13. Meaning the crates were not permitted to be overloaded.
14. Quintal, from the Latin centenarius – a historical unit of mass equivalent to 100 pounds (45.35 kilos).
15. Miceli, O ponto onde estamos, p. 77.
16. Padre Fernando Oliveira, A arte da guerra do mar. Lisbon: Naval Ministry, 1969, p. 77.
17. A mysterious disease cured by St Cosmas. The twin saints Cosmas and Damian were doctors to whom miraculous cures were attributed. During Diocletian’s persecution they were arrested and decapitated in Cilicia around 300 CE.
18. Joaquim Romero de Magalhães, ‘Quem descobriu o Brasil’, in Luciano Figueiredo (Org.), História do Brasil para ocupados. Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2013.
19. Miceli, O ponto onde estamos, p. 171.
20. Pêro Vaz de Caminha (c.1450–1500) was a Portuguese knight who had accompanied Cabral to India in 1500. He wrote the official report of the discovery of Brazil by Cabral’s fleet in April 1500 (Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha). He died in a riot in Calcutta later that year.
21. ‘Land of the True Cross’ (from the Latin Vera Crux).
22. Portuguese for ‘bay’. The state is named after ‘All Saints’ Bay’ (Bahia de Todos os Santos) where the capital Salvador is located.
23. Dom Manuel I (King Emmanuel I), of the House of Aviz, King of Portugal from 1495 to 1521.
24. Paracelsus (1493–1541) was a Swiss-German Renaissance physician, occultist, alchemist and astrologer. His insistence on using observations from nature rather than consulting ancient texts was a radical departure from the medical practices of his day.
25. Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) was an Italian mathematician, physician, philosopher and astrologer. He was an inveterate gambler who formulated the first rules of the theory of probability and the author of over two hundred books on medicine, mathematics, philosophy and music.
26. Pêro Vaz de Caminha, Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha, April 1500.
27. François I, of the Angoulême branch of the House of Valois, King of France from 1515 to 1547.
28. Dom João III (King John III), of the House of Aviz, King of Portugal from 1521 to 1557.
29. The term, currently used for the semi-arid scrubland in the interior of Brazil’s northeast, had a much wider application in the early days of the colony when it referred to the vast unchartered interior of the territory.
30. A coastal town 211 kilometres (‘as the crow flies’) to the south of Salvador.
31. For the name ‘Brazil’ see, among others, ‘O nome Brasil’ (Revista de História, n. 145, pp. 61–86, 2. sem. 2001), and Inferno Atlântico (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1993, pp. 29–32), both by Laura de Mello e Souza.
32. Pau-Brasil.
33. Fernando de Noronha (c.1470–c.1540) claimed to be the first European to discover the paradisiacal island named after him, the largest of an archipelago situated in the Atlantic 545 kilometres to the northeast of Recife. There is controversy surrounding who first arrived on the island, which was initially named Sao João after St John the Baptist.
34. See S. D’Agostini et al., ‘Ciclo econômico do pau-brasil’. Available at:
35. João de Barros with Laura de Mello e Souza, Inferno Atlântico, p. 24.
36. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo (c.1540–c.1580) was a Portuguese scholar and historian. His History of Santa Cruz Province, commonly known as Brazil was published in 1576. The book describes the discovery of Brazil and the first years of its colonization, as well as its exotic fauna and flora that were unknown to Europeans. It even describes a sea monster that supposedly appeared off the coast of the Captaincy of São Vicente (the modern-day State of São Paulo) and was killed by the local inhabitants.
37. The National Archive of Torre do Tombo is one of the oldest institutions in Portugal. Originally installed in one of the towers of Lisbon Castle in 1378 (tombo ‘register of charters’, torre ‘tower’), it has been one of the central archives of the Portuguese state.
38. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Visão do Paraíso: Os motivos edênicos no descobrimento e colonização do Brasil. 6th edn. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2002.
39. De Mello e Souza, Inferno Atlântico.
40. The following passage about the reports of fifteenth-century travellers is based on research undertaken for the book O sol do Brasil: Nicolas-Antoine Taunay e as desventuras dos artistas franceses na corte de d. João by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008).
