Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  “And they’re also more distant and defensible,” Ishmael said. “As armador, I see less and less chance for profit with Carijó. Better that I give my money to those who look for gold.”

  “These vagabonds seeking El Dorado are hopeless dreamers. They’ll ruin you.”

  They were walking back in the direction of the house. On the verandah was a high-backed wooden bench, and they could see a lone figure seated upon it, her head turned toward them.

  “She haunts me — a shadow forever hovering in the background. She’s won the affection of my mother, so that she may visit whenever Vasco permits it.”

  “In a few days you’ll be marching down the Serra do Mar with Raposo Tavares; you’ll be saved.”

  “Will I?” he asked, glancing at the motionless figure on the bench.

  X

  January - September 1640

  On January 17, 1640, the Hopewell, a three-hundred-ton English merchantman, one of several foreign vessels chartered by Lisbon agents for the expedition against the Dutch at Pernambuco and now part of the fleet that had left the Bahia two months earlier, was drifting with a light wind, about fifty leagues north of Recife.

  A three-masted flute, the Hopewell was a handy little trader that could be crewed by a dozen men and was lightly armed: eight pieces on the main deck, two swivel guns at the quarterdeck railings. In recent years the Hopewell had been transporting settlers and supplies to the new North American colonies.

  Will Tuttle captained the Hopewell’s mixed crew of English, Danes, and Portuguese. From an old Yorkshire family of sheep farmers, Tuttle was a big, ruddy-faced man in his late forties, with a heavy build and a slow, deliberative manner. His only previous action had been a brief exchange of cannon fire with a barque belonging to Chesapeake Bay fur traders, who had established themselves on an island in the bay before the Maryland Territory had been granted to Lord Baltimore’s family.

  It would have given Will Tuttle no small satisfaction to witness the defeat of the Dutch, those fervent adherents of the heresy, but as the Hopewell drifted north of Recife, Tuttle had begun to accept that such an outcome was remote. On each of the five days since January 12, the armada had engaged the Dutch fleet in a series of uninspired fights, and the Hopewell had yet to fire more than a practice round.

  Since daybreak, Captain Tuttle had been on the poop deck in an attempt to escape the stench from the lower decks: The ship was crammed with three hundred soldiers, twice the number she was meant to hold.

  It was now past noon. Earlier, two Dutch warships had engaged the fifty-four-gun galleon São José, one of the stoutest ships of the armada. The Hopewell and other transports had orders to maintain position seaward, away from the first line of fighting ships. When the distant boom of the battery guns had fallen silent, and the Hollanders had turned away, a cloud of smoke hung above the São José, still afloat but listing and crippled by the bombardment.

  Such defeats had not been anticipated when the armada sailed from the Bahia in November with five thousand men in thirty great galleons and fifty-six smaller vessels, from armed merchantmen like the Hopewell to swift yachts. Yet even Will Tuttle had had misgivings, not about the armada’s fighting potential, which was formidable, but about its leader, the Conde da Torre, Dom Fernão de Mascarenhas. On the voyage out from Lisbon fourteen months ago the count had led the men and ships into the Cape Verde Islands, where more than half of the five thousand recruits were left behind, dead or dying from disease. Upon reaching Brazil, the count had had to spend a year at the Bahia refitting the armada.

  During his months at the Bahia, Captain Tuttle kept a journal, in which he noted his impressions of the bay and the city of Salvador, which he found so much more sophisticated than the English colonies, where many lived in bark wigwams or cellars dug out of the earth:

  *

  From our Anchorage, there is first to be sene a longe and handsome Street, with cellars and the warehouses of merchants, craftsmen and artisans. The City of Salvador is walled, haveing fifteen hundred houses of stone and mortar, exceeding good with tiled roof and limed walls, and situate along hilly, cobbled streets, the same as the quarters of Lisbone. The palace of the Governor, cathedral, churches of Franciscans, Benedictines, and Fathers of the Company of Jesus are well built, with marbled floors, gilded ornaments. There is a great Infirmarie for sicke men . . .

