Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  He took up position there, with The Turk and another raider. When the swivel gun was readied, Amador blasted away at the approaching canoes — with no effect, for they were still out of range.

  The Desterro finally had been turned, and she could now hurl her shot at the canoes closing in from the north. So tightly arrayed were the canoes — against Abel O’Brien’s directive — that the first two exploding balls effectively destroyed five craft. The slavers cheered, for it was a critical blow, slowing the advance from that direction.

  The squadron rushing up from the south closed the gap to five hundred yards. The Desterro’s port guns fired. Her first shots fell harmlessly into the water between the canoes, which were spread out, as Abel O’Brien had cautioned. They raced forward, grabbing every precious moment as the men in the ship made ready to reload.

  With the second round, two canoes were hit, the explosions immediately followed by the shrill screams of dying men and the cries of terror-stricken survivors flung into the bloody waters.

  Abel O’Brien was within hailing distance of Segge’s canoe. “Secundus! Secundus! Now! Be ready!”

  The gap separating them from the Desterro was now 350 feet. O’Brien and Segge barked orders to the men in their craft. Each canoe carried smoldering fire buckets and hand grenades, which Abel O’Brien had made at his cave.

  Then Segge saw Amador at the stern of the ship. The instant he recognized him, there was a puff of smoke as the swivel gun fired, and the hail of shot struck several men in an adjacent canoe. A small cry escaped Segge’s lips. Calmly, then, he raised the two pistols he’d drawn and fired off both in Amador’s direction. He saw Amador waving his fist at him. Instantly Segge called for a musket and fired that, too, but missed his target.

  The Desterro’s guns roared. Tabaliba’s canoe was torn into pieces by the blast and every man in her killed or mortally wounded.

  Then Abel O’Brien had been about to hurl his first grenade toward the Desterro, when a sharp-eyed musketeer on his belly near the bowsprit fired at him. The ball caught him in the shoulder. He lost his balance and fell out of the canoe. But the grenade flew from his hand and dropped back into the craft. Several explosions followed; within seconds, nothing was seen of men or canoe.

  Segge was three canoe lengths behind and he saw it all.

  “Paddle!” he screamed at his crew, who had hesitated momentarily. “Faster! Faster!”

  About fifty yards separated his canoe from the Desterro. Segge glanced to the stern and saw Amador and The Turk bringing the swivel gun to bear.

  Suddenly the canoe lurched sideways. In their frenzied haste, the paddlers had not seen a submerged log. But that violent swing to the left, which almost swamped the craft and made Segge fight desperately to keep his foothold, saved them from the shot fired by Amador and The Turk.

  Then the nine-pounders fired.

  Swung off course, the canoe lay directly in the line of fire of the third port gun. There was a roar and a flash and an earsplitting explosion as the grenades in the canoe ignited.

  Secundus Proot, the artist with his dream of a second Eden, died instantly.

  “Fool! Fool! Godforsaken heretic fool!” Amador screamed.

  The Desterro now began a systematic bombardment of the enemy canoes. When the channel had been cleared, Bento Maciel turned his attention to the shore, both the beach and the high bank of Death-Bird Island. He put a party of musketeers and Tupinambá on the island with orders to spare no one.

  On Death-Bird Island, the urubu, which had taken flight at the first burst of musket fire, now began to circle back to their territory. And into the channel streamed piranha.

  Men who lived to tell of this day would never forget the horror. The blood attracted thousands of the deep-bellied fish, their triangular-shaped teeth snapping at those who thrashed about frantically to escape this ultimate enemy. The piranha feasted and the mighty Rio das Amazonas became a river of blood.

  Late in the afternoon, two days after the battle, the Desterro was anchored four miles downstream. The slavers had lost twenty Portuguese and half-breed raiders, 175 Tupinambá, and two hundred slaves. They had no idea of the casualties among their attackers, though they spoke confidently of having exterminated the majority. Where they had failed, they suspected the piranha had succeeded.

  But there was one man who had miraculously escaped the piranha and had been found half drowned and washed up on the shore. And now he knelt on a beach opposite the Desterro.

  “Your father was a hound of hell! You are the same!” he said.

  Bento Maciel Parente accepted this insult calmly. “Is that all you have to say?”

