In the first place, a society based on slavery from one end to the next presupposes the use of violence. And the currency of violence was by no means restricted to the relationship between masters and slaves. Other conflicts that erupted around the country showed the discontent to be both deep-rooted and long-lasting. It was clearly manifest in the resentment of the settlers over their isolation, at their submission to the Portuguese Crown – both in times of abundance and at times of crisis – and at the arbitrary behaviour of the local elites, who acted with complete autonomy due to the habitual negligence of the Crown when it came to passing laws for its vast and distant colony. The national myth of a human and natural paradise where harmony and peaceful coexistence prevailed does not stand up to a closer examination of the forced labour system and the daily routine of the colony. There was no ‘happy ending’ to be had.
‘LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’ AND ‘DEATH TO THE GOVERNOR’
In the early hours of 8 December 1660 a group of farmers decided that the time was long overdue for a revolt against the new taxes imposed by the governor of southern Brazil, Salvador Correia de Sá e Benevides, who needed to raise money for the defence of São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro. The town was constantly threatened by foreign invasions – from the French, the implacable enemies of the Portuguese, and from the Dutch, who were at war with Spain – as well as the occasional forays by pirates and corsairs. The defiant settlers owned land in the region that was referred to as the Banda d’Além,1 on the far side of Guanabara Bay, which began in the parish of São Gonçalo do Amarante and whose boundaries became less and less clearly defined as it spread towards the interior of the captaincy.
Everything was planned in utmost secrecy. The farmers waited cautiously, met, and finally decided. Guided by only a sliver of moonlight and enveloped in darkness, they set their boats in the water and crossed Guanabara Bay. They silently made their way around the enormous granite rock marking the entrance to the bay, which the Portuguese had baptized ‘The Sugar Loaf’ – a reference to the extremely valuable cone-shaped sugar blocks, shiny on top and darker toward the bottom, just waiting to be packaged and sent off to Europe. Before sunrise, they moored at Praia de Piaçaba at the edge of the Largo do Carmo (the square now called Praça XV).2 These were the docks used by all travellers who disembarked in Rio de Janeiro during the second half of the seventeenth century.3 Thus began the first settlers’ revolt in the history of Portuguese America.
The date and the place had been carefully chosen. It was the feast day of Nossa Senhora da Conceição4 when large crowds traditionally gathered in the Largo do Carmo, a central meeting place in the city. This public square was where the Municipal Council Chamber, responsible for the administration of the town, and the São José Church were located, as well as the pelourinho. Furthermore, Rio de Janeiro was temporarily without its leader: Governor Sá e Benevides had been called away to Paranaguá, the southernmost point of the vast Southern Department that comprised the captaincies of Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro and São Vicente, which the Crown had placed under his command. He was on a mission to verify the news that had arrived in Rio de Janeiro of the discovery of gold deposits on the border between São Paulo and Paraná.
It is not known whether the insurgents met any resistance from the city guard, which consisted of around 350 men who had not been paid for several months. It is known, however, that the rebels landed shouting ‘Long live the people’ and ‘Death to the Governor’. People who were still asleep were woken up by the uproar and the devotees of Nossa Senhora da Conceição. They had arrived early for the festivities, and now rushed to join the insurgents. At five in the morning the crowd invaded the Municipal Council Chamber, removed its members from office, and deposed the governor.5
For the next five months the political and administrative life of Rio de Janeiro was controlled by the colonial insurgents, who attempted to install their own form of government. They called elections for the new members of the council, extending the right to vote to the entire area around the bay, including the Banda d’Além. Thus, the inhabitants and landowners in the rural areas of Rio de Janeiro were included in a process that had previously been restricted to those who were privileged enough to be established in the town. They also suspended taxes authorized by Sá e Benevides, and his allies were imprisoned in the Fortress of Santa Cruz.6 His closest associates were expelled from the captaincy.