  The Senhores de Ingenios have fiftie great Mills for the SugarCanes. In theire houses, they have much silver plate and gold, and treasures of the Orient and Occident; theire women favor onelie silks and the gold thread of Lyons, and have an extravagance of jewels about their person. The women are rarely sene, the Senhors confineing them to their houses in the manner of indolent Moorish princesses. Beyonde this delight in Riches and Apparells, aspects of the lives of the Portugalls are as mean as those sene with our people at Maryland.

  They grow nothing but Canes, Cottons and Tobaccos, and so long as these Fields prosper, they are as content with the same table as their slaves — a sloppe of the ordinary foode of this Countrey, that is called Mandioca.

  *

  Will Tuttle had put the journal aside when the Hopewell was ordered to Rio de Janeiro with four other ships to fetch recruits and supplies from the southern captaincies. From there he’d sailed on to Santos to take aboard the contingent raised by Captain-Major Raposo Tavares at São Paulo.

  Returning to the Bahia, the Hopewell had rejoined the fleet, and the armada of eighty-six vessels had finally got under way the previous November. But contrary weather had driven the ships past Recife; retracing their course, they were met on January 12, 1640, by a Dutch squadron with less than half the number of their sail. On the five days since then, those desultory fights between their ships had seen a large and useless expenditure of powder and shot: The Dutch had sunk one galleon and ten small vessels; the armada had destroyed one enemy warship and disabled another.

  Having witnessed the latest indecisive fight, Captain Tuttle was despondent as he stood on the Hopewell’s poop deck: He realized that unless they could break the Dutch sea defense, they would be unable to land their troops near Recife. Puffing absently on his pipe and gazing out over the water, he observed a skiff making its way from the galleons to the Hopewell. Tuttle moved down to the ’tween-deck bulwark to hear what the messengers from the flagship had to say.

  Since he spoke little Portuguese, standing next to him, ready to interpret, was a marinheiro who had once served with the English East India Company.

  After a quick exchange with an officer in the skiff, the marinheiro turned to Tuttle. “The battle is over,” he said. “Finish. The count is to return to the Bahia.”

  “Pedro, ask him what battle he —” Tuttle broke off, noticing the sad, bewildered faces of those below, and changed his mind: “No — ask only what our orders are, Pedro.”

  These came swiftly: The galleons were off the shoals of a dangerous cape — Cabo de São Roque, five degrees south of the Equator — and had no alternative but to stand out to sea and head for the West Indies or Spain, since there was no chance of their weathering this cape or returning to the Bahia through waters securely held by the Dutch; the Hopewell, a chartered vessel, was free to make her way home or wherever she pleased.

  “Amazing!” Will Tuttle exclaimed. He pointed toward his crowded decks. “And what am I to do with this cargo of highlanders?” He knew little about the Paulistas other than that they were mostly wild half-breeds who lived on the heights above the Serra do Mar. “Carry them across the Atlantic?”

  This provoked a lively discussion between the marinheiro Pedro and the officers.

  “The troops will be landed. Their commanders have volunteered to march back to Salvador through the sertão,” Pedro said. He saw the captain’s incredulous expression. “These mamelucos don’t know anyplace but Brazil; if they’re taken away in our ship, they’ll never get home.”

  “But, Pedro, if they’re set ashore, what chance will they have?” Tuttle asked. “Four hundred le
agues lie between these lands and Salvador, with savages and Dutch all along the way.”

  “Oh, Capitão, don’t worry about such men,” Pedro said. “If anyone can survive this march, it will be these mongrels of the sertão.”

  “May the Almighty, in His mercy, help them,” Tuttle murmured.

  Ishmael Pinheiro had warned him that this would be a foolish venture. To have come so far, imprisoned in the stinking bowels of a ship, and to have failed so miserably! How he had hated the sea, the waves rolling on and on with dreary monotony, the horizon rising and falling with such nauseous regularity, the world shrunk to a rough square of deck, groaning and creaking, and contested by other men and the vermin that alone thrived in such dark confines.

