The valley now had ten times the plantings Inácio had seen a decade before, an enormous water-driven mill financed by the Jew Papagaio, and two shiploads of sugar readied for Lisbon every season. Nicolau had leased lands to impoverished settlers, who produced cane for his engenho. And there was a new enterprise, too, with a herd of cattle introduced on grounds west of the valley. However, Inácio was not to think this exceptional, Tomás told him, for others knew such prosperity in Nova Lusitania. Olinda was no more a hovel clinging to those steep hills but a city as noble as São Salvador, with seven hundred households and, in the lands beyond, eighteen mills similar to that of Senhor Cavalcanti.
Tomás spoke almost reverently of Dona Brites, widow of Dom Duarte Coelho, who had died so sadly. When it became clear that João III had indeed wanted Dom Duarte to return rights and privileges to all lands except the ten leagues of coast granted him as his personal property, the donatário had sailed to Lisbon to appeal to his king. But João had received his old warrior coldly, ignoring all he’d done for Nova Lusitania, and Dom Duarte had collapsed and died within three days. Dona Brites, whom Inácio remembered as a severe, devout woman, had taken control of the captaincy, keeping the representatives of king and governor-generals at a distance that assured the donatário’s family continued control of Pernambuco.
With obvious irritation, Tomás complained to Inácio that even as they marched here, against the Tupiniquin, the savages of Pernambuco, the Caeté and the Potiguara were sure to be attacking outlying engenhos and committing outrages against the Christians — even to within a league of Olinda. And without an adequate force to crush them, the colonists were faced with new problems:
Through their toil and industry, the settlers had acquired no less than four thousand slaves from the Kongo kingdom and the lands of the Guinea coast; Engenho Santo Tomás alone had more than one hundred. At first, these precious imports had been fearful of the forest savages, filled with a horror of their flesh-eating and brutal disposition. But when they’d seen how handily their masters slew Caeté and Potiguara, they began to lose their dread, and dozens of slaves had run from the plantations into the woods, where, though blessed as Christians before departing Africa, they now consorted with the heathens. Ten of Nicolau’s slaves had fled in this manner, along with others from neighboring engenhos, and this was the reason Tomás had led thirty Pernambucans south. They had caught eight runaways, who were now part of Mem de Sá’s expeditionary force.
“Drawn into the forest by the savages, our peças become the worst outlaws and murderers,” Tomás explained. “I thanked God, when Governor de Sá invited me to join his campaign. Be swift my sword, I prayed — be swift, for there’s no difference between a Caeté or a Tupiniquin beast.”
This morning, Rodrigues de Caldas was just finishing his address to the campaign leaders. Mem de Sá’s force, he announced, was being split into three columns: One would march down the coast, along the hills that lay toward the sea; a second would make its way to Porto Seguro through the valleys behind the coastal range; the third, led by Tomás Cavalcanti, was to head inland in a southwesterly direction.
The objective of each column was the same: to seek out and destroy the villages of the Tupiniquin. Already not a single maloca remained within a day’s march from Ilheus. Governor de Sá’s initial conquests of the clan to which the colonists’ murderers had belonged, and the Tupiniquin horde cut down on the beach, had been followed by a more orderly plan.
“Let us show them full Christian charity,” the governor had said. “The Tupiniquin have only to abandon their forest hovels and move to aldeias they will build near our own settlements. There they will enjoy my protection and the guidance of the Company of Jesus.”
The clans who accepted this promise without argument were to be given an opportunity to collect their possessions, and they were then to be led to the coast. The stockades and malocas were to be destroyed.
“If they refuse our offers, then force them out,” the governor said. “Force them out and drive them to their new home, where they may gradually be brought to accept our honest and good intentions.”
When the group around de Caldas started to break up and move off, Tomás remained talking with the commander. Inácio was surprised to note their shared enthusiasm, very different from their relationship that day in Mem de Sá’s cabin. But then he had learned why soon enough.
