Brazil and the Brazilians cannot be understood without knowledge of their history, for here as in no other part of Latin America the past has led up to the present without any violent upheaval. While the Spanish colonies of Central and South America were plunged first in revolutionary and afterwards in civil war, shedding not only blood but also tradition and brotherhood with their kin, Portuguese America was saved from similar conditions by the odd turn of fortune that made her a monarchy, independent of Europe and yet ruled by a European prince, during the most critical years of the nineteenth century.

Thanks to Napoleon Buonaparte, no furious chasm, difficult for even thoughts to bridge, was opened between Brazil and the Mother Country; it was never necessary for young Brazilians to be taught that Europe was an oppressor who must be bitterly fought. Brazil gained in the arts of peace and in the retention of pleasant relations between herself and the lusitanos, while, in contrast, Spanish American feeling is still so strongly anti-Spanish that in times of unrest it is the immigrant of Iberian blood who is singled out for special ill-will. These republics are without memorials to their Spanish discoverers or rulers; Mexico, for example, has no statue or tablet to the memory of Hernan Cortés, great figure as he was. Admiration for the conquistadores is generally forgotten in bitterness against Spanish rule, all history before revolutionary times is coloured with this deliberately fostered feeling, and only occasionally does there arise a speaker or writer broad-minded enough to take up the cudgels for Spain and the rich inheritance she left to her children.

Brazil was more fortunate. From the time of the first Portuguese settlement down to the present day she has never suffered any great internal conflagration: there were persistent Indian troubles in the first centuries until the survivors of these unlucky natives moved back to the interior forests, but among the population that grew up in Brazil, hardy and prolific, there has been little strife with the insignificant exception of the feuds of the Emboabas, the Mascates and the Balaios.

Brazil was discovered twice. First came a Spaniard, Vicente Pinzon, an old companion of Columbus: he found and reconnoitred the mouth of the Amazon, and sailed south to a point which he named Santa Maria de la Consolación, but which is now known as Cape St. Augustine. On his return to Spain his report roused no interest at a Court where new discoveries of land only added to the embarras de richesses, and the attention of the adventurous was already taken up with the West Indies; the second discovery (if we ignore the tale of the sight of Brazilian shores by Diogo de Lepe, whose wanderings were, in any case, unfruitful) was a pure accident, but, occurring to a Portuguese, was immediately seized upon as a basis of claim to part of the new lands in the West. This was on May 3, 1500, three months after the voyage of Pinzon to the Amazon. Spain, to whom the all-powerful Pope Alexander VI had allotted in the famous bull of 1495 all the new lands discovered or to be discovered in the West, while Portugal was given rights to discoveries in the East, might have contested this claim but for two reasons: the first was that the Treaty of Tordesillas had shifted the Pope’s dividing line westward to a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands so that Portugal could retain her Atlantic island discoveries; the second was that either by accident or design the early cartographers drew Brazil’s easterly outline about twenty-two degrees more to the east than it should have been, so that the whole of the enormous tract of what is Brazil today fell within the legitimate claims of Portugal. It was but a matter of equity that Portugal should have a share in the lands of the West, for to the work of that Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, the initiative for sea adventure was due. Henry, inheritor of sea traditions on both sides of his parentage, for his mother was an English princess, daughter of John of Gaunt, spent his life in a long sea dream translated into deeds; for forty years he lived on the lonely promontory of Sagres, his observatory full of charts, the haunt of shipmasters and geographers, with his shipyards below the windows ever busy with the building of stout caravels: from 1420 until his death in 1460 the Navigator urged and bullied his captains to go southward down the coast of Africa, where no sailor had penetrated within Christian times, whatever they had done in the days of the bold Phoenicians.

Thus were the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira rediscovered and settled, the pilots venturing with terror into that “Green Sea of Darkness” where sea monsters threatened their passage, and at last daring to sail farther into the southern waters where not only the water but the land boiled with the terrible heat, they said. Rounding Cape Bojador they found a coast populated with sturdy blacks, began the slave trade that demoralized half the world; in 1486 Bartholomeo Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms” and proved that there was indeed as Henry, dead for a quarter of a century, had dreamed, a southern gateway to the Spice Isles of the East—the goal of adventurers ever since Marco Polo’s tale was spread abroad.

By this discovery the whole imagination of seafaring Europe was awakened: small wonder that Columbus in the end got a hearing when he talked of a sea-path to the East by way of the West, or that, on his return with a story of rich lands, Spain should have been satisfied to believe the theory that the shores of Cathay had been found. Columbus, who became half demented towards the close of his life, never knew that he had found anything but lands on the edge of Cathay; he once forced his men to take an oath to this effect under the penalty of hanging them to the yards of his ship.

