Backlands (16 page)

Moreover, the mountain range is a highly efficient agent of condensation. Its special topographical profile triggers the evaporation of ocean moisture. The rivers that flow down from its heights then rise again from the sea, moving their waters away from the coast and back up to the interior, rushing into the backlands. The waters entice the stranger into missions of exploration. The earth seduces man: It calls him to her fertile breast; it enchants him with her beautiful form and finally traps him irresistibly in her river currents.

The majestic course of the Tietê offers an eloquent example of how a river led the way to the exploration of the land. Other rivers, such as the São Francisco, the Parnaíba, the Amazon, and other waterways of the eastern seaboard, present currents and rapids that fall from the terraces of the plateaus and make progress to the interior difficult. The Tietê effortlessly carries travelers to the Rio Grande and then to the Paraíba and the Parnaíba. This river was the highway into Minas Gerais, Goiás, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, and, in fact, all of Brazil. In taking this easier course, one that charts our colonial expansion, the explorers did not encounter either sterile lands or ugly deserts, as in the North, to impede their journey.

It is easier to show how this physical distinction helps to clarify the differences and contrasts between the events that took place at the opposite poles of our country, particularly during the period of acute colonial crisis in the seventeenth century. Dutch rule during this period was established in Pernambuco and extended along the entire east coast from Bahia to Maranhão. In the memorable confrontations that took place, our three founding races joined ranks to face a common enemy. The man of the South, on the other hand, remained completely distanced from these events and, in acts of rebellion against the decrees from the Portuguese crown, demonstrated his disengagement from his struggling countrymen. He was almost as dangerous an enemy as the Dutch. It was a strange population of rebellious men of mixed race, expressing other tendencies, following their own guiding stars, and setting out in new directions. These determined southerners trampled all manner of bulls and edicts. They rebelled outright against the Portuguese court in tenacious resistance to the Jesuits. In turn the Jesuits ignored the Dutch and appealed to Madrid through Ruy de Montoya and to Rome through Dias Taño. This made it clear that they regarded the rebels from the South as the more serious enemy.

Indeed, while von Schoppe’s army was propping up the Nassau government in Pernambuco, in São Paulo events were leading to the dark tragedy of Guaíra. And when the Portuguese restoration made it possible to repel the Dutch invader, and to round up the exhausted resistance fighters once again, the southerners used these events as the opportunity to make it clear that they were forging a separate destiny. They declared their complete autonomy in the one-minute reign of Amador Bueno.

There is no greater division in our history, one which reveals the true face of the nation. One can barely distinguish it in the lavish courts of the governors in Bahia, where the Society of Jesus ruled with the privilege of conquering souls, a self-serving euphemism used to cloak its monopoly on indigenous labor.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the differences became even more apparent. The men from the South were spreading out through the entire country. They traveled as far as the distant borders of Ecuador. Well into the middle of the eighteenth century, pioneers followed the twisted trails of the
bandeiras
. They followed each other untiringly in successive waves, with the inevitability of a natural law. In fact, these intrepid caravans of warrior-pioneers did represent unlimited potential. As the waves of humanity descended on the four corners of the earth, invading their own country and breaking trails in all directions, they made discoveries after the discovery, baring the gleaming breasts of the mines.

The backlands’ pioneers headed west from the coast, leaving behind the decadence of its metropolitan lifestyle riddled with the vices of a degenerate monarchy. They migrated to the distant territories of Pernambuco and the Amazon and appeared to come from another race, with their courage and resiliency in the face of adversity. When Indian raids threatened Bahia, Pernambuco, or Paraíba, and settlements of runaway slaves, known as
quilombos
, multiplied in the forests, the southerner rose as a classical hero to vanquish all dangers in his path. The crude epic of Palmares tells this tale.