Nevertheless, loyalty to the Crown was demanded loudly and clearly. The Cachaça Revolt, as the episode became known, was not a revolt against the Portuguese king, but against the fiscal policies of the governor. And it was definitely against a very specific royal decree, which limited the production of cachaça and its exportation in order to protect the consumption of Portuguese wine in the colony. Former governors had turned a blind eye and not interfered with the clandestine production of cachaça by the inhabitants of the captaincy.
According to Frei Vicente do Salvador,7 in 1620, out of a total of 230 sugar plantations in the colony (most of which were in the northeast), forty were located in Rio de Janeiro. The sugarcane cultivated around Guanabara Bay had a low content of sucrose and, when crushed, produced large quantities of watery juice. The quality of the sugar was consequently poorer than that produced in Pernambuco and Bahia. But this was of little importance for the distillation of cachaça, which, as we have mentioned, was a key by-product for the sugar-based economy. Whatever the quality of the sugar, cachaça exports were guaranteed due to the demand from the slave trade, especially in Angola and Guinea, where it was used in exchange for slaves.8
By the end of the sixteenth century, slave labour was indispensable for running the plantations in the colony, and two of the items most in demand for purchasing slaves, manioc flour and cachaça, were shipped directly from the port of Rio de Janeiro. Thus the Carioca settlers9 became experts in the art of smuggling. Avoiding the insatiable tax inspectors, skirting the blockade that prevented trade between the various colonies of the empire, and using cachaça as a currency for barter, they managed to become active participants in the slave trade. Smuggling undoubtedly caused incalculable losses to the Crown, but it was one of the few colonial activities where the profits remained entirely in the hands of the settlers.
There was also a thriving domestic trade in cachaça. Considered ‘a man’s drink’, it was mostly consumed by the poorer classes – slaves and free blacks, cafuzos,10 poor whites and vagrants. Its high calorie content served as a dietary supplement for these segments of the population. It was always available for purchase, displayed in gourd shells alongside rapadura (lumps of unrefined sugar) and tobacco – ‘the saintly herb’, as it was then called. It was easily found in the shops in the towns and villages and along the routes that were opening up into the interior.11
Unfortunately for Rio de Janeiro’s inhabitants, the finances of the captaincy were in a calamitous state and Governor Sá e Benevides was attempting to remedy the situation by raising taxes. The high mortality rate among slaves due to outbreaks of smallpox had seriously affected the production of sugar, leaving the city devoid of funds at a time when money was needed to fortify the entrance to the bay and guarantee the payment of the troops that garrisoned the city. In 1660 the outlook for the near future was one of unpayable debts: Rio de Janeiro was bankrupt.
Sá e Benevides was certainly a character: courageous, astute, vain, gallant with the ladies, sympathetic to the Indians, disinterested in the fate of the blacks and autocratic with the settlers.12 His ambitions had never been moderate. On an island in Guanabara Bay where his family had established the first sugar plantation in the captaincy, he installed his own shipyard with the intention of building the largest galleon in the world. He built six in all, one of which, the Padre Eterno, weighed 2,000 tonnes, was 53 metres in length, and had 144 pieces of artillery mounted on its decks. It was indeed the largest ship to navigate the oceans at the time.13 The Cariocas were so impressed with the Padre Eterno that they baptized the island Ilha do Gove
rnador and the location of the shipyard Ponta do Galeão.14
It was not by chance that Sá e Benevides had been appointed governor: he was from one of the most illustrious families of the colony. He was the great-great-nephew of Mem de Sá, Brazil’s third governor-general, who had expelled the French from Guanabara Bay, and a cousin (three times removed) of Estácio de Sá, Mem de Sá’s nephew and the founder of Rio de Janeiro. As the fourth generation of his family to govern the captaincy, Sá e Benevides considered Rio de Janeiro as part of his property holdings, and his inheritance. It was this distorted view that permitted him to override the decisions of the Council, impose unpopular taxes, drain the city funds, and abuse the power invested in him by the king.15
The accusations of the insurgents may well have been justified, but they had underestimated Sá e Benevides. Not only was he a senior official of the Crown, he was also an exceptionally able military commander with an impressive history of service to the King of Portugal in the naval struggle against the United Netherlands, a formidable maritime power. His most memorable feats of valour included the reconquest of Angola, defeating the fleet led by Admiral Piet Heyn off the coast of the captaincy of Espírito Santo and setting fire to Dutch ships in the port of Salvador as they were finally expelled from Bahia.