To his obsession was chiefly due the lack of any clear conception in Europe of the existence of a great new continent until the Portuguese captain stumbled upon Brazil in 1500, although three years before Alonzo de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci had coasted the Caribbean, charting the north coast of Venezuela and Colombia as well as the east of Central America. That year of 1497 was the great year of discoveries, in sea adventure, for then began the series of voyages of the Cabot family, Labrador being discovered in that first scouring of the north seas by Europeans; from that year also dates that strange chapter of oriental history, Portuguese rule in India, when Vasco da Gama sailed past the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut.

Early in 1500 Captain Pedro Alvares Cabral was despatched with a fleet of thirteen ships to follow up the conquests of da Gama; warned of the calms off the African coast which later became notorious among sailors as the “doldrums,” he stood far out to sea, was caught in strong currents, and found himself to his astonishment off an unknown coast.

Sailing south until a safe landing place was reached (Porto Seguro, some twelve miles north of the little town on the Bahian coast that today bears the name) he landed on Good Friday morning, was received in a friendly manner by the South American natives to whom Europe was thus discovered, took possession of the territory in the name of the Portuguese King, sent a ship back to Lisbon under André Gonçalves to report the discovery, and sailed on again to India.

Dom Manoel was sufficiently interested by the tale of Gonçalves to make farther investigation, equipped three vessels and sent them under the command of the Sevillian pilot Amerigo Vespucci to examine the new Terra da Vera Cruz. On the way they met Cabral’s fleet returning from India, and this explorer put his helm about and with them re-found eastern South America, sailing along and charting most of the coast of Brazil. It is the precision and not the inaccuracies of these sixteenth century maps that form their most remarkable feature.

On this journey much hostility was shown by coast-dwelling natives, and a couple of landing parties met with disaster; the cannibal taste of the “Indians” was plainly demonstrated. No settlement was made. A year later, in 1503, Duarte Coelho came with another fleet, seeking the waterway to India that was one of the dreams of adventurous Europe: another, allied to the first, was the quest of Prester John. Anyone who could find a quick sea-path to India and at the same time find and form an alliance with the mysterious Christian Priest-King, would wield power beyond rivalry.

Duarte Coelho was unlucky. His flagship and three other vessels were cast away on Fernando Noronha island, the other two reaching the shelter of what is today Bahia. Here the natives were kindly disposed, a little colony of twenty-four men elected to stay behind near Caravellas, and after a stay of five months the rest of the explorers went back to Portugal. They took with them logs cut from the coastal forests which proved to yield a dye equal to that known in Europe as “brasil,” a much prized deep red colour: they also carried back Brazilian monkeys and some of the parrots and macaws still common in the north. Many of the old maps of Brazil are marked “Terra dos Papagaios” (Land of Parrots) instead of the official “Terra da Vera (or Santa) Cruz,” but it was not long before the new country became generally known as the Land of Brazil-wood, and finally as Brazil.

From 1503 onwards no attempt at settlement or conquest of the land was made for thirty years; captains on their way to India called at the coast for fresh water, and on the return sailed into some northern wooded bay and cut brazil-wood. The real attention of Portugal was taken up with the splendid spoil that fell so readily to her hands in India; she loaded her caravels with the silks and spices and precious stones of the East, just as Spain a little later loaded her stout ships with the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas. Territory offering nothing more and nothing less than fertile soil and genial climate was little considered in the midst of those visions of gold: since then the whole world has been plunged in blood for the sake of such wide spaces of land. Land in great areas only became highly valorized, both in the Americas and Africa, when the virile races of Europe needed space for their teeming, dominating children.

Brazil benefited from her lack of wealthy cities offering loot. As a consequence of that lack she was not flooded, as were Mexico and Peru, with gold-seeking, brutal adventurers, but was instead slowly colonized by genuine settlers. Some of them did not come willingly, for Portugal used certain tracts spasmodically as penal settlements, but in the Middle Ages severe punishment was frequently dealt out for offences that would today be considered light, and many of the convicts thrust across the Atlantic turned out to be good citizens: good or bad, they were the stuff of which bold pioneers are made, and to their extraordinary hardihood and that of their tireless descendants of mixed blood the conquest of interior Brazil was due.

Portugal delayed occupation of Brazil until other European countries began to establish themselves along different parts of the neglected shore. In 1515 the mouth of the Rio de la Plata had been discovered by Juan de Solis, and Spanish settlements were set up south of the Portuguese claims—still indefinite. In 1540 the Spanish captain Orellana made his wonderful journey from Peru over the Andes and down the Amazon, and roused the interest of Europe, but long before then the Dutch were trying to establish outposts on northerly Amazonian tributaries, and the French had settled a little colony at Pernambuco.

