It was a week before he spoke to his family about Brazil, and by then his mind was made up. His wife, Helena, intuitively knew this, and whatever his plans might hold, she would not oppose them; she had married Nicolau the year after his return from India, and had always been aware of the restlessness that long campaign bred in him.
Helena was a quiet woman, who had lived with the older Cavalcantis since her marriage. She’d often hoped that Nicolau would seek a place of their own, but he never had, and she’d not complained. Her family came from nearby Collares and she sometimes visited them, but most often she never ventured farther than her fatherin-law’s courtyard.
It was thus remarkable that when her husband spoke of moving to another world entirely, she showed no alarm.
When Nicolau came to tell his father of his decision, his brothers were there too.
“Santa Cruz? What is there?” old Cavalcanti asked. “Wood you must ask the king to cut? Birds? Monkeys? Wild men?”
“Dom Duarte, senhor,” Cavalcanti said respectfully, “believes there is sufficient to stake his fortune on.”
“Then he’s a wealthy fool.”
“He goes not to trade but to found a colony.”
“A settlement? Where have the Portuguese ever made a settlement? We’re traders, merchants, shippers — this you should know better than most men.”
“Madeira prospers,” Nicolau said in a level voice.
The old man rapped his knuckles against the table. “Madeira, Azores — islands at the door of Lisbon. Brazil lies at the other side of the world. To fetch dyewood is one thing, certainly, but to move there — you’ll live like savages and you’ll be forgotten.”
“Dom Duarte and the other donatários sail at the behest of the king.”
“Will King João remember them when their sails are over the horizon?”
Nicolau ignored the question. “In Brazil, I saw how green and fertile the land is,” he said. “Sugarcane, senhor, will make Pernambuco prosperous.”
“So this is your decision, Nicolau. But what of the boys? Henriques and Pedro — what is there in such a wild place? What can they find with savages and monkeys as their tutors?”
Now Nicolau smiled. “Pedro, surely plenty,” he said. The fourteen-year-old was a mischievous terror with no love for lessons. His brother, a year older, was quieter and reserved. “Henriques will find more than in these parts.”
Hours passed as the men sat talking at the long table, with jars of wine from the vineyards of Helena’s family. The boys stormed into the room and were told what they’d suspected since Pedro overheard the talk between Dom Duarte and his father earlier.
The sons of Nicolau’s two brothers were with them. Felipe’s oldest, Inácio, a soft-tempered and sickly child, was greatly excited by the news. “Oh, senhor,” he addressed Nicolau, “you’ll go to live among the heathen?”
Nicolau laughed kindly. “In their very lands,” he said.
This son, the family knew, was born to be a priest: the pale Inácio lived in awe of the dark-robed men who guided him.
“But Padre Miguel tells us that they are an ugly and savage race, for whom there may be no salvation,” the boy ventured.
Cavalcanti started. “Padre Miguel?”
“Yes, senhor, in Lisbon, where I take my lessons.”
“Your padre, Inácio — he’s been to Brazil?”
“Oh, yes, senhor, he’s gone among the Tupiniquin and has preached to them, but he says they have hearts of stone.”
“That he would,” Nicolau said quietly: The Brazil Padre Miguel remembered was not the promised land to which Nicolau was to return.
They came bursting into the small square, shrieking and yelling at the top of their voices, their chests smeared with red urucu dye, and heads crowned with feather diadems. Bare feet splattered the mud. Ahead were those they pursued, who cried that they were Normans. This failed to appease their adversaries, who loosed a barrage of missiles.
A group of warriors observed this battle with amusement, and began to laugh, as the children of the Portuguese pelted one another with manioc flour and rotten eggs.
Nicolau Cavalcanti was not surprised that the leader of the attack on the “Normans” should be his son Pedro. Almost a year had passed since their coming ashore in Brazil in March 1535, and Pedro had shown nothing but delight in his new home. Henriques remained reserved and thoughtful about his true feelings about the move.
