When the gallant Martim Affonso de Souza, sailing first to Cananea, eventually built his modest mud and palm leaf town at S. Vicente, he was saved from the hostility of the Tamoyo Indians by the friendliness of Ramalho, father of many children by a daughter of Chief Tibiriça. The Tamoyos as a rule gave a great deal of trouble to the Portuguese, although the French in their numerous attempts at settlement along the Brazilian littoral always managed to make fast friends of this tribe. To anyone who knows the São Vicente of today, it is difficult to imagine on what the first settlers lived; the shore is hot, sandy, backed by mangrove swamps, producing beans, maize, mandioca and sugar. Small wonder that an early chronicler said that to live in these colonies it was necessary to forget all European habits of life, to begin a new existence upon new food, with all old ideas of comfort and even necessity thrown aside.
When a company of Jesuit priests, headed by José de Anchieta, came to S. Vicente, they found their ministrations thrown away on a disorderly and undisciplined band of settlers. Conceiving their duty to be here, as the Padre de las Casas and many of his cloth conceived it in Mexico and Central America, the Christianizing of the natives, Anchieta decided to leave the coast (where Braz Cubas had now built his little chapel and hospital on the island where Santos stands today) and seek converts in the uplands. The mountain barrier was climbed, and on January 25, 1554, an altar was set up on the green and well-watered plains of the interior, and mass was said on a site named São Paulo de Piritininga, in honour of the saint whose day it was. The habit of early missionaries and discoverers of naming new places with the Roman calendar in their hands has helped the historian to fix many a doubtful date.
A few miles away from the mission was the town of João Ramalho, who had been tactfully confirmed in his possession of lands, the “Borda do Campo,” by Portugal, while his settlement was formally named a township with the title of Santo André in 1533. Its site was near the present São Bernardo, an open sunny region of prairie with woods on the horizon.
With this tribe of Ramalho’s making the Jesuits sought no connection; they could not convert those half-breeds any more than they could make the hardy impenitents on the coast give up stealing Indians. Better and more pliable material was to hand in the pure Indian tribes; two groups, one under Tibiriça and the other under chief Cai-Uby, built their cabins in new S. Paulo, Tibiriça’s people forming a line which is now the Rua São Bento, while the other converts guarded the road that led over the hills to S. Vicente.[[2]] It was not long before trouble came. João Ramalho’s children plagued the priests: the priests retaliated by getting an order from the then Captain-General, Mem de Sá, by which Santo André was razed to the ground and its inhabitants forcibly incorporated in São Paulo. The latter soon changed its character as a peaceful mission settlement, the Indians suffered from aggressions by the whites who now came up from S. Vicente or their own half-white kin, and in the end a concerted attack was made by the natives upon the town, only old Tibiriça remaining loyal. The Indians were beaten, but the Jesuits saw that the mission could not be restored; they determined to carry the cross farther afield. With indomitable energy and indifference to suffering the band of priests made their way across the interior plains and woodlands, until they founded a new city (Ciudad Real) at the junction of the Paraná and Piquery, and began to gather the Indians together in new settlements.
For a time they were undisturbed. But the life of the new Portuguese colonies depended upon agriculture; the white men were neither many enough nor sufficiently acclimated to till the fields themselves, and they seized the unfortunate natives and forced them to field labour. It was unsatisfactory work, as a rule: the native of the eastern coasts of South America was not a cultivator of the soil by habit, but rather a hunter and fisher, as he is still in his interior retreats. They were too on the whole a gentle as well as an idle race, and they died like flies under the whip.
It was not long before the coast plantations of the Portuguese were denuded of workers: to get more slaves it was necessary to follow the Indian across the sertões. It was about 1562 that the first slave-hunting expeditions, the “entradas,” began; they were headed by the mamelucos, the descendants of Ramalho, who had no hesitation about betraying their native kinsfolk to the white man. Violence was avoided: the preferred plan was to coax any tribe approached “com muito geito e enganos” and only when blandishment failed was force resorted to. Tamed natives accompanied the “entries” and when the children of the woods heard tales of waiting pleasures told in their own tongue, whole clans often followed willingly to the coast, never to return. When they retreated more deeply and became more wary, and it was found that the Jesuits were advising them, a grimmer system was planned; it was decided to conduct open warfare against the missions.
By this time, in the first part of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits had attained remarkable success with their converts; they were not content with teaching them the Christian faith, but insisted upon the girls learning spinning and weaving while the men planted and reaped. Results were much the same as those desired by the coast settlers, but methods differed. About Ciudad Real, in the Guayará region, fourteen great missions flourished when the Paulistas began to disturb them: by the middle of the sixteen hundreds they were all broken up, the fields waste, the priests fled, and the Indian converts prisoners in S. Paulo or hiding in the forests.
To accomplish this, more careful expeditions were arranged than the earlier “entradas,” although the mamelucos had made some wonderful journeys, across the river Paraguay, over the Chaco and into Bolivia, now and again having a brush with the Spanish settlers of the South, who, later on, were expelled from tentative settlements in Rio Grande do Sul: no land was too wide for the Paulistas to hold. But the “bandeiras” were now organized like an army, men enlisted in them regularly and accepted rigorous discipline. Beginning with the deliberate object of uprooting Jesuit control of the Indians, explorations continued in this form for over eighty years with other aims added—conquest of the interior, discovery for its own sake, and search for mines of gold and precious stones, as well as the repression of Spanish entries from the south and from Peru.
At the time when these extraordinary expeditions began the interior of South America was still unknown. The high sertão and the forests were still full of mystery, although the coast had been stripped of such marvels as the giants who frightened Pinzon’s sailors, the men fourteen feet high seen by Magalhães, and the alligators with two tails which Vespucci reported. In the interior magic still reigned, with its trees yielding soap and glass, Lake Doirada with shining cities about its margin, and the marvellous kingdom of Paititi, lure of many disastrous expeditions, where some of the natives were dwarfs, others fifteen feet tall, some had their feet turned backwards and others had legs like birds. The bandeirante opened the sertão and dispelled these wonders.
In his book, O Sertão antes da Conquista, Sampaio says that the Paulista “was compelled by his habitat to be a bandeirante: the conquest of the interior was written in his destiny.” If that is true, at least these labours were taken up with a kind of fierce joy. There was scarcely an able-bodied man of the time who did not join one or more of the bandeiras, and there is on record the case of Manoel de Campos who made twenty-four of these journeys. Many bandeirantes never returned, remaining in the sertão to found towns in Minas, Matto Grosso or Goyaz; some, returning after years of absence, found their wives married to other men, while “many heroes brought back from the sertão children whom they had not taken in,” says Rocha Pombo.