Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Three days earlier, reduction natives had reported to Padre Pedro Mola the advance of Raposo Tavares’s bandeira. The priest realized that it would be futile to commit the people of San Antonio, with their twenty muskets and primitive hunting weapons, to a pitched battle against the company of Paulistas. His Guarani had won that fight in the manioc fields, but they had faced only a single detachment of Paulistas, and surprise had been in their favor. Despite the odds against them, some of the elders in the reduction had urged a proper defense.

  “Raposo Tavares is a determined man, but I cannot believe that he is entirely in the hands of the devil,” Padre Mola had argued. “After all, he has honored the agreement we made: Not one of our people who carries a pass from me has been molested. When he comes, we will make certain that our church and square are filled with a worshipful host. Surely this bandit will realize that the Lord God will damn his soul eternally if his men harm these children of Jesus.”

  But, with each passing hour, the imminent threat from the bandeira made the padre increasingly apprehensive, and he had suddenly decided to strengthen his people for whatever ordeal they might have to face by granting them the blessing of the Lord. For seven hours, Padre Mola required the great congregation of Guarani to shuffle past him, one by one, and he gave each his blessing and baptized those not yet offered to the Lord. Before he was finished, his voice became a cracked whisper and others had to lift his arm for the Benediction.

  At dawn on January 30, after a sleepless night, Padre Mola had dressed with care. He conducted two Masses, with the church filled to capacity. The Guarani also crowded together on the square in front of the church, groups falling on their knees to pray for deliverance from the evil they knew to be gathered in the forests beyond.

  After the services, Padre Mola had stepped into the square, heading toward the main pathway that led from the reduction entrance. He remained at the edge of the square, his arms folded.

  When lookouts had come running to warn that the Paulistas were approaching, Padre Mola acknowledged them but stayed where he was, slowly rocking back and forth, his rosary trembling in his hands. Nor did he move when the first Paulistas burst into the reduction. All but two of the elders and Tatabrana, the runaway slave, stood near him.

  Ever since the sighting of the Paulistas, Tatabrana had warned that his former master and those with whom he marched would journey across these lands for no other reason than to enslave the men, women, and children of San Antonio. However, Padre Mola had prevailed with his promise of Christ’s blessing.

  But Tatabrana had been carried away by slavers once before, and when the Paulistas tore through the entrance, he and the two elders and seventeen Guarani, armed with the muskets of San Antonio, were standing in the lane between the first two blocks of houses.

  From where he stood, Padre Mola could not see Tatabrana and his men at the far end of the main thoroughfare. He’d started to move slowly toward the Paulistas who were entering the reduction. When these troops passed the first row of houses, Tatabrana’s tiny force opened fire on the front-runners.

  “Oh, dear God, all is lost!” Padre Mola called out, and started to run. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Tatabrana’s small group, after firing its first volley, backed off in order to gain time to reload. The first salvos had felled a few Paulistas, but the rest of the attackers continued to charge the musketeers. Tatabrana and six others stood firm, wielding their muskets against the first raiders to reach them. Within minutes they were overwhelmed.

  Captain-Major Raposo Tavares had entered the reduction with a second wave of Paulistas, and found Padre Mola, so splendidly attired in his vestments, dashing along the main pathway.

  “Men of São Paulo, it is God’s preserve you violate!” Padre Mola cried out when he saw the captain-major and his officers. “For the love of God, stop!”

  “Stand aside, Padre Mola,” Raposo Tavares commanded. “We wish you no harm.” His sword was drawn and held loosely at his side.

  “You will be damned for this, Raposo Tavares.” ‘Jesuit, stand back!”

  Raposo Tavares motioned the mamelucos and Tupiniquin forward, and they swarmed toward the main square, taking up their war cries against the Carijó.

  When Amador and Bernardo da Silva entered the reduction, the last of Tatabrana’s defenders had been chased to Padre Mola’s own quarters near the church, where they had sought a final refuge. One was stabbed to death in the doorway as he tried to prevent the Paulistas from entering; the attackers rushed inside, seized the men who’d fought with Tatabrana, and dragged them out, along with the women and children who were hiding there. The raiders danced away gleefully with the priest’s clothes. Others had great sport running down and wringing the necks of the padre’s seven chickens.