The Carioca rebels had taken on more than they had bargained for. Instead of simply marching on the city, Sá e Benevides took up position on the Piratininga plateau and waited for the Portuguese ships that had sailed from Bahia to help him retake the city. When he received confirmation that they were approaching Rio de Janeiro, equipped with weapons, ammunition and reserves of food, he finally departed from São Paulo. In the early hours of 6 April 1661, as the Portuguese fleet entered Guanabara Bay, Sá e Benevides, in command of a small army of Tupi bowmen, faithful allies of his family since the times of Mem de Sá,16 entered Rio de Janeiro. He defeated the sentries at the Fort of São Sebastião,17 occupied the Council Chamber, invaded houses, confiscated weapons and arrested their owners. Before the day was over Rio de Janeiro had been retaken, the insurgents defeated, and their leader Jerônimo Barbalho Bezerra beheaded.18
THE SEMANTICS OF REVOLT
The Cachaça Revolt may have been the first insurgency, but it was by no means the last. There were to be many occasions on which exasperated, resentful settlers turned to rebellion as an instrument for applying pressure on the government to meet their demands, to counteract abuses by the local authorities, and to protest against the rigidity of the rules imposed by Lisbon. At their height, incessant protests throughout the colony posed a serious threat to the stability of Portugal’s Atlantic Empire.19
To confront these manifestations of discontent Portugal adopted new forms of administrative discipline for the colony. It subdivided the protests into a number of categories: insurrection, sedition, revolt, uprising, rebellion, riot, tumult, and so on. Names are only invented when there is a reality to justify them, just as rules are established for circumvention. In this sense, Brazil was no exception: measures were disseminated for the control of the population, and organized according to these categories, which sought to classify the gravity of the threat.
In the vocabulary of the time, the word ‘insurrection’ was used to designate an angry group, at times joined by slaves, with immediate, concrete goals. ‘Sedition’ was used to refer to a gathering of ten or more armed colonists with the deliberate attempt to disturb public order. When such gatherings totalled thirty thousand or more they became a ‘rebellion’, an extremely dangerous event that could lead to anarchy or civil war. An ‘assuada’ meant a gathering of the colonists with the purpose of disrupting public order and enacting a specific offence to an authority. An ‘uprising’ was a gathering of a large amount of people venting all sorts of discontent. A ‘tumult’ was a revolt of the ‘people’, where the term ‘people’ referred either to the population as a whole or to the lowest levels of the social pyramid: the plebeians, the masses, the rabble. Although they went under different names, every one of these acts of insubordination was political in intent.
The increasing occurrence of civil disturbance revealed the extent to which political struggle involved questions of broad public concern. Uprisings of the least privileged classes were frequently joined by freed blacks and escaped slaves, with an escalation of violence that caused terror among the population. Obviously those involved were exposing themselves to enormous risks. As far as the Lisbon authorities were concerned the penalties for these crimes were prescribed in the Philippine Ordinances, Portugal’s longest-lasting legal code, promulgated in 1603 by Dom Filipe I (Philip II of Spain), the first sovereign during the period of Iberian unification. Anyone who confronted one of the king’s officials could be condemned for the crime of lèse-majesté, with punishments that ranged from being publicly whipped to having one’s property confiscated, being sent to the galleys for life or being put to death.20
Nevertheless, rebellions against the colonial authorities continued to occur with alarming frequency. The motives behind the Cachaça Revolt were just the beginning of a long list of recriminations seen by the settlers as sufficient justification for protest, with the risk of being branded a rebel and putting one’s life in jeopardy. Revolts would begin as an expression of discontent with the ‘mismanagement of the colonies’, the draconian introduction of interminable taxes with no prior consultation, the abuse of power on the part of crown officials in the colony, and the enormous distance that separated Brasil from Portugal, and the king, whose arbitration was required for the resolution of conflicts, from his colonial subjects.21
The frequency of these revolts left the imperial authorities in a state of constant alert. There was the perennial risk of armed assaults on crown officials, uprisings by disparate social groups, and the threat of the overthrow of local governments. The main danger was political contagion: as the uprisings increased in number, they spread throughout the territory. The motives may have differed, but every protest chipped away at the stability of the colony and caused further unease in Lisbon.