  “That . . . and every curse upon your soul!”

  Bento Maciel nodded to The Turk, who stood next to the prisoner.

  “Mercy! Mercy, my beloved Lord! Mercy!” the man on his knees called out.

  Then The Turk swung his ax and chopped off the head of Abel O’Brien.

  That night after the execution, Amador and Bento Maciel were seated in the stern of the Desterro.

  “Will you take a ship from Belém to Santos?” Bento Maciel asked.

  “No. My family is at São Paulo. I will return there. But first I’ll go to Pernambuco.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “There’s a bag of silver waiting for me. A reward for rendering a service for Senhor Cavalcanti.”

  XIII

  September 1644 - November 1692

  When Amador reached Belém do Pará with Bento Maciel Parente in late September 1644, the tale of his mighty journey through the wilderness excited the local planters, who prevailed upon him to stay for a time: “You sought El Dorado, Amador Flôres, and from what you say, you found it! A hoard of savages for the fields of Belém!”

  Amador had no intention of voyaging back to the lands he and Segge Proot had traveled, but two planters convinced him to lead a slave hunt to the Rio Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon, less than three hundred miles away. The expedition was not a success: Half of the fifty Tupinambá with him perished from sickness and attack by savages; the survivors returned to Belém with eighty-seven captives, a paltry number compared with thousands sold at the riverside pens at Belém.

  Amador had agreed to the expedition because of reports reaching Belém from Pernambuco: Since Johan Maurits’s departure in May 1644, a group of Portuguese settlers had been in a state of incipient rebellion. Maurits had governed for seven years with tact and tolerance, but many Portuguese had been embittered by his seizure of the capital of Maranhão captaincy and the settlement of Loanda in Africa, in the interim between the signing of the ten-year truce between the Netherlands and Portugal and its ratification at Recife. The capture of Loanda had been a particular blow to planters at the Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, for their supply of slaves from that port had dried up.

  By 1643 the Dutch garrison at São Luis do Maranhão had been put to the sword by the local Portuguese. This heartened the Pernambucans, especially those who owed thousands of florins to the Dutch Company. Besides, despite Maurits’s efforts at quelling religious hatred, most Portuguese resented the heretics and Hebrews in their midst. Many Jews were conscious of this ill will and had sailed away with the count’s fleet; others were talking of migrating to Dutch possessions in the Caribbean or to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in North America.

  In May 1645, Amador at last resolved to leave Belém. The news of the emerging uprising in Pernambuco made him consider taking ship directly for Santos, but the prospect of the bag of silver awaiting him at the Engenho Santo Tomás was too alluring. Besides, if he did tangle with the Dutch again, so be it, for twice now he had suffered the treachery of these heretics, with Proot and with those who had silenced his comrades at Engenho Santo Tomás.

  Amador took passage with a small trader that put him ashore at a secluded bay of Paraíba, a captaincy north of Pernambuco; from there, he made his way to the engenho through the backlands.

  In early June, Amador finally trudged up the hill
toward the house of Senhor Fernão Cavalcanti. It was four and a half years since he’d left this valley with Secundus Proot. With the exception of a row of outbuildings near the quarters he’d shared with the Portuguese mill workers, there were no conspicuous changes. But, ever since entering the Cavalcanti lands this morning, Amador had experienced a sense of foreboding, which intensified the nearer he got to the heart of the settlement. Now as he limped toward the house, his gaze roved from the chapel to the main dwelling.

  There was not a soul in sight.

  He stopped abruptly at a movement near the slave quarters, but continued walking when he saw a dog creep back into the shadows. He drew level with the chapel and noticed that its doors were closed, as were the shutters of Padre Gregório Bonifácio’s rooms next to the small church. He kept walking, past the trees where Senhorita Joana had often found him.

  “Stranger!”

  Amador froze.

  “The musket — drop it!”

  He obeyed the command.

  “The pistol! Your other weapons!” The orders came from the direction of the chapel, behind him.

  He threw the pistol next to the musket. As he began to unsheathe his machete, he turned sideways and saw the chapel doors ajar, a musket barrel protruding between them.

  “Senhorita? Senhorita Joana?”

  The musket was still trained on him.