Of these the Portuguese made short shrift, a fleet being sent from Lisbon specially for their expulsion, but the settlement made by royal orders on the same spot met with no better fate, for in 1527 French raiders sacked the infant colony, to be followed a few months later by an English raiding party under Hawkins. The Portuguese Government, forced to take measures, determined on a plan which had already given good results on the island of Madeira. Instead of assuming the burden of colonization on the account of the government, large grants of land were made to Portuguese of high standing or wealth; on them fell the burden of settlement, but on the other hand to them would accrue the chief rewards of tropical adventure and industry. The Crown attained several objects at one stroke—the colonizing of a difficult country, the rewarding of many noblemen whose claims were apt to be troublesome, while at the same time an outlet was provided for the adventurous and turbulent. The waning of her power in India left Portugal with a surging class of stout-hearted folk upon her hands: she sent them to Brazil, and suffered as Brazil benefited.

The allotment of Brazil into separate capitanias (captaincies) was made in 1530; the average coastal strip presented to the holders was fifty leagues, and as to the depth of the land commanded was a matter for the individual captain: he could have as much as he could conquer. No one had any idea of what the hinterlands contained, for, with the exception of the riverine explorations of the Spanish on the Orinoco and the Plata, Europeans had not visited the South American interior east of the Andes.

Martim Affonso de Souza came out in 1531 as Admiral of the Coast, empowered to mark out the capitanias and to keep one for himself; he found French vessels hovering about Pernambuco, seized them, and went on to Bahia (Bahia de Todos os Santos) named thirty years before and frequently visited, where he found a Portuguese sailor, survivor of a shipwreck, married to the daughter of an Indian ruler and living like a patriarch with a large family already grown up about him. This Caramarú, “big fish caught among rocks,” was of great help to the Portuguese when the colony was founded, and his half-breed family, possessing Indian knowledge and Portuguese leanings, formed the nucleus of the true hardy Brazilian of the north coast. Sailing south on his delimitation errand, Affonso de Souza entered Rio harbour, but passed on to mark out his own capitania on the hot sands of the São Paulo coast, near the present Santos, under the name of São Vicente. By a freak of fate, here the story of old Caramarú was duplicated. On the uplands beyond the Serra do Mar another Portuguese sailor was living, one João Ramalho married to the daughter of the native chief Tibiriça, and also surrounded by an extraordinary number of descendants: these children and grandchildren of Ramalho were the first mamelucos, that bold tribe who were thorns in the flesh of the Jesuits, but who were instrumental in giving Matto Grosso, Goyaz and Minas Geraes to Brazil.

Martim Affonso de Souza marked out twelve capitanias, but of the accepted applicants few besides himself made serious and systematic efforts to settle and hold their great lands; the rights offered them were very large, including almost every authority of the king himself except that of coining money: possession was perpetual and hereditary.^[1] “If these hereditary captaincies had continued to exist,” says the Brazilian historian, Luis de Queiros, “we should have today so many republics, corresponding to the number of territorial divisions, and not a homogenous whole which a nation so full of life and hope as Brazil constitutes. By good luck, however, almost all of the recipients of the grants were unsuccessful in their attempts at colonization, and some of them did not make any real beginning....”

In the far north nothing was done by the donatario to colonize Ceará, and it was not until the French had for years established themselves on that coast and inside the mouth of the Amazon that, in 1616, a Portuguese military expedition from Maranhão turned out these rivals and founded Pará. Genuine colonization work was done at three outstanding points—Pernambuco, Bahia, and São Vicente, or rather, São Paulo, which became active nuclei of agricultural production, of a sturdy population born on the soil, dowered with a clannish fighting spirit that, local as it was, did much that was of extreme value in the evolution of Brazil. The strength of two of these centres, S. Paulo and Bahia, was largely derived from the two old Portuguese castaways, the battered heroes Ramalho and Correia; that of the third markedly successful colony, Pernambuco, was due to the powerful personality and real ability of the Captain, Duarte Coelho; he was aided by the fertility of the soil of the north-eastern promontory, Pernambuco showing itself so prolific a producer of sugar that it began to feed the mother country from very early colonial days, no less than forty-five ships a year calling to fetch sugar and brazil-wood. Settled with good immigrants by Duarte Coelho, who protested successfully against the dumping of convicts upon his capitania and ruled his people like a feudal lord, Pernambuco was the only territory that escaped control by the Captain-General sent out by the Crown in 1549 to try the effect of centralized power upon the languishing capitanias. Hardy and jealous of their independence, the Pernambucanos remained a little kingdom apart, ruled over by Duarte Coelho and his wife’s relatives after him, until the Dutch appeared in strength off the north Brazilian coast and from 1630 onwards for over twenty years held possession of Pernambuco and a long strip of the coast above it. The Pernambucanos have always been a factor to be reckoned with in Brazilian affairs: the territory they hold is richly productive and has never looked back in commercial importance. They do not forget that great tracts of land were in early days won by their ancestors by hard fighting from the Indians, nor that they have sent many an able son to high places in the governing of Brazil. It was the productivity of the Pernambuco (“Nova Lusitania”) and Bahia colonies that made colonial Brazil valuable and attracted hardy settlers to her shores.

