It was a disaster. Between 1697 and 1698, 1700 and 1701, and again in 1713, having failed to plant enough manioc, beans, pumpkin and corn to provide sustenance for the multitudes that continued to arrive, the inhabitants of Minas Gerais, in the words of Padre Antonil, ‘died of hunger with their hands full of gold’.44 To avoid starvation the Mineiros ate anything they could get their hands on: dogs, cats, roots, insects, snakes and lizards. They even ate the bicho de taquara,45 a poisonous white larva found inside the stems of bamboo.
For those who set out from the northeastern ports of Recife and Salvador there was only one path that led to Minas, the Caminho Geral do Sertão (also known as the Bahia Trail or the Trail of the São Francisco Corrals). Of the three ‘mouths of Minas’, this was the longest. Those who took it in the search for gold were mostly settlers from the plantation areas of Bahia and Pernambuco who, with the decline of the sugar industry, were losing their livelihood. The route was well known to the Paulista bandeirantes, who had used it since the beginning of the seventeenth century. It had a number of advantages: its forests were not as dense as those of the Serra da Mantiqueira, the trees were wider apart, interspersed with open spaces covered with vegetation and bushes. Most importantly, it was crossed by rivers that could be navigated by canoes.
‘The sertão was another unchartered sea’, as the twentieth-century historian Raimundo Faoro so fittingly described it in his book, Os donos do poder.46 The journey between the peaks and chasms, the abyss of the unknown, was a long and lonely one. Many left the path before reaching the mines and settled in the interior: criminals pursued by the law, insolvent debtors, sons of small farmers whose land was too small to divide up any further, and poor workers who had no land. They stopped their journeys and claimed land in isolated places; beyond the reach of the law and dazzled by the prospects of captured Indians, golden lakes and mountains gleaming with precious gems, they continued the devastation of Minas Gerais. For people escaping from poverty, looking for land, avoiding prison or concealing the crime of sedition, it was the perfect refuge.
This generalized belief that the interior of Minas Gerais was beyond the reach of the law transformed the Caminho Geral do Sertão into the most popular smuggling route for gold. As Pedro Barbosa Leal, who knew the region well, explained to the authorities, the interior ‘was full of “loopholes”: deserted fields, virgin forests and unused paths which could be used for escape.’47 And the smugglers knew the exact location of the ‘loopholes’. With surprising audacity they risked travelling down the São Francisco river in canoes. This was the first stage of a long journey for the gold, either northward to Europe or southward to the River Plate. Casting anchor at clandestine wharfs in the dead of night, when the soldiers guarding the beaches could see nothing but blackness, they slipped past the ports of Jacobina and Rio das Contas – inspection posts where the king’s taxes were levied – and with the gold safe and sound, they would set out on a journey of several weeks through the sertão to Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte or Ceará, where the gold was finally put on board the vessels that shipped it out of the colony. There was an alternative route, by land, which represented an even longer and more perilous journey for the smugglers. It followed along the banks of the São Francisco river as far as Parnaguá, in what is today the state of Piauí. From there it continued on to Maranhão from where the gold was smuggled to Europe.48
To the despair of the Crown, a substantial part of the gold found in Brazil slipped through the hands of its inspectors. Smuggling gold became a major illegal business – the profits of which were considered large enough to offset substantial perils and risks. The colonial authorities did everything they could to stop the smuggling: the routes into Minas were monitored by inspection posts manned by tax collectors as well as military guards. Padre Antonil’s book was confiscated by the Crown in 1711 and banned for describing the route between Salvador and the gold-producing region. The Caminho Geral do Sertão was closed to travellers and the transport of merchandise – only cattle for the sustenance of the Mineiros was allowed to pass. But the measure was of little use. Gold continued to disappear. The audacious smugglers hid themselves among the cattle traders with their pouches of gold well concealed. They made maximum use of corruptible priests, who, exempt from searches at the control posts, managed to divert large quantities of gold from the royal coffers. Lisbon was furious and, in 1709, banned the presence of religious orders in Minas Gerais.
