The labour for deep mining was also provided by slaves. To reach the water table they dug wells up to fifteen metres deep and carved funnel-shaped tunnels into the rock. While the tunnels were being constructed, the earth often collapsed, killing the slave workers. They also operated the water wheels connected to a chain of open crates that were used to bring up the earth. The water provided the energy to push the inverted crates downwards and to rotate them as they dug out the mud from the bottom of the pits. The marks left by deep mining can still be seen in the countryside of Minas Gerais. In the seventeenth century a traveller knew by the signs that he had arrived in Minas: quarries in the hills, muddied rivers, devastated forests and the ubiquitous potholes.
Many people made their fortune from one day to the next, even though the cost of merchandise was the highest in Portuguese America and gold dust was the currency used. Padre Antonil was horrified by the eccentric and ostentatious behaviour of the wealthy Mineiros: ‘accompanied by troops of musketeers, always at the ready to perpetrate acts of violence’ and ‘lavishing money on superfluous goods: a black slave acquired at a cost of a thousand cruzados [whose task it was to herald their master’s arrival in public places by blowing a bugle] and a mulatta of ill repute (purchased at double the usual price) with whom they steadfastedly committed multiple scandalous sins’.69
Portugal knew very well what was happening in the interior of its colony. It had been waiting impatiently to find gold for more than a century. The dream had now come true in Minas Gerais, and Lisbon began to move in to take control. In 1700 a tax of one-fifth of the value of all gold discovered was imposed; it was called the quinto (fifth). The miners were required to take their gold to the forging house, where it was made into bars and the tax was deducted.
Unsurprisingly, very few miners paid the tax. But the Crown was determined to set up a taxation system that would squeeze every last drop of profit out of Minas Gerais. It created a Gold Commissariat, appointed tax collectors, set up customs posts at the exit points and installed forging houses throughout the region. Over the years it increased and diversified the taxes. A panning tax that affected all miners was instituted as well as a general annual tax charged from each of the four administrative districts – Rio das Velhas, Rio das Mortes, Vila Rica and Serro do Frio. A per capita tax was imposed on every single individual and each economic activity, including on all the slaves who worked in the captaincy. After 1751, Portugal increased the pressure even more: an annual minimum of a hundred arrobas (around 1,500 kilos) was established for all gold brought to the forging houses. Anyone who failed to reach the quota was obliged to pay tax on the difference.70
The gold left along the River Tagus for other countries in Europe almost as soon as it had arrived by that same waterway. England was the main destination, where it was used to pay for imported manufactured goods that were otherwise unavailable in the Portuguese domestic market. Despite the high levels of tax evasion and quantities of smuggled gold, vast amounts of the precious metal entered the port of Lisbon during the first half of the eighteenth century: a total of 196 kilos in 1713; 946 kilos in 1720; 3.4 tons in 1725; 4.2 tons in 1731; and 11.5 tons in 1741.
The peak of production was reached between 1737 and 1746. By the middle of the following decade it was already in decline. The situation was irreversible: during the 1760s the amount collected from the ‘one-fifth’ tax had fallen to around 209 kilos per year, and by 1771 to just 147 kilos.71 The result was dramatic: the Mineiros were convinced that their diminishing income was not the result of a decline in production, but rather of the exorbitant taxes. Thus the seeds for revolt were sown. But the positive outcome of the gold rush was also irreversible: by the end of the eighteenth century, Minas Gerais was the only area in Portuguese America where the settlers had created a network of towns and cities. This was the origin of a unique society capable of developing a highly distinctive and sophisticated culture.