Bahia was the queen city of Brazil from 1549, when Thomé de Souza was sent out as Captain-General and made this the administrative and political head of the country, until 1762, when Rio de Janeiro became the Vice-regal Capital; she also was a fighting city, seized and sacked now and again but successful in getting rid of her foes in the end, and she was the centre of tobacco cultivation from early days. When gold and diamonds were discovered in the interior valleys and serras the Bahianos played a plucky part in exploration and opening, as well as charting, regions of forest and sertão hitherto unseen by white men. To the men of Bahia, as well as to the courageous legions of Pernambucanos led by the Albuquerque family, Brazil owes much: but the great pioneers, the unsurpassed confronters of hardship, the men who made Brazil the huge country that she is instead of the strip upon the Atlantic seaboard that she might have remained, were the bandeirantes of São Paulo.

When the gallant Martim Affonso de Souza, sailing first to Cananea, eventually built his modest mud and palm leaf town at S. Vicente, he was saved from the hostility of the Tamoyo Indians by the friendliness of Ramalho, father of many children by a daughter of Chief Tibiriça. The Tamoyos as a rule gave a great deal of trouble to the Portuguese, although the French in their numerous attempts at settlement along the Brazilian littoral always managed to make fast friends of this tribe. To anyone who knows the São Vicente of today, it is difficult to imagine on what the first settlers lived; the shore is hot, sandy, backed by mangrove swamps, producing beans, maize, mandioca and sugar. Small wonder that an early chronicler said that to live in these colonies it was necessary to forget all European habits of life, to begin a new existence upon new food, with all old ideas of comfort and even necessity thrown aside.

When a company of Jesuit priests, headed by José de Anchieta, came to S. Vicente, they found their ministrations thrown away on a disorderly and undisciplined band of settlers. Conceiving their duty to be here, as the Padre de las Casas and many of his cloth conceived it in Mexico and Central America, the Christianizing of the natives, Anchieta decided to leave the coast (where Braz Cubas had now built his little chapel and hospital on the island where Santos stands today) and seek converts in the uplands. The mountain barrier was climbed, and on January 25, 1554, an altar was set up on the green and well-watered plains of the interior, and mass was said on a site named São Paulo de Piritininga, in honour of the saint whose day it was. The habit of early missionaries and discoverers of naming new places with the Roman calendar in their hands has helped the historian to fix many a doubtful date.

A few miles away from the mission was the town of João Ramalho, who had been tactfully confirmed in his possession of lands, the “Borda do Campo,” by Portugal, while his settlement was formally named a township with the title of Santo André in 1533. Its site was near the present São Bernardo, an open sunny region of prairie with woods on the horizon.

With this tribe of Ramalho’s making the Jesuits sought no connection; they could not convert those half-breeds any more than they could make the hardy impenitents on the coast give up stealing Indians. Better and more pliable material was to hand in the pure Indian tribes; two groups, one under Tibiriça and the other under chief Cai-Uby, built their cabins in new S. Paulo, Tibiriça’s people forming a line which is now the Rua São Bento, while the other converts guarded the road that led over the hills to S. Vicente.^[2] It was not long before trouble came. João Ramalho’s children plagued the priests: the priests retaliated by getting an order from the then Captain-General, Mem de Sá, by which Santo André was razed to the ground and its inhabitants forcibly incorporated in São Paulo. The latter soon changed its character as a peaceful mission settlement, the Indians suffered from aggressions by the whites who now came up from S. Vicente or their own half-white kin, and in the end a concerted attack was made by the natives upon the town, only old Tibiriça remaining loyal. The Indians were beaten, but the Jesuits saw that the mission could not be restored; they determined to carry the cross farther afield. With indomitable energy and indifference to suffering the band of priests made their way across the interior plains and woodlands, until they founded a new city (Ciudad Real) at the junction of the Paraná and Piquery, and began to gather the Indians together in new settlements.

For a time they were undisturbed. But the life of the new Portuguese colonies depended upon agriculture; the white men were neither many enough nor sufficiently acclimated to till the fields themselves, and they seized the unfortunate natives and forced them to field labour. It was unsatisfactory work, as a rule: the native of the eastern coasts of South America was not a cultivator of the soil by habit, but rather a hunter and fisher, as he is still in his interior retreats. They were too on the whole a gentle as well as an idle race, and they died like flies under the whip.

It was not long before the coast plantations of the Portuguese were denuded of workers: to get more slaves it was necessary to follow the Indian across the sertões. It was about 1562 that the first slave-hunting expeditions, the “entradas,” began; they were headed by the mamelucos, the descendants of Ramalho, who had no hesitation about betraying their native kinsfolk to the white man. Violence was avoided: the preferred plan was to coax any tribe approached “com muito geito e enganos” and only when blandishment failed was force resorted to. Tamed natives accompanied the “entries” and when the children of the woods heard tales of waiting pleasures told in their own tongue, whole clans often followed willingly to the coast, never to return. When they retreated more deeply and became more wary, and it was found that the Jesuits were advising them, a grimmer system was planned; it was decided to conduct open warfare against the missions.

