Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late Colonial Brazil

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-2-215

1527-1900

Hal Langfur,

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

The major gold and diamond strikes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries produced an unprecedented economic expansion, a complex urban society, and a rich Baroque culture in the inland region of southeastern Brazil that came to be called Minas Gerais. The mining windfall transformed Portuguese America and the transatlantic commerce that linked it to Europe and Africa. By the time the Portuguese crown fully acknowledged these changes and transferred the colonial capital from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, however, the inevitable depletion of the mineral washings was well underway. The accompanying economic havoc, first felt on a large scale around the middle of the eighteenth century and intensifying as the decades passed, resulted in severe social dislocation and political discontent.1 Long after the search for gold purportedly ended and the concerns of colonists turned elsewhere, the inhabitants of the captaincy of Minas Gerais continued to scour outlying lands for new mineral deposits and, when these failed to materialize, for pastoral, agricultural, and commercial alternatives.Between the 1760s and 1820s, local elites, slaves, impoverished settlers, and seminomadic indigenous peoples engaged in a violent contest for land and resources, radiating outward from the mining district's major towns. Throughout the vast hinterlands of Minas Gerais, this conflict sometimes smoldered, sometimes flared, accompanying the primary instance of frontier migration during Brazil's transition from colony to nation; yet, both this conflict and the migration itself have gone virtually unstudied, subject to the long-standing scholarly tendency to emphasize Brazil's coastal populations and export matrices. A slow-moving, often inconspicuous dispersion to the west, to the south, and, especially for the purposes of the present article, to the east, this internal colonization depended on the actions of both the powerful and the poor, the white and the nonwhite, the free and the enslaved, each with their own reasons for journeying to the frontier, each with their own claims on unsettled land, each seen as invaders by the indigenous groups who occupied this domain.Although present in virtually every zone in which settlement occurred, indigenous resistance would peak in the rugged, mountainous zone, then still blanketed by the great Atlantic forest, wedged between the inland mining district and the Atlantic coast (see figure 1). Forging a local policy of frontier incorporation, captaincy officials, despite a profound ambivalence concerning their own actions, challenged a crown policy that designated this area, along with other frontier zones, as "forbidden lands"—territory placed off-limits to settlers in an attempt to block the flow of contraband to coastal dwellers and seafarers. In the process, events on this remote colonial frontier impinged on metropolitan authority, eroded established territorial boundaries, undermined crown indigenous policy, and recast regional identity.Penetration of the region and aggression against its native occupants took what appeared to be a dramatic turn in 1808. Following the arrival in Rio de Janeiro of the Portuguese royal court, in flight from Napoleon's armies, Prince Regent João declared open war on the Botocudo Indians, officially sanctioning their slaughter and enslavement, a policy that remained in place until 1831. Archival evidence reveals, however, that the militarization of this conflict began a full half-century earlier. Despite royal prohibitions, virtually every governor of Minas Gerais, from the 1760s on, pursued a policy of violent Indian conquest at one time or another, although none commanded the military resources and few possessed the unabashed anti-Indian candor of the prince. That the conflict commenced long before the crown declared war demands a rethinking of the basis of this official action. Far from a sudden reversal marking the ultimate deterioration of relations between the state and the remnant of the once numerous Indians of non-Amazonian Brazil, the crown's action in fact capped a long history of conflict caused by settler and state incursions into the Indian territory that local authorities called the Eastern Sertão.The chronology and origin of the assault on the Indians are not the only formulations requiring reassessment. Crown and local indigenous policy must be reconsidered, as well as the very notions of geography and regional identity that gave rise to colonization. Local officials invoked a crown policy intended for Brazil's settled village Indians as the legislative basis for the conquest of this sprawling frontier. They did so in a fluid and contested context in which interdependent yet irreconcilable positions concerning the significance of Indian territory