The son of the North did not have the benefit of an environment to endow him with equal physical stamina. If that had occurred, the expeditions would have also come from the east and the North and would have crushed and eliminated the indigenous population in a pincerlike operation. But as the northern settler tried to move west and south, he encountered a hostile natural environment and he speedily retraced his steps to the coast. He did not have the bravery of a conqueror who at once feels at home in a new land. The northern man lacked the confidence that the lush and easily penetrable virgin territory inspired in the southerner. The explorations begun then, in the second half of the sixteenth century, by Sebastião Tourinho along the Rio Doce, Bastião Álvares along the São Francisco, and Gabriel Soares in northern Bahia to the headwaters of the Paraguaçú, may have had the energetic stimulus of the Belchior Días silver mines. They are, however, a pale imitation of the huge Anhangüera or Pascoal de Araújo
bandeiras
expeditions.

Trapped between the cane fields of the coast and the backlands, between the sea and the desert, in a blockade aggravated by climatic conditions, the northerner lost his nerve and did not acquire the rebellious spirit that rings eloquently in the pages of the history of the South. Such contrasts are certainly not based on racial factors. With this outline of the role of the environment on our history, let us proceed to discuss its influence on our ethnic development.

Let us refer back to our opening argument. If we agree that the environment does not form race, in the Brazilian case there is great variation in the mixture of the three principal races in diverse regions of our country. The very diversity of conditions to which inhabitants must adapt has prepared the way for different racial variations to emerge. Furthermore, and in our times this is an indisputable fact, external factors have a strong impact even on well-established populations, which continue to be displaced by secular migrations even if these societies have the resources of an advanced culture. If this applies to highly evolved races in other climates, which are sheltered by a civilization that is like the blood plasma of a great collective organism, how can we describe our own situation, which is very different? In our case, the close contact between races means that racial characteristics will become intimately fused, and the long period of evolution that follows creates inherent weaknesses in the mixed races. This, in turn, increases the influence of the environment on racial formation. The environment imprints its own characteristics on the human organism, which is undergoing a process of fusion of different types. Without taking this daring analogy too far, we can assert that these complex biological reactions have more energetic agents than the chemical reactions of matter. In addition to heat and light, which exercise their influence in both cases, we must consider topography, climate, and the mysterious presence and catalytic force of nature in all its forms. In our country, as we have seen, the intensity of these elements is far less uniform than has been claimed. History shows that the environment has led to a high diversification of our ethnic characteristics, producing a unique miscegenation.

There is no such thing as a Brazilian anthropological type.

Let us continue to seek the elusive and perhaps ephemeral mirage of a subrace in this intricate human stew. Since we are unable to describe our own nascent races, let us stick to our subject. We will quickly review the historical antecedents of the
jagunço
, the gunman of the backlands. As we have seen, racial formation in the North of Brazil is very different than in the South. Historical circumstances, which are in large part the result of physical conditions, marked the nature of racial mixing with distinct differences that are still prevalent today. The settlement march from Maranhão to Bahia is a case that illustrates this point.

It was a slow march. The Portuguese settlers did not approach the northern coast with the vital strength that comes from concentrated migrations, large invading masses that are able to preserve by sheer numbers all the qualities acquired on a long historical trajectory even when displaced from their native soil. They came in ragged groups, divided into small bands of condemned exiles or counterfeit colonists, without the virile energy of conquerors. They were still spellbound by illusions of the East.

Brazil was a land of exiles, a vast prison that was used to intimidate the heretics and renegades, all the victims of the dark “let him die for it” justice of the times. From those early times, the reduced number of settlers contrasts with the hugeness of the land and the great size of the indigenous population. The instructions given in 1615 to Captain Fragoso de Albuquerque concerning the implementation of the truce treaty with La Ravadière are very clear. This document states that “the lands of Brazil are not unpopulated because there are more than three thousand Portuguese inhabiting them.”

This applied to the entire country, even one hundred years after the discovery. According to Aires de Casal, in his monograph
Corografia Brazilica
, “The population grew so slowly that at the time of Dom Sebastião’s death in 1580 the only settlement was on the island of Itamaracá, which had about two hundred inhabitants and three sugar plantations.”

