Luis Fialho was from the sertão and had been raised among people to whom Portugal had a magical quality, in some ways not unlike Land of the Grandfather. He had been exultant when the ship carrying him from Rio de Janeiro crossed the bar of the Tagus: “Portugal! Home of the heroes!” Through a forest of masts, he had glimpsed the royal palace, the wharves and warehouses, and had rushed to a higher deck for his first sight of Lisbon’s seven hills crowned with tower and spire, with every slope and promontory, every valley populated. The Mother City!
Nor had Luis Fialho’s wonder diminished at Coimbra, a city that had figured in every phase of Portuguese history since its capture from the Moors in 1064; “I hear the music of the past,” Luis Fialho had told his friends, “the immortal song of Lusitania.”
Often Luis Fialho’s lyrical contemplations had been followed by dark melancholy at the thought of Brazil. He had spoken of America as sensuous and corrupting. It was in Luis Fialho’s carefully chosen words, “A hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites.”
But, toward his third year in Portugal, Luis Fialho’s friends had noticed a change in his attitude. He still praised the glories of old Portugal, and he brooded over the deprivations facing a man of gentility in Brazil, but a new critical note had crept into his conversation:
“This swarm of monks and friars in Portugal, these priests in every office of the kingdom . . . Don’t two black robes suffice for four thousand pagans in Brazil? Here, twenty priests are called to minister to the same number of true Christians.” The Inquisition had informers everywhere, and Luis Fialho shared such comments only with like-minded friends, but other observations he made freely: “Why is it that the king’s officers must labor as servants and coachmen or starve? That no street is without soldiers in rags begging for alms? Dear God in heaven, what has become of proud Portugal?”
What Luis Fialho found so difficult to accept about the poverty and stagnation in Portugal was that the kingdom had been given riches as never before. Great Mafra and all the lavish works from Dom João V’s reign, the brilliantly adorned churches and convents — exorbitant as these expenditures had been, they represented only a fraction of the fabulous treasure of gold and gems sent from the captaincies of Brazil.
Olímpio Ramalho da Silva and Procópio Almeida had not been the only Paulistas to discover gold in the early 1690s; three groups of prospectors had made simultaneous strikes beyond the Mantiqueira Mountains in a region that had become known as Minas Gerais (“General Mines”). By 1709, Vila Rica de Ouro Prêto (“Rich Town of Black Gold”) and surrounding mining camps had a population of fifty thousand whites, half-breeds, and slaves. In 1718, Paulistas had found gold at Cuiabá, eight hundred miles directly northwest of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. So great was the wealth of the Cuiabá diggings that the first pair of cats transported to the rat-infested camp had been sold for a pound of gold!
And there was more than gold to fill the royal purse. North of the lake where Amador Flôres da Silva had found his “emeralds,” gold prospectors had picked up cloudy crystals in the alluvial beds; they considered these worthless and used them as backgammon pieces, until lapidaries in Lisbon identified them as diamonds. Crown officials stepped in to prevent the illegal exploitation of Dom João’s fields and eventually proclaimed a “Forbidden District,” some 130 miles in circumference, east of the range known as The Spine. A miner caught extracting diamonds without the king’s authority could be thrown into jail or banished to Angola; illegal possession by a slave could bring up to four hundred lashes, often after forced ingestion of a purge of Malgueta pepper to flush out any gems he had swallowed.
Luis Fialho stood with his back to the others and was looking at Mafra. “Dear God, what a majestic pile! What would those Paulistas searching for El Dorado say? What could they believe but that here, before their eyes, was the palace of El Dorado!”
Marcelino Augusto laughed. “Every stone paid for with the gold and diamonds of Brazil.”
“Exactly. And so the fable becomes reality,” Luis Fialho said, turning to them. “They marched through the sertão, our men of the bandeiras, with a vision of a fabulous city of palaces and glittering temples. They couldn’t see that it was they who would make this possible, this El Dorado of their dreams, with Mafra and every other grand edifice.”
“I know some dreamers,” Paulo began. “They —”
“I dream!” Marcelino Augusto broke in.
“Francisca Caetano!” Luis Fialho said. “You and a hundred others, my friend, all with your sleep disturbed by fair Francisca.”
