CHAPTER 1

The New World between God and the Devil

That unripe side of earth . . .

—John Donne, “To the Countess of Huntingdon”

From Imaginary Voyages to Real Voyages

The discovery of America was perhaps the most amazing feat in the history of humanity. It opened the doors to a new time, different from all others—or “like to no other,” as Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote. It joined the known worlds of Africa and Asia to a new part of the globe, as men “discovered the totality of which they are a part.”1 The novelty of the discovery was not, however, immediately understood. In the Caribbean Islands a restless Christopher Columbus searched for the signs of Asia that would assure him he had reached the land of the Great Khan. Calling the indigenous peoples he encountered “Indians,” Columbus struggled to link what he saw to the travel narratives of Juan de Monte Corvino, Giovanni da Pian Carpino, Marco Polo, and so many other medieval explorers who from the thirteenth through the end of the fourteenth century had taken advantage of the Pax Mongolica to journey throughout Asia and the Indian Ocean region.² This new information brought with it and fertilized a whole imaginary universe. European eyes sought confirmation of what they already knew, leery of recognizing the Other.³ At a time when hearing meant more than seeing, the eyes first saw what they had heard said, and everything they saw was filtered through reports of fantastic voyages, of far-off lands and monstrous beings who inhabited the ends of the known world.⁴ Perhaps with some trauma, the evidence of these new things gradually crept into the age-old patrimony of the European imagination, destroying dreams and fantasies and finding echo in other signs of the world’s disenchantment. In 1820 Giacomo Leopardi pointed his accusing finger at what he felt was a lamentable trend.⁵ As a European, he was lost in this inability to recognize the Other, that is, the new universe emerging around the American image. Three hundred years had gone by, time enough for the mental projections of sixteenth-century Europeans to stretch into the newly discovered continent, encountering the imaginary universe of peoples from other cultures and ultimately merging with them. The colonizing process would see the weaving of an American colonial imagination, while other Europeans, not just Leopardi, would not realize it.

Although it was singular—that is, colonial—the New World would owe much to elements of the European imagination, under whose sign it was born. Heavily influenced by extensive reading of works like Sir John Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, Columbus saw India in America. Shackled to the medieval universe, he saw in order to write narratives that would in turn be heard.6 In Columbus, medieval thought commingled with the intrepid adventurer of a new age—the age of navigation and discovery—just as the habit of hearing was allied to that of seeing, in a kind of premonition of the baroque’s characteristic visual primacy.⁷ Columbus was overcome by the “vertigo of curiosity” that was to contaminate so many others after him, from the Portuguese chroniclers to Hans Staden, Anthony Knivet, and Jean de Léry. Placed “at the service of the discovery of the world,” the eye gained precedence over the other senses, seizing and imprisoning the rare, the strange, and the unique, just as these had captured medieval attention earlier. Reorchestrated, the senses gave birth to new travel narratives, this time early modern.⁸

Yet before Columbus had written his letters and his journal, and even before medieval explorers had reached Mongolian Asia and told of their actual travels using a narrative structure in which the imaginary element still played a central role, imaginary voyages enjoyed immense popularity in the Christian West. Among the most interesting of these were the complex travel narratives and visions of the Carolingian period.⁹ In the twelfth century, the marvelous acquired new strength and began melding with geographical descriptions of a world unknown or little known to Europeans. The legend of Alexander, for example, popularized the marvels of India, the flower-women, and other exotic beings that the Crusades had made more familiar to medieval man.¹⁰ Around the same time, another growing legend was that of Prester John, a Christian sovereign of the East (about whom more will be said later on). Fantastic voyages beyond the known world, like the Vision of Tungdal, Navigation of St. Brendan, Purgatory of St. Patrick, and Le livre d’Alexandre were “remarkably disseminated in the Iberian area throughout all of the fifteenth century and in part during the sixteenth.” Of these, A vida de Santo Amaro is notable for its richness of invention and particularly because it told of a maritime adventure that reached a number of desert islands.¹¹ So from early on, travel narratives linked fantasy and reality, blurring the borders between real and imaginary. Fictitious adventures like those of St. Patrick contained elements drawn from the earthly world, while real adventures like those of Marco Polo were interlaced with fantastic accounts and implausible situations that the merchant had heard from someone and believed he had actually experienced himself.¹²

Mandeville’s Travels is a good example of this blending of the imaginary and the real. Written in French, probably in Liège in the mid-fourteenth century, these narratives are authored by an imaginary Sir John of Mandeville. Based on geographical texts and encyclopedias like Vicent of Beauvais’s, this compilation was published several times in Latin and in a number of European languages as well. The first of the two-part work offers an itinerary of the Holy Land (a “sort of pilgrim’s tourist guide,” in the words of Carlo Ginzburg), while the second describes a trip to the East that encompasses far-off islands and reaches India and Cathay (China). It ends with the description of the Earthly Paradise and of the islands surrounding the mythical kingdom of Prester John. Although both parts are presented as direct testimonies, there is a difference between them: “the first abounds in precise and documented observations, [whereas] the second is mostly imaginary.”13

What was people’s vision of earth in the fourteenth century? They believed in the existence of the equator, the tropics, five climatic zones, three continents, three seas, and twelve winds. Northern Europe and the Atlantic Ocean were already part of an imaginary geography and were described in almost fictional form; arctic peoples lived in darkness in the cold north, while the sea held countless mysterious islands. Talk about Africa included the Maghrib and Egypt; hypotheses were fashioned about the sources of the Nile, said to lie within India (in turn believed to be connected to Africa, enclosing the Indian Ocean) or in the upper part of the Niger. Immensely fascinating to the European imagination, Asia enclosed the Earthly Paradise, sealed off by high mountains, an iron curtain, and hordes of monstrous animals. To the north lay the legendary country of Gog and Magog, inhabited by the tribes of Israel cast out by Alexander. Stretching over the middle was the kingdom of Prester John, descendant of the wise men and relentless enemy of the Mohammedans. The first mention of this kingdom—of major importance in the European imagination—comes from Otto of Freising (1145), twenty years before Prester John was supposed to have written his letter to Alexander III, Manuel Comnenus, and Frederick Barbarossa. To the south lay India, location of the Christian community of St. Thomas, according to legend narratives. Beyond the Indian Ocean was the country of antipodes, antinomic world par excellence, inhabited by monstrous beings: dog-headed apes, Cyclops, troglodytes, headless beings, ant-men. . . .¹⁴

For centuries, the Indian Ocean had constituted the mental realm that incarnated the medieval West’s exoticism (or need for it), “the place where its dreams freed themselves from repression.”¹⁵ For Le Goff, the fear of unveiling this world was like the fear of unveiling one’s own dreams. One of the basic components of the Indian dream was wealth—islands overflowing with pearls, precious wood, spices, lengths of silk—which linked the dream with the need for greater trade and the acquisition of new markets to supplement Europe’s. The expansion of trade thus constituted the infrastructure of these oneiric projections or at least a part of them.16 The other side of the Indian dream was the fantastic exuberance of nature, of people, of animals, some of which were monstrous. For Europeans, this was a way of compensating for their own deprived and limited world. From a sexual perspective, it was the fascination with difference: cannibalism, nudism, sexual freedom, eroticism, polygamy, incest.¹⁷

All of these themes, analyzed by Le Goff in relation to the Indian Ocean, are present in the discovery of America. As Europeans gained ever-greater familiarity with the Indian Ocean, where the travels of medieval explorers had figured importantly, these countries of legend and these monstrous peoples were pushed farther away, into peripheral regions as yet untouched by Westerners. Claude Sutto shows that Gog and Magog became inhabitants of northern Russia. Prester John shifted from Central Asia to Ethiopia. Medieval man had first placed Ethiopia in Meridional India, in Le Goff’s opinion symbolizing the union of the queen of Sheba and Alexander, and no longer her union with Solomon. By the fifteenth century, the Portuguese already saw Ethiopia as part of Africa. Ever more often, reports depicted Asia in strictly human dimensions.¹⁸

From this perspective, it would seem justifiable that once the Indian Ocean had become known and its fantastic universe demystified, the Atlantic would begin playing an analogous role in the fifteenth-century European imagination: it was the last stronghold of monstrous peoples, of an Earthly Paradise, of the Kingdom of Prester John, and perhaps—as Friar Vicente do Salvador stated—of the kingdom of the devil himself, who here would engage in bloody battle against the cross and its knights.¹⁹ The marvelous would be forever fated to occupy the fringes of the world known to the West, and the American colonial world would thus be its last frontier.

The legend of Prester John is enlightening for two reasons. First, it is a model illustration of the notion that a geographical migration took place within the European imagination when unknown lands were finally revealed. Second, it is closely related to Portuguese navigation and to the discoveries. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda believes that the long-standing legend of the Eastern Christian potentate was diluted and simplified by the Portuguese, who had little inclination for fantastic daydreams. He does, however, recognize that this navigating people played an important role in the “demand for the fabulous country of Prester John.”²⁰ In 1487, when Afonso de Paiva and Pero da Covilhã left Portugal charged with discovering an overland route to the Indies, they carried with them Dom João II’s instructions concerning reconnaissance of Prester John’s land. As Buarque de Holanda has stated, the legend was already over a century old by then and did not benefit much from the Portuguese imagination. Yet Brazil’s greatest historian does not focus on the fact that by incorporating this legend the Portuguese inscribed it within the genesis of their enterprise of world discovery. In the imagination of the Portuguese sailors who left with Vasco da Gama or with Pedro Álvares Cabral, how great was their expectation that they would at long last touch the legendary lands of the Christian king?

