A Country
Is Born

Any explanation of Portugal's historic role in the Americas must begin with the link between the crown and overseas exploration. The discovery of Brazil fits squarely into that relationship.

Birth and Growth of Colonial Brazil: 1500-1750

Thomas E. Skidmore

Only four countries in the world—Canada, Russia, the People's Republic of China, and the United States (if Alaska is included)—are larger than Brazil. This chapter tells the story of how Portugal, a country far smaller than almost all of its competitors in the race for colonial territory, imposed its authority and culture on a country that spans more than half of South America.

The focus of this chapter is on key themes that dominate Brazilian colonial history and help explain Brazil today:

· Portuguese origins

· Contact and clash with indigenous peoples

· Forced importation of millions of African slaves

· Creation of a multiracial society

· Consolidation and expansion of Portuguese-ruled territory

· Establishment of an export-based economy

· Beginnings of an independent Brazilian cultural and political consciousness

A brief overview of Brazil's current scale, climate, and geography provides the context for the story.

The Country the Portuguese

Created in the New World

Present-day Brazil covers 3,286,488 square miles. It extends for almost 2,700 miles from north to south, and roughly the same distance from east to west. By the 1991 census it numbered 146.8 million inhabitants, 52 percent white, 42 percent mulatto, 5 percent black, 0.4 percent Asian, and 0.2 percent Indian. As we shall see, these racial categorizations are much less rigid than in the United States. And Brazil boasts virtually every mineral needed for a modern industrial economy, with the conspicuous exceptions of coal and petroleum (although offshore wells are now helping to produce 60 percent of domestic needs).

Brazil's climate has been much maligned. "Insalubrious" has been used historically to describe it, though public health precautions were all it took to subdue the hideous tropical diseases that so frightened chroniclers in the past. Although many areas are typically humid, the extreme cold temperatures afflicting North America and Europe are unknown, and the high temperature extremes are certainly no worse than those of the United States. Hurricanes and earthquakes are also unknown, although floods and drought are relatively common threats.

Present-day Brazil covers five major regions. The following description focuses on the twentieth-century features of these regions. Their characteristics in the colonial era will be discussed later in this chapter.

The North includes the states of Rondônia, Acre, Amazonas, Roraima, Pará, and Amapá. It also includes the Amazon Basin and is by far the largest region, accounting for 42 percent of the national territory. Enthusiasts, both Brazilian and foreign, have nourished illusions through the years about the agricultural potential of the greater Amazon Basin—from Henry Ford's disastrous effort to grow rubber in the 1930s, to the Brazilian military dictatorship's decision to build the Trans-Amazon highway and offer a variety of tax incentives in the 1970s. The facts of the region contradict them. The great barrier to agricultural development of the Amazon Basin is and has always been the vast tropical rain forest. It makes overland travel impossible, leaving the rivers as the only mode of transportation in earlier eras (which air travel is added today). More fundamentally, because rain leaches the soil if the vegetable cover is cut down, these lands cannot be used for conventional agriculture, leaving the area with insufficient carrying capacity for intense human settlement.

The Northeast includes the states of Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia. This region, which covers 18 percent of the national territory, was the heart of the colonial settlement. Since the nineteenth century, however, it has been in economic decline, with its once-flourishing export agriculture no longer competitive in world markets. The result has been continuing poverty for the population, which now constitutes the largest pocket of misery in the Americas. Much of the coast is a humid strip (zona de mata) that has lent itself to plantation agriculture, especially cane sugar and cotton. Behind this relatively narrow humid zone lie two other zones that are less hospitable to agriculture: the zona de agreste, a semiarid region, and the sertão, a larger region subject to periodic drought These latter two regions were famous in the twentieth century for the Brazilian bandits, such as Lampião, immortalized in verse, song, and film. The Northeast is also notable for the effectiveness with which its politicians have represented the region's interests (historically synonymous with the landowners' interests).

The Southeast comprises the states of Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. This is the heartland of Brazilian industrialization, occupying 11 percent of the national territory. The state of Minas Gerais is growing rapidly, having recently succeeded in combining agriculture with industry. Present-day Espírito Santo relies primarily on agriculture, especially coffee and cacao. Rio de Janeiro was the political capital of Brazil until the 1960s. In 1960 it lost its premier status when the national capital was shifted to Brasília, a modernistic new city built from scratch in the interior. Since then it has been losing industry to surrounding states. São Paulo was an economic backwater until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it became the world's primary coffee-producing area. In the twentieth century, for reasons still not perfectly understood, it has become the industrial giant of Brazil, as well as the champion producer of non-coffee foodstuffs.