  The most rewarding task, of course, was the rounding up of the Carijó.

  Some five hundred Paulistas were inside the reduction. Half of them were occupied with the Carijó in the square — those who had already been assembled when the Paulistas arrived, and others who had been turned out of the church. The rest of the raiding force, working in smaller groups, were systematically flushing out the occupants of the houses and driving them down the lanes toward the main thoroughfare.

  Soon after entering, Bernardo da Silva and his youthful aides found themselves with a group of Paulistas clearing out the houses next to the main pathway.

  “Amador, tell me everything you see,” the tenente ordered, above the hysterical cries of the Carijó.

  “Father, the savages are so helpless; our men pull them from their houses without the slightest difficulty. They’re assembled at the square.”

  “Strong, well-bodied men?”

  “The finest, Father.”

  “How many?”

  “In their great plaza? Hundreds.”

  “Take me there.”

  It was difficult to move along the congested main thoroughfare. Carijó were being pushed toward the square. Everywhere Paulistas moved among them, cursing and mocking them for their quick submission.

  Bernardo da Silva heard and felt the great crowd milling around them. “What a triumph, Amador!”

  At some point, Amador and his father had become separated from Valentim and Abeguar; he didn’t stop for them but hurried instead to guide his father to the main square.

  “Faster, Amador!” Bernardo da Silva implored. “Our captain-major must see that his old tenente has come to savor the joy of this day.”

  Amador’s excitement surpassed that of his father’s. He could see the full extent of the prize the Paulista raiders had won this day: whole families with mothers and fathers clutching their young; Carijó of his age, miserable and apprehensive; old men chattering with astonishment; men of fighting age, who’d undoubtedly been at the battle in the manioc field, now completely broken by the superior Paulista force.

  One hundred yards from the square, the crowd of raiders and their captives was impenetrable. Bernardo bellowed for a path to be opened, but his commands were ignored, and they were forced to swing down a lane to the left and make a circuitous approach to the square.

  At last they reached the blocks of houses nearest the church and school. Bernardo da Silva stumbled and fell

  Amador dropped to his father’s side. “Father, what is it? What’s wrong?” He started to help his father to his feet, but Bernardo da Silva gestured him away feebly.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.” He placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Father,” he said softly, “I’ll find the priest. Rest while I go for him.”

  Ten minutes later he found the Jesuit wandering toward the square along the main pathway. Padre Mola’s vestments were in disarray, his chasuble pulled askew. He went agitatedly from one group of his Guarani to another, trying to calm them.

  “My father lies mortally ill!” Amador cried. “You must come to him!”

  Mola frowned at Amador, as if trying to remember where he’d seen him before.

  “Hurry — please,” Amador be
gged.

  When they reached Bernardo da Silva, Raposo Tavares was with him, called to his side by one of the mamelucos.

  “Dear old comrade,” Amador heard the captain-major say, “you should’ve taken the rest you deserved instead of coming on this campaign.” He stepped aside to let Padre Mola approach Bernardo da Silva.

  “Mameluco,” Padre Mola said to the old man on the ground, “I am the priest of those you came to steal from God. Make your peace with the Lord, mameluco, for it seems you have little time.”

  Bernardo da Silva’s face twisted into an expression of such loathing that Padre Mola drew back.

  “There is little time,” the priest said.

  A deep, animal-like cry came from Bernardo da Silva and he made a desperate effort to raise himself.

  “No, Father — no!” Amador shouted, to no avail.

  Forcing his shoulders off the ground, his eyes bulging, his entire head trembling with exertion and rage, the old man grabbed viciously at the outer vestments of the priest. Again came the terrible scream, but abruptly it was cut short. Bernardo da Silva fell back, his head striking the ground. He was dead.

  Amador stepped closer to his father. “His confession?” he said, his voice quavering with alarm.

  Padre Mola, kneeling, had started to pray over the mameluco. He stopped, and turned to look up at this son of a slave raider. “God would not allow it,” the priest said.

