Colony of the Sertao: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade

After expelling their European rivals from the Amazon in the early-seventeenth century, the Portuguese set about exploiting the principal assets of the vast basin—the indigenous inhabitants. As allies, converts, and slaves the native population provided the labor and much of the social fabric of the developing colony. While a variety of canoe-borne expeditions ventured ever farther up the main river and its tributaries seeking elusive gold, harvesting forest products, and expanding the crown's domain, prosperity and power for the leaders and sponsors of those forays derived mainly from the human cargo brought downstream to missions, forts, and other settlements. As a result, crown and colonial authorities attempted to regulate and control the expeditions, and fierce competition developed among institutions and individuals involved in the process. Documents in Portuguese and Brazilian archives reveal the key role played by the Indians themselves in collaboration with the little-studied cross-cultural intermediaries, known as cunhamenas.

The vast forests of the sertão, or interior, had long sustained a large Indian population and the early development of the colonial economy depended fundamentally on the extraction and exportation of natural products, including spices, cacao, oils, and dyes, rather than on extensive plantation production. Masters of their environment, natives worked the annual collecting canoes that traveled the labyrinth of waterways. A modest amount of tobacco cultivation, especially early in the seventeenth century, and cotton, food crops, and sugar demanded additional laborers. Skilled Indians also wove cloth, cut lumber, constructed dwellings, fished, hunted, and manned all forms of transportation, from the ubiquitous river canoes to the wealthy colonists' sedan

chairs.¹ In the northern Brazilian captaincies of Pará and Maranhão, slaves were more likely to be native than African, at least until well into the eighteenth century.² As the governor of Maranhão asserted in 1686, "[A] settler esteems more the service of one Indian than that of two Negroes; the former . . . know how to row canoes and make them; they are industrious in hunting and fishing; . . . they have the skill and ability to comprehend all the work they have to do for the whites, which one does not find in the . . . Negroes. . . ."³ Demand for new slaves rose precipitously when European markets opened for cacao in the 1720s and when smallpox and measles ravaged the native population in the early 1720s and 40s.⁴ Little had changed from the previous century when the celebrated Jesuit Antônio Vieira reported on the impact of such epidemics: "Because the entire wealth of the colonists is based on their slaves, it is commonplace for people who at one point thought of themselves as extremely rich and well off to fall into abject poverty."⁵ The constant demand for slaves pushed expeditions farther into the interior and fueled the production and importation of trade goods.

While the need for native labor certainly motivated the expeditions to the sertão, I would suggest a broader perspective. Unlike other regions of the Americas, in the vast Amazon basin, land had little intrinsic value. The control of Indians, through alliance or by force, conferred power. They could procure more slaves and were essential to any military undertaking in the region. In turn, natives, often as willing participants in contests for power, used the colonizers for protection as well as to take revenge on their enemies. All sectors of society jostled for influence with the Indians, whether through legislation, as in the case of the colonists and missionaries, or through private enterprise, as in the case of the resourceful cunhamenas, men who married into native families to gain a network of allies. Crown officials, missionaries, soldiers, private citizens, and mission Indians competed for authority in the interior and a share of the slave trade.

Prospecting for gold and the expansion of Portuguese territorial claims persisted...