By this time, in the first part of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits had attained remarkable success with their converts; they were not content with teaching them the Christian faith, but insisted upon the girls learning spinning and weaving while the men planted and reaped. Results were much the same as those desired by the coast settlers, but methods differed. About Ciudad Real, in the Guayará region, fourteen great missions flourished when the Paulistas began to disturb them: by the middle of the sixteen hundreds they were all broken up, the fields waste, the priests fled, and the Indian converts prisoners in S. Paulo or hiding in the forests.

To accomplish this, more careful expeditions were arranged than the earlier “entradas,” although the mamelucos had made some wonderful journeys, across the river Paraguay, over the Chaco and into Bolivia, now and again having a brush with the Spanish settlers of the South, who, later on, were expelled from tentative settlements in Rio Grande do Sul: no land was too wide for the Paulistas to hold. But the “bandeiras” were now organized like an army, men enlisted in them regularly and accepted rigorous discipline. Beginning with the deliberate object of uprooting Jesuit control of the Indians, explorations continued in this form for over eighty years with other aims added—conquest of the interior, discovery for its own sake, and search for mines of gold and precious stones, as well as the repression of Spanish entries from the south and from Peru.

At the time when these extraordinary expeditions began the interior of South America was still unknown. The high sertão and the forests were still full of mystery, although the coast had been stripped of such marvels as the giants who frightened Pinzon’s sailors, the men fourteen feet high seen by Magalhães, and the alligators with two tails which Vespucci reported. In the interior magic still reigned, with its trees yielding soap and glass, Lake Doirada with shining cities about its margin, and the marvellous kingdom of Paititi, lure of many disastrous expeditions, where some of the natives were dwarfs, others fifteen feet tall, some had their feet turned backwards and others had legs like birds. The bandeirante opened the sertão and dispelled these wonders.

In his book, O Sertão antes da Conquista, Sampaio says that the Paulista “was compelled by his habitat to be a bandeirante: the conquest of the interior was written in his destiny.” If that is true, at least these labours were taken up with a kind of fierce joy. There was scarcely an able-bodied man of the time who did not join one or more of the bandeiras, and there is on record the case of Manoel de Campos who made twenty-four of these journeys. Many bandeirantes never returned, remaining in the sertão to found towns in Minas, Matto Grosso or Goyaz; some, returning after years of absence, found their wives married to other men, while “many heroes brought back from the sertão children whom they had not taken in,” says Rocha Pombo.

The bandeira went always under the supreme command of a leader to whom implicit obedience was due; before setting out the bandeira in a body heard mass, the leader confessed and made his will, invariably including the phrase ... “setting out to war and being mortal and not knowing what God our Lord will do with me.”... A priest accompanied each bandeira, not only to shrive the dying and bury the dead, but by way of easing the conscience of the band regarding their mission and “reconciling it with the Divine Mercy.” The outfit for every man was made at his own cost, and if it is possible to judge by the baggage of Braz Gonçalves, who died on an expedition in 1636, and whose goods were scrupulously recorded and sold at auction, it was simple. His greatest possessions were three negro slaves, but he had also an awl, a bit and a hammer, a pair of worn slippers; some lead and gunpowder, one tin plate, a chisel, a mould for casting shot, a ball of thread, an old cape.

It was only possible to face what lay beyond the outposts of settlement when equipped and ready for war; the bandeirantes knew that there was constant risk of attack by Indians and that nature opposed them with as fierce a menace. The country through which they passed was likely to be foodless, and they were prepared to sow seeds of grain in green valleys, camp, and wait until the crop was harvested before going on their way.

The rivers of the interior plateau, flowing westward with the tilt of the sertão, themselves offered a great highway of adventure to the early bandeirantes, bringing them into Paraguay and the outskirts of Bolivia and the Argentine, but as they went farther afield the Paraná was left to the east, Goyaz and Matto Grosso were traversed, and the path of the pioneers led up unknown mountains, through untracked woodland; they marched across boundless prairies as if navigating the ocean, with only a sea-compass and the starry night to guide them. Nothing checked these explorers; had not the discovery of the General Mines turned their minds to gold-hunting, they might have followed Antonio Raposo across the Andes and disputed Peru with the Spaniards. Wherever they penetrated they established outposts and forts counting a collision with the Spanish as the best reason for creating a stronghold: it was the work of these untiring sertanistas that led the way to the present magnitude of Brazil.

The bandeira was the original creation of the Paulista, without parallel in history; not even the white pioneer of North America had the same functions: he neither wandered so far nor performed such deeds. João Ribeiro remarks that “as in the case of the caravans of the desert, the first virtue of the bandeirante was a resignation almost fatalistic, and abstinence carried to an extreme; those who set out did not know if they would ever return, never expected to see their homes again—and this often happened.” The bandeira in its greatest phase was a travelling city, a commune linked by mutual interests, that surged forward over the silent country; nothing deterred them, whether mountain passes, precipices, hunger, weariness, or constant fighting. If they had a path it was that of the crosses on the graves of the men who had gone before them. They went always on foot.

