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Stilt-Root Subsistence: Colonial Mangroves and Brazil’s Landless Poor

2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-83-2-223

1527-1900

Shawn William Miller,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

In 1677, the Jesuit prelate in Rio de Janeiro, Father Silveira Dias, summarily excommunicated every distinguished member of the city’s municipal council. Although priests frequently quarreled with local officials over such issues as control of indigenous labor, marching order in annual processions, or the extent of clerical exemption from municipal taxation, only in the most extreme scuffles did clerics make heretics of the local elite. In this case, the Jesuits exercised excommunication, their ultimate weapon, in defense of a fetid mangrove swamp.1This was not an isolated instance. In the next decade, the Benedictines and individual landholders, with respective threats of excommunication and arrest against trespassers, pursued exclusive claims to the mangrove forests that bordered their lands on Rio’s extensive Guanabara Bay.2 As a result, the bay’s wretched free poor—abruptly barred from a resource that had supplied much of their food and had been traditionally open to all—appealed to the municipal council for redress. Despite strong ties to landed interests, the council challenged all corporate and private claims to areas seaward of the high tide. With crown support, the council reaffirmed the mangroves’ public status, holding that, as in Portugal, tidelands were state property and open to the use of all. In a colony where forest and field were generally hoarded by fidalgo, priest, and king, Brazil’s tidal forests—due in part to their brackish location—escaped elite monopolization.This study investigates the relationship between two peripheral populations: the mangroves at the fringes of the colonial landscape, and the peoples at the margins of the plantation economy.3 Brazil’s rural poor, landless due to latifundia and wageless due to slavery, prioritized subsistence in their economic life and engaged various strategies to evade the prospect of hunger. These strategies, of course, included subsistence planting on plots granted at the landholder’s consent, but sources suggest that where possible the rural poor preferred hunting, fishing, and gathering from nature’s abundance. While many explained these activities as unproductive and the result of the free poor’s lazy disposition, the drive to eat seems to best explain the poor’s unique set of “indolent” strategies. Subsistence security—having enough to eat—was at the center of their economic life, and it outweighed all other ambitions.The ruling elite acknowledged the poor’s basic right to eat and defended a primitive moral economy by reserving some mangroves for the exclusive use of the poor. Hence, by the coincidence of the poor’s hunger, the state’s paternalism, and the mangrove’s own unrivaled fecundity, mangroves outside immediate urban areas survived the onslaught of colonization. Today mangroves still grace as much as one-third of Brazil’s coastline. Conservation can only take a portion of the credit for mangrove survivals, but what is exceptional is that, at least in some areas, strict conservation policies were shaped not by the commercial interests of the elite but by the subsistence requirements of the poor.The mangrove forest was commonly deprecated as the epitome of wilderness, the antithesis of civilization, and the primary breeder of tropical disease.4 But recurring conflicts evidence the mangroves’ role in meeting the subsistence needs of the poor and the commercial interests of the elite.5 Due to the mangroves’ many extractives (including firewood, timber, lime, clay, tannin, fish, shellfish, and feathers) and its easy access by water, these swamps of rank muck and impassable tangles were among the colony’s most exploited resources. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, formerly the colony’s highest forest official, opined that, had the king granted the Jesuits exclusive control over Rio de Janeiro’s mangroves in 1677, he might as well have given them the city and captaincy as well, “for all of their inhabitants would have been sold to the avarice of great corporations, which would have become the rulers and only lords of the fortunes and persons of their fellow citizens.”6 Silva Lisboa may be accused of anticlerical exaggeration, but he points to the mangroves’ notable place in the colonial economy.Mangroves, adapted to the brackish waters and anaerobic muds of tropical tidelands, framed much of Brazil’s colonial coastline, particularly the estuarine waters on which her chief urban centers were located. In fact, all of Brazil’s major colonial ports held extensive reserves.7 Brazil’s mangrove formations, unlike most tropical forests, are simple in composition, consisting largely of three arboreal varieties: red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), black mangrove, commonly known as siriúba (Avicennia