It was also Sérgio Buarque de Holanda who pointed out this shift of the Earthly Paradise to the Atlantic universe, transferred from the distant reaches of Asia and Africa and in its new habitat associated with quite ancient Celtic traditions.21 It was a slow process. In the tenth century the Earthly Paradise was to be found in the middle of the ocean. It subsequently traveled first northward then westward, accompanying the progress of geographical knowledge, “until disappearing in the late sixteenth century, though it did not fade from the popular imagination before the eighteenth century.”²²

As the European imagination accumulated legends, relocated them spatially, and remolded them, it also came to encompass the archipelago of the Brazil islands, possibly a transformation of the island of São Brandão. From 1351 to 1508, this land went by myriad designations: Brazi, Bracir, Brasil, Brasill, Brazil, Brazile, Brazille, Brazill, Bracil, Braçil, Braçill, Bersill, Braxil, Braxili, Braxill, Braxyilli, Bresilge.²³ In 1367 Pizigano’s letter listed the three islands of Bracir, which would from that time on be registered on most maritime charts, with their position unchanged: “the southernmost of the islands we find indicated within the Azores group, approximately at the latitude of Cape Saint Vincent; the second lies NW of Cape Finisterre, at the latitude of Brittany; the third, to the W and not very far off the coast of Ireland.”²⁴

Friar Vicente do Salvador most likely was unaware that the name “Brazil” had appeared on medieval maps, and it seems to me that he was the first to associate this title with the reddish dyewood. But it is curious to note that when he did so he offered a very complicated explanation of a religious bent, alluding to the struggle between good and evil, between heaven (kingdom of God) and hell (kingdom of the devil). Moreover, he associated “this immature portion of Earth” with the realm of demoniac possessions, unburdening upon the nascent colony the full weight of the European imagination, where the devil had played a major role since at least the eleventh century. If an identification with infernal regions is visible in Friar Vicente’s text, less evident is the association between the fruit of a concrete voyage—to wit, the discovery of Brazil—and the many imaginary voyages that Europeans had been undertaking for centuries, though one connection is just as legitimate as the other. Brazil, colony of Portugal, was thus born under the sign of the demon and the projections of the Western imagination. But in this excerpt from Friar Vicente, infernal dominion was not the only possibility. The first move, made by Pedro Álvares, had been toward heaven, to which the colony was meant to be coupled—had Lucifer’s successful efforts not turned it all into a lost cause. The text of Brazil’s first historian is remarkable precisely because it takes into account the complexity underlying these two possibilities: seeing the colony as the dominion of God (i.e., as paradise) or of the devil (i.e., as hell). For Friar Vicente, the devil came out on top: Brazil was the name that stuck, and the monk laments that the other appellation fell into oblivion, for it was much more virtuous and consonant with the courageous Portuguese people’s goal of saving souls.

Taking quite a different stance, Antonio de Santa Maria Jaboatão, another friar, saw the discovery of Brazil as supernatural and miraculous. For many years, God had kept the existence of this expansive region hidden and had finally unveiled it to human eyes so that heaven might gather “bountiful profits” from this treasure. Not only is that which occurs supernaturally and miraculously to be deemed wonderful, but so too is that which “occurs naturally, outside the normal order of things,” as was the case with the discovery of Brazil—which was therefore miraculous and supernatural.25 For Jaboatão, the supernatural was a positive force in the case of Brazil’s discovery; it had been a divine act, and it was God, through His unfathomable designs, who led men to this land. The discovery of Brazil revealed and reinforced the existence of God: a divine miracle—such was the revelation of the Portuguese colony in America.

The formulations of these two clerics, separated from the event they interpreted by a greater or lesser number of years—in the case of Jaboatão, by two and a half centuries—lead us to think about the constancy of the mental universe, less permeable to change than are economic and social structures. The age of the discoveries was characterized by religious zeal; as is well known, the discoverer of America himself was seriously thinking about using American gold in a Crusade against the Infidel. For Columbus, it can be said there were three kinds of reasons for navigating the seas: the human, the divine, and the natural.²⁶ As components of the mental universe, they were never isolated from each other but maintained a constant and contradictory relationship: in the divine sphere, God does not exist without the devil; in the world of nature, there is no Earthly Paradise without hell; among human beings, virtue and sin alternate.

The maritime venture thus played itself out under the heavy influence of the European imagination, both positive and negative currents of thought. The golden age of European utopias was tightly linked to the great discoveries and travel accounts, “embellished by the imagination.” They produced culture shock and led to comparisons with, and questionings of, the prevailing social structures.²⁷ André Thevet and most especially Jean de Léry made their influence felt in the construction of the myth of the noble savage, and edenizing tendencies find resonance in many of the chronicles and treatises written on Brazil; Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, among others, was considered a propagandist of Portuguese colonization of the tropics.²⁸ But even the rosiest interpretations spoke of risk, danger, and death. Thevet himself calls attention to the other side of expansion—the fear of the ocean sea, of maelstroms, of Adamastor giants: “. . . abandoned at the whim and mercy of the most uncertain, least merciful, and least safe of all elements, with small wooden ships, fragile and dilapidated (from which one can almost always expect death more than life) to navigate their way toward the Antarctic pole, which had never been discovered nor was even known to the ancients.”²⁹ Léry and his companions even started to believe they would be eternal prisoners of the sea: “Indeed, since we had been tossing and afloat on the sea almost four months without putting into port, it had often occurred to us that we were in exile out there, and it seemed as though we would never escape it.”30 Gandavo’s tantalizing prognoses saw a tragic reversal in the accounts of shipwrecked Portuguese, a curious literary genre that flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “We have nothing but ships swallowed by the waves; crews wasted by disease; extreme suffering by women, the aged, children; lean gains for the more fortunate, who may perhaps manage to survive one journey but will die on the next.”³¹ Viewing overseas expansion as the “petty eagerness of greed and oppression,” the authors of these accounts in effect denounced the ideological instrumentalization of elements of the imagination, which was grounded on the justification of “spreading the faith and the empire.”

Once discovered, Brazil was to occupy a position in the European imagination analogous to that previously held by the far-off mysterious lands that, once known and penetrated, had lost their enchantment. With the advent of slavery, this imagination would be remolded and restructured while still maintaining deep European roots. As a modified extension of the European imagination, Brazil also became an extension of the metropolis with the advance of the colonizing process. Everything that existed there existed here, but in a singular, colonial form. Once again, it was the highly astute Friar Vicente who perceived this similarity within difference: “Does wheat flour come from Portugal? That of this land suffices. Wine? A most mild one is made from sugar and for those who like it strong, by boiling it for two days, it leaves one drunk like grape wine. Oil? It is made from palm-tree coconuts. Cloth? Cotton is made with less effort than it takes to make linen or wool there. . . . Almonds? They too can be replaced with cashews, et sic de ceteris.”³² “This Brazil is now another Portugal,” Fernão Cardim was to write, shortly thereafter adding its differences: a much more temperate climate, much rarer diseases, but less comfort in dwelling and in dress.³³ This was an early perception of being-and-nonbeing, which would intensify in the eighteenth century. America was much more a child of Europe than Asia or Africa had ever been. But “it was Europe, and at the same time, non-Europe; it was the geographical, physical, and soon the political antithesis of Europe.”³⁴ Good and evil, heaven and hell, which in Europe (the metropolis) ended up reaching equilibrium, could here (the colony) more than anywhere else tend toward polarization. In terms of nature, the idea that the New World was an extension of Europe—and thus the place where the myths of an Earthly Paradise would be realized—tended to triumph; almost always, nature was edenized. But when it came to a distinct kind of humanity, painted black by the African slave and brown by indigenous peoples, difference won out. The human world was infernalized to an extent never before dreamed by all of European teratology—an imaginary place of Western visions of an inviable humanity. Clouds of insects, gigantic snakes, and intense heat all aroused great perplexity, but the cannibalism and lassitude of indigenous peoples, the sorcery and noisy music of blacks, the mixing of the races, and, last, the colonists’ desire for autonomy engendered repudiation.

Nature: The Predominance of the Edenic Vision

Western expansion was twofold in nature. On the one hand, new lands were incorporated and made subject to the temporal power of European monarchs. On the other, new flocks were gathered for religion and for the pope.35 Of all the fruits that the newly discovered land could yield up, to Pero Vaz de Caminha it seemed the finest would be the salvation of indigenous peoples. “And this should be the principal seed that Your Highness should sow,” the scribe of Calicut took the liberty to advise, writing quite naturally. In Caminha’s text, spreading the Catholic faith appears to be the monarch’s great desire: “to do what Your Highness so desires, that is, expand our holy faith!”³⁶ Nearly fifty years later, Dom João III reiterated the Christianizing goals of the Portuguese monarchy: “The principal thing that compelled me to command that said lands of Brazil be peopled was so that its folk be converted to our holy Catholic faith,” he wrote to Tomé de Souza in 1548.³⁷ It has become a commonplace to state that religion furnished the ideological means for justifying the conquest and colonization of America, masking and camouflaging the atrocities committed in the name of faith. This was undeniably true. But if so much has been said about the relations between infrastructure and superstructure, almost no efforts have been made to dissect the complex world of religiosity. It never hurts to remember that the close of the Middle Ages and dawning of the Early Modern age were typified by a deep, zealous, angst-filled religiosity.³⁸ Therefore, while material objectives were not minor, Christianizing was indeed an integral part of Portugal’s colonizing program for the New World. Moreover, it was an important part, given the weight of religion in the lives of sixteenth-century people.