De Caldas had mellowed toward Tomás for two reasons: After the first engagements with the Tupiniquin, he recognized that the planter’s son, whom he’d first regarded with contempt, was a ferocious and fearless fighter. Few of his own seasoned soldiers of the king could match Tomás Cavalcanti’s skill and daring against the savages, his canny appreciation of their tactics and treacheries. Second, de Caldas had discovered that Tomás had been telling the truth about his romantic vigil at the house where Mem de Sá’s orphan ward was lodged. The commander’s men assured him that Tomás had indeed been waiting to see the king’s “daughter,” Theresa Dias, and been begging Dom Almeida to protect the girl until he returned from the south.
As the other officers headed off to join their columns, de Caldas and Tomás approached Inácio. Because he’d journeyed through that part of the forest before, he was to accompany Tomás’s column, with its eighty soldiers and colonists and four hundred Tupinamba.
Tomás hailed him enthusiastically: “Padre Inácio, we march to bring back to His pasture those who strayed from the field you prepared for them.”
“A lovely solace, Tomás, if my lost Tupiniquin are found and returned to grace.”
“I promise you, my cousin Inácio, no native who can be taken for Christ will be overlooked.”
Tomás Cavalcanti kept his promise.
For three weeks the column pushed through the valleys and forests, first due west and then south, until it was following the direction Inácio had taken with Guaraci and the two converts at the time of his retreat. Tupinambá scouts ranged ahead of the main body, locating thirty Tupiniquin stockades — 140 malocas with nearly ten thousand people.
The Portuguese (actually, their ranks included Spaniards, a German, a Scot, and three Genoese, whose avowed Catholicism met the main criteria for serving or settling in Brazil) moved slowly, laden with weapons and baggage. In addition to swords and daggers, pikes and crossbows and hand axes, there were forty arquebuses, with enough power and shot to keep them supplied for months, and two falconet cannon.
In the first days beyond the encampment at Ilheus, two Tupiniquin villages joined the column peacefully, their elders persuaded by Padre Inácio that this was how they would be spared the punishments reported by warriors fleeing from the coast. The families at these malocas rolled up their hammocks, put aside their treasured feathers and dyepots, and obediently stood aside as the soldiers and Tupinambá tore down their stockade, burned their houses, and pulled up the manioc and other plants in their fields.
But, at other stockades, Tupiniquin chose flight, aware of the superior force gathered against them. When Tomás Cavalcanti’s men reached the villages abandoned by these Tupiniquin, there was nothing for them to do but indulge in a destructive rage, unsatisfied until the malocas and tracts of forest around them were in flames.
At other villages the Tupiniquin simply refused to move: Nothing could persuade them to leave their homes. To Padre Inácio’s pleas and the arguments of others, they responded by showing that their fields were still productive, the thatch on their houses new, the clay of the great pots their women fashioned for beer as fresh as the brew they held. Their people had slain no Long Hairs — why should they move?
They watched as their clearing filled with Portuguese and Tupinambá. Their people were forced out of the malocas. Then they were chased beyond the clearing to join other Tupiniquin waiting at the column’s stopping place, and here they were told how foolish they’d been to reject the peace offered by the new lords of the forest. But nothing that was said made sense to them, for as they waited to move, they saw the smok
e rising from their malocas, and the Tupinambá leaping with joy at the sight.
Among the last clans encountered in those first three weeks, the column began to meet fierce resistance. As tales of devastation and atrocities spread through the forest with intensifying horror, warriors took up their clubs and bows and arrows, and strode out as a body to meet the invaders.
On the twenty-second day of the column’s march from Ilheus, it was attacked by one hundred warriors from malocas that Tupinambá scouts had reported to be an hour’s march ahead of the column. Shouting their war cries from afar, they leaped noisily through the underbrush, running in closed ranks into a wall of fire and steel. The Tupinambá, who cut off all avenues of retreat, caught those not slain by the soldiers.
The expedition’s casualties were light: two Portuguese killed, four wounded, and thirty Tupinambá lost. Immediately, Tomás Cavalcanti ordered an offensive against the malocas of the Tupiniquin attackers.