Tomorrow was the start of Lent, and the little community was in a carnival mood. Colonists stood near the clearing or sat on benches at a prudent distance from their reveling youngsters. Less than one hundred souls had come to the captaincy of Pernambuco. Dom Duarte Coelho Pereira, ever ambitious, preferred to call his colony Nova Lusitania, after the name the Roman invaders gave to their conquest above the Tagus River.
Dom Duarte had done as his king commanded: Upon landing, he had erected a stone pillar fifty paces beyond an early Portuguese logwood camp on the south bank of a river he promptly named Santa Cruz. Opposite was a green island called Itamaracá; Dom Duarte had gazed at it enviously, but the marker placed it beyond his captaincy.
Near the pillar, a start had been made at a settlement also called Santa Cruz, but soon the settlers had moved inland to this more elevated position, and named it Villa do Cosmos, for the saint. Shortly, however, they were seduced by the cadences of the native word Iguarassu (Big River) and had begun to use it for both “stream” and “village.”
The houses of the settlers stood within a sturdy mud-and-stonewall stockade. Some of the dwellings, like those of Dom Duarte and Cavalcanti, were made of clay and stone; the rest, of palm fronds. At one end of the square was a long, squat, crumbling mud structure — their equivalent of the câmara, where Dom Duarte and his officials conducted their business. The building of which they were inordinately proud was their church, which had been recently built on the highest ground of the village.
Beyond the settlement were fields of manioc and sugar, nothing like the great sweep of canes envisaged in King João’s charter, but at least a beginning. To be ready for the crop, Dom Duarte’s brother-in-law, Jerónimo Albuquerque, was building the first cane press. He called it an engenho, a mill, and it was good for Dom Duarte to report to King João with such a grand term, but the engenho was really a very simple machine that could be worked by two men.
To comprehend the magnitude of the colonists’ task was to see the labor expended to gain the crude blocks of dark, unrefined sugar. It was to stand alone at the edge of that green barrier and make the first cut in the first trunk, its upper branches lost in the tangle above; to hear the first crack and then the explosion as the tree broke away and fell; to hack with long-bladed knives at the first thicket and to kindle the first flame that would rise to a wall of fire sweeping all before it.
To comprehend the enormity of the task was to walk through the ruin of charred and blackened timbers smoking and hissing, glowing red within, and to breathe the scorched earth; to take such fields and, with hands grained by ash and scarred by splintered wood, to begin, inch by inch, turning over the red soil and laying cuttings of cane.
As the children fought the mock battle in the square, Nicolau and several colonists stood listening to Dom Duarte discuss the vicissitudes facing them, not only the problems involved in growing cane, but also difficulties with the natives.
Among the warriors invited to the carnival was the one-eyed chief Tabira, whose people, the Tobajara, lived in nearby villages. Tabira’s missing eye was a reminder of this man’s bravery: Leading a charge against an enemy stockade, Tabira had been struck in the eye by an arrow, and without slowing his pace, he had pulled out the shaft and gone back to the fight.
Tabira’s people were similar to Aruanã’s Tupiniquin, far to the south — with one exception: They had never practiced cannibalism. When Dom Duarte and his colonists landed, Tabira and his people, splendidly dressed in their body paints and feather adornments, greeted them joyfully. Dom Duarte was
delighted, until he learned the reason for this welcome: Tabira desperately needed a Portuguese alliance against his old enemies, the Potiguara and the Caeté.
Of all the Tupi tribes, the Potiguara (Shrimp Eaters) were the most powerful, their big, settled villages extending over hundreds of miles north of the Portuguese settlement. Their chiefs had allied themselves with French loggers, who lived among them and knew the reason for the Potiguara’s strength: Unlike other tribal leaders, the Potiguara chiefs permitted no dissension among the clans of their nation, thereby ensuring unity within them.
The third tribe in the area, the Caeté, enemies of both Tabira’s people and the Potiguara, were a smaller but brutal and warlike band, who, as with the Tupiniquin at their malocas, raided to capture prisoners for ritual slaughter in their clearings. Recently these Caeté, who so rejoiced at the suffering of their victims, had themselves come up against a new and terrifying enemy: Portuguese slavers, who crept ashore at night, to villages south of Dom Duarte’s settlement, and carried off entire malocas of men, women, and children.
