As we have seen, the economic life of Portugal’s South Atlantic Empire was based on the combination of sugar and slaves. This combination created the mercantile communities that gravitated around the wealth produced by the large estates. Salvador, the dynamic centre of the Portuguese administration, also served as the largest port for this rural society. A good governor-general, as João de Lencastro undoubtedly considered himself to be, had to be cautious about any new proposals surrounding the mining of gold. His first priority was to be responsive to the demands and interests of the existing mercantile elite and the masters of the engenhos.
In the middle of 1697 news of the discovery of gold arrived in Salvador. It had been found mixed in with the gravel on the bed of a small river in a valley covered with humid forest, surrounded by the steep escarpments of the Serra do Espinhaço. The local indigenous people called the river Tripuí (‘dark beneath the waters’).7 The governor-general could have had no idea that Tripuí was just the beginning: the discovery of its ouro preto, ‘black gold’,8 proved to be the first clue to finding a gigantic mass of the precious metal, extending as far as Carmo and Sabará, at the point where they were intercepted by the Guaicuí river (the original name of the Rio das Velhas).9 The governor-general continued to believe that the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais was in fact a serious problem. In 1701 he wrote a long letter to Dom Pedro II10 containing a number of suggestions. The first was to seal off the area where gold had been found by closing all the routes that gave access to the interior. The second was to concentrate all the trade that emanated from the mines in Salvador and to subject the whole mining region to the jurisdiction of the captaincy of Bahia.11
No one in Lisbon was impressed by João de Lencastro’s wariness. Despite the innumerable expeditions that had failed, the Crown’s obsession with mountains of gold and silver had by no means abated. The authorities also believed that among the inhabitants of São Paulo de Piratininga – the base from which the explorers set out on expeditions into the interior – there were people who knew exactly where most of the gold could be found. After all, they had been exploring the sertão long before the discovery of gold in the 1690s. What they had been seeking, however, was something else: ‘red gold’, a term coined by Padre Vieira during his struggle against Indian slavery and that referred to the blood of the Indians captured and enslaved by the settlers.12
These colonists travelled for months or even years on end, almost always on foot, walking in single file, barefooted like the Indians, with feet splayed out and ankles turned inwards to alleviate the fatigue and cover the ground more quickly. Throughout the seventeenth century innumerable expeditions to capture Indians penetrated the sertões that are now a part of Minas Gerais, making the inhabitants of São Paulo (Paulistas) famous throughout the colony. These people seemed to have been born on the Piratininga plateau with the sole purpose of exploring the unchartered interior, confronted at every turn by arrows, wild beasts and fevers,13 and travelling further and further inland.
This exploring had begun with the town of São Paulo de Piratininga, which was surrounded by the Serra do Mar – a series of densely forested mountain peaks stretching towards the horizon. It was thus strategically located to protect its inhabitants from intervention by the imperial authorities in Rio de Janeiro. The town was built on the top of a hill and was guarded from a distance by the forts in the Cantareira Mountains. It was also surrounded by a providential network of rivers. These were later to be used by the explorers to travel by boat to the Paraná river, from where they entered the network of tributaries in the River Plate basin and made their way upstream into the southernmost part of the colony.14
The town of São Paulo developed around a college that had been built by the Jesuits of the Society of Jesus, the walls of which were made from a mixture of clay and sand. It had a small church and a large plot of land surrounded by Indian houses. It stood at the exact location of what today is the Pátio do Colégio, at the very heart of the city centre. The college was a cherished project of Manuel da Nóbrega, the leader of the Jesuits in Brazil: to gather the Indians of the region together and with them to build a new society of devoted Christians – a society that would be free of both the pagan customs of the natives and the bad habits and vices of the Europeans. The project was a dismal failure. The natives had no intention of abandoning their beliefs and the Portuguese colonists were equally reluctant to forgo their predatory behaviour. But the town remained, strategically located at the entrance to the hinterlands from where the settlers captured and enslaved the Indians, claiming, as they always did, that this was a ‘righteous war’. The Indians were put to work in the fields, used for breeding cattle, for domestic tasks, and even as a means of transport.15
In the first half of the eighteenth century these expeditions began to be called bandeiras, a term that was adopted throughout the colony, although other names were also used, including entradas, jornadas, empresas or conquistas (intrusions, journeys, undertakings, conquests). The bandeirantes who set out from the Piratininga plateau began to assume the form of militarized hunting expeditions for the enslavement of Indians or the search for precious metals, producing a mode of life that some Brazilian historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referred to as bandeirantismo.16 The expeditions that set out from the town of São Paulo combed the interior of Minas Gerais and did all they could to hide the existence of gold from the representatives of the Crown. They had good reason for this: keeping the colonial administrators at a distance meant avoiding both the exorbitant taxes and the rigorous imperial laws that restricted the number of Indian slaves.