The Portuguese were sincerely convinced of their missionary role. “Other men, by divine institution, are only obliged to be Catholic: the Portuguese man is obliged to be Catholic and to be apostolic. Other Christians are obliged to believe in their faith: the Portuguese man is obliged to believe and moreover to propagate it,” said António Vieira one century and a half after discovery. The example of missionary zeal came from above, from the king: “All kings are of God, made by man: the king of Portugal is of God and made by God and for this he is more His,” said Vieira. But the example also came from God Himself above, who had elected the Portuguese from among other peoples, in a kind of repetition of the history of Israel.³⁹

The question of faith was not separate from the issue of the overseas enterprise: the faith would be spread, but lands would be colonized as well. Portuguese caravels were vessels of God, and missionaries and soldiers sailed in them together, for “not only are the missionaries apostles, but so too are the soldiers and captains, as all go in search of heathens to bring them to the light of faith and to the congregation of the Church.”40 In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Sebastião da Rocha Pitta would continue to explain the discovery of Brazil theologically. Here the land was uncultivated and its inhabitants were barbarians “when general Pedro Àlvares Cabral discovered it,” “joyous to be the first who found an unknown region of so many heathens (where our monarchs had that which they sought, to expand our Catholic faith, which was their purpose in ordering the plowing of the seas with so many armadas).” Expansion of the faith, colonization, and strengthening of monarchical power always appear in conjunction. Dom João III “devoted his Catholic zeal to the enterprise, among the lands as well as the souls of Brazil, and he achieved both victories, gathering as many lambs into the fold of the universal pastor as subjects under the rule of his dominion.” In lines almost identical to Vieira’s, Rocha Pitta wrote that the monarch sent “captains and missionaries together” to the Portuguese colonies.⁴¹

Friar Vicente do Salvador justified the colonizing endeavor on the basis of religion. Among the products raised in the colony were bread and wine, required for the holy sacraments. “If you say to me that a land that has no wheat bread and grape wine for mass cannot sustain itself, I will agree, for this divine sacrament is our true sustenance; but for this purpose that which grows in this same Brazil, in São Vicente and the fields of São Paulo, suffices.”⁴² Colonial nature was thus enfolded into the sphere of the sacred.

Gandavo proposed to engage colonists in the exploitation of maritime riches until mines of precious metal could be discovered inland. He said that in addition to exploiting this wealth, it was important to bring indigenous peoples from the sertão [Brazilian backlands], for when “placed before the light and knowledge of our Holy Catholic Faith,” their souls would be saved.⁴³ It was up to the settler to discover the land’s riches and also to enrich the heavens, converting souls. There seems to have been a flow of reciprocity, a kind of balancing of accounts: Providence’s benevolence, affording the discovery of silver and gold, should be repaid in souls. By the same token, the more souls that were sent to heaven, the more benevolent the Creator would feel toward the colonists.

According to Father Simão de Vasconcellos, divine attention was first directed toward Europe, Asia, and Africa, where humanity, the Earthly Paradise, and the patriarchs had been placed. The other part of the world, “no less agreeable,” had lain bereft of paradise, patriarchs, the divine presence, the light of faith, and salvation for 6,691 years. At the end of this period, “the order was given for this new and hidden world to appear”; the Portuguese were made God’s arm and charged with spreading the faith to these new parts.⁴⁴ Once more, here is the idea that God provided for everything, determining that the Portuguese should discover lands in order to colonize and Christianize them—again, the idea of a “kingdom of God by Portugal.”

It was thus a generalized idea, particularly among clerics, that the discovery of Brazil had been a divine action and that God had chosen the Portuguese from among all peoples. Furthermore, as masters of the new colony, the Portuguese had the duty to make it produce material wealth by exploiting nature and spiritual wealth by recovering souls for the divine legacy.

The discovery of Brazil—a divine action—unveiled to the Portuguese the paradisiacal nature that so many would liken to the Earthly Paradise. Within the storehouse of their imagination, they searched for elements of identification with the new land. Associating fertility, lush vegetation, and the pleasant climate with the traditional descriptions of the Earthly Paradise made this faraway, unknown land seem closer and more familiar to the Europeans. The divine presence could be felt in nature as well; elevated to the divine sphere, this nature once more reinforced the presence of God in the universe.

This is what Rocha Pitta, Thevet, Léry, and others have to say. In a famous passage, Rocha Pitta describes the passion-fruit flower and associates it with Christ’s passion: “mysterious creation of nature, which from the same parts that composed the flower shaped the instruments of the holy passion.”45 Awed by the beauty of a certain bird, possibly from the parrot family, Thevet wrote: “Thou shalt know not how to deny praise to He who is the artisan of such a lovely work.”⁴⁶ In an admirable passage, Léry, an author of greater skill, tries to show that the diversification of the natural world is proof of the grandeur of God’s divine work. During the year he spent involved in the French effort to establish a religious colony in Brazil—known as French Antarctica—Léry says he observed trees, fruits, and animals wholly unlike those found in Europe. Each time he recalled the image of that new world, “the serenity of the air, the diversity of the animals, the variety of the birds, the beauty of the trees and the plants, the excellence of the fruits, and, in short, the riches that adorn this land of Brazil,” he remembered the cry of the Prophet in Psalm 104:

    O Seigneur Dieu que tes oeuvres divers

    Sont merveilleux par le monde univers

    O que tu as tout fait par grand sagesse!

    Bref, la terre est pleine de ta largesse.

Fortunate were the peoples dwelling there, he concluded—but with this caveat: “if they know the author and creator of all these things.”⁴⁷

Thevet’s stance is more straightforward: the beauty and perfection of the natural world refer us to God, again proving His existence. What other craftsman could fashion such a perfect work? Léry goes further: the beauty of the New World reinforces the existence of God not simply because it is beautiful but indeed because it is different. In this context, the specific lends evidence to the varied and the multiple found within divine will and action. God thus exists, for He makes what is beautiful and makes what is different. Léry’s position of course reflects the Calvinist notion that the world was created for the glory of God. Incorporating these ideas, he read the colonial world through a religious prism in which Catholics and Protestants ended up converging.

If the European imagination shifted its projections to the New World and if spreading the Christian faith and colonization went hand in hand, it was no surprise that the discoverer of America would be its first “edenizer” as well.48 As a Soldier of Christ, Columbus was concerned with the salvation of souls. In order to justify the need for Christianization, the New World’s “indigenous” peoples had to be denigrated—and by denigrating them, slavery was justified. Columbus therefore inaugurated the double-edged movement that would last for centuries in American lands: the edenization of nature and the denigration of men—barbarians, animals, demons. This tendency to associate the men of the colony with animals or demons would later be accentuated; but in Columbus there is an inarguable display of ceaseless interest in examining nature and a disinterest in the men who reaped its benefits. “Here and in all the island, the trees are green and the plants and grasses as well, as in the month of April in Andalusia. The singing of the small birds is such that it would seem that a man would never willingly leave this place. The flocks of parrots darken the sun. Birds great and small are of so many kinds and so different from ours that it is a wonder,” the discoverer was to write.⁴⁹

Ever since his first voyage, based on analogies between what he saw before him and what he had read in authors like Mandeville, Columbus would endeavor to prove that he had reached the environs of the Earthly Paradise.⁵⁰ Like him, countless authors would make repeated reference to the presence of paradise in American lands, in the literal or figurative sense.⁵¹ Friar Vicente do Salvador stopped short of expressing the idea that paradise lay there, but he did unreservedly state that “Brazil has a greater abundance of provisions than all lands that there are in the world, for in it are found the provisions of all the others.”⁵² With these words he echoed the man who had first written about Brazil: Pero Vaz de Caminha. Making no reference to the Earthly Paradise, focused much more on describing people than landscapes, Caminha said this new land was “so generous that, desiring to profit of it, everything shall grow in it, by virtue of the waters it hath.” The potential utility of this discovery was of greater import than fanciful deliriums. In contrast to Columbus, the Portuguese were incapable of dreaming, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was to state. How did the earth look to Caminha? “Very flat, very lovely,” “very big,” “very fine climate, fresh and temperate.”⁵³ For Rocha Pitta, on the other hand, Brazil was not just the best part of the New World—“a most vast region, a fortunate land upon whose surface all is harvest, within whose center all are treasures, along whose mountains and coasts all is aroma,” a remarkable country where a lavish nature surrenders fertile production for the “affluence of the monarchy and the benefit of the world”—rather, it was the Earthly Paradise itself.⁵⁴ It is well worth citing the passage where he defends this position, for it lists all the paradisiacal features thereafter to be repeated ad infinitum (in Brazil’s national anthem as well):

In no other region does the sky appear so serene, nor does the dawn awaken more lovely; in no other hemisphere does the sun have such golden rays, nor such radiant nocturnal reflections; the stars are the gentlest, and appear always joyful; the horizons, be the sun rising or be it dying, are always clear; the waters, drawn from springs in the fields or from aqueducts within settlements, are the purest; Brazil is, in short, the earthly paradise discovered, where the greatest rivers are born and flow; a wholesome climate prevails; gentle stars have influence, and the gentlest zephyrs breathe, although, since it lies beneath the torrid zone, Aristotle, Pliny, and Cicero would doubt and consider it uninhabitable.55

