A history of the Brazil

by James Henderson

In the same year the arraial or establishment was removed to the situation of Forquilha, where Cabral had found a better vein of gold; and in the following, one Miguel Sutil, from Sorocaba, having taken up a station with his party upon the margin of the Cuiaba, two Carijos, or domestic Indians, sent into the woods in search of honey, brought him at night twenty-three pieces, folhetas, or lamina, of gold, which weighed one hundred and twenty oitavas, stating that there was more in the wood where they had found it. Sutil, highly delighted, next morning went with his European comrade, Joam Francisco, called by way of nickname Barbado, and all his domestic establishment, conducted by the two Carijos to the place where they had found the precious metal, and which is the present site of the town of Cuiaba. Here they spent the day, gathering with their hands all the gold upon the surface of the ground, or thinly covered, and desisting only with the termination of daylight; they assembled late at their bivouacs, when Sutil found that he had accumulated half an arroba, or sixteen pounds weight, of gold, and Barbado upwards of four hundred oitavas. This adventure becoming known at the arraial of Forquilha, caused its removal to the situation where Sutil and Barbado had been so successful, and where it was calculated that four hundred arrobas of gold were collected in one month, without the excavations exceeding four fathoms in depth.

In this same year the governor Rodrigo Cezar de Menezes arrived at St. Paulo, whose first concern was to exact the payment of the royal fifths upon this metal. With this intention he nominated two brothers, resident at St. Paulo, of distinguished birth and fortune, Lourenço Leme to the situation of Procurador of the Fifths, and John Leme to the post of Master de Campo of the same mines. Those two individuals, in consequence of the liberty with which they had always triumphed over the laws, were imprudently selected; and now considered themselves more than ever authorised to consult with impunity their own caprices. On arriving at the arraial, they adopted the most violent and absurd measures, and wished to expel from the mines all those who were not Paulistas. The chaplain remonstrating against this injustice, they ordered a shot to be fired at him, which, erring in its object, killed one of his friends. Actuated by the same lawless spirit, they ordered one Pedro Leite to be inhumanly insulted at the time he was hearing mass, merely from some feeling of jealousy entertained against him. These and other atrocities, which they committed, induced the governor-general to transmit orders for their being arrested and sent prisoners to St. Paulo. They received intimation of this circumstance from one of their relatives, and on the arrival of the Master de Campo, Balthazar Ribeiro, to execute the commands of the governor, they had already fortified themselves in a remote place, accompanied by their partizans, where an attack was ineffectually made upon them. In a short time, however, after the loss of some lives on both sides, they fled to the interior with a great number of their followers, but were pursued until Lourenço Leme was killed by a shot, and his brother taken prisoner, and subsequently sent, with a summary of his crimes, to the city of Bahia, the relaçam of which city ordered him to be executed in 1724.

The prodigious amount of quintos, or fifths, which were received at St. Paulo in the year 1723, and the termination of the jurisdiction of the rapacious Lemes, excited an universal spirit in that city for mining. Every one was desirous of becoming a miner of Cuiaba, notwithstanding the calamities attached to so laborious and prolonged a voyage. Of more than three hundred persons, who in the year 1725 departed from St. Paulo, with upwards of twenty canoes, only two white men, and three negroes escaped. All the rest were killed or made prisoners in an encounter which they had with an Indian armada (the Payagoas) in the river Paraguay, in front of the embouchure of the Harez. Although the Paulistas knew that the Payagoas were celebrated mariners, they were totally ignorant of this nation possessing so numerous a fleet.

It may be proper to remark here, that the first Paulistas who entered the river Paraguay met with two nations, denominated Payagoas, and Guaycurus; both numerous and formidable; the first from its large armadas, and the second from the dexterity of the natives on horseback, from which they acquired the denomination of Cavalleiros. The Payagoas, from time immemorial, were always masters of the navigation of the Paraguay and its confluents, as far as nature offered no impediments. The Guaycurus had also always possessed the adjacencies of the same river, for the space of three hundred and fifty miles at least.

As it is an indubitable fact, that there were no horses in South America previous to its discovery by Pinson, in 1500, and that they were first introduced into this country by its two conquering nations, Spain and Portugal, it cannot be difficult to define, with tolerable certainty, the epoch when the Guaycurus first obtained these animals, which they used at all times, even in their shortest excursions, and with which they rendered themselves so formidable to all the circumjacent nations, not excepting the conquerors of the country. It would appear probable that they first derived the horse from the colonists of Assumption, rather than from those of Peru. If they were in former times powerful in war canoes, they only retained a sufficient number for passing from one to the other side of rivers, on discovering that the horse was more useful and advantageous for war, or for depredations upon the distant tribes. Such was the state of those two nations about the year 1720, when their reciprocal aversion was converted into a firm alliance, the Guaycurus soon becoming equally formidable upon both elements, with an establishment of war canoes little inferior to that of the Payagoas.