The Caminho Geral do Sertão entered the gold-producing district at Sabará, the first and at the time the largest town in Minas Gerais. It was there that cattle, leather, dried beef, pork and fish, rock salt and rapadura (a sweet made from sugarcane) first entered the region, all of it extremely expensive. In 1703, Padre Antonil noted that an alqueire49 of flour cost 640 réis in São Paulo, whereas in Minas it cost 43,000 réis.50 He went on to note the extraordinary discrepancy in prices: ‘A pound of sugar, 120 rs. in São Paulo; in Minas 1200 rs. A chicken, 160 rs. in São Paulo; in Minas, 4000 rs. In São Paulo, an ox for slaughter 2000 rs; in Minas an identical beast 120,000 rs.’51
The last of the great famines occurred in Pitangui in 1730. The town had been founded by bandeirantes from São Paulo as a stopover on their way to Goiás at the end of the Emboabas War. The Pitangui mines were located near the entrance to the sertão and were protected by independently minded people whose anger with the Crown had not abated since the war. These people were famous throughout the eighteenth century for the straightforward way in which they resolved any political or property disputes – through the barrel of a gun, or in this case, a blunderbuss.52 The scarcity of livestock in Pitangui all but ruined the town. Some of the inhabitants fled to attempt survival in the forest, all supplies disappeared, and food prices shot up to unbelievable heights. While people were starving, gold seemed to sprout from the soil beneath their feet. There was a particular knoll that earned the nickname ‘Potato Hill’ because the enormous pellets of gold that were found there were shaped like potatoes.53
Food supplies only improved with the opening up of a new route to the mines. The Caminho Novo was planned by the Governor of the Southern Department, Artur de Sá e Meneses. It created a network of trails for the transport of merchandise that connected the mining region to the country’s two most important supply centres – the port of Rio de Janeiro and the town of São Paulo. This third and last ‘mouth of the mines’ began at the end of the Guanabara Bay, in the middle of the Baixada Fluminense54 where the present-day city of Duque de Caxias is located. Before it started its climb into the Serra da Mantiqueira it crossed the Caminho de São Paulo at the town of Taubaté. This new route was to transform Rio de Janeiro into Minas Gerais’s leading supplier, with an ever-increasing flow of travellers, merchandise, cattle and innumerable African slaves all passing through the city.
The Caminho Novo considerably shortened travel times – with luck it could take just twenty days to travel from Rio de Janeiro to Vila Rica. But crossing the Serra da Mantiqueira was still an ordeal. Carts could only be manoeuvred along short stretches of the track. Men and animals floundered in the mire and spent the nights in filthy straw shelters, fighting off bats and a multitude of insects: ants, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, cockroaches and spiders. A century and a half later the great English explorer Sir Richard Burton was to complain of similar woes assailing him on the Caminho Novo: nights passed without sleeping in shelters for muleteers, infested with mosquitoes and ‘swarms of round, fat worms that crawled into my flesh and made their home beneath my nails’.55
By the time gold production reached its height, farms were already established along the frontier between the mines and the sertão and on the banks of the Rio das Velhas. These were enormous estates – all of them equipped with docks to receive the goods that came from Bahia down the São Francisco river and the Rio das Velhas. They included estates such as Minhocas, the Macaúbas and the Jaguara;56 the last of these had the capacity to lodge up to 2,000 people. At the heart of the mining r
egion, along the stretch of the route that climbs to the top of the Serra de Capanema (which today still links the town of Ouro Preto to Sabará) tiny settlements emerged where food was planted for immediate consumption: Santo Antônio do Leite, Amarantina, São Bartolomeu, Santo Antonio da Caza Branca (present-day Glaura) and Curral de Pedra. From the very beginning, as the existence of these villages show, a thriving internal market for agricultural production and cattle-raising grew in the region.