When a few years later Bahia’s population increased, the disproportion between the Europeans and the two other ethnic groups continued in perfect arithmetic progression. According to Fernão Cardim, there were two thousand whites, four thousand blacks, and six thousand Indians.
⁹
For a long time the native peoples held the greatest numbers. Their influence must have been significant in the first intermarriages.

The adventurers who plowed their way into the region were, moreover, of a kind inclined to mass miscegenation. Warriors who had not known a home—used to loose living in the camps—corrupt exiles, and adventurers all lived by Barlaeus’s aphorism
ultra aequinoctialem non peccavi,
“there are no sins south of the equator.” Consorting with the Indian women soon turned into open debauchery, from which not even the clergy were exempt. The Jesuit father Manuel da Nóbrega addressed this situation clearly, in his famous 1549 letter to the king. Here he portrays the lax customs of the colonists with guileless realism and states that the country is becoming populated with the progeny of Christians who are multiplying as a result of their heathen behavior. He suggests that the orphans be sent to him and even the women “who stray from the teachings of the church, and who could all find husbands, since the land is vast and rich.” Thus the first crossing of races occurred intensively in this early period between the European and the native peoples. Casal reports that “from early on the Tupinquims, who are good-natured pagans, were baptized and married to Europeans, thus producing innumerable whites in the country with Tupinquim blood in their veins.”

In contrast, the Africans played a lesser role in the first century of the reign even though they existed in large numbers. In many areas their numbers were scarce, such as in Rio Grande do Norte, where, according to the trustworthy narrator Casal, “The Indians had been long gone, in spite of their savagery, and their descendants through their contact with Europeans and Africans have increased the classes of the whites and the brown skinned.”

These passages are important. They suggest without bias that the extinction of the Indian of the North was due, as our eminent historian Adolfo Varnhagen maintained, to repeated crossings rather than to true extermination.
¹⁰
We also know that the landowners were anxious to profit from these alliances by securing the loyalty of the native. This disposition is also reflected in various royal charters issued by the court from 1750 to 1758, which in spite of what João Francisco Lisboa called “an interminable chain of hesitations and contradictions,” shows there was royal intent to curb the greed of the colonists who were determined to enslave the savage. In fact, some of these charters, such as that of 1680, decree that lands shall belong to the native, “even those lands already given to others since those who should have right of ownership are the same Indians who are natural lords of the land.”

The Society of Jesus was persistent in its effort to assimilate the Indian. The Jesuits were forced to submit to many restrictions on their activities in the South, but in the North they had free reign. In this region they played a positive role, if one overlooks a few moral lapses. They were at least an opposing force to the colonists, who were focused on personal gain. In the stupid struggle between perversity and barbarism, these eternal exiles accomplished a lot. They were the only men of their times with discipline. However quixotic the attempt to raise the mental state of the aborigine to the abstractions of monotheistic religion, it brought the benefit of bringing the native peoples into the mainstream of our history, until the timely reforms of Minister Pombal.
¹¹

The history of the missions in the North, in the entire territory from Maranhão to Bahia, completes in a certain way the feverish push of the
bandeiras
. It was a slow effort to penetrate into the heart of the backlands, from the flanks of the Ibiapaba to those of the Itiúba. If the
bandeiras
spread the blood of the three races throughout the newly discovered territories, triggering a general intermingling of peoples in spite of the conflicts that this brought with it, the Jesuit missions, on the other hand, created organized settlements that became magnets for the work of the apostolate and served to unify and integrate the native peoples, coalescing their small communities into villages. For over a century the Jesuits penetrated deep into the backlands and were responsible for the preservation of this part of our racial heritage. Some historians, impressed by the arrival of the African on a massive scale, an event that occurred without interruption from the end of the sixteenth century to our own times, in the late 1850s, have maintained that the black man was the strongest ally of the Portuguese in the colonial enterprise and ascribe an exaggerated influence of the black in the formation of the backlander of the North. However, as far as the invasion of these miserable enslaved people is concerned, it is questionable that they had a strong influence on the backland territories. Their prolific fecundity as well as their ability to adapt, honed by the searing suns of Africa, are traits that argue against this theory.