The South consists of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. A temperate region, it was and remains a cattle and grain-growing area with only modest industrialization. It is the smallest of the regions, occupying only 7 percent of the national territory. Historically, the most important state in the region has been Rio Grande do Sul, primarily because it borders both Argentina and Uruguay. The residents (known as gaúchos) flirted with separatism in the 1840s and 1890s, but have since become known as among the most nationalistic of Brazilians. Like Espírito Santo in the Southeast, Rio Grande do Sul experienced a heavy inflow of German immigrants after 1890. Paraná was a marginal state until the 1950s, when the coffee culture moved south from São Paulo and touched off an agricultural boom. Paraná was also a prime destination for immigrants from Japan, Germany, and East Europe.

The final region, the Center-West, includes the states of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás, and the Federal District (greater Brasília). Traditionally underpopulated, this has become one of Brazil's fastest growing areas. It covers 22 percent of the national territory, including much of the cerrado, or interior farmland, which has become highly productive since the 1970s, especially of soybeans. The building of Brasília (inaugurated in 1960) was a great stimulus to growth in this region, bringing modern transportation for the first time, and thus the capacity to market products to the rest of Brazil.

HOW COULD
THE PORTUGUESE
DO IT?

Any explanation of Portugal's historic role in the Americas must begin with the link between the crown and overseas exploration. The discovery of Brazil fits squarely into that relationship. The series of events leading directly to the discovery of Brazil began in early March 1500, when King Manuel of Portugal attended a solemn mass in his capital city of Lisbon to celebrate the launching of a new ocean fleet. Larger than any of its predecessors, it was to include thirteen ships carrying a total of 1,200 crew and passengers. Barely a year earlier, the great Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama had returned to Lisbon from the epic voyage (149799) that opened the sea route to India. His success, with its promise of future trading riches, stimulated the Portuguese court to sponsor and organize this new voyage. The commander of the new expedition was Pedro Álvares Cabral, a distinguished nobleman who gave it a social distinction the earlier voyage had lacked.

The stated intent of this expedition was the same as the earlier one: to head for the southern tip of Africa, sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and head north toward India through the Indian Ocean. Almost as soon as the fleet had set out to sea, however, disaster appeared to strike. The lead ship, commanded by Cabral, swung off course into the Atlantic, sailing due west. Cabral and his crew eventually reached the coast of what is now the Brazilian state of Bahia, arriving on April 23, 1500.

They had stumbled on what turned out to be a vast continent. Or was it more than stumbling? There has been considerable speculation over the years that the Portuguese navigators knew exactly what they were doing, that they had in fact planned this "accident" to outflank the Spanish, who had already claimed so much of the new world, and that they were really following the route of previous secret voyages to Brazil. Historians have failed to uncover any evidence in the Portuguese archives or elsewhere to support this version of events. If there were, indeed, previous secret voyages to the new continent, they are still secret. Nor, of course, was the continent new to the several million indigenous Indian people who already lived there.

There is no record of what the Indian residents thought as they were "discovered" by a band of strange sailors with odd clothes and a bad smell, but their reaction can well be imagined. The reaction of Cabral and his men is known: They were fascinated by what they saw. Their thoughts were captured in an official account written for King Manuel by Pero Vaz de Caminha, the fleet's scribe. His "Carta" (letter) demonstrated a typical late-Renaissance perception of the new land, naturally emphasizing what was exotic to European eyes. Vaz de Caminha depicted a realm where the resources—human and environmental—were there for the taking. The native women were described as comely, naked, and without shame, and the soil as endlessly fertile. The image of endless fertility was to capture the imagination of the Portuguese and later the Brazilians, a romanticization that has led to a variety of overoptimistic estimates of Brazil's potential. This description of Brazil sounded seductively different from the hardscrabble life facing most Portuguese at home. It was also designed to encourage the monarch to send follow-up expeditions.

