Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860

Chapter One: The City on a Bay

On the eastern coast of Brazil and facing westward across a magnificent bay lies the city of Salvador or, to give it its full name, São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Holy Savior of the Bay of All Saints). The city’s name eloquently recalls the bay as it is its most defining feature. Its shimmering waters could be seen to the west from almost any vantage point in the city, and in 1780 its inhabitants received most of their foodstuffs, except meat, by boat. This enormous bay reaches inland for some 27 miles. It measures 22 miles at its widest point, and 7 miles across at its mouth (see Map 1.1). A traveler in 1809 marveled that in it “the united shipping of the universe might rendezvous without confusion.” Because the city sits on a peninsula jutting southward, separating the bay from the Atlantic, its port is protected from ocean storms while its inhabitants enjoy almost constant sea breezes, keeping the temperature relatively mild despite being only 13 degrees south of the equator. Charles Darwin wrote that “no person could imagine anything so beautiful as the ancient town of Bahia; it is fairly embosomed in a luxuriant wood of beautiful trees and situated on a steep bank [that] overlooks the calm waters of the great bay of All Saints.”1 The city’s topography and built environment, its social makeup, and its culture provided the setting for the lives of the people I write about in this book and their dealings in the local food trade. the city Nothing struck an arriving visitor more immediately than the rugged escarpment separating the “lower city” from the “upper” one. Rising some 200 to 350 feet and broken by numerous crevices, it still impresses anyone viewing the city from the water. In the 1840s an Chapter 1 the city on a bay Graham-final.indb 9 Graham-final.indb 9 6/30/10 10:31:45 AM 6/30/10 10:31:45 AM 10 feeding the city American visitor admired the two “extended and curving [horizontal ] lines of whitened buildings . . . separated by a broad, rich belt of green, itself here and there dotted with houses.” An extremely narrow space separated the escarpment’s base from the shore, not more than two or three short blocks in width and in many places not even that, although many blocks long and heavily populated.2 The plateau beyond the high cliff is wider, but gives way to a network of streambeds and marshes (since canalized and drained) out of which rise other stretches of high ground onto which the upper city had gradually spread across a connecting neck of higher land. At this eastern edge of the city, in the words of a visiting Frenchman, lay a “lovely” elongated lake called the Dique, with “cold and limpid” water , surrounded by palm trees. The land beyond it, despite many hills and valleys, gradually declines eastward to the ocean (see Maps 1.2 and 1.3).3 Graham-final.indb 10 Graham-final.indb 10 6/30/10 10:31:46 AM 6/30/10 10:31:46 AM Graham-final.indb 11 Graham-final.indb 11 6/30/10 10:31:47 AM 6/30/10 10:31:47 AM Graham-final.indb 12 Graham-final.indb 12 6/30/10 10:31:47 AM 6/30/10 10:31:47 AM the city on a bay 13 The bluff that physically separates the two parts of the city served to divide it socially, an organization of urban space reminiscent of other Portuguese cities around the globe. Describing the lower city with only some exaggeration, a contemporary noted that “all the large merchants reside there with their houses, goods, and offices, as well as all the shopkeepers who live . . . where they have their stores.” Canoes and boats were pulled up on its beach to unload foodstuffs brought from across the bay. An intense trade in African slaves turned the lower city into an extended slave market. Wharf-side warehouses with jetties served the export trade in sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, and hides, and handled the great bundles, barrels, and casks of merchandise arriving from Europe and even India, including textiles , iron goods, spices, wine, olive oil, and salted codfish. Customers found ship chandlers, hardware stores, watchmakers, suppliers of heavy equipment for the plantations, dry goods stores, toy stores, and...