Jaboatão was to reiterate many of the edenizing features enumerated by Rocha Pitta. Brazil—“remarkable, delicious, and rich portion of the great America”—had for a long time remained “hidden from the news of human discourse.” For this reason it was called the fourth part of the world, though it deserved the title of first. Healthy air, fresh breezes, a mild climate, fertile earth, all cloistered by two precious keys: one of silver, demarcating its southern part; the other of gold, defining its northern. Alluding to the Prata and Amazonas rivers, which delimited Brazil’s lands, the author thus sought to liken Brazil to the Earthly Paradise. The beauty of this perspective—the natural world—reinforced the idea of an Earthly Paradise: “Peaked mountains” and “extensive valleys” filled with lush, fruitful trees, covered with “pomes at any season of the year”; joyous, multihued flowers, growing “with no more care for their raising than that of nature, and of time,” capturing one’s eye and stimulating one’s sense of smell; birds that both “entertained the eye with the variety and sheen of their feathers” and “satisfied the taste with their tantalizing and appetizing meat,” in addition to delighting people with their sweet songs—in short, a New World, where the Creator sought to repair some of the Old World’s imperfections. “A new world at last, and such an accommodating place for man to live that not much censure would be deserved by whoever wanted to plant the Earthly Paradise in it, or at least to describe it with the excellencies and privileges of an earthly Paradise.”⁵⁶

As can be seen, Jaboatão did not go so far as to affirm that the Earthly Paradise lay in Brazil, perhaps leery that his work would meet the same fate as that of the priest Simão de Vasconcellos.⁵⁷ Still, even though somewhat timidly, Jaboatão insinuates this analogy in more than one passage. Citing an unnamed author, he exalts the qualities of Pernambuco—the most “flowering, fertile, and rich” of the captaincies. “Its climate is a second Paradise,” he adds, leaving aside (and for others) the question of the initial paradise.⁵⁸

Knivet, a sixteenth-century Englishman who sailed with Thomas Cavendish, left some interesting images of Eldorado that reveal what a strong influence the European imagination wielded in views of the New World. Like Gandavo and Gabriel Soares, Knivet beheld the Resplendent Mountains: “We came into a fair Country, and we saw a great glistening Mountain before us, ten days before we could come to it, for when we came into the plain Country, and were out of the Mountains, the Sun began to come to his height, we were not able to travel against it, by the reason of the glistening that dazzled our eyes.” Knivet was convinced they were in the vicinity of the Potosí, which was the case whenever gold and precious gems were found: “We came to many Mountains, where we found good store of gold, and many precious stones; when we came into this Country, we thought we had been in the Province of Peru.”59

Pero de Magalhães Gandavo and Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão were advocates of the edenizing line. What is interesting about them, however, is that they lent new hues to this edenization, reiterating the notion that the edenic character is restructured and transformed during the process of colonization. Nature is prodigious, generous, friendly—so long as transformed by humans. These humans may even be the poor expropriated fellows from the metropolis or banished undesirables, for nature, with its bountiful positive features, is greater than human pettiness. For these two authors, who wrote in 1576 and 1618, respectively, colonization became an indispensable prerequisite to the edenization of nature.

The images Gandavo uses to describe the Province of Santa Cruz are those commonly found in European descriptions of Earthly Paradises. The land is “very delicious and fresh,” all “cloaked in very tall and thick trees, wetted by the waters of many and very precious streams of which all the land has an abundant part, where the verdure always remains with that moderation of spring that April and May offer us here.” Unlike the situation in Europe, plants do not suffer in the winter, for Providence has provided a perfect nature, rich, moreover, in precious gems and metals.⁶⁰

Yet in very few passages is nature dissociated from humans. The province is “better for the life of man than each of the others in America.”⁶¹ In Gandavo’s view, the colony’s edenic potential favors and facilitates human labor. For this reason all who cannot find opportunities in Portugal should seek the new land; the colony serves to “correct” the metropolis’s ills. In the new land, “no poor walk from door to door begging as in this Kingdom [Portugal]”; and “all those who live in poverty in these kingdoms should not doubt in choosing it for their shelter.”⁶²

Underscoring the quality of the New World’s climate, the fresh winds, the symmetry in length of days and nights, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão adds his voice to the edenic chorus. “There is no lack of authors who want to affirm that the earthly paradise is located in these parts,” he states.⁶³ Even the Elysian Fields so celebrated by the Europeans fell far short of the Brazilian land; like “the fabulous paradise of the scurrilous Maphamedes,” these fields were no more than “deceits.” Here, on the contrary, ran actual rivers of milk and honey—the wild honey found in abundance in the forests, the excellent butter taken from cows, goats, and sheep.⁶⁴ Brandão thus incorporates edenization, an important element of the European imagination, but offers a new reading of it. Paradise is here, where exuberant nature (native honey gushing forth) joins with systematic work (livestock, milk, butter). The happy marriage of nature and labor, initiated by colonization, made Brazil superior to Europe, Asia, or Africa. “The land is ready to have done on it all the husbandry of the world, for its great fertility, excellent climate, good skies, the willingness of its temperament, healthy air, and another thousand features assembled on it.” Docile birds, most excellent fish, crabs, and shellfish abounded here within hand’s reach—“countless eggs, marvelous fruit,” “various types of legumes,” provisions, and “other infinities of wholesome things.”65

It was a bountiful nature but one already transformed by the colonizing effort. As in Gandavo, these efforts are attenuated by the presence of slaves (a propagandizing tool?); but in Brandão more than in Tratado da terra do Brasil, the Europeans’ work in the tropics was eased by the conveniences of a wild nature (plentiful fish and game).

The colonizing, re-edenizing process was thus superimposed on the already edenic nature of the discovered land, which revived images of the Earthly Paradise in the European imagination. When Brandão listed the six essential riches of Brazil, the only native ones he included were timber and brazilwood (in two differentiated categories). All the others—sugar, trade, cotton, crops, and cattle—presuppose the colonizing endeavor. “Of all these things, the principal fiber and substance of the land’s wealth is sugar-raising,” Brandão was to conclude, placing prime emphasis on the most typically colonial of the colonial products.⁶⁶ Is there any room for doubt?

Jaboatão, as seen earlier, likewise embraced the idea of an Earthly Paradise. In an enigmatic text, he shows the other side of the coin. Rich with its infinite treasures of metals, precious gems, and valuable drogas [tropical products such as cloves, pepper, and sarsaparilla], Brazil enriched the rest of the world with the fruit of its womb, “yielding itself up.” But like the viper that nourishes ungrateful offspring and harvests death and destruction, the colony would ultimately suffer; colonial assets, “who does not know it, were, are, and always will be the reason for this same ruin, and for the ruin of its own native sons.”⁶⁷ Viewed within the whole of Jaboatão’s work, this passage might even seem a lapse, a pessimistic outburst by the historian of the Seraphic Order. His meaning is clear: the colonists do not reap the benefits of colonization, which bear fruit elsewhere: in Europe. In the first place, this negative tone clashes with the author’s positive formulations, where Brazil is always cast as having a great destiny to fulfill, favored as it is by the Creator’s generosity. In the second place, what is Jaboatão’s interest in pointing out the defects in the colonial system, since he showed himself to be an enthusiast of the Marquês de Pombal, the true ruler of Portugal (he even dedicated some flattering décimas to this illustrious minister of Dom José I)?⁶⁸

Even if this mystery cannot be deciphered, one can draw inferences from the passage. In writings on the New World—whether by European authors or by colonial authors, who belonged to the elite or shared its culture and therefore let themselves be influenced by projections of the European imagination—edenization rarely reigns supreme or absolute. The specter that haunts it, sometimes more timidly, sometimes more resolutely, is the denigrating view of America, one that seeks to reinforce its negative aspects.

Negative readings of the New World—works by its so-called detractors—multiplied, especially in the eighteenth century. In a notable book, the Italian historian Antonello Gerbi followed the reverse trail of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. From Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda to G. W. F. Hegel, he studied the polemics on America, focusing more on the negative than the positive current, however. During the second half of the eighteenth century, when Jaboatão was writing Novo orbe, these polemics reached one of their most heated moments.69

Edenic formulations were projected on America, erecting a bridge that drew the New World closer to the Old, made it part of its imagination, and filled the space formerly occupied by far-off lands that had gradually been unveiled. In a way, edenizing America meant forging a kind of camaraderie with it, a complicity grounded in the imaginary world. Something was found here that had somehow already been conceived; people saw what they wanted to see and what they had heard said.

Yet as the new continent’s unique features began to emerge, edenization was threatened: novel plants, strong winds, heavy rains, but above all, the most peculiar people and animals—others, different from the Europeans.⁷⁰

It must be made clear that there was no orderly sequence between one tendency and the other, between edenization and detraction. Even the great edenizers of nature did not refrain from more or less pejorative observations about the New World. Though the tendency toward edenization predominated in their case, it did not enjoy exclusivity.

To gain a better understanding of this other side of edenization—detracting and even infernalizing (as will be seen later)—I believe it is worthwhile to remember Erwin Panofsky’s analysis of the paintings of Piero di Cosimo, a Florentine artist born in the mid-fifteenth century. A recluse who refused to eat hot meals and nourished himself on hard-boiled eggs, di Cosimo devoted a series of pictures to mythological motifs. Panofsky views these as an expression of the “hard primitivism” of classical origin.⁷¹ Idealizing the world’s primal condition, “soft primitivism” is in keeping with a religious concept of life—it is the time when Eve spun and Adam wove; “hard primitivism,” on the other hand, is associated with materialism.