Cabral's feat, though dramatic, was in fact part of the continuing success of the Portuguese at overseas exploration. Despite their relatively meager resources (the Portuguese population was about 1 million, compared with England's 3 million, Spain's 7 million, and France's 15 million; Holland was closest with 1.5 million), the Portuguese were, during these years, in the process of creating a trading empire reaching all the way to Asia. Vasco da Gama's arrival in India in 1498 marked the creation of the Estado de India, a network of coastal enclaves running along the Indian Ocean, from Mozambique, around the Malabar coast of India, and all the way to Macao on the coast of China. The resulting wealth had made their kingdom a major international power in fifteenth-century Europe.

Such success was made possible by a combination of factors: early consolidation of the monarchy, and a social structure that respected trade, along with leadership in navigational technology, longstanding involvement in oceanic trading networks, an instinct for trade rather than colonization, and a collective thirst for adventure.

Like Spain, Portugal had to fight a long war against the Muslims, who had occupied the Iberian peninsula since the eighth century. But the Portuguese had liberated their kingdom from its Arabic-speaking occupiers by the thirteenth century, two hundred years earlier than the Spanish. In addition, they were able to resist repeated attempts by the kingdom of Castile (the bureaucratic and military core of modern Spain), to manipulate the succession to the Portuguese throne. To strengthen its position against Castile, Portugal forged an alliance with the English crown in 1386. This alliance, which remained the bedrock of Portuguese foreign policy for the following five centuries, was to lay the basis for England's involvement—especially its economic involvement—in modern Brazil. The marriage of Portuguese King João I to the granddaughter of England's Edward III consolidated the Portuguese dynasty (known as the house of Avis, 13851578) and created the stable monarchical base that facilitated the country's foray into world exploration and trade.

In addition to early political stability, Portugal was helped by a social structure in which the merchant class played a major role. Portugal's economy in the fifteenth century combined commercial agriculture, subsistence agriculture, and trade. The merchants were the key to trade and were respected by the crown. Thus, they had the support of their sovereign as they maneuvered on the world stage, pursuing exploration and trade and gaining the cooperation of foreign merchants, especially the Genoese in what is modern-day Italy.

The power of the merchants and the interest of the crown combined to produce the resources necessary to make Portugal a leader in perfecting the technology necessary for traveling long distances by sea. One of her relative advantages in maritime skills was in shipbuilding, about which the Portuguese had learned much from their Basque neighbors in northern Spain. For example, they produced the caravel, the first sailing ship that was reliable on the high seas. Previous European ships were designed for coastal sailing or for use in the relatively calm inland sea of the Mediterranean. When sailed on the open ocean, they were apt to be swamped by ocean waves and often capsized. The Portuguese also excelled at navigation. In particular, they pioneered development of the astrolabe, the first instrument capable of using the sun and stars to determine position at sea. Finally, the Portuguese were skilled at drawing maps, which were based on the increasingly detailed geographical knowledge accumulated on their voyages. Such maps made possible systematic repeat trips. (The astrolabe and the mapmaking skills give some credence to the speculation that Cabral "discovered" Brazil by design.)

Portugal had yet another asset: a longstanding involvement in the trade routes that linked the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Over the preceding centuries Lisbon had been a regular stop for Genoese traders traveling from the Mediterranean to European Atlantic ports. By 1450, as a consequence, Portugal was already integrated into the most advanced trading network of the time. Portugal's location on the Atlantic also stimulated a natural focus west, as compared with fleets that had set out from ports inside the Mediterranean.

Portugal was also helped because its small population made it impossible to settle nationals in the colonies on the scale soon to be launched by the English and the Spanish. Rather than subjugate the indigenous population politically, the Portuguese established a network of trading posts—militarily fortified and minimally staffed—in order to exchange goods with the local population. They negotiated in order to obtain the local products (spices, gold, rare textiles, etc.), which would be produced for export by local labor, with minimal Portuguese involvement. Such trading was established in Africa and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to obtain spices (black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg) and other foods. The Portuguese also hoped to find gold or other precious metals.

Between 1450 and 1600, the Portuguese established the most viable network of European trading forts. Greatest competition came from the English, the Dutch, the French, and especially the Spanish—competition that soon made soldiers and naval gunners as vital to the Portuguese kingdom as its navigators and traders.