vied for predominance, and to whose opposing ends crown policy proved to be equally adaptable. Before conquest became legitimate, the policy that forbade activity by colonists in the region had to be challenged, as did prevailing indigenous policy. Geographic space itself had to be culturally reconstituted, the sertão transformed from a savage wilderness into a beckoning frontier, from a barrier blocking the passage of gold and diamond smugglers into a fertile, gold-laden cornucopia, an Eden or Eldorado, promising sustenance and riches to those who dared to seize them. This transformation, like the conquest it engendered, occurred gradually and unevenly, with the notion of the fecund frontier present as early as the 1760s and that of the frontier as a geographic deterrent enduring into the 1810s.During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Eastern Sertão became one of the many frontier zones that formed on the periphery of consolidating states and market economies throughout Latin America and the wider Atlantic world.2 The history of this zone resists the kind of stage-by-stage analysis, whether as triumph or catastrophe, commonly favored by frontier historians. For decades, colonization led neither to the successful establishment of a sedentary settler society nor to the final subjugation of the region's indigenous peoples. As a result, historians have rarely recognized the zone as a frontier at all.3 The advances and reversals of settlement characteristic of this and other such areas have even prompted some scholars to see the incorporation of the Brazilian interior as a negation of the usual frontier dynamic or, to use their terminology, as a "hollow frontier." One historian has gone so far as to posit that a Brazilian "pioneer frontier" did not even exist until the 1930s when industrialization prompted rapid expansion into the hinterlands.4 The trouble with such views derives from a failure to understand territorial incorporation as a multidimensional, even multidirectional, process that involves both contestation and mediation. To confine frontier history only to those periods when colonists achieved their greatest triumphs is to write history from the perspective of the conquerors. A more comprehensive and historically precise approach conceptualizes frontiers not merely as the leading edge of European expansion but as zones of contact and interaction, albeit unequal interaction, between cultures. While the penetration of market capitalism into remote environments was central to the frontier dynamic, this expansion in many zones occurred in fits and starts, advanced and receded, and required a long period of gestation. The frontier was not a remote place where European-based capitalism achieved dominance; in fact, that was precisely where it failed to do so. That is why the eastern forests of Minas Gerais felt the pressures of frontier expansion well before the region experienced rapid economic growth and effective incorporation into either an export economy or a consolidated domestic market.5Starting from the assumption, then, that the frontier constitutes that peripheral geographic area where economic and political incorporation is not yet assured, and where the outcome of cultural encounters remains in doubt, this article moves beyond a historiography that subordinates the subject of internal colonization to that of Brazil's export complexes—sugar, gold, coffee, cotton, cacao, rubber, and cattle—under the erroneous assumption that the frontier advanced only when growing international trade and, later, industrialization compelled inland movement. The evidence presented reveals the historical salience of internal colonization that falls precisely between two export booms—gold and coffee—a period commonly treated as one of stasis and decadence; it also demonstrates the enduring importance of native peoples in the face of an urban-based historiography in which they scarcely appear.As in other regions south of the Amazon Basin, Brazilian Indians all but vanish from accounts of the history of Minas Gerais the moment they no longer serve as a narrative foil for the exploits of the bandeirantes, slave-raiders who hunted them mercilessly before the gold discoveries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries restructured colonial society.6 The ensu ing gold rush, which depended on the labor of Indians before African slaves replaced them, and which sealed the final destruction of many groups, unfolds in historical accounts virtually devoid of indigenous peoples.7 By the third decade of the eighteenth century, as one historian puts it, articulating a central assumption responsible for this scholarly lacuna, gold seekers had "already penetrated practically all of the forests and sertões, expelling and/or decimating the great majority of the indigenous population" of Minas Gerais.8 That assessment combines with scholarly biases for focusing on the opulent apex of the gold cycle, the export rather than the internal economy, urban rather than