From Panofsky’s lesson, it can be understood that the Italian Renaissance presupposed two possibilities: revival of the myth of the Golden Age and, simultaneously, the negation of this myth. There could thus be no pure and simple idealization of nature; ever since the classic era, its opposite had always been taken into account.

In a way, Jean Delumeau returned to this issue in Le péché et la peur. In his opinion, the Renaissance was more pessimistic than optimistic. “Francesco Pico della Mirandola and Guillaume Postel were a minority,” says Delumeau. And in another passage: “Sadness and Renaissance: these two terms would seem mutually exclusive, yet they were often close traveling companions.”72 To back up his position, Delumeau borrows a passage from Eugenio Garin, who says it is not hard to find—and sometimes in a single author—“on the one hand, the signs of the Anti-Christ and the imminent cataclysm; on the other hand, the Golden Age.”⁷³

The Renaissance was enigmatic and contradictory, and its contemporaries were aware of this ambiguity. “Everything . . . has been mixed and tangled up, the loftiest with the lowest, Hell with Heaven, the best with the worst,” Guillaume Budé was to lament.⁷⁴ Consequently, it is not surprising that heaven and hell would also intermingle in stories of America and that even the most edenizing of authors would find themselves caught up in detraction.⁷⁵

Gandavo, an edenizer par excellence and propagandist of the new land, deemed the place delightful and temperate albeit subject to deadly winds. “This wind from the land is very dangerous and unwholesome,” he stated, “and if it aims to stay a few days, many people die, both Portuguese as well as the Indians of the land.” Positive and negative qualities alternate in the same paragraph: “The land itself is weary and neglected; in it one finds the men somewhat weak and wanting in the strength that they possess here in this Kingdom, because of the heat and the provisions that they use here; this is when people are new to the land, but after a time they grow accustomed, and so solid and so hale and hearty as if this land were their very native country.”⁷⁶

The negative aspects of both the climate and the land itself even influenced the animals. Gandavo deliberately avoided discoursing about them, but nevertheless did so in one paragraph, where he endeavored to justify their existence and endow them with a certain inevitability:

There are many other poisonous animals and creatures in this Province, with which I do not deal, of which there are so many in such abundance that it would be a very long story to name them all here and specifically deal with the nature of each one, there being, as I say, an infinity of them in these parts, where, because of the temperament of the land and of the climates that rule it, these could not but exist. Because as the winds that originate from this same land become infected with the rottenness of the grasses, woods, and swamps, [these creatures] produce themselves, many and most venomous, under the influence of the sun that contributes to this [and are] scattered about all the land, and for this reason grow and are found in maritime areas, and throughout the sertão, infinite in the way I say.⁷⁷

Writing his Tratado around 1584—thus making him one of Brazil’s first chroniclers—the priest Fernão Cardim realized that the same climate that stimulates development of fine animals brings the proliferation of repulsive beings. In his words: “It seems that this climate induces venom, for the infinite snakes that there are, as well as the many scorpions, spiders, and other filthy creatures, and the lizards are so many that they cover the walls of the houses and their openings.” And then the counterpoint: “Just as this climate induces venom, it likewise seems to induce beauty in the birds, and as the entire land is filled with woods and groves of trees, so is it filled with handsome birds, of all kinds of colors.”78

Unlike other authors, Cardim detected fleas and lice solely among the indigenous peoples and blacks. In compensation, “there is no want of cockroaches, moths, wasps, flies, and mosquitoes of so many kinds and so cruel, and venomous, so that when they bite a person the hand is swollen for three or four days.” They primarily afflicted members of the kingdom, since the insects were hungry for the blood running “fresh and sweet” thanks to the food from Portugal.⁷⁹ Knivet tells of crab-lice. His group walked through mountainous lands so infested with these bugs that to get them off their skin and be rid of them, they had to take dry straw from the ground and scorch themselves, “as you would singe hogs.”⁸⁰

A great admirer of Brazilian birds, Léry would prove more moderate in regard to quadrupeds. But, ethnologist avant la lettre, he introduced them as different, unique. “Concerning the four-footed animals, I will say first of all that in general and without exception there is not a single one in that land of Brazil in America that is in all respects exactly like any of ours.”⁸¹ In Historia natural de Chile, two centuries later, Father Giovanni Ignazio Molina was to state that American nature was not inferior but, rather, different.⁸²

The Jesuits who were in Brazil from the late sixteenth century to the early seventeenth were wholly oblivious to the question of the New World’s singularity. In the Luso-Brazilian tradition, they were the greatest representatives of miscomprehension of the colonial universe. More than the animal and vegetable world, people were the prime target of Jesuit ill-will. But creatures, plants, and lands also received their quota of detraction.

The land of the colony was very poor and wretched: “Nothing is to be gained from it” because its inhabitants were likewise very pitiable, Manuel da Nóbrega wrote to the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Father Diogo Láinez. “Here there is no wheat, nor wine, nor oil, nor vinegar, nor meats, save by miracle,” he went on in disappointment. “Whatever is found in this land, which is fish, and roots, no matter how much may be had, we shall not cease to be poor, and even this we do not have.” In addition to being scarce, the food that was available was “very weak” and the work to be done in the colony “much greater.”⁸³

Besides being poor and not highly fertile (the native food was “weak”), the land was swarming with “an immense number of vermin, namely, bichos de pé [chigoes], and much smaller than those [in Portugal], with which all are covered,” according to Father Jerônimo Rodrigues. “Fleas such as one cannot believe, save one has lived with them, as we have lived with them for these two years, in summer as in winter, for much of the day we spent killing fleas.”84 The fleas were “the perdition” of the priests’ drawers and shirts, which were soiled all over with bloodstains. One night, says Father Jerônimo, he swatted four hundred and fifty fleas to death in his bed, not counting those that fled. “And here came the Father to say that we would not take ill, because of the many bleedings the fleas were giving us,” our narrator goes on, “but I, to the contrary, said that they take the good blood, leaving the bad.” The legions of fleas were due to the “infinity of dogs” and because the indigenous people urinated wherever they happened to be.

As if fleas were not enough, a cricket plague destroyed books and clothing. Although they killed “a great multitude every day,” it was easy to reach out and grab forty to fifty; there was no end to them. Faithful to the habit of tallying insects, Father Jerônimo once counted five hundred crickets.⁸⁵

And the cockroaches? What “there was, one could not believe, for the altar, the table, the food, and everything was covered with them. And every day the father took a large number of them in his hood, and every day with traps we caught thousands and they always seemed to grow.”⁸⁶

Already in the sixteenth century, the contours of the polemic on America were being outlined: a humid, inferior continent, thick with inferior animals like insects and reptiles. In the mid-eighteenth century Georges-Henri Leclerc de Buffon was to state: “Let us then see why such large reptiles, such fat insects, such small quadrupeds, and such cold men exist in this new world. The reason is the quality of the land, the state of the sky, the degree of heat and humidity, the location and elevation of the mountains, the quantity of running or still waters, the expanse of the forests, and above all the raw state in which nature is found.”⁸⁷

At the time the New World was discovered, Isabel of Castille appeared troubled and worried by the information from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He explained to her that because of the quantity of rainfall the earth was made rotten and kept tree roots from penetrating deep into the soil. “In this land where trees do not take root,” the queen said, “little truth and less steadfastness will there be in the men.”⁸⁸ A humid climate, inferior animals, weak people with no will—this is an association the Portuguese chroniclers did not make in the sixteenth century. Once again it is Buffon who systematizes the negative data on America, in his concern with explaining the reasons for the inferiority of animal species on this continent. It was sparsely populated, and most of the people lived as animals, “leaving nature in its raw state and neglecting the land.” Uncultivated, the land became cold and unable to reproduce active cultures, like the embryos of the great quadrupeds, which in order to grow and multiply require “all the warmth, all the activity that the sun can give the beloved land.” For the opposite reason, what proliferated were reptiles, insects, and “all species of animals that crawl in the mud, whose blood is of water, and which multiply in putridity.”⁸⁹ In the eloquent words of Gerbi, America was fated to be the “prolific humid mother of cruel tiny animals, barren of noble beasts.”⁹⁰ In America, the majestic lion of the old continent would be reduced to pitiful dimensions; here the king of the animals was a maneless coward.91 In 1768 Cornelius De Pauw would take Buffon’s observations to their ultimate consequences: American nature, like American people, was decadent and decaying. “It is without a doubt a great and awful sight,” he stated, “to see one-half of this globe so forsaken by nature, so that all in it is defiled, or monstrous.”⁹²

Humanity: The Predominance of Demonization

The inhabitants of far-off lands, which were fantastic realms to European eyes, constituted another humanity—fantastic as well, and monstrous.⁹³ As the great discoveries took place, these peoples migrated from India to Ethiopia, to Scandinavia, and, finally, to America. In the precarious medieval world, it became necessary to name the unknown and make it incarnate in order to contain fear within bearable limits—monsters described by religion (Satan); monsters described in the world of beasts (unicorns, dragons, ant lions, mermaids, and so on); individual human monsters (crippled people, fiends); and monsters that inhabited the ends of the earth, resembling normal people (i.e., western Europeans) but bearing monstrous hereditary traits.

