Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  The malocas Cavalcanti had seen the day he discovered this valley were at the far end of the rise. Cavalcanti had handled the natives kindly, arriving with many gifts and promising more if they helped him work these lands that were now his. As happened in most first contacts between the Portuguese and the people of Brazil, there was delight and happiness in the malocas; the natives were honored to have these strangers near their clearing. They saw the Potiguara driven to the fields by the black men, and they laughed at them.

  The move had placed the Cavalcantis at the farthest limit of settlement. Dom Duarte still considered it too dangerous, but he did not object strongly, for he was pleased to see his colony expanding. If Cavalcanti gained a hold on his valley, others would be encouraged to settle the open leagues between Engenho Santo Tomás and Olinda.

  But this day, even as the Cavalcantis gave thanks to God, as Nicolau’s hope soared with his first year’s accomplishments, humble as they were, another force was building — a force that would bring anguish and sorrow to the colony.

  At Iguarassu, under the brazilwood tree where he held court, Affonso Ribeiro was giving a speech:

  “Oh, senhores, I ask you, what need is there for work in paradise? Why this great labor when the land can provide a free bounty?”

  The “senhores” — as dissolute a group of layabouts and criminals as Dom Duarte had ever railed against — shouted encouragement. Ribeiro’s children and grandchildren ran among them, a mob of half-castes of all ages, who took care to stay beyond their father’s reach.

  There were others, too, who heard him, though they understood little of what he said. These men from nearby malocas found it good to visit with Ticuanga of the Tupiniquin. Here were no priests to give them ugly glances, no planters beseeching them to work their fields, but men like themselves, who loved to talk and sing and dance, away from the hot sun.

  “Ah, the good Dom Duarte . . . ” Ribeiro said. “Dom Duarte who labors hardest for this land.” Bitterness came into his voice. “Dom Duarte, who hangs the sons of others to save himself . . .

  “Dom Duarte loves to tell the king that he is the shepherd of his colony. Others claimed the same long before Dom Duarte: shepherds, they called themselves, come to lead this people to heaven. They told the people the great canoes were taking them to the lands of their ancestors. This I saw with my own eyes: how the naked savages wept with joy to be carried off into slavery.

  “I tell you, senhores, from one end of this land to the other, the people know that the Portuguese will enslave them. I know this, senhores, for I, Ticuanga of the Tupiniquin, am a warrior with my people!” He swayed, unsteady with the effect of the wine, and moved toward the natives. “I stand here — a warrior among these, too!”

  Suddenly Ribeiro broke away and stumbled toward his maloca. When he returned he held a rattle, and shook it as he swayed before the warriors, his big feet pounding the earth.

  “Dance, Muraci! Dance, Piragybe!” he called out.

  These two came forward, and they chanted and danced with Affonso Ribeiro.

  The drinking session had started early, and went on into the night, the riffraff of the settlement and their native friends carousing until little liquor remained. One jar was jealously guarded by a degredado named Martim Pinto, who was sitting on the ground when a young warrior made a dive for the liquor.

  "Thief! Pinto yelled. "Son of a bitch!" He grabbed the warrior's ankle and threw him to the ground.

  Warriors who saw the incident rushed to their comrade, and the clearing filled with the shouts of angry men.

  A dagger in his hand, Pinto leapt at the young native. There were screams, and then sudden silence among all involved in the melee. The fighting stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  Affonso Ribeiro, who'd taken no part in the fight, came out of the darkness.

  "Aieee! Pinto! You've killed the son of a chief!"

  Three days later, in the clearing at the malocas of the chief whose son had been slain, the father swore to avenge the young man's death. He had ordered that the victim's head be severed and his skull peeled.

  "This is my son," he lamented, holding up the bare skull to his people. "Let any who deny that evil has come behold these silent lips and sightless eyes."

  He passed the skull to six warriors, and ordered them to travel through the forest with a message:

  "We welcomed the Portuguese as brothers. We sang and danced and rejoiced when our women went to lie with them. We laughed at the few among us who saw no good in this. We laughed at the enemy we drove to the fields of the Long Hairs. Here is the son of our chief - we ask you where is his laughter?"