  Five days later, Amador stood at the front of a large group of men gathered in a semicircle in the Paulista stockade. Opposite them, Raposo Tavares and two officers were conducting a ceremony that Amador was witnessing for the first time:

  Near the captain-major was Tenente Bernardo da Silva’s leather chest, open and emptied of its contents. One of the men with Raposo Tavares was sorting these and arranging them neatly on the ground

  “Observe with care, Amador Flôres, so that you may report to the widow da Silva that all was properly done,” Raposo Tavares said.

  The captain-major and his assistants then proceeded to auction off Bernardo da Silva’s belongings, the purchasers affixing their signature or mark to a brief bill of sale, agreeing to pay the widow da Silva when they returned to São Paulo. When a Paulista of some means died on campaign, it was a bandeira custom to protect the interests of his widow and heirs by conducting such auctions; months might pass before the company returned to São Paulo, and the dead man’s belongings could otherwise be lost or stolen.

  Reserved for Amador were his father’s silver spoon, musket, and war jacket. Everything else was sold — everything, that is, but the most valuable possessions: sixty-four Tupi slaves, part of his private militia, who’d survived the battle in the manioc fields. Raposo Tavares himself promised the safe return of the slaves to the lands of the widow Rosa Flôres. And he also undertook to protect the da Silva family’s share of the Carijó taken on this raid.

  It had been five days since they’d buried the tenente on a hillside overlooking San Antonio, with Padre Mola ordered to perform the last rites. Padre Mola had abandoned the reduction and left for Asunción with a few aged natives released to him. The remaining Carijó — almost four thousand — had been driven by the bandeira to an area just beyond this Paulista stockade.

  When the company marched off, it left the stockade ablaze as a precaution against its possible occupation by wild Carijó, who would be a threat to future bandeiras. Reports from the three other companies of the army that had left São Paulo the previous August told of successes at San Miguel and Jesús Maria, where a total of 2,800 natives had been captured. At Concepción, the Paulistas had met resistance; the reduction priest and his natives had prevented the invaders from entering the stockade, and had survived on dogs, cats, rats, and mice until a relief force arrived from distant reductions and drove off the São Paulo raiders.

  The companies rendezvoused three days after Raposo Tavares’s column had started its march. Accompanying the slaves from the other reductions were two Jesuit fathers who had asked permission to join their natives on their march to São Paulo. Raposo Tavares was reluctant to grant this request. “They’ll cry to our governor when we reach civilization. They’ll have weeks to rehearse their lies against our men.” But the other commanders were not concerned about this possibility, and suggested that it was a good thing to have the Jesuits along: “They’ll keep these pagans cheerful for their presentation to the slave buyers.”

  On the forty-day march from the stockade to São Paulo, the column crossed mountains and valleys, and pushed through swamps and patches of noxious lowland. Hundreds sickened: weak from hunger, dozens succumbed from fevers and bloody dysenteries and were left dead in the forest. In those forty days, one out of every seven of the youngest children died.

  On April 7, 1629, the bandeira reached the heights of Piratininga and São Paulo.

  Amador marched at the side of Captain-Major Raposo Tavares. Around his head he wore a red kerchief, which an officer had given him. And in his hands he held Tenente Bernardo’s musket.

  The company’s trumpets sounded as the advance group headed for the square in front of the câmara, where the few elderly councilmen who had not accompanied the bandeira stood waiting.

  Amador’s happiness at this victorious homecoming increased when he saw

  Ishmael Pinheiro move out of the crowd coming to welcome the Paulistas.

  “Is it truly you?” asked the chubby-faced Ishmael excitedly.

  “Oh, yes, my friend, and with such glorious company,” Amador replied. “I’ll never return to the cattle and pigs.”

  Ishmael laughed. “With so many Carijó to herd, you won’t need to go back to your poor father’s fields.”

  “No. And he wouldn’t want me to. ‘You’re a son of the sertão, Amador Flôres,’ he said to me. ‘There’s no other home for you.’”