VILA RICA DO OURO PRETO
The traveller who dismounted his horse in Vila Rica during the last three decades of the eighteenth century would certainly have been surprised at the exuberance of that ‘strange city surrounded by rocks, silence and shadows’72 and also by the fact that Minas Gerais was no longer a world in the making. The population of the town at the time was about 80,000, out of a total of 320,000 scattered around the whole captaincy, excluding Indians.73 The inhabitants of Vila Rica navigated steep, hilly streets lined with a wide variety of buildings: palaces built from stone and mortar, town houses with tiled roofs, low wooden buildings and thatched huts made from wattle and mud. At the bottom of the slopes there were wide streets and open squares where public notices were posted and the pelourinho was installed, from which narrow alleyways wound their way back up the hillsides.74
The neighbouring town of Mariana, where the bishop resided, was the seat of the diocese and thus responsible for guiding the faith of the inhabitants of Minas Gerais. Unlike Vila Rica, its streets were crowded with oratories, crucifixes and Stations of the Cross. But the architecture of Vila Rica, the administrative seat of the richest and most populated captaincy in the colony, was more imposing, as was appropriate for the seat of the Crown’s authority. By 1780 the town already had a Governor’s Palace, built of stone, erected on the hill of Santa Quitéria. It had four bastions and a curved ramp dotted with sentry boxes in the style of a military fortress. The magnificent town house of the contractor João Rodrigues de Macedo – probably the richest man in the region, in charge of collecting the taxes on all incoming merchandise – had also already been built. He had his residence, the Casa dos Contos,75 built on a stone foundation; it had a monumental staircase lined with paintings, a large balcony and countless windows and doors – a sign of the owner’s social status. It was the most admired stately home in all the captaincy.
The gold was still paying the bills. By the beginning of the 1780s Vila Rica had erected churches whose interiors were lined in gold. They were the wonder of every visitor to the town, and still are today: São Francisco de Assis, the Basilica of Pilar and Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Antônio Dias. The precarious wooden bridges were replaced with stone ones equipped with arches, parapets, pillars and seats, all cemented with fish oil and quicklime. Seven drinking fountains were erected, where people met to gossip as they collected the water. Made of richly decorated bronze or soapstone, they were set into walls around the city. The bridges and fountains were meeting places for slaves, washerwomen and muleteers, and became centres of rumour-mongering. People stood around the arches of the Ponte dos Contos or beside the gargoyles on the Gloria Fountain, listening attentively and exchanging the latest news.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga and Alvarenga Peixoto, the three great poets of the captaincy, would describe these novel urban surroundings as a framework for their verses. In his poem ‘Vila Rica’, written in 1773 or thereabouts, Cláudio Manuel da Costa sings the praises of the town’s façades; of the fountains and other sources of water; of the many bridges built to facilitate the transport of goods throughout the town; of the elegant clock tower, a beautiful example of Minas Gerais architecture; and of the splendid churches (whose magnificence he may have considered immoderate, as he comments ‘they have exhausted our funds’).76
Cláudio Manuel da Costa was the doyen, and possibly the main intellectual reference, of a group of scholars who were all members of the highest social class in Minas Gerais. They were the sons of wealthy landowners, gold-mine proprietors, civil servants, members of the clergy and high-ranking military officials. All of these young men had been educated at universities in Europe – at Coimbra or Montpellier. The group was of crucial importance in generating information about Minas Gerais, including the production of cartographic records, studies about the mineralogical potential of the captaincy and the diversification of its economic production. This knowledge was to provide the fuel for the Conjuração Mineira (Minas Conspiracy), the most important anti-colonial
plot in the history of Portuguese America, and the first with clearly republican leanings, as we will see in the next chapter. Furthermore, some members of that group created a form of poetry which was to be a turning point in Brazilian literature.
This group of poets in Minas Gerais created new standards for Brazilian literature. They considered themselves Arcadians with a direct connection to the fashionable poetry of eighteenth-century Western Europe; poetry that depicted gallant shepherds and gentle shepherdesses in scenes of idyllic pastoral life. They were all masters of the terms and style of the European Arcadians, but they were also cosmopolitan: they incorporated the natural surroundings, customs and aspirations of Minas Gerais into their verses. Furthermore, within the traditions of Arcadian pastoralism, they expressed the uniqueness of their position as privileged intellectuals, increasingly aware of the antagonism between the Portuguese colonial enterprise and the reality of day-to-day life in the towns of Minas Gerais; of the conflict between the interests of those settlers born in Portugal and those born in Brazil, and between their own aspiration for freedom of intellectual expression and the rigid censorship imposed in the colony.
