Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  The parting was as simple as the first meeting between Segge and Kaimari. Kaimari stood surveying them both.

  “It was good,” he said. That was all. He turned away, walked to his escort, and immediately set off for his village.

  Amador and Segge were left with thirty Paresí and the interpreter, Pitua. They traveled for three weeks through a mixed region of swamp, savanna, and forest to reach the Mojo, the tribe from whom the Paresí obtained the green stones; for the trade, the Paresí carried fine feathers and an assortment of herbs and roots from their medicine men.

  Amador and Segge were left behind with ten Paresí, while the rest of the party went to the Mojos. The traders accomplished their mission in ten days, the pagé carrying back a bag of the prized stones. Amador and Segge examined these, and identified the same quartz as seen with Kaimari’s insignia of office. “Worthless,” Amador said to Segge. “No more valuable than bits of broken glass.”

  The ten warriors who stayed with them had built two canoes, using fire and stone-ax to hew and shape the thirty-foot craft from tree trunks. These were launched the day after the traders’ return. The Paresí agreed to accompany them to Love-Me-River, but there they would leave them.

  On the afternoon of August 23, 1643, two days after beginning their voyage, they heard the roar of a fall. The poor boating skills of the Paresí made Amador and Segge apprehensive, but Pitua, who’d come this way before, laughed.

  “Guajara Mirim,” he said. “‘Little Falls.’”

  The canoes were moving with a strong current, some twenty yards from the left bank. The river was almost a mile wide, its flow north broken in several places by rocky, wooded isles.

  Amador and Segge were in the second canoe. They saw the first craft turn away from the bank and head for a large island just above Guajará Mirim. The roar of the falls was growing ever louder. The paddlers in the second canoe began to follow the other craft. Pitua said something about spending the night on the island.

  Neither of the men paid attention to him. Both leapt up simultaneously and began shouting at the top of their lungs.

  On the west bank of the river stood the first white men Amador and Segge had encountered in two and a half years.

  Amador ordered the Paresí to pull over to the left bank, but they continued to head toward the island. “There are many flesh eaters in that forest. The Paresí refuse to land there,” Pitua said. Segge, too, argued with them, but the paddlers were adamant. Amador and Segge deposited them on the island and headed back toward the west bank with Pitua, who made them promise they’d return him to the island before nightfall.

  Even before the canoe ground to a stop on the gravelly shore, Amador jumped from the craft, splashing toward the men. There were eight of them, including a Jesuit. “Thank God, senhores, for a miraculous meeting!”

  The leader, a small, wiry man, stood flanked by two sturdy musketeers. His thin, pale features reflected no pleasure whatsoever. In Spanish, he asked, “Where do you come from?”

  Amador’s ebullience began to diminish. “Senhor?”

  The Jesuit came forward. “I am Juan Baptista Osorio. I speak Portuguese. Where do you come from?”

  Amador laughed. Segge had come to stand next to him. “‘Where do you come from,’ he asks. For two and a half years, Padre, we’ve walked the sertão — from Dutch Pernambuco across the great sertão to this river.”

  The priest frowned as he translated this for the Spanish commander and the six men gathered near him. The commander’s grave demeanor did not change. He spoke rapidly to Juan Baptista, who addressed Amador:

  “You say that you have been away two and a half years?”

  “Longer,” Amador said. “We departed in the year of our Lord 1640 — the month of October. First we went to the Tapuya of Pernambuco.” He indicated Segge. “My companion is a Hollander — Segge Proot. The Hollanders sent him to paint the Tapuya.”

  While the Jesuit relayed this to the commander, Segge asked Amador: “We’re in Peru?”

  “Who knows where we are.”

  “This is Don Hernando Ramirez de Ribera,” the priest said. “He commands our expedition.”

  “Are we in Peru?” Amador asked.

  The priest pondered this momentarily. He did not give a direct answer: “We have come from Pueblo Nuevo de Nuestro Señora de la Paz to this river the natives call Mamoré.” They had been traveling for three months searching for gold. This Juan Baptista did not reveal to the two men. He looked intently at Segge. “A Dutch heretic?”