schaueriana and nitida), and white mangrove (Laguncularia racemosa).8 Most distinctive for its stiltlike respiratory roots, the red mangrove dominates the immediate shoreline and serves as pioneer in the mangrove forest’s expansion, colonizing shallows and creating dry land as it advances. Its viviparous fruit extends the mangrove’s propagative power by floating for as long as a year searching for shallow mud in which to sink its energetic roots. Just inland the siriúba predominates, identified by the hundreds of snorkel-like pneumataphores (respiratory roots) that jut from the mud and by the salt crystals sparkling on its leaves. The white mangrove, with less pronounced pneumataphores, inhabits the highest land. All together, along with a rather small variety of lesser plants and grasses, these form the mangal.Here colonists found a ready abundance that was unmatched by other colonial habitats in providing subsistence. Simão de Vasconcellos, a seventeenth-century Jesuit historian, noted that while the mangrove had no fruit of any value, it compensated admirably for this fault “with various utilities of yet greater advantage to the inhabitants.”9 Tidal forests are an extreme example of an eco-tone—a habitat formed by the meeting of two others—and, like most eco-tones, they embrace uncommon numbers of living creatures. The mangrove’s own leaf is master link in a complex food chain that supports immense stocks of fish and shellfish. Annually, mangroves nourish the creatures about their roots with more than six thousand kilograms of fallen leaves per hectare. Algae, protozoa, and various larvae feed upon this detritus, and crabs and various fishes consume the now proteinized leaves. Some fishes pass their entire lives among the mangroves; others, both salt and freshwater species, employ the mangroves as spawning grounds and nurseries. All classes, including slaves, exploited the mangals’ fish and shellfish as important sources of protein. Vasconcellos pointed out the curiosity of shellfish being both the “sumptuous repast of the rich and a staple of the poor.”10In harvesting the mangal, early colonists only imitated the practices of the coastal natives. In fact, the largest archaeological objects bequeathed by Brazil’s precolumbian peoples were the mangroves’ shell middens (sambaquis), some of which are 350 meters long and 25 meters high. For maybe a century after the first European settlements, subsistence remained the primary utility of the mangrove swamp, and I will first describe what the inhabitants consumed and how it was collected. Thereafter, I will depict the beginnings of the mangrove’s commodification and, finally, how the state responded to the impact of this development on the subsistence needs of the poor.Many colorful, raucous birds nested in the mangroves’ branches, but early observers took little note. What demanded attention was the multitude of crabs that gave the mangal its animation. More than a hundred crabs might inhabit one square meter of mud, and “boiling” was the common adjective used to describe their collective movement. Many crabs, particularly the largest specimens, found protection among the red mangrove’s roots. The little aratu (Aratus pisoni)—the agile, prehensile monkey of the crab family—spent part of its life in the mangroves’ branches feeding on the young leaves and tender buds. The swimming siri (Callinectus spp) were abundant and tasty, and the guanhumi (Cardisoma guanhumi), whose mouths were reported large enough to accommodate a man’s leg, wandered far from their dens during thunderstorms and caused such a racket together that they spooked locals into charging armed from their houses, believing they were under native attack. The swift guanhumi were difficult to catch, so when one sidled into the house it was considered a windfall due to their excellent meat and sizable portions. In the 1640s, the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso noted that Dutch soldiers loved to hunt them in the late afternoon and that the meat was good enough alone to satisfy entire cohorts. Potiaçu (Macrobrachium amazonicum), the freshwater lobster, and various species of shrimp were also harvested from the mangroves’ waters.11The mangrove, or fiddler, crab (Ucides cordatus), nearly always referred to by its indigenous name uçá, was the most widely collected and highly praised for flavor. It was also remarkable for its defenses—a single oversized pincer that drew blood from unprotected flesh. But succulence trumped truculence, and Fernão Cardim in 1583 described the uçá in Bahia as “the sustenance of all this land, particularly of the Guinea slaves and Indians.” In the same decade, Gabriel Soares de Sousa observed that the uçá fed on leaf litter, shellfish, carrion, and each other, shocking newcomers by their unspeakable numbers. Gatherers (mariscadores) determined a crab’s size by the diameter of its den and adeptly barehanded even the largest, reportedly harvesting only the males. Soares de Sousa explained that “there is no inhabitant on the farms of