41. ‘Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot’, a ninth-century account of the legendary journey of St Brendan (c.484–c.577) to the Isle of the Blessed.
42. Aethicus Ister (Aethicus of Istria) was the protagonist of the seventh- to eighth-century Cosmographia written by a churchman, Hieronymus Presbyter (pretending to be St Jerome), that purports to be a Latin translation of the original Greek. It describes Aethicus’ travels from Ireland to India and his encounters with strange foreign peoples.
43. Pierre d’Ailly (1351–1420), a French theologian, astrologer and cardinal, was the author of 170 books. In Imago mundi, a work that influenced Christopher Columbus, he discusses the form of the Earth.
44. The (probably fictional) compiler of the immensely popular Travels of Sir John Mandeville, an account of his supposed travels around the world.
45. Information taken from José Roberto Teixeira Leite, ‘Viajantes do imaginário: A América vista da Europa, século XVII’ (São Paulo, Revista Usp, no. 30, pp. 32–45, June/August 1996). See also Guilhermo Giucci, Viajantes do maravilhoso: O Novo Mundo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992); Howard Rollin Patch, El otro mundo en la literature medieval (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1956); Joaquín Gil Aléxis Chassang, Historia de la novela y de sus relaciones com la antigüedad griega y latina (Buenos Aires: Poseidon, 1948).
46. Teixeira Leite, ‘Viajantes do imaginário’.
47. See Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a terra de Santa Cruz. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986.
48. Antonio Pigafetta (1491–1534) was an Italian scholar and traveller from the Republic of Venice who travelled with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) on his first expedition to the Indies. They entered the Bay of Guanabara in 1519 (before the city of Rio de Janeiro existed). As Magellan’s assistant, he kept an accurate journal of the voyage in which he noted extensive data concerning the geography, climate, flora and fauna, and the inhabitants of the places that the expedition visited.
49. Dom Sebastião I (King Sebastian I), of the House of Aviz, King of Portugal from 1557 to 1578.
50. Treatise on the Land of Brazil and History of the Province of Santa Cruz.
51. The French attempt to establish the colony of France Antarctique on the shores of Guanabara Bay is discussed later in this chapter. Their foundation of the city of São Luis in the northern captaincy of Maranhão is discussed in chapter 2.
52. Ibid.
53. F, L and R in the original (Fé, Lei and Rei).
54. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, Tratado da terra & história do Brasil. Org. de Leonardo Dantas Silva. Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Massangana, 1995, pp. 19 and 24.
55. Gândavo, ibid., pp. 24, 27 and 29.
56. The translation of the title is History of Santa Cruz Province, commonly known as Brazil. The book has not been published in English.
57. Serge Gruzinski, La colonisation de l’imaginaire: Sociétés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
58. Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) was a French Renaissance poet, known to his generation as the ‘Prince of poets’. He wrote his Complainte contre Fortune after reading André Thevet’s Singularitez de la France antarctique. He refers to the Indians as ‘happy people’ who should be left in peace ‘without anguish or worry’ (‘sans peine et sans souci’). (Encyclopaedia Universalis)
59. Ronsard with Manuela Carneiro da Cunha,
‘Imagens de índios do Brasil’, op. cit., p. 4.
60. Henri II, of the House of Valois, King of France from 1547 to 1559. He married Catherine de’ Medici in 1533 when they were both fourteen years old.
61. Ferdinand Denis, Une fête brésilienne célébrée à Rouen en 1550. Paris: Techener Librarie, 1850.
62. Carneiro da Cunha, ‘Imagens de índios do Brasil’, op. cit, p. 5.
63. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was the editor (along with Jean de Rond d’Alembert, until 1759) of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, which was published in France between 1751 and 1772.
64. Claudius Ptolemy (c.90–c.168 CE) was a Greco-Egyptian writer from Alexandria whose Geographia was a compilation of the geographical knowledge of the second-century Roman Empire. During the Renaissance a sequence of new editions was published with updated maps.
65. Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) was a German cartographer and cosmographer whose Cosmographia, published in 1544, was the earliest German description of the world.
66. ‘[…] persistent legends before the voyages of Columbus and Vespucci that feed […] an association between cannibals and the mythical dog-headed inhabitants of Africa, as in the definition appended to Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel’. (African Cultures and Literatures edited by Gordon Collier).
67. Quoted by Carneiro da Cunha, ‘Imagens de índios do Brasil’, p. 5.
68. The proponents of literary Romantic Indianism were the novelist José de Alencar (1829–1877) and the poet Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864). The movement sought to create a national identity through the romantic portrayal of Brazil’s indigenous peoples in the early years of the colony.
69. Montaigne, ‘The Cannibals’, Essays. Translated into Portuguese by Sérgio Milliet. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1972, pp. 101–6. (Coleção Os Pensadores)
70. The title in translation is The Singularities of Antarctic France.
71. André Thevet, As singularidades da França Antártica. Lisbon: [n.p.], 1878, pp. 146–80.
72. Jean de Léry (1536–1613) was a Calvinist who joined the colony of France Antarctique in 1556. Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, the French admiral who had founded the colony, originally accepted the Protestants. However, after eight months he accused them of heresy and had them expelled. Léry and the other Protestants took refuge with the Tupinambá. Three of them later returned to the colony and were executed by Villegaignon. Léry and the other missionaries returned to France on an old, unseaworthy vessel. Later, Léry wrote his History of the Martyrs (1564), in which he dedicated a chapter to his three murdered colleagues, entilted ‘Persecution of the Faithful in the Lands of America’.
73. See Carneiro da Cunha, ‘Imagens de índios no Brasil’
74. The title in English is History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil.
75. Jean de Léry, ‘Preface’, in Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amerique. Genebra: A. Chuppin, 1580, pp. 2–9.
76. Ibid., p. 227.
77. Léry related the history of these killings in his Memorable History of the Town of Sancerre, in which he accuses the French of being more barbarous than the cannibalistic Indians he had met in Brazil.
78. See Frank Lestringant, ‘De Jean de Léry a Claude Lévi-Strauss: Por uma arqueologia de Tristes Trópicos’, Revista de Antropologia, São Paulo, vol. 43, no. 2 (2000).
79. Located on the coastline of the present-day state of São Paulo, to the northeast of the Island of São Vicente.
80. Hans Staden, Duas viagens ao Brasil. São Paulo: Hans Staden Society Publications, 1942 [1557], ch. 42, part 1.
81. Ibid., pp. 161 and 185.
82. Ibid., pp. 196–8.
83. Carneiro da Cunha, op. cit., p. 14.
84. The whole passage about indigenous legislation is based on the excellent article ‘Índios livres e índios escravos’ by Beatriz Perrone Moisés, in Manuela Carneiro da Cunha’s (Org.) História dos índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992, pp. 115–32).
85. St José de Anchieta (1534–1597; canonized by Pope Francis in 2014) was a Spanish Jesuit missionary, one of the first priests to introduce Christianity in Brazil and one of the founders of Sao Paulo (1554). He is considered one of the most influential figures of the first century of the colony.
86. Oswald de Souza Andrade (1890–1954) was one of the founders of Paulista Brazilian modernism. The quote is from his Manifesto Antropófago (1928) in which he attacks the legacy of the Portuguese and of the missionaries.
87. Much of the subsequent commentary is based on Os índios antes do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2000) by Carlos Fausto, and from the already cited História dos índios no Brasil, organized by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha.
88. Arid grasslands interspersed with stunted vegetation, characteristic of Brazil’s central plateau (where Brasília, the capital of the country, is located today).
89. Examples of Aratu ceramics – pear-shaped funeral urns – have been found at archaeological sites in Brazil’s northeast. Aratu ceramics were influenced by the Uru tradition of the Carajá. See Gabriela Martin, Pré-história do nordeste do Brasil.
90. Oca – one of the names used for indigenous habitation. Normally made of wood or bamboo and thatched with straw or palm fronds.
91. Ocara.
92. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da alma selvagem. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002.