“I’ll hang those thieves if I catch them,” Dom Duarte told the colonists standing with him. “They’re worse than the Normans.”
“They could have come from any one of the captaincies,” his brother-in-law, Jerónimo, pointed out.
“Certainly. They wouldn’t do this in their own colony,” Dom Duarte said, “and risk setting their own Tupi against them. They come here, where we only want peace, and disturb our Caeté.”
Dom Duarte’s anger over slavers stealing his Caeté reflected his fear that the Caeté would be stirred up against the Pernambucan colonists. He did not oppose the enslavement of the savages. Tabira’s warriors had recently herded twenty Potiguara to the settlement. In the past, the Tobajara had seen no value in taking Potiguara prisoners and had slaughtered them on the battlefield; they were now given a handful of trinkets for each healthy Potiguara delivered to the colonists.
As allies of the Portuguese, the Tobajara were spared slavery and encouraged to labor freely in the cane fields for payment of cloth and other rewards; but this arrangement was faring poorly, for now Dom João’s brazilwood gatherers were competing with the colonists for Tobajara labor.
“When we arrived, the Tobajara did all we asked,” Dom Duarte said. “They labored happily for a looking glass or worthless knife. Today?” He shook his head. “How does the king expect me to build an honest and orderly community when the men who come to cut his logs spoil the savages? They pay the Tobajara more than any colonist can match. Besides, the most stupid savage sees it’s better to fell and haul timber for a short season than to work in our fields.”
“With the guns and lances they get from the loggers, they’re better able to fight the Potiguara and bring their captives to us,” Cavalcanti remarked. He, too, saw no contradiction in enslaving the Potiguara while protesting the theft of the Caeté.
“True, Nicolau, but will they ever bring enough?”
“A man needs six slaves to live decently,” Cavalcanti said. “One to fish for him, one to hunt for him, and the rest in his fields.”
“Six?” Jerónimo interjected. “What will you accomplish with six? They sit around their huts like grandfathers and talk and drink, and send their women to the fields. No, senhor, not six — perhaps sixty and you may begin to make something of your lands!”
Dom Duarte turned again to Cavalcanti. “This man you wish to bring here — he would know how to handle our problem.”
“Since Cabral’s day, senhor, he’s lived with these people. He knows them better than any man.”
“But will he be willing to move?”
“I believe so,” Cavalcanti said, “considering your irresistible offer.”
Cavalcanti was sailing south on the next ship to Porto Seguro. He planned to fetch Affonso Ribeiro and his family and settle them at Pernambuco. That ugly business with the Franciscan friars — Ribeiro’s confession of responsibility for their slaughter — no longer troubled Cavalcanti: More important now was the value a man of Ribeiro’s experience could have in dealing with the Potiguara and the Caeté. Ribeiro was to be offered lands in the captaincy and Dom Duarte would write to the king and seek a full pardon for one who had stolen a goat so many years ago.
The carnival was a brave little affair, not without moments of nostalgia and melancholy: There would be something glimpsed in the turn of a dancer or heard in a voice that drew the observer away to a town or village in “old” Lusitania.
Though the colonists had moved once already, Dom Duarte had not been happy with this choice of Iguarassu as his main base. Hidden in the forest, it was a poor site for the capital of Nova Lusitania. A few weeks before, he had seen his “Lisbon”: on the coast twenty-five miles to the south, there were seven hills, from any one of which he could look far inland, and which could be admirably defended seaward. Here, too, were rivers along which his planters could establish cane fields; opposite the coastline, a little farther south, was a long reef that formed a magnificent natural harbor.
There was at this time an old romance of chivalry and knighthood with its heroine, Olinda, a name meaning “beautiful.” Dom Duarte found this a perfect description for those seven hills facing the sea: Olinda.
Cavalcanti traveled to Porto Seguro and found Affonso Ribeiro willing to go to Pernambuco with his wives — including Aruanã’s daughter, Salpina — and twenty children and relatives, a tribe in itself.