rural society. Add the overshadowing presence of the foiled 1789 nativist conspiracy known as the Inconfidência Mineira, and the absence of Indians from what we know about Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century and beyond becomes comprehensible if no less misleading.The inhabitants of colonial Minas Gerais knew otherwise, especially those who migrated outward from the urban mining centers as the decline following the gold boom became pronounced. To their great consternation, they knew that Indians had, in fact, survived in the sertão, even if they were not fated to do so in later historical monographs. West of the São Francisco River, throughout the fertile region that would come to be known as the Triângulo Mineiro, the southern Kayapó formed a barrier to settlement well into the nineteenth century.9 South and southeast of the mining district, along its border with the captaincies of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, lived the Coropó and Coroado. They responded to settler incursions throughout the second half of the eighteenth century with a combination of resistance and accommodation.10It was, however, especially in the Eastern Sertão that Indians continued to keep the territorial ambitions of colonial society in check. The Puri resolutely held the southern reaches of this tropical and subtropical forest separating Minas Gerais from the Atlantic coast. Their domain stretched from the Paraíba River to the low mountains of the Mantiqueira range and the upper reaches of the Doce River. Ranging roughly from north to south, the Kamakã, Pataxó, Kopoxó, Kutaxó, Monoxó, Kumanaxó, Panhame, Maxakali, Malali, and Makoni inhabited the forests dividing Minas Gerais from coastal Bahia and Espírito Santo, including portions of the Pardo, Jequitinhonha, Mucuri, São Mateus and Doce river valleys.11 Vying for the territory of these groups, moving across a vast expanse of mountainous terrain extending from the Pomba River north to the Pardo River and beyond, the Aimoré or Botocudo, as they were increasingly called after the middle of the eighteenth century, blocked settlement and exploration for new gold and diamond deposits.12The Portuguese applied the name Botocudo generically to a variety of groups believed, no doubt erroneously in certain cases, to be common descendants of the Aimoré, inland natives who for two centuries raided coastal settlements in Ilhéus, Porto Seguro, and Espírito Santo before seeking refuge from the Portuguese deeper in the interior. These groups generally spoke the same Macro-Gê language or one of its dialects.13 At times, the Portuguese classified groups like the Pataxó, Maxakali, and Makoni as Botocudo subgroups; at times they considered them distinct. To this day, no scholarly consensus has emerged.14 That the name Botocudo had a questionable ethnological basis—although it is still employed, since colonial sources provide little alternative—should be clear from its origin: it derived from botoque or batoque, the Portuguese word for barrel lids that resembled the ornamental wooden disks that many, but not all, of these Indians inserted in their ear lobes and lower lips.15 In practice, when colonists used the term Botocudo, they referred to nothing more specific than any one of the numerous indigenous groups of the Eastern Sertão who refused to submit to Portuguese subjugation. The primary exception occurred when colonists sought to focus attention on a particular group, singling them out as enemies, for instance, not only of the Portuguese but also of other indigenous communities. Thus in 1800, priest Francisco da Silva Campos petitioned the crown for greater aid in the struggle to christianize Indians, expressing horror that the Botocudo had "destroyed through warfare" the following "nations" in order to "eat them": "Mandali [Malali?], Maxakali, Pendi, Capoxi [Kopoxó], Panhame … Monoxó, [and] Pataxó."16 The generic term Botocudo, in other words, was synonymous with enemy.The persistence of this inadequate representation of the Botocudo in the subsequent historiography derives from a dearth of ethnographic studies, extending into the second half of the twentieth century, by which time the near extinction of the region's natives and their languages had occurred. Apart from the broadest of characteristics, such as their seminomadic hunting and foraging, their proclivity for fissuring into small bands, their determined territoriality, and their frequent conflicts with neighboring groups, frustratingly little is known about Botocudo conduct and cosmology. Mobility and fragmentation themselves help explain the nature of their resistance to colonization, which took the form of isolated ambushes and flight far more frequently than large-scale warfare. The impulse to resist itself, however, sprang from a still more fundamental need to retain an expanse of territory sufficient to ensure physical and social reproduction.17Like indigenous nomads throughout the Americas, the Botocudo and their fellow occupants of the Eastern