93. The Ducks’ Lagoon (Lagoa dos Patos) is the largest in Brazil.
94. Today the highly polluted river that runs through the city of São Paulo. The source is in the Serra do Mar, and it ends at the Jupiá dam on the Paraná river, in the interior of the state.
95. The river that forms the boundary between the state of São Paulo and its immediate neighbour to the south, the state of Paraná.
96. The division between the groups is also based on Fausto, Os índios antes do Brasil, pp. 68–70.
97. Piratininga (Tupi-Guarani for ‘fish to be dried’) is the name of the plateau where the first settlement was located, from which the city of São Paulo was to grow. It was founded in 1554 on a steep hilltop between the Anhangabaú and Tamanduateí rivers by a group of twelve Jesuits, including Manuel de Nóbrega and José de Anchieta, around a Jesuit college built of rammed earth (the Colégio de São Paulo de Piratininga). See chapter 3.
98. These reflections on the exploitation of the Indians in São Paulo are based on John Monteiro, Negros da terra: Índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994).
99. Fausto, Os índios antes do Brasil, pp. 78–9.
100. Pierre Clastres, op. cit.
101. Father Antonio Vieira – born 1608 in Lisbon, died 1697 in Bahia – a great Catholic pulpit-orator, was one of the few sources who described the conditions in the early days of the colony.
102. See Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da alma selvagem.
CHAPTER 2
1. Beet sugar made its appearance even more recently, only becoming part of the Western diet from the nineteenth century onward.
2. This introductory section on the history of sugar is largely based on the seminal work by Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985).
3. The Infante Henrique, of the House of Aviz, later to become Dom Henrique I (Henry I), King of Portugal from 1578 to 1580.
4. A historical unit of weight used in Portugal and Spain, originally a quarter of a quintal (25 pounds, 11.33).
5. Muscovado or mascavado – past participle of mascavar, the term used for separating sugar of inferior quality – used figuratively to mean ‘adulterated’. (Dicionário Aurélio).
6. Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
7. The first two kings during the period of political union between the Crowns of Spain and Portugal known as the Iberian Union or the Philippine Dyn
asty. Philip II, of the House of Hapsburg, was King of Spain from 1556 to 1598 and succeeded to the Portuguese throne as Felipe I in 1581. He was also Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, and, during his marriage to Mary I of England (1554–8), King of England and Ireland. He was succeeded by his son, King Philip III of Spain and Dom Felipe II of Portugal (1598–1621).
8. See Marshall Sahlins, ‘Cosmologias do capitalismo: O setor transpacífico do “sistema mundial” ’, in Cultura na prática. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Ufrj, 2004, chapter 13.
9. Dom Manuel I (King Emmanuel I), of the House of Aviz, King of Portugal from 1495 to 1521.
10. See Vera Lúcia Amaral Ferlini, A civilização do açúcar: Séculos XVI a XVIII. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984.
11. Dom João III (King John III), son of Dom Manuel, King of Portugal from 1521 to 1557.
12. ‘Holy war’ – a war motivated by religion.
13. A region of the captaincy (present-day state) of Bahia comprising the area of fertile land along the coast of the Baia de Todos os Santos (where the colony’s first capital, Salvador, is located).
14. Jaguaripe (from the Tupi-Guarani ‘River of the Jaguars’), the first town to be built in the Reconcâvo baiano.
15. The cult remained active until the second decade of the seventeenth century, although it was promptly repressed by the Portuguese. See Ronaldo Vainfas, A heresia dos Índios: Catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995.
16. Porto Seguro, in the south of Bahia, is the municipality immediately south of Santa Cruz Cabrália where Cabral arrived in 1500.
17. The low-lying lands around the port of Santos in the captaincy of São Vicente (present-day state of São Paulo). Nowadays, Santos is the port that serves the state capital, São Paulo, which is located approximately 70 kilometres inland, 790 metres above sea level, on the Piratininga Plateau.
18. Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) was a famous Brazilian sociologist and anthropologist whose best-known work, Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves; 1933), is still considered a Brazilian classic, despite a lot of polemic generated by some of its racial premises.
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