The catalyst that brought all these factors together was a combination of individual characteristics that led the Portuguese people to excel in exploration and trade. First, they believed in the religious mission to convert the heathen. The sails of their ships bore a cross to announce their commitment to evangelize for the Holy Faith. But their zeal was more pragmatic than that of the Puritans who settled New England. Unlike the Puritans, for example, they did not stress their theological mission in the reports of success they sent back to their homeland. Second, they preferred to solidify trade rather than to impose formal political authority over the indigenous peoples they encountered. This contrasted with the Spanish, whose first order of business in the Valley of Mexico for example, was to claim legal dominion over the millions of Indian inhabitants of the region. Finally, and perhaps most important, they had a collective thirst to discover the new and the exotic, which drove them to travel the high seas in spite of the obvious and frequently confirmed dangers. Of Cabral's original fleet of thirteen, for example, six went down at sea. This drive to succeed in spite of the odds was captured by the fifteenth century Portuguese poet Camões in his epic poem The Lusiads, which remains the literary document of Portugal: "We must sail!" (Navegar é preciso!)

SECURING THE
FRONTIERS

Running through the story of colonial Brazil is Portugal's continuing struggle to expand its hold on the continent, even as it warded off the efforts by other countries to encroach on the land it had already settled. The likelihood of competition between the Spanish and the Portuguese in the New World had been foreseen by both sides almost from the beginning. As early as 1493, only a year after Columbus's first voyage and seven years before Cabral had reached Bahia, Pope Alexander VI issued a series of papal bulls dividing up the New World between the two crowns. Everything to the west of the dividing line was to be Spanish, everything to the east was to be Portuguese. The Portuguese resisted the Pope's demarcation (was it because that Pope was Spanish?) and a year later reached an independent agreement with Spain, the Treaty of Tordesilhas. This treaty moved the line of demarcation between what was to be Spanish and what was to be Portuguese 270 leagues to the west—not very much of a difference.

On today's map, that imaginary line goes from the mouth of the Amazon through the coast of the present-day state of Santa Catarina, giving the Portuguese dramatically less territory than is occupied by present-day Brazil. No one could see that, of course, because the area was almost completely unknown. In any event, the Portuguese were to exploit the vagueness over the centuries to come, pushing farther and farther west.

The Treaty of Tordesilhas did not hold. The French, though Catholic, refused to honor the papal bulls or the treaty. They began their own exploration of the Brazilian coast as early as 1504 and continued their incursions throughout the sixteenth century. In the 1550s, led by Nicolas de Villegaignon, a naval officer, they controlled the area of Rio de Janeiro, which was to be the base of what the French saw as "Antarctic France," a future refuge for French Protestants. The French were driven out of Rio by a column of Portuguese and Indian troops in 1565, the year of Rio's official founding by the Portuguese. This did not end the French incursions, however, which continued throughout the sixteenth century. One of the most contested regions was the Amazon Basin. Here the French settled at São Luiz, located on the Atlantic coast. The Portuguese finally drove them out in 1615.

The Spanish also proved a threat to Portuguese America. In the 1520s and 1530s, in spite of the Treaty of 1494, they settled on the coast south of São Paulo. Between 1540 and 1560, they established settlements on the coast of modern Santa Catarina. These settlements did not survive, however. Spanish settlements thereafter were mostly in the Rio de la Plata basin, where the Spanish and Portuguese collided head on. The Portuguese originally claimed sovereignty all the way to the Plata River (including the area of present-day Uruguay, which eventually was ceded to Spanish control). The modern boundaries between Brazil and Spanish America in the south emerged only in 1828, when Britain forced recognition of an independent Uruguay.

Portuguese expansion to the west did not encounter resistance from other colonial powers. Exploration of the interior lay in the hands of armed Portuguese bands, which went west to capture Indians and look for precious metals. These bandeirantes, whose expeditions originated primarily in the coastal region of present-day São Paulo, were the prime explorers of inland Brazil and became the heroes of much folklore and mythification by the São Paulo elite of the twentieth century.

In all their efforts to secure the frontiers of Brazil, the Portuguese were helped immeasurably by the Portuguese Jesuits. This aggressive religious order established mission networks in many parts of Brazil, particularly in the Amazon valley, harnessing vast supplies of Indian labor to work the Jesuit-run ranches and vineyards. In so doing, they helped "pacify" (read: subjugate) the local Indian peoples and establish the Christian religion. They also played an important role as cultural brokers. Jesuit linguists, for example, were the persons who established a standard form of Tupi, the principal native language. As late as the end of the seventeenth century, this lingua franca was more widely spoken than Portuguese, and its standardization eventually facilitated the spread of the Portuguese language.