Sertão resorted to many other survival strategies, including cooperation and acculturation. An odd sort of cooperation reigned even when relations turned on enmity, as officials depended on natives to oppose incursions into the sertão in order to serve the interests of the state. Hostile Indians, in short, made policing the wilderness possible. More conventional forms of collaboration also arose. Captaincy governors supplied provisions to those natives who settled in state-supported, church-supervised villages or aldeias. These Indians often joined captaincy troops on expeditions attacking still unincorporated groups. Moreover, parishes on the eastern edge of the mining district were, as one official put it, "full of tame heathens" who had accepted baptism.18 Such evidence points to an array of survival strategies, some of them reactive, some proactive, but all historical products of a prolonged process of contact and conquest.At the points of contact between colonial and indigenous society, Catholic priests frequently functioned as intermediaries, facilitating the process of approximation. Such was the case in the forests along the lower Cuieté River. The church dispatched clerics to the area in order to convert Indians who settled in several aldeias there in the 1760s.19 The largest of these aldeias, Larangeiras, was home to Indians identified by the priest Manoel Vieyra Nunes as children, women, and men, some 40 "warriors" among them, belonging to a variety of separate "nations," apparently Maxakali subgroups. They received gifts for remaining in the aldeia and for their "obedience," including knives, machetes, hoes, and rosaries, as well as food.20 They did not, however, fit neatly into colonial categories that sharply divided peaceable, settled Indians from nomadic adversaries. Some of the groups that took up residence at Larangeiras engaged in "good correspondence," according to Nunes, while others displayed "little correspondence," suggesting that each had its own objectives. With respect to the less genial natives, Nunes betrayed a deep ambivalence: "If they cannot be judged friends," he wrote the governor, "neither can they be called enemies, since they do not engage in hostilities against us."21The spectrum of possible relations did not prevent the Botocudo from becoming the great nemesis of Minas settlers bent on discovering the new lands and sources of wealth that they hoped would restore their languishing personal fortunes or simply provide for their subsistence. Convinced that these lands would return the captaincy to its former prosperity and prominence, capitancy officials became equally determined to neutralize Botocudo resistance. As settlers both rich and poor pushed into zones bypassed by the gold rush, they invaded lands controlled by the Botocudo and other groups, provoking violent clashes and, finally, the prince regent's declared war. Unmentioned in standard histories of the era, however, the war against the Botocudo in Minas Gerais in fact began with the expansionist policies of Gov ernor Luís Diogo Lobo da Silva (1763–68), more than 50 years before the prince regent made it official.22In the rugged, forested sertão separating the mining camps of Minas Gerais from the Atlantic coast, settlement had stalled and Indians, especially the Puri, Pataxó, and Botocudo, remained dominant throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. Their persistent presence was in part a result of crown policy. Soon after bandeirantes made the first discoveries of mineral wealth in the 1690s, the crown sealed off the Eastern Sertão. The aim was to prevent the smuggling of gold and diamonds to the coast by those seeking to evade heavy crown taxation. At least in theory, trade and other overland traffic between the captaincy and the coast were restricted to just three roads patrolled by soldiers: the first leading southwest to São Paulo and the port of Santos; the second, the Caminho Novo, south to Rio de Janeiro; and the third, northeast to Bahia and Pernambuco. Topography largely dictated the location of these routes. Attempts to penetrate the sertão at other points, particularly by way of the most direct route traversing the captaincy of Espírito Santo from the Atlantic coast, proved impracticable because of the inaccessibility of the mountains, the vastness of the forests, the lack of easily navigable rivers, and the absence—out of fear of hostile Indians—of settlers to provision expeditions. That, in any case, is how one contemporary described the problem of access to the mines at the turn of the eighteenth century.23 But the determination of the crown to control smuggling, monitor the flow of gold out of the mines, reap its royal fifth on gold production, and tax imports (including slaves) and exports meant that natural barriers evolved quickly into legal prohibitions.24Just as the discovery of gold determined which regions of the captaincy would become densely populated, the absence of discoveries left other areas all but untouched by colonists