  From maloca to maloca they sped, often addressing clans for whom they'd once known only enmity. Word reached the Potiguara in the north, where the elders spoke with the French loggers who lived at their malocas. The Normans reminded their hosts of the fate of Le Tigre and twenty other corsairs captured by the Portuguese at Pernambuco in 1533: nine men had been hanged; the rest were buried up to their shoulders on a beach and used as targets for arquebus practice.

  "If such be their cruelty toward Christians," the Normans told the elders, "how will it go with the Potiguara?"

  The Potiguaras' answer was to march to destroy the settlement at Itamaracá, opposite Iguarassu.

  When the skull finally reached the Caeté, ancient foes of the Tupi tribes around Olinda and Iguarassu, old differences were set aside. Their warriors took up their clubs and bows and marched north. The route for one group, forty strong, lay through the valley of Engenho Santo Tomás.

  Toward late afternoon on March 27, 1546, Nicolau Cavalcanti noticed smoke above the trees in the direction of the mill, where Pedro was working with the Bakongo, Sebastião, and three native slaves.

  The engenho, distant as it was from Olinda and Iguarassu, knew nothing of the killing at Ribeiro's drinking parry.

  When the dark plume of smoke grew thicker, and the time for Pedro's return came and passed, a fear seized Cavalcanti.

  Five Bakongo and seven natives had already returned to the stockade from the cane fields. Cavalcanti posted most along the timbered redoubt. He warned Helena and the other women to be alert. Then he took two Bakongo and set out down toward the mill.

  When he walked into the small clearing, Nicolau Cavalcanti was filled with a horror he’d never known before.

  “Meu filho, meu filho! O Mother of Mercy, my son!” he cried.

  Pedro and three native slaves had been caught in the open, Pedro with his sword and two others with axes, their only means of self-defense. Pedro’s body was punctured in a dozen places by arrows, his loins blood-splattered where knives had hacked at his private parts.

  Cavalcanti gave a low, animal sound and slowly rocked from side to side. Without taking his eyes off his son’s body, he backed off a few paces.

  The Bakongo, Sebastião, had been at the water digging away at the riverbank. He’d seen the Caeté rushing out of the trees and had fled to the opposite side of the stream. He now emerged from his hiding place and crossed the river. He babbled a report, but Cavalcanti looked at him blindly.

  Cavalcanti was trembling as he glanced toward the trees looking for those who had committed this atrocity, but there were none. With a cracking noise and a crash, a rafter in the burning mill broke and fell into the heart of the fire.

  Cavalcanti began to gather the bits of rag that remained of Pedro’s garments. He now recognized the slave Sebastião, but when Sebastião sought to carry Pedro’s body, Cavalcanti shook his head. The two Bakongo who had accompanied Cavalcanti stood glancing nervously toward the trees.

  Gently Nicolau lifted his son and moved off into the forest, the three Bakongo just a few paces ahead of him, beating a path through the jungle with their hands. At last they came to the edge of the clearing on the low rise.

  The stockade was quiet, its entrance sealed with timbers and thornbush. When Nicolau could pass through, Helena came forward, her hands held up to her face, her mouth soundlessl
y forming words. Then, suddenly, a piteous cry, and she fell to her knees at Nicolau’s feet. “Pedro! O sweet Jesus, my Pedro!” she sobbed, looking up at the mutilated body.

  Nicolau wanted to move off, but Helena clung to his legs, until he made a furious movement to free himself. “For God’s sake, mother,” he said firmly, “the savages who did this may be upon us at any time.” Forcefully he pushed her back, and walked to Pedro’s hut. Inside, he placed his son’s body on the ground and covered it. When he stepped outside, Maria was waiting there with Helena.

  “Oh, Nicolau,” his wife said weakly, “senhor—”

  He put an arm around her thin shoulders and embraced her fiercely. “Little mother, the savages will pay for this sorrow. He tried to still her trembling. “Pray for our son,” he said, and when he felt her stiffen, he released her and left.

  Sebastião came running toward him with important news: One of the Potiguara slaves had tried to flee the stockade but had been captured.