There is a long list of great sertanistas. It includes many names well known in Brazil today—Martins, Soares, de Souza, Barreto, Tourinho, Sá, Leme, Paes, Almeida, Dias, Ribeiro, Carvalho, Rodrigues, and a host of others; few men escaped the lure of the sertão, and some leave stories which are the Iliads of Brazil, putting these among the great adventures of all time. There is for instance Antonio Raposo, who headed a bandeira which left S. Paulo in 1628, and which was “the biggest and most devastating known.” Three thousand people composed the expedition, and its main object was the destruction of the Jesuit missions on the Paraná river, near Ciudad Real. One by one the missions, which had grown into thriving industrial communities, were attacked, besieged, and smashed; as they fell, escaping brothers or converts carried the warning to other convents, stiff fights were made, and in some cases long resistance was maintained. But in the end the Jesuits were broken and dispersed, and the bandeirantes went back to S. Paulo with thousands of Indian slaves. The courageous Jesuits went deeper into the interior, collected such remnants as they could of their property and their protégés, and began the work again.

Raposo, years afterwards, made another journey which brought him into fame as a legendary hero; he crossed the Paulista sertão by Tibagy, thence traversed the heart of Brazil from south-east to north-west, entered Peru, scaling the Andes, crossed to the Pacific and waded into those waters sword in hand; returning, he discovered the headwaters of the Amazon, sailed down it, and when at last after years of travel he came back to São Paulo no one recognized him.

A magnificent figure among indomitable bandeirantes is that of Fernão Dias de Paes Leme. Well may the wild sertão be haunted by the shade of such a man as this, or of his lieutenant, Borba Gato, or that father and son who were known among the Indians of Govaz as Old Devil the First and Old Devil the Second.

Fernão Dias, the “Hercules of the Sertão,” was the discoverer of the emerald mines of Sumidouro, after ten years spent in search. He was a famous slave-chaser of the sixteen hundreds, an extremely religious man whose zeal was only assuaged by much building of chapels and convents with the money earned in long raids; practical, astute, suave, he won his ends by tact rather than violence, among his exploits being that of leading the whole of the allied Goyana tribes to São Paulo. Approaching their territory Dias made no threats, but camped nearby, cultivated fields of cereals and vegetables, and so ingratiated himself into the confidence of Tombu the chief that one day the old Indian collected his people and agreed to go to the pleasant lands of which the Paulista spoke. Five thousand natives thus marched voluntarily into captivity; Tombu remained the worshipper of Fernão Dias until his death, but with the exception of runaways none of the Goyanas ever saw the sertão again.

This was in 1661. Three years later the Portuguese court, greatly desiring the discovery and development of mining regions which should yield tribute to Lisbon, offered special rewards to discoverers of mines, appointed an Administrator of Mines in Espirito Santo, where some coloured stones had been found, and Affonso VI wrote to Fernão Dias asking him to search the interior that he knew so well for the source of the “emeralds” whose beauty raised hopes of finding mines equal in value to those of the Spaniards in New Granada (Colombia), still today the cradle of the finest emeralds. As a matter of fact the green stones found in Brazil are the beautiful but semi-precious tourmalines.

Consenting, the famous bandeirante made some preliminary excursions and in 1676, when he was over eighty years old, led out a great comitiva; the first winter’s camp was made in a valley beyond the Rio Grande, the second at Bomfim, the third at Sumidouro. At last in the Serro Frio some showings of gold were located, and on the way back Dias died by the Rio das Velhas, in the far interior across Minas Geraes. The bandeira had gone through great suffering, and scores of men were buried by the way: at one time the remnants of the expedition had appealed to Dias to give up the hunt and return, and on his refusal made a plan to kill him. The conspiracy was headed by a young man who was the son of Dias by an Indian girl, and dearly loved by the old sertanista, but when convinced of his boy’s guilt Dias hanged him, pardoning the other plotters but driving them from the camp.

To Fernão Dias was due the exploration of what is now the State of Minas Geraes, the whole of it falling practically under his sway as the founder of at least a dozen towns in that hilly interior, the majority surviving to this day. His search had a curious sequel: his son-in-law and faithful aide, Borba Gato, who had found gold mines in Sabará and registered them in 1700, was returning to S. Paulo after the death of his leader when he met with a party headed by the official Administrator General of Mines. Borba Gato’s charts and proofs were demanded, refused, a quarrel broke out, and the servants of the pioneer set upon the Administrator and killed him. Not daring to face S. Paulo with this tale, Borba Gato fled to the interior where a tribe of Indians friendly to him dwelt by the Rio Doce, and there lived hidden out of the reach of the law for twenty years. At the end of that time, attempts to find the Sabará mines having failed, he was offered a pardon in exchange for the secret; he accepted the offer, returned to civilization, and presently retiring to a farm with his family died peacefully in his bed at the age of ninety.