Until about 1750 there was still an abundant supply of gold. Throughout this period the traffic of people and merchandise along the Caminho Novo remained intense. The route supplied Vila Rica with sugar, cachaça, cattle, gunpowder, tobacco, olive oil, rice, salt, quince jelly and wine. With the expansion of towns and villages, Minas Gerais began to receive supplies of a large variety of products and knick-knacks: glass, mirrors, firearms, knives, lead, velvet, chinaware, buckles, furs, red damask breeches, hats adorned with ribbons of gold and silver thread, leather boots with laces for ladies and jackets lined with silk or fluffy wool.57
From one end of the Caminho Novo to the other, a new terror now threatened the travellers. It was no longer the fear of being ambushed by the Cataguá, Guaianá or Tupinambá. The danger now was of being attacked by the quilombolas, who were spreading panic throughout the region with their systematic assaults on travellers, farms and the outskirts of villages and towns. There were quilombos scattered all over Minas Gerais; it almost seemed as if they had sprung up spontaneously to complement the rugged terrain. Most of them were relatively small, but very dangerous due to their proximity to the towns. The quilombo of São Bartolomeu, for example, took its name from its strategic location at the top of the mountain range of that name. It sheltered enough highway robbers to torment the lives of travellers making their way to Vila Rica along the Caminho Novo and to seriously affect the communications between Vila Rica, Mariana and the village of Cachoeira do Campo.58
A complex social network of contacts developed between the quilombos and the urban centres. The black women who sold fresh produce on the streets were at the centre of this network. Inhabitants of the gold-producing region frequently complained that these women, who sold fruit and vegetables to the grocery shops as well as from their stands in the streets, maintained close ties with the quilombolas. Out of solidarity, they also acted as go-betweens, helping runaway slaves to take refuge in the quilombos, in addition to supplying these with livestock and information. It was this last that most exasperated the authorities: ‘black thieves from the quilombos receive information about the whereabouts of people they can rob […] and everything is facilitated by these black women who help them and give them shelter’.59
As the colonizers settled in Minas Gerais, an increasing number of quilombos emerged in the countryside surrounding the towns and villages. With this proximity, the food shops eventually became centres for the trade in contraband with the quilombos. To the irritation of the authorities, and even more of the inhabitants, who now lived in constant fear, there were no legal constraints preventing this trade: ‘The shop owners offer escaped slaves protection for as long as they see fit, and the blacks from the forests offer them shelter in their so-called “houses” […] They leave in the early hours of the morning. In this way every grocer’s shop has become a quilombo.’60 These shops became centres of resistance, expert in eluding the authorities: they were places for parties and lovers’ trysts, shelters for escaped slaves and vagrants, where the environment was ideal for the exchange of smuggled goods with the quilombos.
In 1718, as the population of slaves increased, the governor of the captaincy, the Count of Assumar, a fierce adversary of escaped slaves, resigned to the fact that he could not ‘change the way they think or their natural desire of freedom’, advised the king that ‘the adoption of more violent remedies is required as deserving punishment for these scoundrels’.61 Among the ‘remedies’ he suggested was cutting the slaves’ Achilles tendon to prevent them from escaping. The proposal was not considered unreasonable, so much so that twenty years later, in 1741, the authorities in Minas Gerais once again sent it to Lisbon for approval; and in 1755 the proposal was passed with acclaim by the Town Council of Mariana, which once again sent it to Lisbon. Meanwhile, the count informed the inhabitants of the captaincy of the measures he intended to implement for the recapture of slaves and quilombolas: ‘Any person who offers them shelter, or knows where the said quilombos are located, and fails to inform the authorities will, if white, be whipped in public and banished to Benguela, and if black, be put to death.’62
The Count of Assumar could be excessively cruel, but he was by no means alone in this, nor did he act just on his own account. The colonial authorities produced an endless flow of proclamations, royal charters and letters patent in their attempt to maintain the stability of the slavery system by preventing escapes and suppressing resistance. A royal decree of 1741 determined that an escaped slave be branded on the shoulder with a red-hot iron, and, in the case of reoffending, have one of his ears cut off.63
In addition to the ferocity of the quilombolas, travellers were under constant threat of being assaulted by gangs of whites, free blacks, mestizos and mulattoes64 – a wide variety of men and women who, for one reason or another, had not been absorbed into the mining, cattle-raising and agricultural economy and who existed at the periphery of Minas Gerais society.65 The colonial authorities had designated this surprisingly varied group as ‘loafers’. They were poor – with no social status, a very fluid group that was difficult to control or discipline. Evidently not all of them were highway robbers. Nevertheless, every traveller that set out faced a high risk of being attacked by one of these organized gangs and, if not murdered, at least of being stripped of all his possessions.