  For ten years — from the raid in 1628 until 1638 — Amador da Silva marched with bandeiras that destroyed the remaining eight reductions in the province of Guiará and forced the fathers and the remnant of their great congregations to flee south in the direction of Buenos Aires. The Paulista depredations in Guiará went beyond the ruin of the reductions: Two towns founded by Spanish colonists in the area were attacked and looted.

  The Jesuits established new missions between the Rio Uruguay and the Atlantic Ocean, six hundred miles from São Paulo. They also built six reductions in Itatin province, an area above Asunción and west of Guiará.

  The Paulistas had destroyed the Itatin missions from 1633 to 1635, driving thousands of natives to São Paulo. Then they had returned their attention to the south, capturing 25,000 slaves in their first major campaign. But the long-suffering Jesuits were beginning to fight back. In 1637, Amador was with a bandeira that had been harassed by the Jesuits and their musketeers for ten days on its march back to São Paulo.

  During this ten-year period, when not with the bandeiras, Amador was engaged in a lucrative venture with his friend Ishmael Pinheiro; Ishmael, trader and armador, had assumed the enterprises of his father, who died in 1634,

  Amador and Ishmael participated in a flourishing contraband trade between Brazil and the Spanish colonies. Though united under one crown, Madrid and Lisbon had continued to administer their territories separately, the Spaniards maintaining a monopoly on trade with their vast viceroyalty of Peru which extended from the Pacific coast, across the Andes, to the Atlantic. Goods smuggled from São Paulo to the eastern provinces of Paraguay and Rio de La Plata cost as little as one-third of the price of the legal imports, a contraband traffic so extensive that the holds of half of the two hundred ships sailing annually to Brazil were filled with this forbidden merchandise. And it was not only the breach of their trading monopoly that angered the Spaniards; the smugglers were paid in silver from the mines of Potosi, treasure-house in the heart of Peru.

  While Amador and Ishmael and their fellow Paulistas were harassing the Spaniard, purloining his silver and smashing his missions and boasting of the “liberation of Guiar�
�,” elsewhere in Brazil, colonists were experiencing a decade of disaster.

  That same year Amador had been with the bandeira of Raposo Tavares at San Antonio, a Dutch armada had reached Pernambuco, landing troops on a beach just north of Olinda — then a prosperous city with eight thousand settlers — and seizing the capital by the next evening. Another settlement had sprung up - Recife, named for a long, rocky reef that formed a natural harbor — and a fortnight after the conquest of Olinda, the Portuguese abandoned this small port town.

  After losing Olinda and Recife, the captain-major of Pernambuco, Mathias de Albuquerque, a descendant of the first donatário, Duarte Coelho Pereira, launched a guerrilla war, keeping the Dutch penned into an area within a few miles of the two towns and harrying them until reinforcements for the Pernambucans arrived eighteen months later.

  But at the end of 1634, to the north of Pernambuco, the Dutch commanders dispersed a combined force of Portuguese soldiers and Neapolitan mercenaries sent by Madrid and led by Giovanni Vicenzo San Felice, count of Bagnuoli. In March 1635 Bagnuoli and his men were in the south of the captaincy when again they were defeated, and fled in the direction of the Bahia. Three months later Mathias de Albuquerque, who’d been carrying on this fight for six years, also abandoned the captaincy.

  A relief force had returned to the south of the captaincy, and enjoyed no little success until its commander, Rojas y Borgia, a former governor of Panama, and his second-in-command were killed. Their replacement was none other than Bagnuoli, who attempted to renew the guerrilla war.

  Then, on January 23, 1637, there arrived in Recife the West India Company’s appointee for the governorship of the conquests: thirty-three-year-old Johan Maurits, count of Nassau-Siegen. Maurits moved swiftly to end resistance to the Dutch, opening battle against Bagnuoli, and driving him south, once again across the broad Rio São Francisco, which Maurits considered a natural boundary for the territories won by the Dutch.

  In April 1638 Johan Maurits had appeared at the Bahia itself with 3,600 troops in thirty ships. For more than a month the Dutch tried to breach the count of Bagnuoli’s formidable defense works, and failed. After losing 237 men, they gave up the siege and sailed north.