  It was not only the conditions in the Hopewell that had embittered Amador Flôres da Silva. Six weeks had passed since they were put ashore by the armada. The Conde da Torre had fled in a swift yacht back to the Bahia, and with him, the count of Bagnuoli, of whom much had been heard at São Paulo before this misadventure; once again the Italian, master of the retreat, had run from the Dutch.

  Amador recalled the grand design of this campaign: a swift landing near Recife, a junction with forces marching north from Salvador, a quick ravaging of the countryside, and then the siege of the Dutch. Instead, thirteen hundred seasick and dispirited men had been dumped ashore at the mouth of a river!

  Raposo Tavares had claimed they would perform a glorious service for Portugal, but for six weeks now they had marched without thought of glory or honor. The captain-major himself was not with the column, having remained in one of the ships that returned to the Bahia. Day after day, a hungry, tired rabble with little hope of relief, they passed through lands garrisoned by the Hollanders and their native allies, merciless clans of “Tapuya,” the Tupi word for savages whose language differed from Tupi, generally taken to mean “The Enemy.” There had been short, bloody encounters with Dutch and Tapuya, no quarter given by either side.

  They marched over charred fields set afire by the invaders; stood in defiled churches, the holy images cast down and shattered. Portuguese settlers who had remained in these captaincies reported how Tapuya, incited by the Dutch, had overrun engenhos, massacring entire settlements. And they told of black slaves encouraged to desert to the Dutch, who then armed them for mischief and murder against their former masters.

  “We’re ruined. Ruined!” these planters cried when they recalled how Olinda, loveliest town of Pernambuco, had been destroyed, the very stones of its temples carried off to build the houses of the heretics in their new town of Mauritsstad, opposite Recife.

  Such reports encouraged the column’s commanders to detach small patrols from the main body and send them raiding deep within the enemy-held lands. At the beginning of the seventh week of the march, Amador was with a patrol in the district behind Recife. The Dutch had spared most of the engenhos here, for these valleys held the richest cane fields of Pernambuco.

  The twenty raiders with the patrol, led by a regular officer from the Spanish garrison at the Bahia, were mostly Paulistas, the mamelucos having proved themselves the best troops for this bush warfare.

  On the third day after leaving the column, the patrol was ten leagues from the coast, moving along the bank of a river, when it came to an open, sandy beach. The sergeant called a halt; it was afternoon, and the patrol, which had been on a forced march, would rest the night. Tomorrow it would be in an area thickly infested with the Dutch.

  While the others settled around the beach, Amador was sent to a ridge behind the river from which he could spy out the lands through which they were passing.

  A full hour passed before he stood at the top of the ridge, shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed over the valley. To the north, near the gray-blue smudge of a small lake, he saw an engenho with as many buildings as existed in a good-sized village, and vast cane fields.

  A house that stood on a gentle rise near the lake dominated the settlement. Off to the right of the house was a chapel, and several smaller buildings close by.

  The low hill with the big house and chapel sloped gently toward a river that flowed from the hills opposite the ridge where Amador stood. Near that river were the mill, and warehouse.

  Amador wondered whether the family who owned this valley lived here or had been taken by the Dutch — surely one of the great engenhos of Pernambuco. He’d report it to the sergeant: If a Dutchman held it, as he suspected, then they’d burn it to the ground.

  He was easing his way down the slope when he was suddenly startled by the report of a musket shot. He stopped. The buildings at the other end of the valley were barely discernible, as peaceful-looking in the distance as when he’d first beheld them.

  Then the sound of muskets increased — furious, repeated volleys rising from the trees directly below.

  Suddenly, the musket firing ceased. Within minutes he detected smoke, and he perceived a dull glow in the direction of the beach.

  A few hundred paces from the river, the flames were clearly visible. Only as he broke out of the trees did he think to draw his machete; but his hand froze on the weapon’s tapir-bone hilt and he made a low, agonized noise at the scene before him.

  The bodies of the nineteen men of the patrol were strewn across the beach. Amador was transfixed by this horror, unable to flee. He did not perceive that on the dark river beyond, there drifted a canoe with Dutch soldiers; the last to leave the sands, they had been responsible for severing the heads of the Spanish sergeant and the mamelucos.