HOW THE
PORTUGUESE
ADMINISTERED
THE COLONY

In the first three decades after Cabral's voyage, Portugal treated Brazil as merely another set of trading posts, established on the model of the feitorias (trading stations) set up earlier in Africa and Asia. Asian exploration and trade was its primary interest, where it had a commanding lead over its European rivals and reaped rich profits. By the early 1530s, however, the incursions by the French and Spanish, and the need for more trade to replace declining activity in the Indian Ocean, forced the Portuguese crown to reconsider its position. Since it lacked the resources to strengthen its foothold in America, it resorted to a semifeudal system of hereditary land grants, or captaincies. These were given to rich nobles, in the hope that they would exploit the Brazil wood and other resources, gaining personal profit while also serving the crown. Fourteen captaincies were granted between 1534 and 1536.

Unfortunately for the crown, the risks were too great and the rewards too uncertain to persuade the grantees to make the required investment. Only two captaincies were successful: São Vicente and Pernambuco. The former was south of the present-day city of São Paulo, and the latter was in the northeast.

In 1550, in a new sign of royal commitment, the Portuguese crown created a governor-generalship. Governor Tomé de Souza arrived in 1549. He founded the city of Salvador, which was to remain the capital of the colony for more than two centuries.

In 1572, the threats of French and Spanish penetration near Rio and the South persuaded the government to divide its administration between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, a dual governorship that was ended in 1578. Two years later, Portugal entered a sixty-year "union" with Spain, as lack of a royal heir in Portugal led to Spain's formal takeover of the Portuguese crown. The Spanish control of Brazil lasted until 1640, when a suitable successor to the Portuguese throne was again found.

Interestingly, the Spanish did not use their formal authority to take over the Portuguese colony in earnest. Their one major activity in Brazil was the constructive one of regularizing administrative and judicial procedures, including development of new civil and penal codes in 1603. Otherwise, Spain's energies were engaged in fighting to retain its possessions elsewhere in the New World.

Brazil was not entirely free of those struggles. The Dutch, in particular, took the occasion to attack this new outpost of "Spanish" imperialism by invading Brazil's northeastern coast in 1624. These Dutch invaders (who were sponsored by the Dutch West India Company) managed to maintain control for thirty years, occupying Recife and taking over the lucrative sugar trade. During the occupation of Recife by the Dutch, under Governor Maurice of Nassau (163744), scores of distinguished and mostly Dutch scientists and artists—such as the naturalist Jorge Marcgrave and the painter Frans Post—descended on the area to document its flora and fauna. In 1654, a coalition of Brazilians of all social classes, supported by the local planters' desire to escape their debts to the Dutch, finally drove the Dutch off the coast. Brazilian patriots often point to this resistance campaign as the birth of Brazilian nationalism.

The seventeenth century saw the dramatic expansion of territorial control (north, west, and south) by the Portuguese. The Portuguese administration accommodated this expansion though a codification and extension of the existing authority to newly secured locations, rather than changing the administrative structure. There were two exceptions to this continuity. The first was creation of the position of juiz de fora, a regional judgeship, which was intended to reduce the power of the rural landowners. The second was creation in 1620 of a new state, Maranhão, which included the Upper Northeast and the entire Amazon Basin. Maranhão was divided into six hereditary captaincies, following the precedent set in Bahia and Pernambuco. Unlike those other states, however, Maranhão existed as a separate unit until 1774, reporting directly to Lisbon even though the official administrative center of Brazil remained in Salvador. The impetus for the establishment of Maranhão was Portugal's need to consolidate its control of the North after the expulsion of the French. The action was also explicit recognition of the geographical separateness of Maranhão—a consequence of the prevailing southeasterly winds, which often made travel up the coast from Salvador impossible. Land travel was not a realistic alternative, given hostile Indians and jungle terrain. It was common at that time for overland journeys in Brazil to take months. Rivers were used where possible, but the Amazon flows from west to east, and the most important river in the northeast, the San Francisco, is broken by falls so vast as to be impassable

The eighteenth century was dominated by the rise and decline of the mining industry, following the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso in the early 1690s. The resulting shift in population southward to those regions did have an effect on the administrative structure of the colony. In 1709 the crown created the new captaincy of São Paulo and Minas de Ouro. Then, in 1721, the separate captaincy of Minas was created and in 1748 separate captaincies were established for Mato Grosso and Goiás. Inevitably, as discussed further in chapter 2, the capital was finally moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763 to keep closer administrative control over the lucrative mining area.