Negotiations between the Crown and the Paulistas who discovered the first deposits of gold began in the early 1690s. The agreement was directly authorized by the King of Portugal, Dom Pedro II, and guaranteed the discoverers titles, royal favours and the ownership of the mines they discovered. In addition, the Crown authorities granted the bandeirantes the power they most desired: to be allowed to ‘manage’ the Indians they captured in the interior and put them to work as slaves on the Piratininga plateau. Only then did the gold begin to appear.17
Further discoveries of gold in different areas of Minas Gerais occurred almost simultaneously, all of which lay along the line that connects the present-day cities of Ouro Preto and Diamantina, between the basins of the Rio Doce and the São Francisco river. There – in the centre of what is today the state of Minas Gerais – astonishing amounts of gold were found in the beds of the small rivers that flowed through the valleys and chapadas18 surrounded by the steep slopes of the Espinhaço Mountains. The gold appeared in the form of tiny nuggets of various colours – off-white, yellow, grey, black or opaque and grimy. This last was nicknamed ‘rotten gold’.19 The black colour resulted from the mixture with the chemical element palladium and indicated a high concentration of gold. The white was a result of the mixture of gold and nickel and had a much lower value. However, whatever the colour, the gold was everywhere. Over a period of millions of years it had dropped from clefts in the rocks of the Espinhaço Mountains.
This was alluvial gold, completely different from the gold that the Spanish had extracted in huge quantities from the underground deposits of Mexico and Upper Peru. It was soon discovered that a long sequence of adjoining mines existed in the region; no matter what direction one looked or travelled there was gold to be found. Thus at the beginning of the 1720s the captaincy received the name of Minas Gerais (General Mines).20 The area where the most important mines were located became known as the Gold District. Most of these were discovered at the source of the Rio das Velhas, in the present-day municipality of Ouro Preto (where the Cachoeira das Andorinhas21 is located). Rapid migration to the area resulted in the creation of the first three towns in Minas Gerais, all founded in 1711: in January, the village of Nossa Senhora do Carmo22 was granted the status of ‘vila’; in June the mining centres of Ouro Preto, Antônio Dias, Padre Faria and Tripuí were joined into one and named Vila R
ica; and in the same month the village of Sabarabuçu officially became the Vila of Nossa Senhora da Conceição23 do Sabará. These are the modern-day cities, respectively, of Mariana, Ouro Preto and Sabará.24
Between the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth, the inhabitants of the Piratininga plateau began to think they were being deceived. The Portuguese Crown had promised much more than it was prepared to deliver; it had no intention of granting the ownership of the gold mines to the discoverers. Between 1707 and 1709 discontent erupted into what became known as the War of the Emboabas. The enraged bandeirantes started a war against the emboabas for the control of Minas Gerais. The term emboabas originated from the Indian word for a breed of chicken whose feet were covered with feathers. When used to refer to ‘outsiders’ who wore marching boots, especially the Portuguese, as opposed to the inhabitants of Piratininga who went barefoot, it was taken as a grievous insult. Enemies were identified by their boots and the expletive emboaba was frequently hurled at them. Even today, on hearing a loud bang in the distance, a Mineiro25 mutters ‘either a dog or an emboaba just died’.