  “I’ve told you already — a Hollander and a painter.”

  “And you — mameluco — who are you?” the priest asked.

  “Amador Flôres da Silva, Padre — of São Paulo de Piratininga.”

  “Paulista,” Juan Baptista said.

  Amador nodded. He looked from the priest to the others and began to feel uneasy.

  “What did he say?” Segge asked.

  “This suspiciousness . . . I can understand how he might feel about a heretic enemy. But me? He knows I’m a subject of the same king — His Majesty Philip the Fourth.”

  Juan Baptista turned toward them. “I speak the lingua geral. I heard your words,” he said. “You are wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?”

  “His Majesty Philip is no longer king of Portugal — not since December 1640,” Juan Baptista announced. “The Portuguese have a new king. The pretender João of Bragança is now Dom João the Fourth of Portugal. There is war between our countries.”

  “War?”

  “The armies of King Philip were fighting in Flanders, Italy, and Catalonia . . . and the Portuguese rebelled,” Juan Baptista continued. “Loyal garrisons of Spain have resisted.”

  “In the captaincies of Brazil?” Amador asked.

  “At the Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, João the Fourth was acclaimed without opposition.”

  “At São Paulo?”

  The priest smiled thinly. “The Paulistas wanted their own king.”

  “Dom João the Fourth.”

  Juan Baptista shook his head. “The Paulistas sought to crown one of their own.”

  “Impossible. They’re the most loyal subjects of Lisbon,” Amador replied hotly.

  “Still, they called upon one — Amador Bueno — to serve as their liege.”

  “Bueno?” Amador knew this man: The son of a colonist from Seville, he was a slave raider. Amador roared with laughter. “Bueno a king? Never, Padre, would the Paulistas support such stupidity.”

  “It was so. Bueno himself rejected the rabble’s scepter. He refused to be a party to one more dishonor and defeat.”

  Amador looked darkly at the priest. “What defeat?”

  Juan Baptista raised a hand, indicating that Amador should wait for his answer, and spoke with Don Hernando.

  “If Spain and Portugal are at war,” Segge remarked, “we — Hollanders and Portuguese — must be allies. What a change of fortune!”

  “Padre?” Amador said, impatient to have the Jesuit continue.

  But first the priest put a question of Don Hernando’s: “What is your purpose in these lands . . . of Spain?”

  “The purpose? The purpose?” He nodded. “We sought Paraupava,” he said, using the Tupi-Guarani word for the fabled lake of gold.

  The Jesuit reported this to Don Hernando, and there was laughter from the Spaniards.

  “And have you found it?”

  Amador plucked at his deerskin breeches. “Had we discovered Paraupava — El Dorado — would we be standing before you as beggars? No, Padre, we found nothing but our Lord’s mercy, for we were delivered from the Tupinambá. Only by heaven’s power did we escape from the cannibals.”

  Segge spoke to the Jesuit for the first time, in the lingua geral. “Padre, what do you know of Pernambuco?”

  “It is the same,” the priest replied immediately. “In control of the Dutch. His people” — he glanced at Amador — “not content with the ruin of the holy alliance with Castile, have sig
ned a ten-year truce with the Hollanders. To the eternal shame of Portugal.”

  “I fought the Dutch with the conde da Torre’s armada,” Amador said irritably. “There were other Paulistas, too. We didn’t campaign for everlasting shame!”

  “ It is not what we know,” said Juan Baptista. “of those we fought in the war of Guiará.” His tone was unemotional. “The Paulistas have been defeated, da Silva. The fathers of Paraguay and their Guarani, strengthened with musket and cannon, defeated the bandeiras at Mbororé two years ago.”

  Amador knew the Rio Mbororé; it flowed into the Rio Uruguay.

  “The victory came, da Silva, after your Paulistas had expelled the fathers of the Company from São Paulo.” He noticed Amador’s surprise at his words. “Our holy Father Urban has proclaimed the liberty of the natives and has prohibited their enslavement upon pain of excommunication. When the brief was read at São Paulo, your Paulistas drove the fathers from the captaincy.”

  “Please, Padre, this isn’t São Paulo de Piratininga,” Amador said. “We felt such joy at the sight of fellow Christians.”