Bahia who does not hire an Indian daily to gather these crabs; and from each sugar mill go four or five of these Indian gatherers.” A single gatherer collected three to four hundred live crabs each day, all safely caged in large woven baskets. Many slaves apparently gathered crabs and shellfish on their own time as well. The Jesuit planter Antonil condemned planters who failed to feed their slaves adequately or to grant them a weekday to plant food crops, as this forced slaves to take what little time they had at the end of the day to go in search of a crab for supper, which, along with shellfish, was the slaves’ favored food.12 Hence, slave provisioning was not entirely dependent on local agriculture and charqui imports.A great variety of shellfish also came from the mangroves, and colonial writers provided extensive lists. Luís dos Santos Vilhena stated that the variety “caused admiration at the multiplicity of living things created in these seas.”13 Oysters, which had long been a favorite of the natives, were in great favor among colonists as well: boiled, fried, or raw. The leriassu, which bedded in the mud, were so large they had to be cut into quarters to be eaten, and their shells, lined with mother of pearl, served as dinner plates and basins in São Vicente.14 The smaller lerimirim, which were a staple of many tables, bedded right on the mangrove roots from which they were collected at low tide. Soares de Sousa noted that lerimirim were so thick on the roots that one could not see the wood beneath, and that they “never deplete, because when removed, others are soon born in their places.”15While the harvest was enjoyed by all, the work was reportedly distasteful. In 1817, Louis-Francois de Tollenare gathered oysters in the mangroves that backed the island of Itaparica, Bahia, and advised his readers against it as recreation. In addition to causing sunburn, the walk through knee-deep mud was exhausting, and no fewer than 30 unidentified insects burrowed into his feet. Mosquitoes also found an ideal habitat in the mangal, and locals repelled them with smoky torches of bundled straw, although in some seasons the biting clouds became so thick that whole villages temporarily relocated.16 In 1789, a band of runaway slaves in Bahia penned a rare treaty offering terms under which they would resubmit themselves to their master, Manoel da Silva Ferreira. Many provisions dealt with their subsistence needs. In addition to time off for food production, the fugitives demanded the master provide them with a good canoe and fishing nets and declared that if he provided them a good launch, they were willing to put fish on his table as well. But under no circumstances was he to order them to gather shellfish or build weirs in the mangroves. If the master “desires to eat shellfish,” they wrote, “order your Mina blacks” to gather them. Apparently, only the lowliest African-born slaves were expected to perform this disagreeable task.17The mangroves were also among the colonists’ primary fishing grounds, and coastal fishing even today correlates with surviving mangroves. The variety of fare, from sea cow to sardines, was fantastic. Early in the twentieth century, the fishermen of Santos could name more than one hundred species of fish in the mangroves and commonly netted 24 species in a single cast.18 Cardim wrote that fishing was so productive in the late sixteenth century that surplus catch was used to fatten pigs, and he reported with epicurean satiety that all the homes he visited in Bahia were “so full of fish and shellfish, that in their abundance the people live like counts, and they waste much.” The xareu (jack, Caranx hippos) was among the more important fish for human consumption, although consumed largely by the poor. Massive nets requiring 50 to 60 men, who worked for a share of the catch, hauled 1,500–2,000 fish at a time. A meter in length, the fatty xareu was also salted in barrels as sailor rations.19 Many fish, such as the tainha (mullet, Mugil brasiliensis) and corvina (Micropogonias furnieri), inhabited the mangroves and in season were also taken in large numbers. However, the tainha, which ran in dense schools, were difficult to net due to their propensity to jump, so fishermen simply beat the water with their paddles and let the fish leap into their canoes. The improbability of this technique is outweighed by the numbers who reported it; around 1800 one witness, John Black, reported that several canoes were filled by this means in 20 minutes.20By the beginning of the seventeenth century the desire to commodify the mangroves intensified. Fish and shellfish were never much exported, but the mangal was an important source not only of subsistence foods but also of commodities essential to building the colony and advancing its exports. The extractions in some cases benefited the rural poor who might find therein an independent living. But the commodification of the mangroves also conflicted directly with their subsistence needs by destroying the creatures that bred there.Mangrove