  “Amador Flôres, senhorita . . . Amador Flôres da Silva.” He held his machete loosely at his side. Momentarily he looked up at the second story of the big house, where he saw two more guns aimed at him. He returned his attention to the chapel just as one of the doors was pulled back.

  “ Oh, Senhorita Joana!” He made a move toward her.

  “Stay!” She held the musket menacingly. Joana Cavalcanti was dressed in a plain black cotton gown and men’s boots, and a pistol was thrust into a dark sash around her waist.

  Again he identified himself, and added: “Five years ago I went into the sertão with Segge Proot . . .”

  She stood ten feet from him, her brow furrowed, her lips pursed.

  “Have I changed that much, senhorita?”

  “The mameluco from São Paulo . . . Amador Flôres,” she said, almost to herself, “Mother of mercy, it’s you.”

  “Yes, Senhorita Joana, Amador Flôres, returned from . . .” He could not find words to describe it all. “Returned,” he added simply. Joana stared at him silently.

  “Where’s the senhor?” Amador asked.

  “He’s gone away for a time,” she replied evasively.

  “Your brothers — Alvaro and Felipe?”

  “Felipe is with his father. The Dutch killed Alvaro. He was ambushed with seven others.”

  Amador offered his condolences and then told her that the heretic Segge Proot was dead. Joana frowned and lowered her eyes at the news but said nothing, and Amador did not elaborate beyond relating that Proot had fallen in with a river pirate and his savage levies, who’d launched a hopeless raid against a force of Christians.

  That evening Amador sat at the long table in the big house, and remembered how once he’d stood outside with the dogs and slaves of Fernão Cavalcanti. Joana sat opposite Amador, next to the bibulous Gregório Bonifácio. Here, too, were Dona Domitila, Beatriz — pregnant with the child of a husband Senhor Fernão had found for her — the wives of Fernão’s sons, Alvaro and Felipe, and two aunts.

  Sitting to the right of Amador was one other male: Jorge Cavalcanti, the elder brother of Senhor Fernão. Tomás Cavalcanti’s son Lourenco had had three sons — Jorge, Fernão, and Francisco — and the same number of daughters. Francisco had died before Amador’s first sojourn, a victim of the measles; Jorge had been away in Europe in 1640. He was now fifty-eight, three years Fernão’s senior, with the same medium build, narrow, aristocratic face, and green eyes. But he looked much older than his age and was overbearingly pompous. Jorge had been twice widowed. Now he was married again — to Joana Cavalcanti.

  Amador had been openly shocked when the senhorita introduced him to her husband. Jorge, in the lavish attire of a Spanish grandee, beribboned and hung with lace, had peered down his long nose at Amador, showing displeasure at Joana’s announcement that the mameluco was an acquaintance of hers.

  It was not the consanguineous union of uncle and niece that troubled Amador — such marriages were rarer than those between first cousins but not unheard of, given a chronic shortage of good Christian women in Brazil — but the thought of vibrant, lovely Joana wedded to this fop, whose style in clothing bespoke his political sentiments. While acknowledging the right of the Braganças in Lisbon, Jorge Cavalcanti expressed a longing for Madrid, where he had spent a decade as adviser to the court of Philip IV.

  During dinner — a frugal meal by comparison with the last banquet Amador had witnessed here — Amador started to tell the Cavalcantis about his journey. They listened for a while, but were confused and disbelieving of the extent of his wanderings, and he was moved to give up his narrative. Instead, he himself listened attentively as Jorge Cavalcanti and Padre Bonifácio spoke of events in Pernambuco. Amador realized that only when they had assured themselves he was not here as an agent of the Dutch were they prepared to tell him what had happened to Fernão Cavalcanti.

  Fernão had maintained friendly relations with Johan Maurits to the very day the count departed Brazil, and was one of many Portuguese who gathered to bid farewell to the governor.