once initial exploration failed to uncover accessible mineral wealth. As the pattern of settlement took shape in the wake of the gold rush, the crown turned to a policy of prohibiting access to these unsettled zones in order to halt unsupervised and thus untaxed prospecting and to stem the flow of contraband. The unsettled zones that ringed the mining district came to be known as the "forbidden lands," a designation used by eighteenth-century officials most frequently in reference to the southern and southeastern reaches of the captaincy, where the heavily traveled routes to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and constant pressure from settlers to open new lands made restrictions on movement imperative in the view of a crown bent on surveillance. But it was to the east and northeast, mountainous territory covered by dense forests, where the connection between the prohibition on travel and settlement, on the one hand, and the presence and resistance of Indians, on the other, was most tightly drawn. This "sertão of the eastern parts," explained Governor Luís da Cunha Meneses (1783–88), had been cordoned off and designated "forbidden lands in accordance with the theory that the said sertões serve as a natural barrier that protects this captaincy against smuggling."25The susceptibility of this verdant sertão to any number of activities incompatible with the dictates of strict colonial supervision meant that the region was among the first to be set off-limits after the gold strikes. In 1700, as news of the discovery of gold rapidly spread, construction of a road linking the mines with the Espírito Santo coast was begun and then, two years later, abruptly halted on crown orders. From one point of view, the project made sense. Promising a direct route to the mines, traversing a distance from east to west of some 350 kilometers between the coast and Vila Rica, the road could have served as the sole access to and egress from the mines, all traffic being monitored as it passed through the fortified gateway port of Vila Nova do Espírito Santo (later Vitória). But the opposing view, which prevailed, was that opening yet one more access to the mines would make the supervision of all routes more difficult.26 That the crown had some difficulty stopping what it had begun is clear: concerned by the unlawful flow of gold from Minas Gerais to the coast, the governor of Espírito Santo was forced in 1710 to reaffirm the suspension of all exploration or road building in the region.27 It was not until a full century later that the crown changed positions and finally permitted the construction of a number of roads cutting through the Eastern Sertão to the coast, including a route descending the Doce River basin, passing from Vila Rica to Vitória through the heart of Indian territory.28 Over the course of the century, similar prohibitions had been extended to the rest of the captaincy. A royal charter of 1733, reconfirmed in 1750, prohibited the opening of new roads to the mines from any direction, not just the east, punishing as smugglers those who ignored the order or traveled along unauthorized routes. Violators had their possessions seized as presumed contraband and divided equally among the royal treasury and any informants whose collaboration led to such an arrest.29The perimeter of a territory as vast as the Eastern Sertão was impossible to patrol, but colonial authorities did what they could to enforce the prohibition. In 1761, for example, Minas Governor Gomes Freire de Andrada (1735– 52, 1758–63), learned of the discovery of gold at Cuieté, 240 kilometers northeast of Vila Rica. The gold had been unearthed by explorer Domingos Jozé Soares and a dozen of his companions who had formed a bandeira (expedition) and descended the Doce River. Proceeding eastward to the coast, where they presented a quantity of gold dust to authorities in Vitória, Soares and part of his band were promptly imprisoned for venturing off established roads to prospect in prohibited zones. Five more associates arriving later learned of the arrest and fled north to the coastal settlement of São Mateus, a town described by their accuser as a bastion of fugitives, smugglers, and murderers among whom these men were to be included for daring to cross the Eastern Sertão.30 Similar cases presumably occurred with some regularity. Another one that left documentary traces occurred in 1778, when Governor Antônio de Noronha (1775–80) learned that one of his regional military commanders had authorized a number of men to form and arm a bandeira to enter the forests occupied by Indians in a mountainous region between the Doce and Paraíba rivers. Implicated in the illegal action were the officer Captain Francisco Pires Farinho and his relation Manoel Pires Farinho31 and perhaps the district commander himself, Jozé Leme da Silva. In charge of a group of settled Coropó and Coroado Indians at the newly established parish of São Manuel da Pomba (Rio Pomba), the Farinhos found their strength bolstered by an influx