was the principal fuel in coastal regions, due to its accessibility to water transport and its high quality. Red mangrove is extremely dense (1.20 specific gravity), making it a superior fuel whether in the form of raw firewood or charcoal.21 Sugar millers in particular, but also whale oil processors, lime producers, brick and tile makers, and distillers, all placed demands of near industrial levels on the mangrove for fuel. Firewood accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the costs of sugar mill production, and already by the 1670s mills in the northern reaches of Bahia’s bay were harvesting mangrove fuel 70 km to the south on Itaparica Island and in the town of Jaguaripe. In the mid– eighteenth century, ships making passage to Europe generally stocked 1,000 billets of mangrove fuel for the crew’s needs. And even Portugal made fuel demands on the mangrove, importing an average of 120,000 billets from Bahia each year in the late 1750s.22 This, of course, was in addition to the daily needs of the general population. Even in the 1890s, the mangroves provided 20 percent of all the domestic fuel consumed by Rio’s citizens.23Like crabbing, fuel cutting was undesirable and strenuous work. According to Armando Magalhães Correa, mangrove fuel cutters early in the twentieth century worked naked from the waist down, donning only a canvas sack for a shirt and a leather belt to hold their machetes. They worked constantly in muck and water as they bucked the trees into manageable lengths and loaded them into canoes. As the immediate coastal trees were felled, men cut and dug canals into the interior of the mangal to afford water access to the white and siriúba mangroves. It was harsh labor, but it long remained a cheaper option than cutting and hauling timber from distant mountain slopes.24Most of Brazil’s coastal cities, which were often built over and among mangroves, were also largely built of them. First, while not an esteemed construction timber, mangrove was among the few timbers available to the poor classes, as most quality timbers had been monopolized by the crown and were found on private land. Prior to the nineteenth century, housing for Rio’s urban poor was constructed of mangrove wattle, and the rafters of these and other edifices, including mills and plantation homes, came largely from the red and siriúba mangroves. And again mangrove found its way across the Atlantic, particularly to Oporto and the Azores, as posts for wine grape trellises (varas de parreira).25Second, even for those who could afford masonry walls, the mangroves— which captured clay sediment—were the source of clay for ceramic production. Brick kilns were usually established in the vicinity of mangroves, in part because the mangrove’s slow-burning fuel was required for effective firing, and also because its bark was used to color the ceramics. Antonil had discouraged sugar millers from attaching a pottery to their operations, as the kiln’s incredible demand for mangrove fuel destroyed the slaves’ source of shellfish. Antonil identified the apicus—deposited hillocks that lay in a band between the mangal and dry land—as the major source of clay during the colonial period.26 Vice Admiral Pedro António Nunes, who owned a stoneware enterprise (casa de louça), strategically located his kilns just inside the bounds of the São Lourenço mangal near Niterói, providing equal access to the apicu deposits inland and the mangrove’s fuel toward the bay. Sugar mills, which required clay to “clay,” or whiten, sugar, and the potteries—some of which were connected to the mills for the production of sugar forms—sent slaves to load it on double canoes lashed together with planks. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Rio’s city council attempted to discourage the building of mangrove shacks with palm roofs, which they considered both urban eyesores and fire hazards, by fixing the price of bricks and roof tiles at a level that larger numbers could afford. But this would simply substitute one mangrove commodity for another.27And third, it was in the mangroves that masons found the lime that mortared the rising masonry city. Until the nineteenth century, Brazil’s lime came almost exclusively from the shell middens. So large that some thought them the remains entirely invaded by mangroves. This proved beneficial, as one could simultaneously harvest both the shells and the fuel needed to reduce them to quicklime. After collection, which usually involved transporting shells and firewood to a central location, workers formed caieiras, piles of alternating layers of shells and mangrove firewood, which they burned for 10 to 12 hours. Compared to reducing limestone blocks, the process was simple and required less fuel.28The quality of shell lime was not on par with that of the limestone that was occasionally imported from Lisbon as ballast. The local mortars had a tendency to turn black in the humid tropics, and for watertight construction, such as water storage tanks, stone lime was preferred, but nearly all