Classic authors like Ctesias and Pliny were references for the Latin teratologists (Solinus, Macrobius, St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Rabanus Maurus), all incorporated by authors of the early Middle Ages. In the late Middle Ages, it had been St. Augustine who had established certain concepts about monsters—monsters had something to demonstrate. Isidore of Seville was to return to St. Augustine, classifying monsters in four large families: individual monsters, monstrous races, fictitious monsters, and human-beast monsters. This classificatory labor represented the Westerner’s desire and effort to “affirm his own normality, comparing it point by point with the deformity of imaginary races.”⁹⁴ In the thirteenth century, Thomas of Cantimpré compiled a list of monsters drawn from a number of earlier writings—a list that the largest medieval encyclopedia, Vicent of Beauvais’s Speculum, would include in its entirety. Realizing their pedagogical value, medieval moralists made ample recourse to monsters, bestowing upon them a moral meaning and social dimension; the monstrousness of monsters was somehow depleted by their internalization.⁹⁵

As a reader of Cardinal d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, Columbus believed in monsters. The cardinal wrote of peoples “whose customs had fallen away from human nature,” of “anthropophagic wild men with horrible, misshapen features, at the two extreme regions of the Earth . . . : it is difficult to ascertain whether these beings are men or beasts.”⁹⁶ Columbus thought that as he moved inland he would encounter one-eyed humans and others with snouts like dogs. On January 8, 1492, he saw three mermaids leap out of the sea and was disappointed, for they were not as beautiful as he had imagined. In the direction of the setting sun, he wrote to Santángel, people were born with tails.⁹⁷ Perhaps he would sign below François de Belleforest’s words: “The present time is more monstrous than it is natural.”⁹⁸

In two of the most popular forms of “escapist literature,” monsters played a central role: travel books and knightly romances. “Monstrous races—giant monopodes, or with enormous ears, or with their faces on their chests—had had a place in descriptions of Africa and Asia from ancient times, and still could be found in Renaissance cosmography.”99 In the seventeenth century, Francisco Correia’s account of the wreck of Nossa Senhora da Candelária (“which, coming from the coast of Guinea in the year of 1693, a heavy storm caused to come aground on the Ilha Incógnita”) told of monsters and exotic animals. On the island there were apes “eight palms tall and with teeth the size of four fingers”; snakes as “thick as a small wine cask of eight almudes [roughly 65 gallons]”; marine women who would leave the waters swiftly and climb uphill, ladies of “all perfection down to the waist, as lovely as can be” but made ugly by huge ears that “dropped below their shoulders” and rose half a palm above their heads when lifted. From their waists down, they were covered with scales, “and their feet were shaped like a she-goat’s, with fins along their legs.” Near Tenerife, the author also saw “a marine man of such horrendous features that he looked like the devil himself.”¹⁰⁰

Many of the chroniclers writing of Brazil in the sixteenth century referred to sea monsters. Knivet saw “a great thing come out of the water with great scales on the back, with great ugly claws and a long tail.” It advanced on him, opened its mouth, and “thrust out a long tongue like a Harping-Iron.”¹⁰¹ Gabriel Soares made reference to the many marine men in the Recôncavo region, known as upupiara by indigenous peoples. These creatures swept jangadas [fishing rafts with one sail] and people to the bottom, drowning them in the sea. The tide would later return them “bitten on their mouth, on their nostrils, and on their nature [genitals].”¹⁰² The author himself claims he lost a number of slaves this way.

Gandavo’s writing is rich in details. A monster had been killed in the captaincy of São Vicente in 1564, and he set himself the task of penning a faithful account of the event, “even though in many parts of the world news has already been heard of it.” In the middle of the night, an indigenous woman had spotted the monster “moving about with unusual steps, swaying back and forth, and roaring now and again.” He was crossing a low area near the sea and was so ugly “that he could only be the devil.” “He was fifteen palms long and covered by hair all over his body, and on his snout he had some very large threads, like a mustachio.” The boy who killed it, by the name of Baltazar Ferreira, went about “as if terrified, without saying anything for a great time.” In the language of the land, that being was called a hipupiára.¹⁰³

In the eighteenth century, the fear of sea monsters still persisted, now in the form of a “boy of three or four years” who was the color of heathens, with thick, misshapen features, “his head covered with few hairs”; he was most agile in the art of dodging shots taken at him. Jaboatão recounts an episode involving these sea boys and a native Brazilian manning a canoe. The Indian, “with the first sight he had of the beast, fell to the bottom of the boat with a great cry, tightly shutting his eyes and his teeth, so that for all the medicine that they gave him in the town, there was none for his life, which only lasted him, in the state in which he fell, four and twenty hours.”104 His companions in the canoe, black men from Guinea, were neither afraid nor upset by the sight.

Disseminated throughout the world—as Gandavo himself stated—the legend of the marine man acquires indigenous tones in Gandavo and in Gabriel Soares and combines its characteristics with European ones (as, for example, in Knivet’s narrative). Similarly to what occurred with the Earthly Paradise, the European imagination’s projections of monstrous humanities and animals migrated to America. Perhaps relatives of the centuries-old European dragon were the serpents with “most large and frightful wings” of which Gandavo had heard tell.¹⁰⁵ The immense lizard “covered with whitish scales as sharp and rough as oyster shells” that approached Léry and his companions to stare at them with its sparkling eyes no doubt had its European counterparts as well. “It has occurred to me since, in accord with the opinion of those who say that the lizard takes delight in the human face, that this one had taken as much pleasure in looking at us as we had felt fear in gazing upon it,” Léry wrote.¹⁰⁶

In Europe, monsters remained in vogue through the seventeenth century. Protestant preachers like Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon used them generously in their preaching, following the example of the medieval moralists; at a time of religious reformation, they associated heresy with monstrousness.¹⁰⁷ Folk ballads sang of monsters. Crowds rushed to public squares to see the Siamese twins Lazarus and John Baptist Coloredo, who were exhibited all across Europe between 1637 and 1642.¹⁰⁸ People discussed whether hermaphrodites could marry, if both heads of Siamese twins should be baptized, and so on.¹⁰⁹ Even Pierre de Ronsard wrote verses about monsters.¹¹⁰ Once a commonplace part of everyday life, the monster entered a process of demonization starting in the fifteenth century. It shifted to a separate part of the world, compacted with the devil, and fell out of harmony. As the world rejected ambiguities at the close of the Middle Ages, the monster lost its position as an integral part of creation and became instead a freak.¹¹¹

But sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe’s fascination with the monster was concentrated on a specific type: individual human monsters. To the other monsters—the beastly ones, the “geographical” ones that inhabited the ends of the earth, those described by religion (Satan)—the Europeans added the concept of the Wild Man. Through the discoveries, monsters thus did not cede their place to wild folk but joined them.¹¹²

Fifteenth-century cosmographers believed the new lands would be inhabited by monsters, but Columbus found only the Wild Man—to his surprise, well shaped and well built, of “incontestable human character,” belying longstanding legends and suggesting the “essential unity of humankind.”¹¹³

Like monsters, the Wild Man was not a new theme but had roots in the ancient world. He was the antithesis of the knight and contrasted the Christian ideal with instinctive life in a pure state. In the Middle Ages, what held sway was an ambivalent attitude of fear and envy toward the Wild Man; he threatened society but was exuberant, sexually active, and led a free existence in the forests.114 His spiritual traits were seen as negative, while his physical gifts were considered positive.¹¹⁵ The medieval Wild Man lent many of his characteristics to the people of the New World. Until the mid-sixteenth century, when he was portrayed in processions, at parties, at masquerades, and in solemn representations as well, he was melded with authentic aborigines from the American jungles. For Gerbi, William Shakespeare’s Caliban is the “greatest poetic representation of one of these lascivious, ignorant men.”¹¹⁶ But even before Caliban, Naturmenschen appeared in medieval legend, theater, and literature, especially in northern Europe.¹¹⁷

For Francois Gagnon, this monstrous humanity expressed geographic marginality, reflecting a concentric representation of the world; the Wild Man, however, expressed sociological marginality, constituting a hierarchical representation of the world.¹¹⁸ The Amerindian could fit in with either representation: in terms of geographical distance, he was the monster; in terms of his nakedness and natural life, he was the Wild Man.

These two representations coexisted, as Gagnon shows. Over time, however, that of the Wild Man eventually prevailed, although his monster side was never totally forgotten. Monstrousness was tightly linked to the geographical unknown, demolished by the experience of navigation and discoveries. The Wild Man, however, did not depend on the unknown but rather on Christian society’s hierarchical representation. The image justified the colonial enterprise as an effort to bring culture and religion to those who had none, and so it endured as long as the colonial system did.

By the seventeenth century the need was felt to make the indigenous peoples of Brazil part of the Old World’s mental universe. Interestingly, this was achieved precisely through recourse to their geographic marginality. Friar Vicente, citing Dom Diogo de Avalos, provides an interpretation for their origin, which he then immediately discards; it is nevertheless worth mentioning because it fits in perfectly with the notion of geographically marginal humanities. Dom Diogo, in Miscellanea Austral, said that

in the Altamira mountains in Spain, there was a barbarian people that was regularly at war with the Spaniards and that ate human flesh, with whom the Spaniards grew wrathful and so they joined together their forces and took this people to battle in Andalusia, where they laid waste to them and killed many. The few that remained, not being able to sustain themselves on the land, abandoned it and embarked for wherever fortune would lead them, and thus found themselves on the Ilhas Afortunadas, now called the Canaries; touched land at the islands of Cape Verde; and made port in Brazil. Two brothers were made chiefs of this people, one called Tupi and the other Guarani; the latter, leaving Tupi to people Brazil, went to Paraguay with his folk and peopled Peru.¹¹⁹

In this remarkable passage, the European imagination conjoins two migrations: that of the Earthly Paradise to the Atlantic (Ilhas Afortunadas) and that of geographical “marginalities” (wild folk and cannibals) to the same region! By all indications, from the close of the sixteenth century the European imagination thus saw unknown lands and monstrous humanities as converging in Brazil.