A direct result of the murder of the Administrator was the stocking of the sertão of Minas with cattle: the entourage of the dead man, as much horrified by the deed as was Borba Gato, instead of returning to the capital took to the bush with the seeds, stores and livestock without which no expedition set out, and formed nuclei of fazendas in a score of different places.

One of the earliest discoveries of gold in Brazil was made by Bartholomeu Bueno da Silva in the Serra Doirada, in Goyaz, about 1682. He it was who found the Indians wearing scraps of gold as ornament, and tricked them into showing the place of its origin; displaying a bowl of agua-ardente (aguardente—spirit made from sugarcane) he set light to it, telling the Indians that it was water and that he would in like manner set fire to all their springs and rivers if they did not reveal the source of their gold. Southey calls Bartholomeu Bueno “the most renowned adventurer of his age,” and to him is due the opening-up of Goyaz, until then only entered by passing slave-hunters: but his discoveries were not followed up and it remained for his son, nicknamed by the Indians Anhangoera the Second his father having been known to them as Old Devil the First on account of the incident referred to above, to re-find the mines and extend the gold-mining fever to Goyaz. It was in 1722 that this son, then a man of over fifty years, succeeded in obtaining government help for exploration: by this time Minas was overrun with gold seekers from every part of Brazil and the authorities were ready to give active help to new mining expeditions. This bandeira set out with great éclat, crossed the Rio Grande and wandered for three years, the leader seeking landmarks dimly remembered from his boyhood. Persistent, patient, conciliating his weary followers, he founded the town of Barra, at last located the gold mines, returned to São Paulo and got together a new band of men, led the way back and settled them at what is now the City of Goyaz, and so closed with a remarkable colonizing feat the last of the great expeditions into the high sertão.

A little later gold-miners penetrating to Matto Grosso began operating at Cuyabá,^[3] and almost immediately the discovery of diamonds at Diamantina brought a new rush of people into this far interior region. The day of the explorer, the true bandeirante, was over, and the age of mining was by this time in its epoch of greatest excitement.

Few writers on Brazil have refrained from scourging the bandeirantes for their cruelty to the wretched natives and for their destruction of the Jesuit missions. It is true that they were brutal, but theirs was a brutal age, and in explanation, not extenuation, of their deeds it should be remembered that they, the white civilian colonists, were fighting for their own preservation against hostile Indians whose hand, quite naturally, was against the invader, and secondly against their economic ruin by the line of action taken by the Society of Jesus. Not only did the patient Jesuits coax and catechise the Indian, but they put him to work in the fields and sold abroad the product of his hands: when later on conflict raged in North Brazil between colonists and Jesuits the chief grievance was that the Society, for whose support the civilian community was taxed heavily, used the Indian labour denied by Royal decree to the settlers, and also maintained great stores (armazens) where every kind of European merchandise was kept.

It was for this reason, and not because they were bad Christians, that the colonists of Maranhão once stood on the shore with guns in their hands and refused to allow a shipload of Jesuits to land until they had given a solemn promise to do nothing with the Indians except to convert them; they regarded the members of this religious body as business rivals. Nor were the Jesuits tactful in their dealings with colonists or colonial government authorities; secure in the support given them not only by the Pope but, especially perhaps in the period of Spanish rule in Brazil under Philip II, by the King, they made no concessions, defied the civilians, and apparently courted trials of strength: right or wrong, they were able to count upon judgment in their favour in any quarrel referred to Europe.

When the bandeirantes began their unmerciful raids upon the Jesuit communities in the south Brazilian sertão the number of missions had increased from thirteen in 1610 to twenty-one in 1628, and to them had been largely drawn the natives who once, as Thomé de Souza said in writing to Portugal, had been so thick that “even if they were killed for market there would be no end of them.” Attacked, the padres might well have counted upon help from the Governor General of Brazil, but for the fact that about this time the whole military attention of the authorities was taken up with the determined aggressions of the Dutch upon the northern capitanias; the affairs of São Paulo were left in the hands of the Paulistas. The great matter of regret is that in the case of the Jesuits much excellent constructive work was wasted, just as the fine colonizing work of the French in Rio and in Pará and Maranhão was destroyed, and that of the Dutch on the Amazon and in Pernambuco; the spirit and the interests of the times forbade the Portuguese to allow settlers of other races a foothold in Brazil, but nevertheless it was unfortunate that so much good blood and good work was thrown away in a huge land that so badly needed both.