of settlers to an area until recently dominated both by these Indians and the Puri. Emboldened, they sought to explore outlying zones, including those set off-limits by official regulations. Noronha reacted after Manoel Farinho led a bandeira, probably manned by settled Indians, in search of "a great stretch of open country thought to be rich" in mineral wealth. The governor chastised his local commander and Captain Farinho alike for sanctioning the expedition and thereby risking opening a route for contraband. Only with Noronha's express permission were bandeiras to be allowed to "penetrate the forests of that sertão," which the governor reminded his commander, "serve as a wall" separating Minas Gerais from Rio de Janeiro and the coast. Anyone else who persisted in such activity should be considered a criminal, imprisoned, and severely punished.32In this way, over time, the geographic basis of the mining district's access routes and settlement pattern merged with the exercise of colonial power to determine the boundaries of those lands occupied by colonists and, conversely, those where indigenous peoples found refuge and remained dominant. To the east, settlement over almost the entire distance between the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador was restricted to a narrow strip along the seaboard largely as a consequence of the Indian presence. The crown consciously sought to turn the zone between the coast and the inland mining district into a kind of forested no-man's-land, peopled by native antagonists, whose enmity, forged over the course of two centuries of conflict with coastal settlers, would prevent unauthorized access to and smuggling from the mines.33Crown legislation and the zeal of local governors had to go only so far in constructing such a barrier. The best defense against smuggling was the untracked wilderness itself and its reputedly savage denizens. Although official concerns about illicit activity in the region would never disappear entirely, colonial authorities remained convinced that their prohibitions were by and large successful, certainly far more so than measures taken to stop contraband along authorized routes. Governor Noronha could declare that "through the [eastern] forests the smuggling of gold is impracticable given that the nature of the said forests, their breadth, and the wild Indians who inhabit them make impossible the criminal pretension of smugglers in those parts."34Maps of the region provide another gauge of the effectiveness of this barrier and the status the Eastern Sertão acquired over time as Indian territory. More than this, they offer a glimpse of the conceptual framework officials and their informants projected onto distant forests, mountains, and river valleys—the changing way this unsettled space was culturally constructed, encoded, and represented, whether through valorization of its resources, demonization of its native inhabitants, or a combination of the two.35 The hopes, expectations, fears, and ethnocentrism of colonists are more in evidence than topographical accuracy on these maps, as their creators sought to possess graphically a territory that remained beyond their grasp physically. With each added detail, each refinement in technique, moreover, map-makers documented and disseminated new knowledge that amounted to a challenge to the very royal injunctions that infused the space with special significance in the first place.Drawn in the mid-seventeenth century, prior to the incorporation of geographic knowledge resulting from the gold boom, a map by the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu illustrated the Brazilian interior as virtually blank but divided into numerous regions identified by the indigenous groups dwelling in them. The zone separating the coastal captaincies of Ilhéus, Porto Seguro, Espírito Santo, and Rio de Janeiro from the region that would later evolve into the mining district—the zone that came to be known in Minas Gerais as the Eastern Sertão—bore the names of the following Indians from north to south: the Guaymure and the Aymure [Aimoré] (west of Bahia); the Apiapetang, Tapuia [a generic term for non-Tupí indigenous groups, including the Botocudo], and Margaia (west of Espírito Santo); and the Molopaque and Tououpinan-bauti [Tupinambá] (west of Rio de Janeiro). A subsequent map by Blaeu represented interior river basins with slightly more detail and altered the names of some indigenous groups. The territory controlled by the Aymure, those Indians the Portuguese would later name Botocudo, extended far to the west of the São Francisco River, although there is no reason to believe that Blaeu based the size of this territory on anything but speculation.36That exploration, despite prohibitions, persisted in the Doce river basin (and by inference in other watersheds of the Eastern Sertão) between Blaeu's time and the mid-eighteenth century is evident from a map from the 1750s, by which time the major discoveries of the gold cycle were over and the region's all