicate gradations of skin colour, far from indicating a lack of discrimination, constituted a veritable exercise in linguistic engineering to distinguish physical features, behavioural characteristics and differing mentalities. The structure was complex and at first sight appears to have been more flexible than it was. Native Americans, after being catechized, became vassals of the Crown, whereas slaves were converted to Christianity. But in reality the colony adopted slavery throughout the whole of its territory, creating a dichotomous society that opposed landowners to slaves, whites to blacks and natives to Africans.
Although, for the palate, sweetness and bitterness are two different things, in the logic of the sugarcane business they were inseparable. The slave ships were never idle. Ships crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, laden with white sugar – the whiter it was the greater its purity – and cargoes of black-skinned slaves from the various nations of Africa. Slave labour was decreed by the Cortes of Lisbon, the commercial establishments of Amsterdam and London, the forests of the Amazon, the trading posts of Africa, and above all by the sugar plantations of America.48 As Padre Vieira said, a new hell had been created in the distant lands of Brazil. A hell that was no longer made from the red dye of brazilwood, but from the furnaces of the sugar mills and the bleeding bodies of slaves.
A NEW ‘SUGAR LOGIc’
From the beginning of the sixteenth century every aspect of the colonial enterprise depended on the production of sugarcane: from the formation of settlements, towns and the defence of territories, to the division of properties, relations between differing social groups, even the choice of the capital. In 1548, Dom João III established by Royal Charter the appointment of a governor-general and other representatives of the Crown who would reside in the colony. The following year the first governor, Tomé de Souza, disembarked in the then almost deserted captaincy of Bahia and immediately set about building the capital on the coast. Baptized as Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the city was to remain Brazil’s capital until 1763, when it was transferred to Rio de Janeiro. Salvador became the seat of government, of the Supreme Court and of the principal Crown Inspectors. It became a centre for exportation, first of brazilwood and later of sugarcane. But not all the captaincies were as lucky. Most of them were sorely afflicted by isolation and Indian attacks, so that little advantage could be taken of the incentives provided by the Crown: exemption from taxes such as the 10 per cent tithe as well as other fiscal advantages.
Despite the Crown’s attempts to control the colony, decentralization was evident. Power was retained, both literally and symbolically, in the casa-grande and the engenho;49 these were the centres of colonial life, of command and of hierarchy. The word engenho, which initially referred to the sugar mill itself, later came to signify the entire sugar production complex: the mills, the land, the plantations and the outbuildings.
The casa-grande was located near the sugar mills. Not only was it the landowner’s residence, it also served as a fortress, guesthouse and office
. Some of these houses had a second floor, but even so, in most cases, they were by no means imposing. Until the seventeenth century their appearance was modest; the walls were made out of wattle covered with mud and the roofs were thatched with sapê.50 Nevertheless, the landowners, especially the owners of engenhos near the coast, made these houses icons of the social importance and economic and political power they had acquired in the colony. Padre Antonil described these landowners as having the position to which everyone aspired, saying that they were ‘served, obeyed and generally respected’. They constituted a kind of aristocracy of wealth and power rather than the hereditary nobility of European countries.
In the colony, titles of nobility were conferred in recognition of services rendered but could also be bought. However, those who aspired to nobility did not have the enduring power that the sugar barons enjoyed. As the traveller Alexander von Humboldt noted: ‘In America, every white man is a gentleman.’ In a territory where the workforce was made up of African slaves, the mere fact of being white was considered a merit in itself with the right to be treated as nobility. In 1789 an employee of the Crown noted that the colony was a place where ‘a person with few possessions and modest origins gives himself airs of the grandest noble’.51 Even learned magistrates and wealthy tradesmen aspired to become aristocrats.