And, obviously, many of the poems of these three great writers sang the praises of Vila Rica. Cartas chilenas,77 for example, is a series of poems, dating from around 1787 and attributed to Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, but on which Cláudio Manuel da Costa and Alvarenga Peixoto may well have also collaborated. In this series of poems, the streets of Vila Rica are depicted as crowded with people going about their daily work. In the hustle and bustle, free blacks and mestizos wander along alleyways and steep streets, steering clear of the law’s harsh repression – death sentences, prison and beatings. Innkeepers, shop workers and black women make their appearance in the poems, the latter marketing food either out of doors, or in the shops serving slaves and poor freemen miners, who dreamt of the gold once so easy to find. Shoemakers, tailors and muleteers also emerge – planning to improve their social status by entering the militia.
In Cartas chilenas the poet also describes the town’s recreational activities: tournaments, processions, the Opera House. The new theatre was the pride of the captaincy’s wealthy elite. It seated three hundred people and was equipped for every type of spectacle. Step by step, Gonzaga describes how the Town Hall was erected, with the slaves being driven on by the whip as every morning they struggled up the hillside of Rua Direita de Antônio Dias with their tools. It was a magnificent building inspired by Michelangelo’s work on the Capitoline Hill. It also housed the gaol, including the dreaded ‘secret’ cells where prisoners were tortured and the ‘oratory’ cells where those condemned to be hanged spent their last hours awaiting the noose.78
Gonzaga was right. Society in Minas Gerais was mixed, with people of different races mingling in the streets and squares of the town. Masters and slaves could often be seen working side by side. Town life allowed for a greater degree of flexibility than the plantations; the slaves had more autonomy and could, with luck, work towards achieving their freedom. Urbanization and the increasing incidence of alforria – slaves freed by their masters, especially when the said freedom was purchased, either with a single payment or in instalments79 – were to affect this gold-mining society in three important ways. The first was in the high number of mixed-race people in proportion to the number of whites. The second was the formation of the largest group of freed slaves in the colony. The third was the opportunities for pardos and free blacks to improve, if only a little, their social status. This was achieved by working in commerce, perhaps becoming the owner of a small rural property, officiating at Mass, joining the military or learning the skills to become an artist – an engraver, a painter, sculptor or musician.
But the social structure of Vila Rica was far less fluid than it may seem; in practice, it remained strictly hierarchical.80 At the top were the owners of the land and the gold mines, the elite group of intellectuals, high-ranking Crown officials and powerful contractors. At the bottom were the slaves. Between the two the lower classes mingled noisily: miners, muleteers, shop workers, soldiers and artisans. At the very bottom, almost as if they did not exist, came the large population of vagrants.
The Baroque style was adopted wholeheartedly in Portuguese America, albeit a long time after its first appearance in Europe. It became the predominant form of artistic expression in this society, deeply associated with its religious, political and economic aspirations.81 Although it had first appeared during the sugar cycle in Salvador and other towns in the northeast, it was in Minas Gerais that it seriously took root. It offered an appealing and effective means of religious communication through the theatrical beauty of its forms and images that could be adapted to different contexts, whether to altars in the churches or fountains and oratories in the streets. It flourished across all the art forms throughout the colonial world.
