The Return of the Bandeira : Economic Calamity, Historical Memory, and Armed Expeditions to the Sertao in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1750-1808

Introduction

Historians of colonial Brazil have conventionally located the conclusion of the great era of bandeira-led conquest somewhere near the end of the seventeenth century. The onset of the colony's gold cycle, corresponding with a series of major inland mineral strikes, reoriented those most actively engaged in the bandeira enterprise. Concentrated in the southern coastal captaincy of São Vicente, later, São Paulo, these wilderness adventurers had explored Portuguese America's immense interior and hunted its indigenous inhabitants. When their accompanying search for alluvial riches finally had born fruit, the Paulista backwoodsmen remade themselves into miners and merchants. The bandeirantes had first discovered gold in 1693 in Brazil's southeastern interior, the region that would soon acquire the name Minas Gerais or the General Mines; they made secondary strikes far to the west in Mato Grosso and Goiás in 1718 and 1725. Many then found themselves quickly displaced by the tide of Portuguese fortune-seekers and their African slaves who followed the paths now opened to the mining zones. As gold and then diamonds flooded the Atlantic world in unprecedented quantities, the colony's subsequent historical legacy would

accrue not to São Paulo's peripatetic rustics but to those who consolidated control over the flow of riches. During the second half of the eighteenth century, with the mineral washings already in decline, attention would shift still further away from wilderness exploits, supposed to reflect a bygone era, back toward the coastal agricultural export enclaves that had traditionally preoccupied the Portuguese crown. The scholarly concerns of a later era would generally follow suit. As a consequence, the persistence of armed expeditions of exploration and conquest, which continued to roam the unmapped interior of Portuguese America, would go all but unnoticed as a critical feature of the late colonial period.

Intended to correct this misconception, insisting along with the other contributions to this volume that old assumptions about bandeirismo require reevaluation, the present essay concentrates on the many expeditions deployed after 1750 to the sertão or wilderness encircling the settled towns, villages, and mining camps of the captaincy of Minas Gerais. Frequently referred to as bandeiras, but known also by other terms such as entradas, expedições, and tropas, these military and paramilitary ventures continued to evolve long after their purported demise. They effected a new search for sources of mineral wealth and posed a mounting threat to seminomadic indigenous peoples living in the remote reaches of the colony's primary mining district. The bandeiras were particularly active to the east of the captaincy, a region known as the Eastern Sertão, where Indians bypassed by the original gold rush proved to be especially tenacious guardians of lands not yet incorporated into the colonial domain (see map). There, over the course of half a century, a new generation of bandeirantes combed the rugged tropical and semitropical forests that separated the settled interior from the Atlantic coast.¹

As the mining boom collapsed and an associated sense of economic crisis deepened, miners, ranchers, farmers, merchants, and even clergymen sought to salvage their languishing fortunes by enlisting the captaincy government to conquer and safeguard new lands. A succession of captaincy governors responded enthusiastically, reviving while transforming the bandeira tradition that had resulted in the great discoveries of earlier decades. These crown-appointed officials considered the renewal of the Paulista tradition, now to be taken up by Mineiros, essential to revitalizing the mining district. In the process, the bandeira once again became the preferred means of mounting a new advance on the wilderness and neutralizing native resistance while searching for gold and diamonds in the eastern...