REVOLT OF THE VASSALS: POLITICAL DISCONTENT IN PERNAMBUCO, SERGIPE, MARANHÃO AND BAHIA
At the end of August 1666, five years after the Cachaça Revolt, the governor of Pernambuco, Jerônimo de Mendonça Furtado, was arrested in broad daylight while walking down Rua São Bento22 in Olinda. The group of conspirators that arrested him was made up of members of the property-owning elite of the captaincy, who had won over popular support to confront the most powerful crown official in Pernambuco. And they had no intention of discussing the matter. Without further ado, they incarcerated the governor in the Brum Fortress in Recife and then packed him off to Lisbon.23
These were powerful men who had an extensive list of complaints against Mendonça Furtado. They accused him of illegally enforcing the payment of debts, confiscating property, openly protecting allies in debt to the National Treasury, failing to respect ecclesiastical immunity and arbitrarily arresting or releasing people – all in exchange for bribes. Rumours were rife in Olinda and Recife that the governor not only pocketed part of the revenues owed to the Crown, but also increased these revenues by minting coins in the palace. Mendonça Furtado was despised by the people, who nicknamed him Xumbergas – a derogatory term for a dissolute libertine, for a drunk person with odd manners.
Xumbergas was one of a succession of despotic local governors who made use of the powers invested in them by the Crown to get rich as quickly as possible through bribery and corruption. In Padre Vieira’s fine words, there was no remedy for the greed that was putting Portugal’s control of its colony at risk. The priest, who knew these governors well, proclaimed from the pulpit: ‘This is the prime cause of the ills of Brazil: taking from others what is not theirs, greed, covetousness, underhanded dealings for personal gain, where the State is plundered and justice ignored.’24 And he concluded, ‘To put it simply, Brazil is doomed because of these ministers of His Majesty who come here not to promote our good, but to expropriate our go
ods.’25
In Pernambuco the reason for discontent was the corruption and inordinate power of the local authorities. When these were added to frustration over the burden of taxation it was a sure sign that a tempest was brewing, whether in Pernambuco or any other part of the colony. In 1671, for example, a rebellion erupted in the northern captaincy of Sergipe del Rei.26 The settlers, with the support of the Municipal Council, decided to expel the capitão-mor Joaquim Antônio Monteiro Correia (the title of captain-major was conferred on the head of the administration and military forces of the captaincy until such time as a governor was appointed by Lisbon). The uprising was a serious concern for the administrators of the Northern Department, the long stretch of coastline that included the captaincies of Rio Grande, Paraíba, Itamaracá, Pernambuco and Bahia. Sergipe del Rei was of particular strategic importance to the Crown because it permitted communication by land between Bahia – where the capital of the colony, Salvador, was located – and Pernambuco, the nerve centre of the sugar industry.27
In 1684 the storm of rebellion broke over Maranhão. The brothers Manuel and Tomás Beckman, the former a sugar plantation owner and the latter a poet and lawyer, with a following of about eighty armed men including merchants and sugar planters, led the movement.28 Their discontent had led to specific goals: to remove the governor and to put an end to the Companhia de Comércio do Maranhão e Grão-Pará,29 which had been granted a monopoly on all exports by Lisbon in an attempt to avoid smuggling and tax evasion. And while they were at it, they had a mind to pay back the Jesuits, whom they blamed for the Crown’s 1680 edict preventing them from enslaving the Indians. From the settlers’ point of view this prohibition was disastrous for the economy of Maranhão, where labour for the sugar plantations was in short supply.
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