Friar Vicente says that Dom Diogo de Avalos’s opinion was not correct because it was unfounded: “What is correct is that this people came from elsewhere; from whence, however, it is not known, for even among them there are no writings, nor has any ancient author written about them.”120

In a brief passage, Rocha Pitta bears witness to the fact that in the early eighteenth century theories on the Eastern origin of indigenous peoples were already well known; here again appears the need to connect this other humanity to the many humanities that had populated the European imagination during the time when communication between West and East had been interrupted. “I will leave aside the controversy on the origin of the first inhabitants that passed through this region, and from whence they came, whether from Troy, from Phoenicia, from Carthage, from Judaea, from the creators of the Tower of Babel, or whether from Ophir, because on this point the arguments of the authors have no more strength than a few feeble conjectures,” he says.¹²¹

European perceptions of indigenous Americans took three different forms: they were seen as another humanity, as animals, and as demons. These perceptions follow no chronological order—indigenous groups were not first perceived as another humanity and then as animals—but may even be present during the same period. Regarding Brazil, the European imagination restructured itself in response to its observation of the American difference. Commentaries on these people were almost always derogatory. Merged with the Wild Man, the almost likable European monsters gained a much more animal-like and devilish form in the colony than in the hegemonic centers.

For the purposes of analysis, it can be said that at the first level the European saw another humanity in the Amerindian. One of the sixteenth century’s main edenizers of the colony, Gandavo, wrote much about the “multitude of barbarian heathens that nature sowed throughout all this land of Brazil.” He emphasized their negative traits: they threaten the settlers’ safety; with weapons in hand, they combat “all human nations” (among which they of course are not included); they do not pronounce the f, l, and r and therefore have no “faith,” “law,” or “Rex”; “they live as beasts, without numbers, or weights, or measures.” “This is a very bold people,” he wrote further on, incapable of friendship, with no belief in the soul, vengeful. “Most inhuman and cruel,” pitiless, “most dishonest and given to sensuality,” they engaged in vices “as if they had within them no human reason.”¹²² How could one colonize such a paradisiacal land with people who behaved as irrational beings—or, in other words, behaved as if they were not human? Brazil only failed to flourish more robustly because of the indigenous slaves “that rose up and fled to their lands and flee every day: and if these Indians were not so runaway and inconstant, Brazil’s wealth would know no comparison,” Gandavo was to state.123 It does not seem to be overstating things to affirm that when he edenized nature and made propaganda in favor of colonization, Gandavo felt himself obliged to vilify everyone who was born in the new land, going so far as to question their humanity. At the same time, he drew the rough draft of a justification for slavery: “There are many slaves from Guinea as well: these are surer than the Indians of the land because they never run away, nor do they have anywhere to run to.”¹²⁴ In História da Província de Santa Cruz, Gandavo would again question the indigenous peoples’ human condition, adding his thoughts on their disdain for work. “They all live very idly, with no thoughts other than eating, drinking, and killing people, and for this they grow very fat. . . . They are most inconstant and changeable.”¹²⁵ It would be difficult, if not impossible, to advance the colonizing enterprise with people so unqualified for systematic work.

Gaspar Barleus and André Thevet—both Europeans involved in colonizing experiences different from Portugal’s—display quite different perceptions of indigenous peoples. Describing the Amerindians’ way of adorning themselves, Barleus blasts away with a value judgment: “In short, they take remarkable delight in sordid and fetid barbarism.”¹²⁶ Difference is thus perceived and immediately condemned. Thevet, however, vacillates more, undecided. The indigenous are a “vulgar herd”¹²⁷—and “coarse”¹²⁸—but, credulous and manipulated by their prophets, they are to be pitied—“ces pauvres gens [these miserable people],” he says in compassion.¹²⁹ They have no faith, law, or religion, nor civility, but live as “irrational beasts,” as nature made them. Yet they are “marvelously strange.”¹³⁰ The way Thevet perceives this difference brings to mind the medieval imagination, where Americans are not what Europeans—based on the medieval concept of the Wild Man—had imagined them to be. “However, many have the mad opinion that these people we call Wild Men, because they live in forests and in fields almost like brute animals, are also covered by hair all over their bodies, like a bear, a deer, a lion, and they even paint them like this in their rich pictures; finally, to describe a Wild Man, they assign him an abundance of hair, from his toes to his head, as an inseparable feature, like the blackness of a raven, which is totally false,” says Thevet, backed by experience. Those who made such assertions did so without ever having seen an American Indian. “As to myself,” he goes on, “I know and I can state it with certainty because that was what I saw.” Reality was not like that: “To the contrary, the Wild Men both from Eastern India as well as from our America leave their mother’s womb as pretty and smooth as the children of our Europe.”¹³¹ The indigenous man has no hair; he is beardless; he is inferior—so would the detractors of America state in the next century, overlooking the adult male’s habit of depilation, common among the Indians and reported by Thevet himself, among others.

Knivet is one of the few Europeans who set down unfavorable thoughts on European behavior in America, and he of course did so in the context of the hegemonic countries’ dispute over control of the overseas colonies.132 He writes of Portuguese inhumanity and urges the indigenous peoples to stand against them. Thus he displays the other side of Amerindian antihumanity: European antihumanity. “Notwithstanding all these fearful inconveniences [leopards, lions, crocodiles, surucucus (bushmasters, the largest venomous snake in the New World)], we chose rather to fall into the paws of a Lion, and the claws of the Serpent, than into the bloody hands of the Portuguese.” Knivet incites the indigenous peoples against the Portuguese, showing them how the colonizers do not recognize them as human beings; instead they enslave them, brand them with an iron like dogs, flog them, and inflict torture on them as if they were not flesh and blood.¹³³ The Englishman said he would rather “stand at the Heathen mercy of savage Man-eaters, than at the bloody cruelty of Christian Portuguese.”¹³⁴

One feature of the Amerindians’ alleged antihuman humanity was routine daily violence. At the hands of this menacing humanity, Europeans lived with the risks of being struck by arrows or being eaten.

Jaboatão offers us remarkable cinematographic descriptions of massacres by indigenous peoples. In Ilhéus, he tells us, Tapuia Gueréns shot arrows through the family of Sergeant-Major Bartolomeu Lopes da Franca, comprising himself, his wife, and five children, and “all who were supping around the table were found dead.” The slaves fell dead in the fields, and only the fifth child survived, for he was studying in town; he would inherit nothing but sorrow, for the estate was lost in the slaughter.¹³⁵ The “tyranny” of the indigenous people was also unleashed against the sugar plantation of Captain-Major Antonio de Couros Carneiro, a Knight in the Order of Christ, even though the place was well guarded by people and weapons. They fell upon the engenho before midday with “their frightening roar,” beating their arches and “using their arrows on the unwatchful, unwary family.” Inside the houses, the servants cried out in terror: “Heathens, heathens!” One of the captain’s daughters, Dona Isabel de Góis, was saying her rosary when she was surprised by the commotion. She ran to the rooms of one of her brothers; but they caught her in a “cloud of arrows,” and she fell before the whole family, invoking the name of Jesus, asking for confession, straightening “her skirts with her hands, for the modesty of her feet,” covering her face with a kerchief, raising her hands to heaven, and offering herself in martyrdom—an involuntary victim sacrificed to the hatred of the Holy Catholic Faith. She died, pierced by more than twenty arrows. Her mother hid in the millstream, and though “almost frozen to death,” she was found alive. In the inner rooms, in the fields, all over, lay the dead. Luiz de Freitas, a child who had gone out to hunt wild pigs, was found “shot through from head to feet with more than seventy arrows.”¹³⁶ During the attack on the home of Francisco de Sá Menezes, who was sick in bed, indigenous peoples killed a small child of his, carried in the arms of its wet nurse, in the patio. Both were “pierced and covered with arrows.”¹³⁷ It was also in Bahia that another indigenous attack took place, this time against the home of Francisco de Araújo de Brum, “a single man who a short while before had finished his Studies of Philosophy in the city.” One morning he had sent his armed men and slaves to do the outside work and had stayed at home alone, with only the house servants. He was strolling about his grounds when a troop of heathens surrounded his house, keeping him from going back inside. The licentiate “took off running” toward the nearby river, thinking that once in the water he could dodge the enemy’s arrows. “But as his luck would have it, the tide was out, and huge mud holes slowed his steps; as he fled death on land, he drank it in the mire and clouds of arrows, with which he was covered. . . .”138

Reference to the risk of being eaten is found in many of the pages written by Jesuits. “Next year, if the negros [i.e., indigenous peoples] do not eat us, I shall write you in greater detail of everything, if it so serveth God,” Father Azpilcueta Navarro wrote to the Brothers of Coimbra in a letter dated 1553.¹³⁹ Preparing to enter the sertões—“a treasure of souls”—Nóbrega expressed to the provincial of Portugal his fear of indigenous cannibalism. Before departing, he wanted to leave work on the boys’ houses “well advanced,” for there lay “the basis of the Society, if by chance they should kill and eat every one of us that goes.”¹⁴⁰ Knivet left an impressive account of the execution and ingestion of a Portuguese man by indigenous peoples. First they killed the man by striking him on the nape of the neck; next they removed his skin with the “tooth of a Conie [capybara],” aided by fire, until, using their hands, all the skin of the body could be detached. The head was cut off and handed over to the executioner, while the innards were given to the women. The body was carved up joint by joint, and the parts were distributed. The next day the women boiled every joint in a “great pot of water,” and the whole group made a huge kettle of soup.¹⁴¹