  “Where is he?” Cavalcanti demanded.

  Sebastião indicated a direction with a motion of his head.

  Cavalcanti hastened over to the Potiguara, a young man of fine physique whom Cavalcanti had bought at Olinda just three months ago. He was sitting with his head bowed toward the ground, his arms tied behind him and fixed to a post. At Cavalcanti’s approach, he looked up in terror.

  Cavalcanti said nothing but drew his sword and clasped it with both hands. The Potiguara made a frantic attempt to scramble away, jerking his bonds so wildly that the stake was loosened and pulled askew.

  Cavalcanti swung his blade and decapitated the man.

  The six remaining native slaves, four of whom were from Potiguara malocas, witnessed the execution.

  Cavalcanti ordered a Potiguara who had been his slave for four years to step forward. The native had been given the name José.

  “Are there others who want to run to the savages?”

  “No, senhor!” José was staring at the corpse. “We do not want to run away.” A priest at Olinda had baptized José. “We are Christians. This one was a savage.”

  “Put the head on the stockade,” Cavalcanti ordered José. “Let the beasts in the forest see what awaits them.”

  “Yes, senhor!” And José, reciting one of the few Christian appeals he knew, added, “Jesus Christ be praised!”

  With Cavalcanti in the stockade were his six Bakongo and six native slaves; four men from the malocas at the opposite end of the hill; Helena, Maria, and Jandaia, and Tomás and the other children.

  Cavalcanti summoned one of the natives from the neighboring malocas and asked him to find out if his people would come to the defense of the stockade. The man declared that it was useless to risk crossing through the forest for nothing. His people would know what had happened at the mill and would have fled deep into the trees.

  Cavalcanti accepted this as true. He made a thorough check of their meager defenses and had Sebastião, who’d been trained in the use of the falconet, load and fire the guns several times into the forest. Cavalcanti searched the encircling line of trees but detected nothing that suggested the savages were out there.

  Guards were posted that night and through the next day, but no attack came. Cavalcanti did not relax his vigilance, but their water supply needed replenishing, and on the second morning, he sent one of the Bakongo and a Potiguara to the stream. Within minutes the black slave came dashing back to the stockade: The savages were nearby in the forest and had slain the other man; the Bakongo escaped only because he’d been trailing behind.

  Cavalcanti had been hoping for a sign that it was safe to venture beyond the valley to fetch a priest for Pedro’s burial, but the slaying of the man sent for water showed that the savages were lying in wait. During the funeral, Cavalcanti stood with Helena and Maria, a widow at eighteen. With every clod of earth thrown over Pedro’s crude coffin, Nicolau’s anger rose. He concentrated his gaze not on the burial site but on Tomás, who bore a look of understanding far beyond his nine years. Cavalcanti had lost two sons — one who had left Brazil, and one who would remain in its earth forever. He would not lose this one!

  A week after the funeral, a group of natives broke out of the cover of the trees from the direction of the malocas and came streaming toward the stockade. Cavalcanti made ready to fire one of the falconets, but then he recognized some of the natives who dwelt at Engenho Santo Tomás’s malocas.

  There were nine men, with a group of women and children. They reported that many from the malocas were hiding in the forest, but the same group who’d raided the mill had slaughtered others. They identified the enemy as Caeté, more ferocious than the Potiguara.

  Cavalcanti realized that these newcomers would rapidly exhaust the food and water in the stockade, but he welcomed them anyway, for they almost doubled his small force.

  He slept early that night, leaving Helena and Jandaia on guard at one falconet, Sebastião and another Bakongo at the other. He’d gone to rest long before midnight so that he’d be awake in the predawn hours, when the danger of assault by the Caeté was strongest.

  The Caeté had sent spies to watch the stockade day and night. This dark evening, they decided to attack. Two advance groups, each with eight warriors, crept to the edge of the trees opposite the falconet positions.

  The two women heard a noise behind the stockade and their hands tightened around their pikes. Helena wondered whether she should rouse her husband, but then she saw the figure of Sebastião and the other Bakongo standing calmly at the other gun.