Marcelino Augusto had met Francisca at the house of his aunt, who was married to a Neapolitan merchant, a patron of the new Lisbon opera house, where the Caetano girl had recently made a triumphant debut.
“Tell us about your dreamers, Paulo,” Luis Fialho said.
“The senhores de engenho who went to the mines. They passed through the sertão with their peças to evade the dragoons.” The supply of slaves to Minas Gerais was controlled by Crown quota, but thousands were taken in illegally via the backlands because of the high price they commanded. “After months, if the senhores were not caught by the soldiers, the only gold they saw came from the sale of their blacks.”
The Cavalcantis had not been enticed away from Engenho Santo Tomás by the hope of a quick fortune, despite the difficulties Pernambuco’s sugar industry faced as English and French plantations prospered in the Antilles, but had extended their control over a valley beyond Santo Tomás. In the sertão, 250 miles west of Recife and north of the Rio São Francisco, the family had also obtained four holdings covering fifty square miles for a stock-breeding fazenda.
“Selling their slaves was a serious mistake,” Luis Fialho said in response to Paulo. “A claim is useless without slaves to work it.”
“And so, too, a cane field. Some came back from the mines and lived like squatters on their lands; some were seen begging in the streets of Recife. They cursed the day they had the notion of going south to a den of peddlers and marinheiros who robbed and cheated them.”
“The rabble of Europe!” Luis Fialho said. “It was a dark day for us when they set their covetous eyes on the highlands of Brazil!”
Paulo and Luis Fialho shared a disdain for Portuguese-born merchants and traders in Brazil, whom they called peddlers and marinheiros, and for Emboabas (“Feather Legs”), a Paulista epithet for foreigners at the mines. It was Luis Fialho’s theory that the Tupi word had something to do with the outsiders’ fear of dropping their breeches or going barefoot in the jungle.
When Luis Fialho had first spoken to Paulo of the Emboabas, he revealed the rancor toward these outlanders passed on to him by his elders: “The Feather Legs swarmed over the mining camps like vermin. They showed no respect for the Paulistas who had conquered that sertão. ‘Savages!’ they called men like my grandfather, Baltasar Soares.”
The Paulistas had taken up arms against the Emboabas in 1708, when the mining camps controlled by a Paulista superintendent were in a state of anarchy.
“For three years, Grandfather Baltasar fought the damn Feather Legs. If only our people hadn’t quarreled among themselves. ‘Too many generals! Too many grand chefes!’ says my grandfather.
“In the end, the king’s soldiers came from Rio de Janeiro to restore peace, for the uproar at the diggings was robbing His Majesty, too, cutting off his supply of gold.”
Of course, Paulo knew of the troubles that had erupted at the diggings four decades ago, but his disdain for the foreigners stemmed from a cause far closer to home, for in Pernambuco, too, there had been conflict with Portuguese-born rivals between 1709 and 1711. Olinda had never fully recovered from the devastations during the Dutch invasion the previous century, but the senhores de engenho had maintained it as capital of the captaincy and controlled its municipal câmara, which had full political power over Recife, the commercial center with its population of twelve thousand. The merchants and traders had repeatedly appealed to the Crown for their own municipal
council, and in 1709 a royal decree elevated Recife to town status and ordered the erection of a new pillory, the symbol of royal and municipal authority.
“The peddlers came from Portugal with rags on their backs and the huge conceit to seek privileges that belonged to the noble families of Pernambuco,” Paulo had told Luis Fialho. “But when Bartolomeu Rodrigues Cavalcanti and others hurled down the pillory at Recife, the peddlers cried ‘Treason!’ and took up arms. The governor supported them and was forced to flee to the Bahia. The war lasted a year, until Lisbon sent a new administrator in October 1711 — My father and other rebels were granted a royal pardon, but Dom João insisted that the pillory be raised.”
There had been experiences at Coimbra that had also affected Paulo’s feelings toward Portugal, none so disturbing as the prejudice he found toward the mazombos, as the Portuguese disparagingly referred to the Brazilian-born whites.
“Where will the king find subjects more loyal than the great plantation owners of Pernambuco?” Paulo had said angrily. “Nowhere! Is it wrong for a man like my father to long for rank and honor from the court? God in heaven knows how faithfully Bartolomeu Rodrigues has served the kingdom!”