THE PEOPLES
OF BRAZIL

One of the best-known facts about Brazil is the multiracial nature of its population—a mixture of indigenous Indian, Portuguese, and African, with the later addition of Japanese, Middle Easterners, and non-Portuguese Europeans. This section gives a brief overview of the Indians and African in colonial Brazil.

When Cabral arrived in 1500, a far-flung and complex network of indigenous peoples was already there. The Indians numbered more than one hundred separate language groups, from the Charrua in the far south to the Macuxi in the far north. These "Indians" (índios, the term used by the Portuguese and later the Brazilians) differed significantly from the best-known native peoples of Meso-America and the Andes. In both of those regions, at least some of the indigenous civilizations had reached a high level of complexity, as in the ceremonial city-building of the Aztecs (more properly known as the Nahua) in the Valley of Mexico and the Inca in the Peruvian highlands.

The city-building societies were highly disciplined. They mounted armies to resist the Europeans, fighting set battles involving thousands of Indians under strictly organized command. Once defeated, however, as their leaders were disgraced or died, they became leaderless. This dissolution of the Nahua and Inca societies facilitated the Spanish creation of an economy manned by an Indian labor force that was forced to do what it was told.

From the beginning, Portuguese colonists also saw the Indian as an indispensable source of labor. However, the Brazilian indigenous peoples were hunters and gatherers. The Indians inhabiting Brazil did not form set armies and were not inclined to stand and fight. Nor did they have a Nahua or Inca-style social hierarchy that the Portuguese could take over to enforce work discipline.

Scholars disagree on the number of Native Americans living, when the Portuguese arrived, in the area that is now Brazil. Plausible estimates range anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million, with one going as high as 8 million. However large this population may have been in 1500, it shrank drastically after the Europeans arrived. Epidemic disease was a major cause. The Europeans brought such infectious diseases as smallpox and measles to an American environment lacking any previous exposure—and therefore immunity—to them. Harsh treatment by the Portuguese, who met native resistance with brute force, further decimated indigenous populations.

Disease and harsh treatment took a heavy toll on the indigenous peoples of Spanish America also, but those who survived were often relatively easy to track down and organize into work crews. The Indians who survived in Brazil retreated into the rain forest or the temperate interior, where the Portuguese had trouble pursuing them. These indigenous peoples were scattered into more than a hundred separate language groups, almost all unintelligible to one another. The language group that proved most important was the Tupi-Guarani, found especially in coastal Brazil. Theirs was the language standardized by Jesuit missionaries under the label of Lingua Geral that became so widely spoken throughout Brazil. But there were other Indian peoples scattered to the west and south who were slowly encountered by the Portuguese in the course of their sixteenth and seventeenth-century explorations. And there were many language groups in the rain forest of the Amazon Basin whom the Portuguese had no contact with in the colonial era.

The Indians in Brazil were a revelation to the Portuguese. Even before Columbus, Europeans had developed a lively fantasy world to describe the humans, animals, and plants they expected to find beyond the Atlantic horizon. Vaz de Caminha's report reinforced the European prejudice that Portugal had discovered an idyllic world where evil was unknown. As Portuguese King Manuel wrote to his fellow monarch in Spain, "My captain reached a land... where he found humans as if in their first innocence, mild and peace-loving." Jean-Jacques Rousseau later based his optimistic theory of human nature at least in part on these early descriptions of the Brazilian Indian.