The Third Orders and lay fraternities that replaced the religious orders which had been expelled by the Crown in Minas Gerais financed the construction of the churches. Strategically located on the hilltops, with their monumental architecture, sumptuous decorations and altars painted in gold, they exemplified the splendour of Minas Gerais Baroque. Some of the lay fraternities, such as the Third Orders of the Carmelites and the Franciscans, were closely associated with the white economic and intellectual elite. Others, such as the Amparo and the Mercês fraternities, gave assistance to artisans, free mulattoes and pardos, while the Fraternidade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário82 was exclusively for slaves. During religious processions and festivities, however, the hierarchy was broken down and all groups came together amid a stirring mass of saints, crosses and colourful flags.83
Whereas the churches were the Baroque scenic spaces par excellence, the processions and feasts represented the grandeur of its popular dimension. By definition an enrapturing, spectacular, theatrical style, the Baroque was visually mesmerizing, and seemingly horrified with the concept of empty spaces. The visual aspect of these festivities, their sumptuous trappings, enchanted the Vila Rica inhabitants. The atmosphere was one of festive and religious ecstasy: images of saints covered in a profusion of colours, liturgical vestments and precious gems, the solemn file past, the stately pace of the procession, the silk and damask cloths hung from the windows along the route, all permeated with the mystical smell of incense. The magical world of the Minas Gerais Baroque had to be seen to be believed.
The unique and expressive nature of this Baroque was the result of both the mining society’s urban environment and the creativity of the local artists, who reinvented European Baroque. The work of Antônio Francisco Lisboa – Aleijadinho (‘the little cripple’) as he was nicknamed, due to a degenerative disease that deformed his body – represents the high point of this creativity. He was a master sculptor, engraver and architect. He was of Portuguese and African descent – his father Portuguese and his mother a slave. His work in stone and wood expresses not only his faith and spirituality, but the entire range of human emotions. Aleijadinho was the architect of the São Francisco de Assis church, the jewel in the crown of Minas Gerais Baroque, as well as the creator of its internal decorations – a perfect expression of harmony between architecture, sculpture and painting.
In the same church, Antônio Francisco Lisboa worked with another great master of the day: Manuel da Costa Ataíde, known as Mestre Ataíde. The brightly coloured, cheerful figures that appear almost to be moving, characteristic of Lisboa’s work, found their match in the work of Mestre Ataíde; the two offset and complement each other. All of Aleijadinho’s sculptures, whether on the altar, the pulpit or lining the walls, have energetic expressions and bright, sparkling eyes. According to his biographers, ‘Antônio Francisco was a soft-spoken mulatto with a deep voice and a burning genius’.84 Perhaps this is the reason why these figures, full of vigour and so mobile and alive that they seem to gesticulate, were so essential to his work. His partner, Mestre Ataíde, created stunning scenes on the ceiling, walls and throughout the architectural det
ailing of the São Francisco de Assis church. For the panel at the back of altar he used straw-coloured paint so that the glitter of the gold would not be eclipsed. His masterpiece was painted on the ceiling of the nave, with an illusionary perspective in which the columns appear to advance and the ceiling to open up towards the sky. A superb, chubby mulatta Nossa Senhora da Porciúncula floats upwards, wreathed in clouds, accompanied by a retinue of mestizo angels playing a concert on musical instruments that were typical of an orchestra of the time.
The deposits of gold ‘always ended. They weren’t eternal’,85 whereas the Baroque awoke a sense of the intangible, a world without frontiers. Minas Gerais at the end of the eighteenth century was a place where gold and the Baroque went hand in hand. With its mestizo saints – mulattoes with oriental eyes – the Baroque intuited and connected the two extremes of the Portuguese Empire, which began in Macau and ended in Vila Rica. Or vice versa.
5
Revolt, Conspiracy and Sedition in the Tropical Paradise
The Minas Conspiracy was the most significant anti-colonial movement in Portuguese America. It threatened the status quo of the colony and turned Minas Gerais into the centre of a plot that was clearly republican in nature. And – a startling fact that is often overlooked – it occurred before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Furthermore, the conspiracy was certainly not an isolated case of defiance in the colony. Very unlike the image often promoted by Brazil, both nationally and internationally, Brazilian history is a far cry from a fairy tale, exempt from wars, conflicts and routine violence.
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