This had not been Paulo’s only disillusionment: He had found the atmosphere at Coimbra suffocating. Paulo’s early education had come from Padre Eugênio Viana, a priest/tutor at Engenho Santo Tomás.
“What a wonderful teacher we had in Padre Eugênio,” Paulo had told Luis Fialho. “Certainly he had his supply of quince switches and a broad leather strap that he soaked in water to increase its sting. But he didn’t believe that all young boys were possessed by the devil. If he saw us drowsy and irritable, the padre would throw open the door of our schoolroom and lead us outdoors. ‘Come boys,’ he would say, ‘let’s walk! We have as much to learn beneath our Lord’s sky as under dusty rafters!’”
After the enlightened guidance of Eugênio Viana, Paulo had found Coimbra medieval and called the ancient seat of learning “the tomb of thought.” Whereas other European universities were being swept up in the intellectual ferment of these midyears of the eighteenth century, the pedagogues of the Jesuit-controlled Coimbra adhered to their ancient statutes and were obsessed with technicalities and hairsplitting debates.
Now, on the hill above Sintra, Marcelino Augusto gazed across the plains below them. “Even before Vasco da Gama’s day, when we had settled the Atlantic islands, men left Portugal to make a better life for themselves. Your ancestors, Luis, Paulo, they may have set out from these very lands.”
Paulo Cavalcanti nodded, though he did not know that Nicolau Gonçalves Cavalcanti had left for Pernambuco from João Cavalcanti’s house, just six miles southwest of Sintra.
“True. For generations the Cavalcantis have served Portugal against savages, Norman corsairs, Spaniards. The men of Santo Tomás helped drive the Dutch out of Brazil. Why must we surrender our patrimony to these latecomers?”
Luis Fialho agreed. “The Paulistas welcomed the Feather Legs with open arms. They fed and sheltered them and protected them against the savages. Then thousands of Feather Legs streamed to the gold camps, and they turned against the Paulistas.
“In the same way the savage was dispossessed in earlier times?”
“Ah, my friend, don’t heed everything the Frenchmen and others say. The savage so noble and pure-hearted?” He shook his head. “That’s what Rousseau tells the world, but he hasn’t seen the true savage.”
Luis Fialho’s lack of sympathy for the natives was in conflict with current feeling in Portugal. In 1748, Dom João issued an order abolishing slavery of the natives of Brazil and the northern territory of Maranhão and Grão Pará. The decree did not affect in any way the million black and mulatto slaves in Brazil, but from July 13, 1748, the enslavement of the natives was prohibited.
“‘Dispossessed,’ you say,” Luis Fialho went on. “Dear heaven, what glorious dispossession! Wherever the savage has been expelled, there’s hope that Brazil will one day be a civilized and Christian nation.”
“I’ve heard different reports from my father,” the young Fonseca said, as they moved along a small ridge from where they had a fine view of the distant Tagus. “Don’t misunderstand men like Dom António. They speak in defense of the natives because reason now dictates that they should no longer be enslaved like peças.”
“And who’ll speak for the early settlers?” Luis Fialho said. “Who’ll recall the terrors endured before plantations and towns were safe from attack? Who’ll remember thousands who gave their lives in the sertão?”
“You, my poet friend. You!” Marcelino Augusto said, slapping a hand on Luis Fialho’s shoulder. “First you wept at the misfortune of birth in that land of savages. No place was so grand and noble as Portugal; no terra firma so cruel and unforgiving as Brazil. But then, Luis Fialho, we came to hear you praise that continent, its valleys, its rivers, forests, seas, all surpassing what you saw here. You made a discovery here — you and Paulo. Yes, my friends, across the bar of the Tagus, you discovered Brazil!”
The heavily draped salon of the Fonseca country house was austere. The rugs were old, threadbare in places, and reeked of a musty, unpleasant odor. Two huge mahogany tables with heavy carved legs dominated the room. Tall mirrors reflected objects connected with past Fonsecas: a pair of waist-high Chinese porcelain vases; a teak cabinet with ivory marquetry from Goa; a Persian water pitcher; a four-foot iron statue from West Africa, representing a sixteenth-century Portuguese soldier.