In his letter describing Cabral's voyage in 1500, Vaz de Caminha described the Indians as "tough, healthy, and innocent." Another alleged Indian trait, bestiality, became the stuff of legend in Europe. A particularly famous example was Hans Staden's 1557 chronicle, The True History and Description of a Land of Savage, Naked, Fierce, Man-Eating People Found in the New World. Staden, a German, was shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast and survived imprisonment by Indians. His bloodcurdling narrative described natives who delighted in cooking and devouring their captives in a form of ritual cannibalism. The woodblock illustrations of the book showed human limbs being readied for the boiling pots. The pictures confirmed what Staden's European readers were ready to believe. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European illustrations of Brazil fixed on cannibalism (about whose extent present-day anthropologists disagree). The existence of this "barbarism'' gave the Portuguese further legitimacy for their claim that they were bringing civilization to "savages." It also made easier the theological and legal arguments for subjugating the Indians. As with the Nahuas of Mexico, the image of flesh torn from helpless (especially white) bodies served to justify seizing the land and exploiting native labor, a rationale the Church was eager to support.

The colonists who actually lived in Brazil had a less fanciful and more arrogant attitude towards the Indians, as they coexisted, cohabited, and clashed with them. Their arrogance is epitomized in the words of a chronicler writing in 1570 that the language of all the coastal Indians "lacked the three letters F, L and R, which is startling because it means they have neither Fé [faith], nor Lei [law], nor Rei [king] and live, thus, without justice or order."

The Indians who remained under Portuguese control in the sugar-growing area of the Northeast dwindled as they died from contagious disease and maltreatment, obliging the Portuguese to seize fresh Indians to maintain a labor force. By the end of the eighteenth century, Indians were hardly visible in the Northeastern coastal sugar society. Indians survived in any numbers only in the interior, where they lived relatively free from contact with the Portuguese colonists. This scattering reinforced the fact that, unlike Mexico or Peru, Brazil does not have the glories of an indigenous civilization hovering over its modern existence. There are no massive pyramids such as at Teotiohucán or hidden cities such as Macchu Picchu. This does not mean, however, that the Indian left absolutely no trace on modern Brazil. In language (the place names), diet (the ever-present manioc root), and medicine (innumerable herbal cures), links can still be found.

As the Indian labor force dwindled, the Portuguese turned to Africa. Even before reaching the New World, the Portuguese had used Africans as slaves. As they explored the West African coast in the fifteenth century, they brought back slaves to work on the plantations of the Azores and Madeira islands. By the 1450s, Africans were being brought into Portugal itself at the rate of 700 to 800 a year. It has been argued—most notably by Gilberto Freyre, 190087, the Brazilian anthropologist-writer who became the most influential twentieth-century interpreter of Brazilian character and society—that the Portuguese were less prejudiced than other Europeans against Africans, partly because of Portugal's long exposure to the darker skinned Moors, who represented a high culture. But the picture that emerges from the archives does not altogether support Freyre's view. Portuguese writers at times expressed extreme distaste of the physical characteristics of Africans they saw. In 1505, Duarte Pacheco, for example, a Portuguese who traveled extensively, dismissed West Africans as "dog-faced, dog-toothed people, satyrs, wild men and cannibals." In fact, both private and public discourse in Portugal was rife with such concepts as "clean blood," "purity of blood," and "infected races." Yet this trait of prejudice, traceable to such different roots as an aesthetic reaction to Africans and a dogmatic reaction to non-Christians (especially Jews and Muslims), was to play itself out, as we shall see, in unpredictable ways in Brazilian history.

As the Portuguese realized, as early as the 1530s, that the Indians could not provide sufficient labor for the harvesting of Brazil wood and the cultivation of sugar cane, they turned to obtaining slaves from West Africa, where Portuguese slave traders were well established. By 1580, the Portuguese were importing more than 2,000 African slaves a year to work the sugar plantations of Northeastern Brazil. Thus began the slave trade in Brazil, which continued until 1850 at a human cost that was staggering. Shipboard conditions were indescribably bad and disease rampant. More than half the slave cargoes typically died en route. It was a tragic story repeated throughout the Atlantic slave trade. In 1695, the noted Jesuit missionary Padre Antônio Vieira, for example, gave this evaluation of the South Atlantic slave trade: "The kingdom of Angola on the opposite Ethiopian shore, by whose sad blood, and black but fortunate souls, Brazil is nurtured, animated, sustained, served and preserved." Brazil received more African slaves (at least 3.65 million, and some estimates are considerably higher) in total than any other region in the Americas. Present-day Brazil, as a result, has the largest population of African descent of any country outside those of Africa itself.

Excerpted from the first chapter of Brazil: Five Centuries of Change by Thomas E. Skidmore, Oxford University Press, Inc. (http://www.oup-usa.org), 1999, 254 pp.

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