They continued to annoy the rising province from the year 1725 to the year 1768, at which period a disunion occurred, and the Payagoas descended to the low Paraguay, formed an alliance, or, more properly speaking, subjected themselves to the Spaniards of the province of Paranna, where they fixed their habitations, and have lived since 1774, a little below Assumption. Two causes are said to have influenced the Payagoas in this separation; the great diminution of numbers which they had sustained in repeated conflicts with the Spaniards and Portuguese, and their jealousy of the Guaycurus, who they now found were not less powerful upon the waters than in the field.

The Guaycurus persevered in the same hostility, although less frequent and less destructive, as will presently be detailed, till the year 1791, when the principal captains of this nation, Emavidi Channe, who assumed the name of Paulo Joaquim Ferreira, and Queyma, who took the name of Joam Queyma d’Albuquerque, accompanied by seventeen of their warriors, with a Brazilian creole, their slave or prisoner, for an interpreter, spontaneously came to solicit peace at Villa Bella, where, in the palace of the governor, and in the presence of the senate, they made a treaty of perpetual friendship and alliance, agreeing to become the vassals of his faithful Majesty. Letters-patent, securing to them the necessary privileges, were granted, which shall be transcribed when we conclude the history of this important nation. We will now return to the proceedings of the Paulistas, in reference to the early colonization of this province.

In the year 1727, the governor Menezes arrived at the new arraial, and gave it the title of Villa Real (royal town) of Cuiaba. The following year he left this town, and proceeded up the river Tocoary, to which was transferred, in 1729, the navigation from the Embotatiu, with the intention of avoiding, at least in part, the attacks of the Indians. From this change, however, no advantage resulted, in consequence of the trifling distance between these two rivers. The first division which left Cuiaba in the year 1730, with upwards of sixty arrobas (thirty-two pounds each) of gold, accompanied by Doctor Antonio Alvez Peixoto, who had accomplished the period of his ouvidorship, was attacked in the Pantanos,[21] by an armada of eighty war canoes, manned by more than eight hundred Indians. The pillage lasted for a considerable time, and only seventeen Christians escaped by swimming to land. It was computed that these warlike Indians lost more than four hundred combatants on this occasion. Some gold, which they carried off, with many prisoners, the Payagoas parted with at such a low price in the city of Assumption, that an Indian exchanged, with one Donna Quiteria de Banhos, six pounds weight for a pewter plate. At this period, a singular branch of commerce flourished in this city, which was in the disposal of cats, at exorbitant prices; the first pair of those animals that were brought to Assumption were sold for one pound of gold, and their progeny at thirty oitavas, and so on, till the augmentation of this race proportionably reduced their value. The extraordinary value of cats in this place, was occasioned by the houses and stores of Indian corn, &c. being infested with prodigious swarms of rats.

In 1730, the Brigadier Antonio de Almeida sent various persons, in two canoes of war, to procure a quantity of the sugar cane, which had been observed two years previously, by some certanistas, growing upon the borders of the river St. Lourenço. This party returned, at the expiration of two months, with a considerable supply of the cane, of which a plantation was formed, and it prospered so abundantly, that in the following year there were numerous planters. The juice of the cane was generally distilled into spirit, and the demand for it was so great, that a flagon of it sold at first for ten oitavas of gold. From the use of this spirit, the pallid aspect of the people gave way to a better complexion; and the diminution of fevers, as well as the mortality amongst slaves, became rapidly manifest.

In this same year, an armament of thirty canoes of war and fifty transports, with six hundred men, two pieces, and a great number of muskets, were despatched in pursuit of an enemy’s squadron, which had advanced to the mouth of the Cuiaba, where it made some fishermen prisoners. This armada having proceeded to the mouth of the Embotatiu, a division of the Indians was descried, which, with loud yellings, suddenly disappeared. After a pursuit of several days’ voyage, which carried it beyond the strait where the waters of the Paraguay are compressed between two morros, (large rocks,) the armada one morning unexpectedly encountered an Indian fleet. The Indians, giving the signal of attack by loud and discordant war-hoops, came furiously to the onset; but the thunder of the musketry and pieces, which were discharged upon them at the same instant, as quickly produced a retrograde movement, and they were pursued in their precipitate flight by the Portuguese, as far as the aldeia of Tavatim, from whence the latter returned, after having destroyed a great many canoes found there.