The Tupiniquin clan had moved its malocas to the north of the bay since Cavalcanti first came here with Gomes de Pina’s squadron; when the master entered the new clearing, Ribeiro had recognized him immediately, and Jandaia, too, had come to meet him, standing back shyly as her father and Cavalcanti exchanged greetings.
Ribeiro saw Cavalcanti looking at his daughter. “All these years, Master, and you did not forget her?”
Cavalcanti said only: “Jandaia.” She was as he’d remembered her, the smooth, copper-toned body, long black hair, that playful pout and slightly hesitant manner. She bent her head coyly when he mouthed her name.
Ribeiro told him that Jandaia had two children, a boy and a girl, by a warrior who had taken her after Cavalcanti’s departure. This man had died in a Cariri raid.
The trip to fetch Ribeiro occupied two months. Dom Duarte granted the degredado a small landholding just beyond the stockade at Iguarassu, where Ribeiro erected a maloca of the kind his little tribe had known with the Tupiniquin. He laughed at the tight hovels the settlers built and told them that the airy palm structures were much more livable, but they rejected his “savage” tastes: They had come to build a civilization, not to lose it.
Two months after the arrival of Affonso Ribeiro, Nicolau Cavalcanti made another journey in August 1536. With Ribeiro and three Potiguara slaves, he took his sons up a river that flowed near Olinda. Like Dom Duarte, who had moved to Olinda, Cavalcanti had concluded that Iguarassu and the lands about it were not the best choice for permanent settlement. Olinda was a far superior site, but the donatary and his family held absolute power over those seven hills: to give up his lands at Iguarassu and move close by would be like living just beyond the walls of a fort or factory. Thus, whenever he could, Cavalcanti made small probes into the forest, searching for he knew not precisely what but certain that he’d recognize it when he saw it.
Just before noon, the party came to a branch of the river. Cavalcanti, without the slightest hesitation, directed the two canoes along the smaller flow.
As they followed the stream, the forest became less dense, especially to one side, where the trees started up a range of hills. After an hour’s travel, Cavalcanti called a halt and they pulled up on a narrow beach before a steep incline. They would stay here overnight, but before darkness, he wanted to stand on top of this hill.
The climb was difficult. In some places they had to pull themselves up by clinging to the roots of trees and vines that brushed the ground, but Cavalcanti moved with haste, keen to see what would be revealed from the s
ummit. He was not disappointed.
The boys, Pedro and Henriques, were first to the top, and Pedro shouted excitedly, “Hurry, Father, hurry! All Brazil lies before us!”
Cavalcanti saw that the hill lay at one end of a long ridge curving to the northwest; the river they’d been following meandered lazily along the base of these heights. Far to the south was another series of hills, similar to this; about four leagues separated these two chains and between them lay the valley, as long as it was broad, the canopy of a lush and ancient forest undulating above low, gentle rises. Another river tumbled into the valley through a gorge in the heights to the south; the rivers met in a small lake. Near the lake, a line of smoke curled upward from a group of malocas.
His heart leapt with excitement as he envisioned fields of cane in the lowlands between the small rises and rolling up their sides — leagues of land to be cleared with fire and ax, season by season, for a valiant harvest!
Affonso Ribeiro had been last to reach the top of the hill, huffing and complaining as he dragged himself up. Like the Tupiniquin he’d lived with for so many years, Ribeiro did not take easily to unnecessary exertion. He leaned against the trunk of a fallen tree as Cavalcanti and his sons paced from one part of the heights to another seeking the best vantage points.
“Isn’t it a glorious sight!” Cavalcanti exclaimed afterward.
“Good lands, senhor,” Ribeiro agreed, “but far from Olinda.”
“Far? A day by river?”
“Two, maybe three days if you pass through the forest. In Brazil, senhor, this can be far.”
Cavalcanti knew what he meant. “But Tabira’s clans are our friends,” he said.
“Today, yes,” Ribeiro said. “Tomorrow?” He shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t build to run back to Lisbon,” Cavalcanti said. “If I take these lands, I take them for my sons, and their sons. This, Ribeiro, is what was promised me at Sintra.”
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