Dom António was not given to brooding over the past. He was a small, sprightly sixty-two-year-old, his expression alert and intelligent. He disliked the shabby room but would not change it, less from respect for earlier Fonsecas than from a reluctance to part with thousands of cruzados.
Dom António sat on a sofa, with Marcelino Augusto next to him. Paulo and Luis Fialho were close by, Paulo on a high-backed ebony chair. Paulo shifted from time to time on the hard seat, but for the most part he was as motionless as if he was sitting for his portrait, his attention riveted on Dom António’s visitor.
This man sat sideways at one of the mahogany tables, an elbow resting on the surface, where several maps of Brazil were spread open. His long legs stretched out in front of the chair suggested his height. He was in his fifty-sixth year, well preserved, with a powerful physique, his hands large but with slender fingers. As arresting as his piercingly intelligent hazel eyes were the cleft in his chin, emphasizing his well-shaped mouth, and a white wig that flowed to his shoulders.
He was Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, and on this day in October 1755, no man in Portugal save the king was more powerful. What made this the more remarkable was that at his birth in 1699, Carvalho e Melo was the son of a cavalry officer.
Educated at Coimbra, Carvalho e Melo had entered the army and gone to Lisbon to improve his miserable prospects with the help of an uncle who served the patriarchal church. But his uncle’s appeals and his own voluntary service with the rowdy aristocrats had failed to bring Carvalho e Melo attention at court. He had pressed his suit with a highborn Lisbon lady, but her family rejected him because of his poor pedigree.
These setbacks had left him with an antipathy toward the clique of nobles who ruled Portugal, and seven years passed before he again felt confident to assault these bastions of Portuguese society. His uncle succeeded in getting him an appointment to the new Academy of History. His assignment: to research the background of the noblest family of Portugal, the ruling Braganças.
Thirty-two at the time and still unmarried, he had again cast around for a wife and found an attentive widow, Teresa de Noronha, the niece of a count — only to be rebuffed once more, by the dona’s relatives. He eloped with Dona de Noronha, an event that had caused a sensation in Lisbon.
In 1739, Carvalho e Melo’s perseverance had been rewarded with the post of Portuguese minister in London, and six years later he was sent as special envoy to Vienna, his services offered by Dom João V as mediator in a dispute between the A
ustrian Empire and the Papacy.
Dona Teresa de Noronha had not accompanied her husband on these missions; she had retired to a convent, where, shortly after Carvalho e Melo’s assignment to Vienna, she died.
The new widower found solace in the arms of Leonor Ernestina Daun, a lady-in-waiting of the Dowager Empress Christina. Leonor was the daughter of Count Leopold Josef von Daun, a hero of the Austrian War of Succession. Marriage to Leonor Ernestina guaranteed the cavalry officer’s son a place among the nobles at Lisbon, where he had returned in 1749, his fiftieth year, to consolidate his gains over the previous decade.
But his outspoken criticism of the priests who enthralled His Most Faithful Majesty and dabbled in matters of state, his enmity toward certain fidalgos whom he blamed for corruption and confusion in Portugal, and his support for the middle-class merchant and entrepreneur had brought Carvalho e Melo enemies who were determined to halt his ambitious progress.
Anticipating a confrontation with these men, he had allied himself with a group loyal to Dom João V’s heir, Prince José. On July 31, 1750, Dom João died, and the new king, José I, immediately appointed as prime minister a beloved but nearly blind, decrepit statesman, who rarely left his house and received visitors only after midnight. Ministry of Marine and the Colonies went to another ailing court favorite. The third portfolio, Minister of Foreign Affairs and War, was given to Sebastião José Carvalho e Melo, who, with the indisposition of his two colleagues, was in control of the cabinet.
Once launched on his reign, José I had come to find the pursuit of stag and Italian opera preferable to the burdens of government, and Carvalho e Melo’s powers increased far beyond his cabinet influence, though he still faced the intrigues of fidalgos and priests who despised the upstart commoner. However, on this day in October 1755, when he had come to visit his friend Dom António, Carvalho e Melo, better known by his subsequent title, Marquis of Pombal, was well on his way to becoming the first modern European dictator.
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