Some of these groups made history. The gang of Manuel Henriques, nicknamed ‘Glove Hand’ because he used a padded glove to replace a hand he had lost in a fight, operated in the region of Cachoeira do Macacu, on the far side of the Paraibuna river in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro. His fame was so widespread it even reached Lisbon. His highly trained band had approximately two hundred men including whites, freed blacks and pardos, divided into groups led by trusted agents. They illegally prospected gold in the area and laid ambushes at the entrance to the Serra da Mantiqueira for the convoys that set out from the port of Estrela headed for Vila Rica.
The most notorious group in Minas Gerais was the ‘Mantiqueira gang’. They assaulted travellers on the high ridges that led to Vila Rica, near the junction between the Caminho Novo and the town of São João del Rey. They were led by José Galvão, nicknamed ‘Mountain’; a huge brown-skinned man with long hair and a bushy beard who was said to be of gypsy origin. The gang had a network of spies in the towns, all watching out for convoys transporting gold or traders with large baskets of merchandise – a sure sign that they were travelling with money. Galvão’s men made a deep impression, due both to their violent methods and their audacity. Travellers were lucky if they did not end up murdered and buried, their bodies relieved of all possessions, documents and clothes, in the secluded heights of the mountains. As the news of these attacks began to spread among the settlers the atmosphere in the towns became increasingly tense, but in spite of constant appeals to the governor no effective measures were taken. Traffic along the routes began to diminish, and it was not uncommon for travellers to providently make their wills before setting out.
The gang was only routed, after a great deal of effort, in 1783, by the ensign Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, ‘Tiradentes’,66 who was then the commander of the Caminho Novo detachment. To this day the inhabitants of Minas Gerais advise travellers against spending the night near the mountain peaks along the Caminho Novo, which are known for the appearance of mysterious lights on stormy nights, visions of the souls of murdered men hovering around the places where they were killed, white apparitions disturbing travellers’ sleep, and the sound of phantom hooves cantering along the Mantiqueira mountain passes.
/> Minas Gerais was settled very quickly and in a short period of time. The production of gold started at the beginning of the 1690s and reached its height between 1730 and 1740. By 1750 it was already in decline. The techniques used were rudimentary and largely improvised. The pellets of gold glistened in the sun on the beds of rivers and streams. They were about the size of a pea and were easily spotted where they lay buried among the gravel. A gold panner needed good eyesight and had to be prepared to enter the freezing cold water of the mountain streams. He also needed the physical strength and the knowledge required to wield the tin or cedarwood basin used for washing and sieving the gold, separating it from the sand, gravel and clay. During the rainy season, when the floodwaters made panning impossible, they excavated the sand along the banks of the rivers or at the foot of the hills, where they chipped away at the gold encrusted in clefts in the rock.67
When the supplies of gold that could be panned began to fail, water was used to wash away the earth that covered the gold deposits. This task was only possible because of a large-scale workforce of black slaves, most of whom came from West Africa (Cameroon, Nigeria and Senegal) and Central Africa (Angola, Congo and Gabon), and, in lesser proportion, from East Africa (Mozambique). Since the opening of the first mines, large numbers of slaves had been brought to the region to meet the demand for gold. Between 1721 and 1722 it is estimated that there was already a population of 45,554 African slaves in Minas Gerais. By 1745 this number had grown to 95,366, and by 1786 had reached 174,000.68 Enslaved people were also brought in from the sugar plantations. These men diverted waterways and made dams, dug the canals where the gold was separated from the gravel, and piled up blocks of stone cemented with mortar to drain off the mud.
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