With the inhabitants of the region seething with anger, the Crown decided pragmatically to pardon the rebels. It did not, however, cede political ground: it nominated emboabas to all the important administrative posts in the newly created towns, thus putting an end to the aspiration of the Paulistas to gain political control of the area.26 Finally expelled from Minas Gerais, they returned to their exploration of the hinterlands, where they made two further discoveries of major gold deposits. The first, in 1722, were the Sutil Mines in Mato Grosso, where the capital of the state, Cuiabá, is located today. The second, five years later, were the Vila Boa Mines, in the captaincy of Goiás. Thus, by the end of the 1720s, the three major areas of gold deposits in Portuguese America had finally been identified.
GOLD MINES THAT WERE ‘GENERAL’
On the morning of 21 July 1674, Fernão Dias Pais Leme set out from the town of São Paulo de Piratininga on his last great adventure. At the head of four companies of men made up of a hundred Indians and forty whites – including his two sons, one legitimate, Garcia Rodrigues Pais, and the other mestizo, José Pais, as well as his son-in-law Manuel da Borba Gato – he made his way towards the sertão. He was around sixty years old at the time, the owner of a considerable fortune and veteran of numerous expeditions to capture Indians. He owned a vast estate near São Paulo, located in what is today the district of Pinheiros.27 For two years he had been planning every detail of the mission, corresponding with both the governor-general and the Crown. In his pocket he carried a licence from the governor-general granting him authority over all the members of the expedition as well as any people who had already penetrated that part of the interior or who were to do so after the expedition had passed.
Fernão Dias was in search of the mythical mountains called Sabarabuçu. According to the Indians, they shone so brightly they could be seen from afar, dazzling anyone who tried to get too near. In Tupi-Guarani they were known as the ‘sun of the earth’.28 A river overflowing with sparkling emeralds and pieces of silver and gold was said to descend from the slopes. The Spanish explorer Felipe Guillén said that he had been told the Indians collected the stones and used them for making troughs – but only for pigs as they believed that the metal ‘was the cause of diseases’.29
Before entering the territory of the Minas Gerais, Fernão Dias sent a group ahead to set up a supply base to ensure the expedition’s survival. The camp, which occupied the villages of Santana and Sumidouro on the banks of the Rio das Velhas, was a combination of a military encampment and a rapidly expanding settlement, surrounded by extensive plantations of corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, beans and yams. The following year, ‘at the end of the rains, at the start/of autumn when the land, parched with thirst/had drunk deeply of the waters of the season’,30 to quote from Olavo Bilac’s beautiful poem31 ‘The Emerald Hunter’, published in 1902,32 the expedition penetrated the sertão in the direction of the northeast. Between 1675 and 1681 they followed the ragged outline of the Serra do Espinhaço, crossing the entire extent of Minas Gerais until finally reaching the region of the Jequitinhonha and Araçuaí rivers. There, at the extreme northeasterly point of Minas, the members of the expedition believed they had discovered the great lake of fabulous wealth of Indian mythology – Vapabuçu – the legendary source of the continent’s rivers that connected Brazil with the Andes.33
Vapabuçu was the fruit of European as well as of Indian imagination. The banks of the river where the expedition camped did indeed seem to glisten with emeralds. But it was an illusion – they were tourmalines, a semiprecious stone of little value. Already ill with malaria, Fernão Dias made his way back to the lake of Sumidouro – the mysterious ‘waters that disappeared’ through a cavity in the forest and were constantly renewed by underground streams – where a few days later he died.