At the village, the few defenders were quickly subdued, and, as before on this campaign, the Portuguese experienced a bitter disappointment that there was no plunder. Their anger at such deprivation drove them to take the only prizes available: wives, daughters, and sons of warriors they had slain.
One man among the Portuguese refused these spoils: their captain, Tomás Cavalcanti. He stood alone near the entrance to the stockade, allowing his men their pleasures but making no attempt to participate.
A Tupiniquin girl did rush up to Tomás, begging him to save her from his men. He’d laughed, seizing her by her hair and shouting the name of the most brutal soldiers he could see in the clearing, one of the German mercenaries. But the man didn’t hear him, and growing impatient with the girl screeching at his feet, Tomás stepped back, drew his sword, and killed her. He wiped the blade against her legs and replaced the weapon in its scabbard. Then he turned away and returned to the column’s encampment.
Inácio had remained with the column, among the Tupiniquin already taken from other malocas and those too sick or wounded to participate in the storming of the stockade. Here, too, were the eight slaves from Pernambuco who had been recaptured by Tomás. They were now all exhausted by fever. Inácio had done all he could for them —three were Christians from the kingdom of the Kongo — but they were too sick even to show interest in his concern.
When the column reassembled the next morning, thirty-six Tupiniquin from the conquered stockade were added — a group of women, children, and the aged, all who remained of a community of three hundred.
Two days later, an old man who had been an elder at the destroyed village approached Inácio. “I remember you,” he said.
To Inácio, he appeared no different from any other old native: small-framed, his face wrinkled, dry, and dusty, his shoulders straight, his gestures lively.
After studying him carefully, Inácio said, “I do not know you.”
The man pointed to the scar on the black robe’s face. “You came to our malocas seeking the Tupiniquin whose village had been attacked by the slavers. I remember you,” he said again.
At first, Inácio was shocked. “Guaraci? The elder Aruanã? They were at your malocas?”
The Tupiniquin shook his head.
“Where, then?”
“I remember you” was all the old man would say, and nothing Inácio said or offered — food, liquor, tabak — could induce him to reveal more.
Only now did Inácio realize that it had been from the last malocas destroyed by the column that he had set out with Guaraci, three days to the west, to the place where Aruanã and his warriors had found them.
“Tomás, I beg you to march in that direction,” he appealed to his cousin.
Tomás was reluctant: “Three days to the west — exhausting for men who’ve marched and fought so hard these past weeks.”
“Aruanã’s people were brought so close to His side; their children were converted.”
“And they were lost?”
“As the lamb of the shepherd.”
Inácio argued so strongly that Tomás finally relented. “Very well, Padre, let us find your strayed flock and bring them to safety.”
The six Tupinambá scouts for the column were found at a shaded rock pool where one had stopped to drink. This warrior floated face down in the shallows; the others were on the ground beside the water, their bodies riddled with arrows. Tomás Cavalcanti walked between the naked corpses. “Bring the padre,” he ordered, and Inácio was fetched. “Could it be, cousin, we seek not lambs but wolves?”
There were more than fifteen hundred people, conquerors and captives, in the column, and when it broke up for the night. Inácio spent much time with the eight ailing black slaves, two of whom he did not expect to survive the night. He’d bled them, but to no avail. Tomás and the Pernambucans who’d caught these runaways showed no sympathy but only cursed them for the trouble they’d caused.
Before dawn, there was a second attack against the column, a swift strike that killed thirty-four Tupiniquin captives who’d rested a distance from the main body. When the alarm was sounded, Tomás and others raced to the scene, but the attackers were gone.
Tomás sent Tupinambá to scout the forest in every direction and locate the source of these assaults. One group was back before noon: Two hours to the west was a stockade, they reported, where the warriors of several villages were assembled. Without delay, Tomás led his men against this stronghold. Inácio asked to accompany them, for he was certain he’d find Aruanã and those of his people not taken by the slavers; but he was told he’d be sent for as soon as the clearing had been captured.