  Moments later the first group of Caeté moved swiftly and silently until they reached the stockade. Two made it to the top of the barricade, where Helena and Jandaia were posted, but when they tried to climb onto the platform, the women drove their pikes at them, Helena striking with such force that she plunged the sharp blade through one warrior’s chest. Immediately she grabbed a firebrand and touched off the falconet, spewing a hail of small shot across the clearing in front of the stockade.

  Sebastião fired, too, and now Cavalcanti himself was awake and running toward the women and helped Helena complete the reloading of the falconet. He saw that at points all along the stockade his men were shooting arrows into the dark; four Bakongo slaves fired the wheellocks, yelling the war cries of their people as the muskets roared. The instant the falconet was ready, Cavalcanti touched off another shot.

  But Helena’s first burst, and that of Sebastião, had been enough to send the attackers streaking back for cover, all except three, who scaled the stockade at a weakly defended place. Cavalcanti caught sight of them dashing across the clearing toward the buildings. He leapt off the platform, ten feet above the ground, hit the dirt with a thud that briefly winded him, then immediately started racing toward the warriors, screaming an alert to the others.

  One of the Caeté stopped and hurled a club in Cavalcanti’s direction, but it went hissing past his head. Cavalcanti slashed out with his sword, lacerating the man’s chest and sending him reeling to the ground.

  He caught the second one near the entrance to the hut with the children. This Caeté shouted at him mockingly and kept him at bay with his club, dancing from one spot to another. Cavalcanti lunged at him with his sword, but the warrior swung his club and landed a terrific blow on Cavalcanti’s shoulder. Cavalcanti staggered back, struggled to regain his balance, and then attacked again, ignoring the pain in his shoulders and arm. He slashed the Caeté’s wrist, and the man lost his grip on the club. But then a child screamed from within the hut.

  A chilling fear seized Cavalcanti. His momentary hesitation gave the Caeté an opening to leap away from him and start racing across the stockade, but Cavalcanti’s concern now was elsewhere. He burst into the dark hut. “Tomás!” he screamed. “Tomás!”

  But his son was safe. The Potiguara slave José stood with a hatchet in his hand above a Caeté, who lay dying. Cavalcanti dropped his weapon and reached for Tomás, sweeping him off the ground with such violence that the child gave a c
ry of alarm. Cavalcanti clutched him to his chest. “Mother of Mercy be thanked,” he said.

  There were no further assaults that night. Toward dawn, Cavalcanti, back at the falconet platform, heard shots in the distance. He dared not leave the stockade to locate the source of the firing, but it was not long before a strong body of Portuguese came marching out of the forest, led by none other than Affonso Ribeiro himself.

  Cavalcanti’s joy at seeing the old degredado and his companions was unrestrained. He leapt up and down on the platform like a wild man, waving wildly, shouting his relief at the top of his voice. Then he tore down to meet them, working frantically alongside his slaves to remove the timbers and branches that blocked the entrance to the stockade.

  “Ribeiro! Old comrade!” he cried joyously. “We weren’t forgotten!”

  “Dom Duarte feared for the safety of Engenho Santo Tomás. I, Affonso Ribeiro, volunteered to lead these men to the valley.”

  “God’s thanks for that!”

  Cavalcanti learned from his countrymen that what had happened at Engenho Santo Tomás was no isolated incident: Throughout the colony, the natives had risen against the Portuguese, even clans allied with the Tobajara. Settlers at other outlying holdings had been murdered, and both Iguarassu and Olinda besieged. Marinheiros had been able to land from a ship opposite Olinda and aid the defenders of the capital, but Iguarassu remained under siege.

  Cavalcanti led his people out of the stockade within the hour, heading through the forested valley toward the tributary of the main river that led to Olinda. They moved below the ridge, from where Cavalcanti had first gazed upon this lovely valley. When he glanced back, he saw smoke enveloping his stockade. “We’ll return, Tomás,” he promised. “These lands, my son, everything you see from this ridge to those far hills, are Cavalcanti lands — forever! Your brother Pedro made it so.”

  THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BRAZIL - THE PORTUGUESE

  BOOK TWO: The Jesuit