‘And those emeralds/Mines that killed/with hope and fever/that never were found/and when found/were nature’s delusion?’34 in the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem about Fernão Dias, written two hundred years later.35 The location of the mythical mountain had not been found and Dias’s expedition had produced not a single piece of gold for the court in Lisbon. Nevertheless, the expedition was still an important accomplishment: the bandeirantes had acquired a survival strategy, ways of adapting to the conditions of the interior of Minas Gerais that allowed them to remain for long periods in this isolated region, surrounded by intractable natural conditions, wild beasts and hostile Indians. At the time, the conquest and appropriation of the region was at least as important to Lisbon as finding treasure, and this was what Fernão Dias had achieved. His expedition adopted the military strategy of clearing land in the bush to plant food for the sustenance of the troops during their forages into the interior, a strategy that was to prove decisive both in combating the Indians and in occupying the land.36 Thus a path into Minas Gerais had been opened up, albeit one that still presented an enormous challenge to any who ventured along it. Fernão Dias’s expedition had carved out a single route connecting the coast to the Serra da Mantiqueira,37 passing the Rio das Velhas and continuing on to the northeast of Minas. This was the Caminho Geral do Sertão, also known as the Caminho Velho or Caminho de São Paulo;38 the ‘mouth of Minas’ connecting São Paulo de Piratininga to São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, and from there to the recently discovered Ouro Preto and Nossa Senhora do Carmo on the banks of the Rio das Mortes and the Rio das Velhas.39
Crossing the Serra da Mantiqueira was particularly hard. The range had been named the ‘weeping mountains’ because of its profusion of streams and meandering rivers. At the point known as the Serra do Facão,40 a razor-edged path crossed five of the highest peaks, ‘preventing the weak from entering Minas’ as was said at the time. This was only an undertaking for the fearless and the strong. The mountains were covered with a dark green blanket of humid forest that travellers entered after the first few days of their journey, after crossing the Garganta do Embaú41 in the Paraíba Valley, at the point which today marks the division between the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The mountains further tormented the travellers with clouds of poisonous insects and sudden downpours of rain. The crossing was particularly dangerous during the rainy season when the mountain peaks were covered in mist. The ice-cold water froze the travellers to the bone and dripped from their beards as they descended the slippery slopes that overturned mules and cargoes as the path became mud and clay beneath their feet.
News of the discovery of gold soon spread. In São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador it was the talk of the town with many of the residents sending excited messages to relatives in Portugal. There was nothing that could be done. Neither the Crown’s efforts to keep the location of the mines a secret – to prevent arousing the avarice of rival powers – nor the alarm of local authorities at the mass exit of inhabitants from towns along the coast, not even the prospect of cros
sing the Serra da Mantiqueira could control the hunger for gold or the frenzied masses that rushed to the region.
‘Nothing like it had ever been seen before and nothing like it would be seen again until the California gold rush of 1849,’ wrote the English historian Charles Boxer in 1962. In their anxiety to reach the gold, people of every kind jostled against each other along the paths. Amid the crowds there were those who were desperate to climb out of poverty, others who dreamt of rapid enrichment, and yet others who were fleeing from political or religious persecution. This last group included enemies of the king and of the monarchy, New Christians, groups of gypsies and heretics of various hues. Among them was Pedro de Rates Hanequim, a verbose millenarian who defended somewhat unorthodox theories in relation to Brazil. In one of these he argued that paradise on earth was concealed in the midst of a mountain chain in the centre of Portuguese America, at right angles to which stood the throne of God. In another he suggested crowning the King of Portugal Dom João V’s brother, the Infante Emanuel, as Emperor of South America, under whom a ‘Fifth Empire’ would be created in the interior of Minas Gerais.42
The governor-general João de Lencastro referred to this multitude as ‘worthless, ill-mannered rabble’.43 The authorities in Lisbon finally echoed his sentiments: those who penetrated the interior of Minas Gerais were ‘intruders, a rootless mob who had no love for a country where they had not been born’. They did in fact originate from many places. Some of them came from Portugal, leaving their wives and children behind. A large number came from the other captaincies, above all São Paulo, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, having sold everything they owned and cast in their lot with the gold hunters. ‘Where the paths end, the mines begin’, Paulistas of the seventeenth century used to say. Those who managed to reach Minas Gerais knew all too well what they wanted: to get hold of as much gold as they could, as quickly as possible. Dazzled by the sheer quantities of the precious metal that gleamed from the rocks around them, in their frantic efforts to locate new veins the miners forgot the most basic fact of all: they could not eat gold.
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