common masonry relied upon the middens; for this, Cardim insisted, shell lime was as good as Spanish limestone. Demand was great. Some sixteenth-century sugar mills consumed more than three thousand moios (2.3 million liters) of oyster lime in their construction. But at that time there was no lack in supply either; Cardim relates that “a single mountain [of shells] built … the College of Bahia, the governor’s palaces, and many other buildings, and it is still not exhausted.”29At the beginning of the nineteenth century, lime producers in Rio located caieiras throughout the bay; Silvestre de Sousa, who provided lime to the government for building the royal palace and maintaining fortifications, centered his production on Brocoió Island, next to Paquetá, equidistant from the many mangroves of the northern shoreline. Pedro Soares Caldeira noted that the booming growth of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói in the mid–nineteenth century placed heavy demands on the mangroves for fuel and shells. Auguste de Saint-Hilaire considered shell collecting, which he observed at Ilha de Governador, as among the labors most detrimental to slave health, and Thomas Ewbank provided a vivid description of slaves, chest-deep in the surf of Gloria Bay, landing tea chests of quicklime, their heads whitened by the caustic powder that had been carelessly ladled from boats with a hoe. Each trip out, the porters submerged themselves to remove the burning lime from their heads and shoulders.30The rusty brown waters of the mangal hinted at one last contribution the red mangrove made to the colonial export economy—in the form of high concentrations of tannin in its bark. Portugal supplied tannin to Europe from her native Mediterranean sumac, but unlike the case of Portugal’s salt industry (a royal monopoly that the crown thrust upon Brazilians despite the colony’s own extensive salinas), colonial tanners substituted mangrove bark with no apparent opposition, and Vasconcellos claimed that the leaves themselves tanned leather more quickly than sumac.31 This contributed to a thriving export of tanned leathers. In the seventeenth century, tanners engaged their own slaves to bark the red mangrove, but by the late eighteenth century barking became a self-sustaining activity. In 1800, Bahia received two hundred boatloads of mangrove bark from its southern towns, and Rio de Janeiro, while relying to some extent on its bay’s own resources, had it shipped in from Santos and from as far north as the mangrove-choked Caravelas River. Passing through Caravelas in 1817, Prince Maximilian of Wied reported that a large vessel denominated the casqueiro (bark boat) plied the waters between Rio and Caravelas with such frequency as to have taken on the official role of mail packet.32 In the early 1750s, Brazil’s combined leather exports averaged more than 150,000 shoe-sole blanks, referred to as vermelho (red) due to the mangrove’s dyeing properties; 110,000 hides, some tanned, others salted; and 500 pelts of the native deer, leaving uncounted the tens of thousands of hides that were produced to package tobacco. By the end of the eighteenth century, leather goods figured as Brazil’s third, and occasionally second, most valuable export.33The 1677 dispute involving the Jesuits is the first documented conflict over the legal status of the mangroves, although there must have been precedents. Thereafter, despite the crown’s declaration of the mangals’ public status, the issue resurfaces often. The nature of the mangal, an alien formation squeezed between the familiar and legally defined spaces of sea and land, presented unusual obstacles to legal and geographical definition. It was easy enough to declare that common property ended at the reach of the high tide, but did that mean the average high tide or the extreme spring tides? The difference amounted to hundreds of square kilometers in an average estuary. And as the tide entered the mangal along contorted natural channels, were the long, narrow strips of supratidal land between them part of the mangal or the mainland? Additionally, the mangal was constantly on the move, increasing the difficulty. At the water’s margin, the mangrove was most fluid. In estuaries with high deposition rates, red mangrove has been observed to advance as much as one hundred meters annually. On the land side, through alluvial deposition and leaf litter, the white mangrove will gradually rise above the highest tides—becoming, by definition, no longer public property. The nebulosity of the mangals’ legal bounds, the landholders’ desire for exclusive access, and finally the short legal memory, corruptibility, and overlapping jurisdictions of crown and local officials made the final settlement of the issue improbable.34 Powerful actors occasionally succeeded in obstructing access, confiscating boats, nets, bark, and firewood, and imprisoning infractors. But the excluded parties consistently petitioned the state, which, bound by law, judged repeatedly in their favor.35However, even when all