  “Indeed, your appearance is that of men who have had much to endure.”

  Juan Baptista turned to Don Hernando, and after they had spoken, the mood of the Spaniards seemed to mellow slightly. Amador and Segge were offered food and wine and were plied with questions about their journey; they answered forthrightly, and Don Hernando showed genuine sympathy at their captivity with the Tupinambá. “The heathen of lands we crossed are no better,” he said. “Juan Baptista, who seeks new subjects for his Company’s reductions, finds them cowed and docile. But as God sees us, every day of our journey we pray for preservation.”

  Perhaps if the leader of the Spaniards had not been Don Hernando, an intimate of the viceroy at Lima, the encounter might have gone differently. But, what Amador and Segge couldn’t have guessed, Don Hernando was perturbed by the presence of the mameluco and the Hollander so close to Spanish settlements. They could be spies, advance scouts of a large force, he’d said in an early aside to Juan Baptista. Don Hernando considered the Dutch quite capable of such an outrageous expedition: He knew that early in 1643 a flotilla from Pernambuco had rounded the stormy tip of the continent to occupy southern Chile, from which they had yet to be dislodged.

  So they sat together in the jungle — Spaniard, Portuguese, Hollander with the roar of Guajará Mirim close by, old animosities preventing them from enjoying the drama of the situation: Here they were, the first colonists, venturing out from east and west, to meet in the heart of the South American continent.

  There was a point in the conversation when Amador came close to recognition of the importance of this fact. “You have marched down the cordillera,” he said. “We came from Pernambuco. We met at this river. There is no island of Brazil.”

  “That is correct — nothing but these dominions of our majesty, Don Philip,” Don Hernando responded.

  When it began to grow dark, the group heard a noise at the river’s edge. Pitua was impatiently slapping the water with a paddle.

  Amador stood up. “We must return him to the Paresí,” he said, indicating the anxious Tupi.

  While they had been drinking the Spaniards’ wine, Amador explained that they planned to go up Love-Me-River to the Rio das Amazonas. However, since they now knew that La Paz could be reached, they would consider a march to that settlement. Their concern was no longer to find El Dorado but simply to return to their people, and this they could do via Peru.

  “So, gentlemen . . . we’ll go back to our savages,” Amador added. “They sit with all our possessions. In the morning, we’ll return.”

  Don Hernando and Juan Baptista conferred briefly before the priest spoke: “Considering that Portuguese are not welcome in Spain’s territories, and heretical Hollanders even less so, it is best that you do not return to our camp but go your own way, Paulista, to lands where you belong. Don Hernando graciously declines to interfere with you or the heretic.”

  “We thank Don Hernando,” Amador said, formally. “We’re leaving,” he said to Segge.

  Within minutes Amador and Segge were off, pulling strongly across to the island. Well before they were out of musket range, Amador yelled at the top of his lungs — a triumphant “Long Live Dom João the Fourth! Long live our king and lord!” — at the Spaniards on the riverbank.

  They came the hour before dawn: twenty-four warriors of a Tupi clan in this forest, led by one Sabá, renowned for his ferocity. A mist rising from the foaming waters of Guajará Mirim covered the island where Amador and Segge and the Paresí slept, and it drifted across the water to the camp of the Spaniards. Sabá led his war party through the damp gray curtain. Not one of the eight Spaniards stirred as the Tupi notched arrows to their bows; not one man was able to reach for his weapon before he lay dying in the dirt.

  After the slaughter, Sabá and his men grew restive. They lived in isolation beyond Guajará Mirim and had never heard of Long Hairs. What manner of creatures had they slain?

  The bravest stepped up to the victims and hastily snatched for trophies: Don Hernando’s one boot, a tin plate. Another warrior tried to pull loose a sword belt, but the Spaniard’s eyes fell open, his head jerked violently, and the Tupi fled.

  Amador sat next to a dead Spaniard, trying on his boots. Segge, grim-faced, moved silently through the camp.

  Amador and Segge ordered the Paresí to dig a single grave, and then proceeded to strip the camp of every useful item. Besides weapons and apparel, they found everything for a well-equipped expedition, including many lengths of cloth, fishhooks, beads, and other trinkets.

