The South American Republics, Part 1 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

In 1621 the northern provinces, Ceará, Maranhão, and Pará, had been separated from the rest of Brazil and erected into an independent government called the State of Maranhão. In Ceará the cattle-industry flourished; around the beautiful bay of Maranhão the Azoreans multiplied their colonies. Cotton, mandioc, and sugar were grown in large quantities; the cotton manufacture soon became an important industry. But the mysterious Amazon, whose entrance was guarded by the town of Pará, seemed most attractive of all. No civilised man had penetrated its length since Orellana's adventurous voyage of a century before. In 1638 Jacomé Raymundo, an able Brazilian, temporarily acting as governor of Pará, determined to explore the great river. The expedition which he sent out found its way up the windings of the multitudinous channels, and after eight months reached the first Spanish settlement in the east of Ecuador. The Spanish authorities at Lima and Quito saw no particular value in a route through a territory in which no gold or silver had been discovered, and which by the Spanish policy could not be used for commerce. But when, two years, later Portugal regained her independence the expedition turned out to have been of vast importance. The Portuguese had found the practicable route into the great river valley; they controlled the mouth of the stream; and though the whole territory lay west of the Tordesillas line Spain never asserted any effective claim to it.

Meanwhile the conquest of the great interior plateaux to the south was rapidly proceeding. The wars with the Dutch rather stimulated than retarded it, for, so long as the Dutch commanded the sea, the widely separated provinces were obliged to communicate by land, and the Indian routes became better known to the Brazilians. Settlers driven from the sugar plantations on the coast took up cattle-raising in the interior of the northern provinces. In the extreme South, as early as 1635 the Paulistas had rooted out the Jesuit settlements from the whole region of the Paraná. To the North they traversed the São Francisco valley and the plateau of Goyaz. Manoel Correa explored the latter region in 1647, and in 1671 another Paulista, Domingos Jorge, penetrated with a force of subject Indians into the great treeless plains which extend beyond the mountain ranges bounding the São Francisco valley on the north. These plains are now the state of Piauhy. At about the same time the cattle-raisers who had established themselves on the lower São Francisco in Bahia, crossed over into the same territory of Piauhy. Within a short time the Indians were reduced to submission, and the cattle ranges were extended over the plains of Piauhy, southern Ceará, and the adjacent provinces. This great conquest completed the junction of southern and central Brazil with Maranhão and Pará. Long lines of land communication were established, and over them travel was more frequent than would seem likely. Piauhy and Ceará soon produced an enormous surplus of cattle whose export into other provinces brought about a revolution in the alimentation of the coast Brazilians. The Indians along the north-east coast were gradually incorporated, destroyed, or pushed back, though it was not until 1699 that they were finally subdued in Rio Grande do Norte. From this time dates the astonishing development of the population of Ceará, who during this century have furnished nearly all the labour for the gathering of rubber.

In the South, settlements multiplied up and down the coast from Rio until nearly the whole of the present state was occupied. Rio and São Paulo flourished with the profits of the clandestine trade with the Spanish colonies. The Paulistas continued to spread in every direction. By 1654 they had occupied the headwaters of the Parahyba and west as far as Soracaba.

During the period just following the expulsion of the Dutch the Portuguese government was not able to enforce its policy of commercial exclusivism. Treaties with Holland and England gave the citizens of those countries a right to trade with Brazil, and the colonists kept up their commerce with the Spanish possessions. Municipal charters were freely granted to Brazilian towns, and the existing franchises reformed according to the most liberal model in Portugal—that of Porto. Brazilians were relieved of the absurd feudal distinctions which exempted nobles alone from liability to torture, and regulated the clothes a man might wear. The extraordinary rapidity of Brazil's increase in population and territory during the middle of the seventeenth century was largely due to comparative freedom from vexatious restrictions and exactions—commercial and governmental. By the end of the century there were three-quarters of a million people in Brazil—a fivefold increase in seventy years, in spite of the fact that the most populous provinces had been the scene of war for twenty-four years of that time.

But the Portuguese government lost little time in returning to the old restrictive conditions. Since the loss of the Indies, Brazil was Portugal's principal source of wealth, and aristocracy and Court made the most of the unhappy colony.

Navigation companies were chartered and given a monopoly of all commerce—export and import. The Jesuits renewed their efforts to gain control of the Indians. In São Paulo they had no chance of success, but in the North the celebrated Padre Antonio Vieira, one of the greatest geniuses that Portugal has ever produced, was given a free hand. He nearly smothered the whites of Maranhão and Pará with a ring of missions, and his successors established settlements on the Amazon which finally spread so as to communicate with the Spanish missions in Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The Brazilians of Maranhão and Pará did not object to the occupation of the valley of the Amazon, but they bitterly resented the Jesuit encroachments in their own neighbourhood. In 1684 a rebellion finally broke out in Maranhão under the leadership of Manoel Beckman. He paid the forfeit with his life, but his work had warned the Portuguese authorities that they must not push their favours to the Jesuits too far.

During the long Dutch war many Pernambucan negroes had fled into the interior, where they had established themselves in independent communities and refused to recognise white supremacy. They fortified their villages with palisades, obtained wives by raids on the plantations, elected chiefs, devised rude forms of administering justice, and adopted a religion which was a mixture of the nature worship of their African ancestors with the outward forms of Christianity. In spite of numerous efforts to destroy them, these strange republics lasted fifty years. It was not until 1697 that a Paulista chief, Domingos Jorge, who was employed after the regulars had failed, succeeded in shutting the negroes up in their great palisade at Palmares. Seven thousand men took part in the assault, and of the ten thousand negroes who defended it none were spared.

This was the only serious attempt at revolt on the part of the blacks which ever occurred in Brazil. Except for a few easily suppressed insurrections which mostly occurred in Bahia among the recent arrivals, the negroes remained in abject submission until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. The comparative mildness of the Brazilian treatment of negroes, the practice of voluntary manumission, and the fact that no impenetrable race barrier existed all contributed to make slavery a less fearful thing in Brazil than in North America.

Both Spain and Portugal claimed the coast between Santos and the river Plate under the treaty of Tordesillas, but neither nation had made any serious attempt to take possession up to the end of the seventeenth century. As a matter of fact, the Tordesillas line passed near the southern boundary of the Brazilian state of São Paulo, but the Portuguese maps pushed all Brazil eight degrees to the east, and Portugal claimed that the line passed near the point where the Paraná and Uruguay unite to form the Plate. The Paulistas had made this claim effective over much of the disputed territory.