  Two musket shots roared out of the dark, followed by another two. Amador’s head jerked up, an amazed expression on his face, as a ball plowed along his side. Two more shots struck him and he toppled to the right, falling beside the headless corpse of his sergeant.

  How long had he been confined to bed in this room, Amador wondered? A month? Two months? A square, high chamber with a chest against the opposite wall and one chair. By now he was familiar with every detail of the room: the patterns above, with the smooth-hewn beams and frames, and the exposed underside of the roof tiles; the uneven surfaces of the white walls, one bearing a black crucifix; the high window, with lines of light between the shutters coming and going.

  He had no recollection of being brought here. His memory of events before being shot by the Dutch had also been confused with nightmares in which he saw the beheaded sergeant. He would lie with his eyes upon the crucifix, puzzling over the circumstances that had spared him.

  He had been grievously wounded: His head was bandaged; there was a hole in his side, and pain when he moved his left leg.

  After a time with only a vague awareness of his surroundings, there had been increasing periods in which he was lucid, still too weak to converse but recognizing people who tended him. He would listen to footfalls on the wooden floor in the house, and to sounds rising to the shuttered window — a church bell, the creak and rattle of carts, horses, dogs, voices. Voices, most mercifully, speaking Portuguese.

  This morning, after a slave woman brought his food, he’d dropped off to sleep, but now he was awake again. He’d heard the steps of someone approaching the room and sat up. The door opened to admit the owner of the house.

  “Ah, Amador Flôres, they tell me that you may soon be well enough to rise.”

  “Only through the mercy of God, Senhor Fernão, and the kindness of your house,” he said slowly.

  Amador was in the grand house on the plantation he had seen from the ridge overlooking the valley — Engenho Santo Tomás, the property of Fernão Theodosio Cavalcanti, of an old and illustrious Pernambucan family. Nicolau Cavalcanti, the founder of this estate, had come to the captaincy with the first donatário, Duarte Coelho Pereira, and had passed these lands to his son, Tomás Cavalcanti. Fernão was the grandson of Tomás.

  The shutters on the window were kept closed against “unhealthful airs.” The light was poor, but Fernão Cavalcanti’s features were clear enough to Amador. He was fifty but looked younger. He had a long, nobl
e, unlined face, with pensive brow and melancholy green eyes, clipped beard and mustache, and dark brown hair. He was elegantly dressed in the Dutch Cavalier style. His hair was long, falling to his shoulders. He wore a large, square-cut linen collar edged with Flanders lace, a high-waisted doublet silver-threaded and trimmed with lace, loose breeches tied at the knee with ribbon sashes, white stockings, and fawn leather boots.

  From the black slave, Celestina, who brought his food, Amador had learned that Cavalcanti was wedded to Dona Domitila Guedes, daughter of another wealthy planter. Dona Domitila, a slow, plump woman, had visited Amador twice to assure him that Padre Gregório Bonifácio, who lived at the engenho, was praying for him. The priest had also been to see him — a fat, elderly man who’d asked him questions about São Paulo and then dozed off in the chair while Amador responded.

  Celestina had told him that there were six Cavalcanti children: two sons, Felipe and Alvaro, both in their twenties, and four daughters, two married and two — Joana and Beatriz — still in the house. Beatriz, a twelve-year-old, had spied on him several times, flying from the room as soon as he acknowledged her. Joana he had not seen, but the slave had hinted at a wild, free spirit.

  “Donzela Joana — that one has a mind of her own,” Celestina had said. “Will there ever be a man to tame Joana!”

  Now, as on the two previous occasions when Fernão Cavalcanti had been to see him, Amador sensed an aloofness toward him, but he expected this from the master of such a grand estate. Amador had given Celestina and the priest some details of his own background, and it was clear that they had conveyed this to the senhor.

  “The men you marched with are now beyond Pernambuco, into the captaincy of the Bahia.”

  “God saved that force, senhor, for the time it must return to drive the Dutch from these lands.”

  “It may be so.”

  “It must be so, senhor. God will never forgive the Portuguese if we allow these pirates and fishermen to spoil Brazil.”