  A month after Count Maurits’s departure in May 1644, a curse had descended upon the valley of Santo Tomás. The engenho lay in one of six administrative districts created by the Hollanders in Pernambuco. A soldier whose contract with the Dutch West India Company had expired was appointed district bailiff — Captain Jan Vlok, the man responsible for the massacre of Amador’s comrades five years ago. Vlok and the ruffians who served him terrorized the Portuguese under their jurisdiction. They demanded bribes to ensure the safe passage of sugar chests to Recife; they encouraged slaves to run away, then caught them and sold them in other parts of the colony; they seized livestock and raided the sugarhouses of planters unable to meet summonses for debt. Complaints to the High Council at Recife by Fernão Cavalcanti and others went unheeded, for Jan Vlok had bought support there with a share of his loot. Six months ago, Fernão Cavalcanti had contacted other aggrieved planters.

  Many of them had served together on Johan Maurits’s councils; now they plotted to destroy what the count had built in Pernambuco. Their task seemed impossible. The Dutch garrison had been cut by two-thirds, but earlier years of hopeless resistance made most planters reluctant to take the field again. The recapture of São Luis do Maranhão had been exceptional, they argued — a small contingent of Hollanders beleaguered by every settler in Maranhão and weeks away from Recife. Even if all Pernambucans could be rallied, what use such insurrection without arms? After the abortive expedition of the conde da Torre five years ago, the engenhos’ weapons had been confiscated, all but a few muskets licensed for personal protection. And in whose name would this rebellion be launched? Secret emissaries from Lisbon had emphasized the king’s desire for peace with the Dutch. Spain, not the Netherlands, was João IV’s enemy, the emissaries said. If the planters of Pernambuco rose, they would do so on their own.

  João Fernandes Vieira, the son of a mulatta prostitute and a Portuguese, was a ringleader of the planned uprising. He had fought the Dutch in the first guerrilla war fifteen years ago; during the rule of Count Maurits, he had laid down his arms and prospered, coming to own five engenhos and serving as a town councilor at Mauritsstad, a hunter of runaway slaves, and captain of a Dutch militia corps. But he owed his benefactors more than 300,000 florins, making him one of the biggest debtors in the colony; when Maurits left, João Fernandes decided to rid himself of this crippling financial burden. Still, his primary motive was the holy restoration of the land.

  Toward the end of 1644, messengers from João Fernandes approached a new governor-general at the Bahia, Antônio Telles da Silva. Publicly, Ant�
�nio Telles said that an insurrection in Pernambuco was unthinkable: Any colonist of his who contributed to such disorder would be prosecuted; and henceforth the Bahia authorities would return to Pernambuco any planter fleeing New Holland to escape his debts to the Dutch.

  Privately, Antônio Telles sent word to João Fernandes Vieira: “Your password is ‘sugar’ — a call for the sweet victory we’ll have!” And in a secret communiqué, he said: “I have dispatched word by sea to the Hollanders at Recife that Henrique Dias, the black devil, is a fugitive heading through the sertão toward Pernambuco. I have sent the regiment of Dom Felipe Camarão in pursuit.”

  Henrique Dias and Camarão, who had been knighted for his previous services to Pernambuco, had led the black and native volunteers in the first guerrilla war. This ruse to send them racing to the side of men like João Fernandes and Fernão Cavalcanti had been as inspiring to the conspirators as other assurances by Antônio Telles: He planned to dispatch a corps of forty veteran officers and soldiers overland to train the colonists; to send others by sea to reach Pernambuco as soon as an insurrection was under way.

  Encouraged by this support, João Fernandes Viera and his fellow patriots had planned an uprising for Midsummer Day, June 24, 1645. But the first convoy of arms from the Bahia had been ambushed after crossing the Rio São Francisco: Fernão’s son Alvaro had died in this clash.

  Then, four days before Amador’s arrival, on May 30, another disaster: An informer in Recife sent word to João Fernandes, the Cavalcantis, and their confidants that the High Council had been told of the rebellion planned for June 24, in an anonymous letter sent by three planters who’d signed themselves “The Truth.”

  And now, after these events had been related to Amador at the dinner table, Jorge Cavalcanti decried this treacherous correspondence but evinced no faith in the conspiracy. “Their cause is hopeless,” he said. “They think they see the power of the Hollanders reduced here. But I, Jorge Cavalcanti, have seen the strength of this enemy in Europe. Even Spain with all her might could not suppress these heretics. And where is the ocean their admirals do not rule? Go to the river Tagus at Lisbon and see the hulks rotting there; then come and tell me how Portugal can supply men and munitions to sustain an insurrection in this colony.”