While the Paulistas were exploring and adding great tracts to the colony in the south, a law unto themselves, undisturbed by invasion except an occasional attempt by the Spaniards from the Plate and attacks on S. Vicente by English and French corsairs, the history of the north was one of constant aggression and desperate defence. Until the year 1578 no concerted attempts were made by England, France and Holland against the colonies of Portugal, a country towards which feeling was not unfriendly but in that year King Sebastião of Portugal, with the flower of his nobility was killed in North Africa in the terrible battle of Alcazar el Kebir, and Philip II of Spain, the “Demon of the Middle Ages,” seized Portugal and all that was Portuguese two years later. The South American colonies automatically came under his sway, and at once fell heir to the feud between Spain and her European neighbours. Brazil was fair game, and during the sixty years that elapsed before Portugal was able to re-assert her independence the easily approached northern capitanias were threatened, sacked and occupied by one or another of the three chief enemies of Spain. Sackings of coast towns made no great difference to the development of Brazil; when the ransom was paid the raiders sailed away and the business of life was resumed without any vital change; no towns were ever ruined by such predatory visits. Occupation of districts was another matter, and, with the exception of loss of lives every one of which was precious in young colonies, the effect was good rather than harmful; the period of Dutch rule on the northern coast of Brazil was a lasting beneficial stimulus. Nor was Spanish control of any direct hurt to the Portuguese colonies: their internal management was little interfered with, Portuguese officials continued to be appointed to Brazilian posts, and if Spain did not adequately defend them because her hands were already desperately full she at least did Brazil the kindness to leave it alone. The one serious administrative measure she took was the formation in Lisbon of a Junta to care for Brazilian commerce, similar to the Council of the Indies sitting in Madrid, and this was undoubtedly useful: the narrow monopolistic trading policy pursued was simply in line with the ideas and practice of the times. It was protection carried to an extreme, was useful at the time of its initiation, and, if it outlived its usefulness in its most irksome manifestations, the principle has so far survived that today, in the third lustre of the twentieth century, it may be said that only one great commercial nation has ever definitely thrown it aside.

The group of capitanias extending from Espirito Santo northwards to Ceará were when Brazil came under Spanish rule the most productive of all; it was but eighty years from the date of Cabral’s discovery, and only fifty from the time of colonization, but flourishing populations were settled along the seaboard, growing sugar, tobacco and cotton and cutting stacks of dyewoods to fill the fifty ships a year that called at the main ports. Bahia, seat of the Captain-General’s administration, was also a bishopric, and the chief religious orders had settled in each considerable town and founded churches, schools and convents. In 1570 a Royal Decree forbade the compulsory use of Indians as labourers, and to fill the ranks of field workers Africans were brought in: to this idea the Portuguese were inured, for the West Coast of Africa had been a source of labour supply for them since 1440; it was the discovery that negroes could be transplanted to the Americas and would there work with docility, thrive and multiply, that made possible the cultivation of thousands of square miles of land, both in North and South America, and warmly as we may reject the principle of slave labour now, it was the only one which could have opened American lands to the extent which they attained in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The white man could not have performed this physical labour.

Indian labour was abolished at the instance of the priests; it was remarkable that to the enslavement of Africans under circumstances equally brutal no objection was made. Negroes were brought to Brazil from 1574 onwards until the abolition of the slave trade, though not of slavery, in 1854. The debt of Brazil to the African negro is a very heavy one.

Soon after the junction of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns there began the series of purely plundering attacks delivered by European enemies of Spain which lasted until the establishment of the Dutch at Pernambuco, but which were of so little political importance that in the meantime the Portuguese authorities were able to destroy entirely the French settlements at Maranhão and Pará which lasted from 1594 to 1615. The work of replacing French with Brazilian settlements was carried out by Jeronymo Albuquerque, son of a dominating Pernambuco family, and not only were well-started French colonies ruined but the exploration of the Amazon, commenced by the famous Daniel de la Touche (Seigneur de la Ravardière) was abruptly ended.

In 1621 the Dutch Company of the West Indies was founded, companion organization to the rich East Indies Company; with the approval of the Dutch Government the Company was equipped for settlement and conquest, and could call upon the home authorities for the help of ships and armed men if war occurred in the course of operations. A fleet of thirty-six vessels under Admiral Jacob Willekens sailed for Brazil early in 1624, made directly for Bahia, and took the city without much trouble. Holding it was a different matter, the population taking to arms, and a year later a combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet arrived and forced the Dutch to capitulate. Another impermanent attack was made in 1627, and in 1630 a different point of aggression was chosen by a great fleet of seventy vessels: the Pernambucan city of Olinda was besieged and taken, the Dutch secured themselves in power and remained masters of this and three other capitanias afterwards seized; they were governed by the West India Company for nearly twenty-five years.

Evidences of the occupation of Olinda and its sister settlement, Recife, now the capital and a very flourishing city, are to be seen in the many houses surviving with curved gables, high unbroken fronts, the exterior walls shining with blue and white glazed tiles; the Dutch brought with them their love of order and cleanliness, good methods in plantation management and excellent organizing power, and the only genuine objection to the rule of the Hollander in Brazil was that the country did not belong to him. All Brazilian historians bear witness to the merit of Dutch methods.