parties accepted the mangal as common, this only altered the conflict. Initially, the mangal was an unregulated public good, an extreme form of common property where each party vied with others in a race to harvest nature’s bounty, the prize falling to those who arrived first and extracted most. But the battle remained over which utility should be given priority, for many of the mangrove’s extractive activities were incompatible. Even among those who cut the mangroves for fuel, there were disputes over whether sugar producers, brick makers, or the general public ought to be favored. Various interests approached the crown with extraordinary claims seeking the right to either take their needs from the mangroves first or to ban all extractions conflicting with their own. As demand for mangrove resources increased, so did demands for regulation.Fortunately for the colonists, mangroves exhibit a prolifigacy and resilience to human impact that is incomparable to most other forests. Typical tropical forests form over millennia through a process of species succession; when mature climax formations are felled, they cannot regenerate in a single generation, but only over similar time scales, if ever. The mangroves, on the other hand, are pioneer species. Succession does not occur vertically, over generations, as in a typical forest, but horizontally across the landscape, seaward. Even when felled, new life springs from the standing roots. Mangroves that had been cut for timber might be selectively reharvested every couple of decades, and Silva Lisboa reported that mangrove could be coppiced (periodically trimmed) for fuel every 12 years.36However, what was true of the tree’s resilience was not so for its habitat, and the felling and barking of the red mangrove in particular brought the immediate emigration of local fish and crabs and the sudden die-off of shellfish that overheat with the loss of shade. Even when only barked, the red mangroves no longer produce the leaves so critical to the food chain. Residents who relied upon the mangal for food complained of these events. Henry Koster, an English planter in Pernambuco who ventured that mangrove grew back at such prodigious rates that demand for firewood could never exceed supply, also noted by contrast that fish forsook the waters in regions where the mangroves had been cut, and that “in a fish-pen … near my place, no fish was caught after the fuel-cutters had established themselves at the bridge hard by; of this I heard much, as there was some squabbling on the subject.”37 The removal of the mangroves, whether for fuel, timber, or bark, proved as detrimental to subsistence exploitation as exclusion.In southern Bahia, complaints about mangrove deforestation and the ensuing disappearance of local fish found sympathy in local town councils. The district of Ilhéus had a population of 6,000 in the 1720s that had grown to 17,431 by 1780 and 75,569 by 1818. Camamu, with roughly 6,000 inhabitants in 1818, was its largest settlement.38 Although some manioc was planted using slave and household labor, and the crown intermittently financed royal timbering here, the population largely relied upon subsistence plots, forests, and waters to provide their daily bread; fish and shellfish were more than alimentary supplements. In 1780, Manoel da Cunha Meneses observed that southern Bahia was the only place in all of the Americas that had neither cattle nor butcher shops.39 In 1701, the crown had made it illegal to ranch within ten leagues of the sea in order to prevent cattle depredations on farms and plantations. Only draft oxen were permitted, and there were few of these in southern Bahia. Most regions imported beef on the hoof, but southern Bahia was too isolated. Despite numerous attempts to build roads into the interior where cattle proliferated, and despite imports of oxen by sea from Salvador to work in timbering, the people of Ilhéus ate no beef. Fish and shellfish provided their protein.40 Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, who both administered royal timbering in Ilhéus and served as judge (ouvidor), concurred. When local manioc planters complained that the king’s expanding timber reserves would prevent the expansion of manioc planting and result in the starvation of the local population, Silva Lisboa countered that the residents did not rely on manioc, but nearly exclusively on the mangroves, for subsistence. Despairingly, he also attributed the district’s general economic torpor not to the natural indolence of the population, but to the productivity of the mangrove. Despite his consistent efforts to encourage the citizens to industry and agriculture, he lamented that “the people live for the most part in dire misery, content with the sustenance of fish and oysters which abound on these coasts and rivers.”41Jaguaripe, on Ilhéus’s northern border, despite greater access to the herds driven from the interior, was in a similar situation. Luis dos Santos Vilhena described the town as economically quite diversified, being the p