The raiding party came straggling back between sunset and late into the evening, and all told of a miserable defeat: Four times they had stormed this Tupiniquin stockade, and on each occasion they had been stopped by a rain of arrows from the defenders. Tomás Cavalcanti was slightly wounded by an arrow that pierced his right forearm. Eight Portuguese were dead or missing, twice that number injured. It was not known how many Tupinambá were lost, for they hadn’t stopped at the flight of arrows but had rushed on to the enemy’s stockade, so many felled that a broad clearing outside the village was filled with their bodies.
Tomás sat on the ground, his back against a tree trunk, as soldier after soldier urged that they abandon this dangerous diversion and head for the coast.
“Oh, Capitão, we’ve achieved more than Governor de Sá expected of us,” said one accepted by all as second-in-command, a middle-aged veteran of the Guinea-coast forts. “We’ve cleared the forest of thirty pagan villages and taken enough natives to the coast to employ the fathers of Jesus for years to come. Let’s go, Tomás!”
“Eight Christians struck down by these pagans and all you can say is that our work is ended?”
None of the soldiers responded.
“Take heart, my men,” Tomás continued. “Even the most cowardly among you will accept the plan I have to lure those Tupiniquin from their redoubt.”
When Inácio learned of the stratagem, he was filled with disgust.
The eight sick slaves were to be carried to a place in the woods, bound together, and left near a stream from which these Tupiniquin fetched their water. When the eight offerings were sighted, Tomás was confident, a sizable force would be sent to collect them. And his men would be waiting.
Inácio had protested. “You cannot sacrifice them so heartlessly.”
“They condemned themselves, cousin, by fleeing their rightful owners. They’ll die before we reach the coast: Let them at least be of some use for all the trouble they’ve caused.”
Before dawn, the slaves were in place, roped together on the ground near the stream. As Tomás had hoped, some Tupiniquin spotted them at sunrise. Sixty warriors rushed upon the blacks, smashing them with their clubs.
They were engaged in this slaughter when the arquebuses roared from the trees beyond, blasting their fiery shot into the throng of warriors and finishing off, too, the blacks who’d provided the lure. Within a quarter of an hour
, forty-five Tupiniquin lay dead with the slaves; others tried to retreat to their stockade, but there the column had launched a new attack.
They had brought up the two small cannon carried from the coast, positioned them just beyond the broad clearing in front of the stockade entrance, and fired repetitive rounds through the wooden defense. The cannonballs were hand-sized and not solid but of a new design, containing gunpowder to explode upon impact. The Portuguese roared with pleasure as these innovative projectiles landed among the Tupiniquin.
Some of the best warriors among the defenders had been caught in the ambush with the slaves, and those remaining in the stockade quickly fell back as the balls burst among their ranks. Immediately their barrage of arrows lessened, and the attackers began to storm across the open ground. The Tupinambá raced to tear aside the branches and other obstacles placed at the entrance to the village.
Tomás Cavalcanti had led his men at the ambush, and he now led the fight being waged at the nine malocas, crying that none who resisted be spared or allowed escape.
Back at the column’s encampment, Padre Inácio had waited until a messenger came to report that the ambush had succeeded and the malocas were being stormed. He hurried off then to the scene of battle, with the Tupinambá who’d brought the news.
Inácio had known what to expect, but the sight of the bound, broken corpses left him sick at heart. He weaved among the bodies of the slain Tupiniquin. Then, with an agonized cry, he dropped to his knees:
“Guaraci! My dear Guaraci!”
The Tupiniquin’s chest had been punctured by shot, the side of his face split by the clubs wielded against him.
“Cristovão,” Inácio cried then over the body of the painted warrior who had been received into Christ’s presence with his sister, Unauá. He prayed silently, remaining for a long time at Guaraci’s side.
The discovery of Guaraci confirmed that these were Inácio’s Tupiniquin, and Inácio dreaded what he would find at the malocas. When he reached the stockade, the main conflict was over. The Portuguese and Tupinambá were rounding up the women and children, and disarmed Tupiniquin were held back by the victors; but for every one who stood captive, three or four others lay dying or wounded on the ground.
Brazil Page 28