  When the canoes had been loaded and the Spaniards interred with a stone cairn above the grave, Amador and Segge stood at opposite sides of the pile of rocks and offered prayers for Don Hernando Ramirez de Ribera and his men.

  At the canoes, Amador spoke: “Spanish, Portuguese, Hollander — the sertão knows no distinction. The strong survive. The weak die.”

  The canoe kept to the middle of the channel, rapidly gaining speed as it approached the crest of Guajará Mirim. Then it plunged into the downward rush of water. The channel swung to the left bank, and very soon the canoe was thrust into slower waters.

  The jubilation at passing these falls was short-lived. Two hours later, with the roar of water ahead, Amador and Segge began to understand why the Tupi interpreter had laughed at the anxiety they had shown on the approach to Guajará Mirim.

  “Guajará Assú!” Pitua now shouted. “‘Big Falls!’”

  Immense, water-worn boulders rose out of the river, the main stream of water boiling through a gap between them. Smaller streams shot through the rocks else where, but not one suggested a navigable way over the falls.

  After a restless night, they were up before dawn, ready to attack the problem of passing Guajará Assú.

  This took three days to accomplish. On the first, the canoes were off-loaded and the goods carried through the jungle. They erred in thinking that a detour in a semicircle would offer a speedier trip than to head directly along the riverbank. Traversing the interior meant having to slash openings foot by foot. Swarms of sand flies and mosquitoes rose in incessant attack; ants with fiery stings and spiders as large as the palm of a man’s hand assailed them. A Paresí was bitten by a six-foot fer-de-lance and died. By the second day, they had all the contents of the canoes at a landing place below the falls. Early the third morning, they began the haulage of the craft.

  They collected long lianas and plaited smaller vines into strong cords, and, taking the canoes above the head of the falls, began to walk them through the rock-strewn river. Segge and ten Paresí were maneuvering the canoes in the water. Amador was with Paresí on the bank; they hung onto the ends of lianas attached to the canoes and worked their way along at the edge of the jungle.

  Twice they reached a place where it was impossible to go forward and had to retreat, shoving the canoes back upstream until they were able to turn their bows toward an alternative
gap between the rocks.

  After five hours, they were safely at the bottom of Guajará Assú with both canoes and able to move the craft freely through the water as those ashore hauled on the lianas.

  The next morning they carefully restowed the cargo, pushed off into midstream — the river was three-quarters of a mile wide at this point — and paddled at a steady speed for three hours. Then the current began to slacken, and there was a now-familiar roar in the distance.

  Amador questioned Pitua more closely about this river: just how many falls were there? he wanted to know.

  Pitua held up both hands, his fingers outstretched.

  There proved to be twice that number. They passed twenty falls between Guajará Mirim and the last barrier before the unimpeded flow of Love-Me-River.

  By day they had to endure a sun so hot that water hissed when splashed onto rocks by men struggling with the canoes. When the sun wasn’t baking them, they were drenched by violent squalls. The mists rising from the water made the nights damp and chilly.

  Two months after the August 23 sighting of the Spaniards, the canoes were finally below what Pitua promised were the last falls. The river was several hundred yards wide here, broken into numerous channels by the rock shelf; ahead lay blue-gray water that ran wide and fast.

  Love-Me-River finally lived up to its name. For five days they had an easy run down long bends of water that swung to the northeast. From six hundred to a thousand yards wide, occasionally a mile from bank to bank, the river often divided into multiple channels passing narrow islands, some of them five miles long.

  Amador and Segge had tried to persuade the Paresí to stay with them, offering them generous gifts of the Spaniards’ goods. But the Paresí could not be induced to go beyond the last falls. Pitua had also refused: “I want to see my sons.”

  “What do you know of the river tribes?” Amador asked, sensing more in Pitua’s reluctance than a simple desire to return to Kaimari’s village.

  “Muras,” Pitua said. “‘Fish People’ And Mundurucu.” His expression was not happy. “Tupi-speaking . . . ‘Head People.’ Very dangerous.”