Jaboatão blames the continual indigenous wars on this appetite for human flesh. He conveys the affable testimony delivered by an old Potiguar woman, who on her deathbed dreamt of her favorite delicacy. She had already received “all the medicine of the soul” and seemed in fine spiritual disposition, inclined toward the Catholic faith. Taking pity on the old woman’s weakness, the priest in attendance decided to “offer her some courage for her body as well” and inquired whether she wanted a little sugar or something else tasty from overseas. “Oh, my grandson,” the old woman replied, “I desire nothing of life, everything bothers me now; only one thing could take this want of appetite from me. If I now had the tiny hand of a Tapuia boy, young and very tender, and I could suck those wee bones, then it seems I would gather some strength, but I, poor me, no longer have anyone to hunt me one down by arrow!”¹⁴²

This antihuman humanity also manifested itself in the state of sin in which the natives of the land dwelled, in the eyes of the European Catholics. One of the main sources of records on the wicked lives of the people of Portuguese America was of course the Jesuit letters. In these the colony was the place of sin par excellence; sin was so widespread that many priests came to doubt the regenerative power of faith. “I have stayed here solely for a want of priests and the need to awaken people in this land who were and are in the slumber of sin, Christians in name only, immersed in malevolence, mixed up in fights, publicly involved in veneries and foul matters, all of which have caused me frailty and little faith and hope of being able to gather fruit,” Father Azpilcueta Navarro wrote from Bahia.143

What were their sins? Vices of the flesh (incest at the top of the list, in addition to polygamy and concubinage), nudity, sloth, covetousness, paganism, cannibalism. “In the vice of the flesh, they are filthy,” Father Jerônimo Rodrigues reported of the Carijó. There were many women for one man: nieces, stepdaughters, granddaughters; “and some take their own daughters as wives.” It was even more appalling that there were many men for one woman, and husbands letting “their wives go where and with whom they please.”¹⁴⁴ In the words of conservative historian Paulo Prado, this was an “unformed, tumultuous” society.¹⁴⁵

Sloth was another pillar of Prado’s explanation (he was an assiduous reader of the Jesuits and the Visitations of the Holy Office). He considered them “the laziest people one could find, because from morning till night, and their whole lives, they have no occupation whatsoever: all they do is fetch something to eat, lie about in hammocks.” These people are “effeminate, alien to any kind of work.”¹⁴⁶ The Englishman Knivet called them “a kind of lazy people, that care not for any thing, but will lie all day lazing in their houses, and never go abroad but for their victuals.”¹⁴⁷

Covetousness was also on the roll of sins, this time involving white people first and foremost—and demonstrating how the colony indeed encouraged transgression. The account of Brother Antonio Rodrigues, who like St. Ignatius had first been a soldier, is quite enlightening in this regard. Rodrigues left Seville in 1523 with 1,800 men, in search of precious metal. He reached the Prata River and saw many of his companions perish in the fangs of wild cougars. Then came hunger—and next the Indians. “Our Lady seeks to punish our covetousness and sins, which soldiers regularly commit.” Hunger thus is seen as a punishment for the atrocities committed: cannibalism, the eating of feces, immoderation of various types, blasphemy, false witness, “unjust justice.” “There the officials in charge would say: ‘Better they die, for there will not be gold enough for so many.’” This is a curious account, where the Europeans are ferocious and the indigenous people kindly: “We found some heathens called ‘Timbos,’ of which there are many. They do not eat human flesh, but rather keep away from this. They are very merciful, for we were languishing and our teeth and lips black, resembling more dead men than alive; they carried us in their arms and gave us food to eat and healed us with so much love and charity, that Our Lord must be praised, seeing so much natural piety in people divorced from faith, who with such gentleness and love treated foreign people that they did not know.”¹⁴⁸

This was a peculiar humanity, antihuman, rather monstrous, different, sinful. Were they really human? Could they be converted and receive the Holy Word?¹⁴⁹ Following the tradition of Giambattista Vico, Abbot Ferdinando Galiani believed that the indigenous people of California were not humans but “the most witted, most cunning, and most able of the monkeys.”150 Even though he recognized human traits in the American Indians, William Robertson could not help but classify them as a “melancholy animal” in his History of America.¹⁵¹ For Immanuel Kant, some American races represented the lowest echelon of humanity.¹⁵²

Assertions of this kind carry with them a long history of detraction. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda pointed out that during the first century of conquest the Spanish who visited the Indies “tended to see the Indians either as nobres salvajes [noble savages] or as perros cochinos [filthy mongrels].” Documents show that the second tendency gained the upper hand in Brazil, as its oldest missionaries got closer to Sepúlveda than to Las Casas.¹⁵³

The comparison with animals appears as early as Caminha’s letter: indigenous groups were a “bestial people of little knowledge,” incapable of understanding Cabral’s gracious gesture. Nevertheless, they were clean, of sound health, and therefore good animals: “They are like birds, or wild animals, for whom the air makes better feathers and better hair than on tame ones.” Hence the wholesomeness, fleshiness, and beauty of their bodies.¹⁵⁴

In 1555 Father José de Anchieta, the “gentle evangelizer of our jungles,” practically compared himself to a veterinarian. Serving as a doctor and bleeder, he describes his treatment of indigenous people’s illnesses: “laying on plasters, raising sternums, and other arts of horse doctors that were necessary for those brutes, namely, for the Indians.”¹⁵⁵

But it was Nóbrega who most debated the animality of Brazil’s indigenous people. In his letters as well as in his Diálogo sobre a conversão do gentio, he repeats the same ideas. “The Jesuit always harps on the same string . . . and ever more openly so as the years go by.”¹⁵⁶ The indigenous people “are dogs in their eating and killing of each other, and are pigs in their vices and behavior.” This famous passage goes on to say that the priests would arrive from Portugal thinking they would convert “all of Brazil in one hour,” whereas it took more than a year to convert one single Indian—such was “their brutishness and bestiality.”¹⁵⁷

Nóbrega’s experience with indigenous people soon undermined his hopes regarding the magnitude of conversion and moved him to consider what “little could be done,” since this “was a kind of people more like wild beasts than rational people.” Inarguably rational, the Christian settlers also were close to animality; they gave the Jesuits “little help” and “much trouble” and with their lifestyles demonstrated “scandal” and “poor example” to the native Brazilians.¹⁵⁸ The idea of an inviable humanity, first ascribed to the indigenous peoples, would gradually come to permeate the colony’s entire population and become associated with the colonial condition itself. The mixing of the races would be one of the factors responsible for this “contagion.”¹⁵⁹ In addressing the topic, Gaspar Barleus compared this mixture to semiferocity: “By whites and Negroes mixing among themselves, brown skins are born, the blackness corrected by a lighter coloring.” The Spanish called this type mulatos and the Romans, hybrids: “namely, produced from unlike parents, like the Demibeasts, born of the fierce and of the tame.”160

Returning to Nóbrega, his letter of May 8, 1558, offers a summary of his ideas on indigenous peoples. From the time of the Discovery, indigenous peoples had harmed many Christians, taking from them ships, plantations, and ranches and mistreating without distinction both those who were cruel to them and those who were kind. “And they are so cruel and bestial that they kill those who never did them any harm, clerics, friars, and women of such fine appearance that brutish animals would find themselves content with them and do them no harm.” In this colony, the valiant Portuguese—the most feared among all nations—were despised by the indigenous groups; they suffered at the hands of and subjected themselves “to the most vile and wretched heathens in the world.” It was therefore necessary to make the indigenous groups conform to a political order with an authoritarian structure, where there was room enough for slavery. “By subjugating heathens, many improper ways of obtaining slaves and many scruples shall cease, for men shall have legitimate slaves, taken in a just war.” Only this would keep the “infernal mouth from eating as many Christians as were lost on boats and ships along the entire coast,” Nóbrega went on to say, indicating the third level of European thought on the indigenous people of America: Indians as demons.¹⁶¹

Other Jesuits would follow Nóbrega’s and Anchieta’s footsteps in perceiving the Brazilian natives as animals. “In eating human flesh, they are worse than dogs,” stated Father Jerônimo Rodrigues.¹⁶² But the Ignatians were not the only ones to view the heathens as closer to animals than to human society. The indigenous people’s excessive cruelty repudiates the human condition, stated Gandavo in História da Província de Santa Cruz. Not only do they kill all those who are not of their flock, but they eat them as well, “for this purpose making use of such diabolical cruelties that they even exceed the brutish animals, who have no reason.”¹⁶³ The Aimoré—a handful of whom are enough to destroy much land—have no fixed house or place where they can be found, “but walk like lions and tigers through the forests,” said Friar Vicente do Salvador.¹⁶⁴ “Human tigers” is also the term Friar Gaspar applies to the Guaitacá in the region of Rio de Janeiro.¹⁶⁵

Like Robertson’s Indian, Barleus’s is a melancholy animal: “The heathens in the sertão and all those who preserve their native customs are more like beasts in their cruelty than like men. They are most hungry for vengeance and for human blood, foolhardy and eager for hand-to-hand combat and for battles,” the historian of Dutch Brazil wrote.¹⁶⁶ Black-haired, threatening in appearance, ferocious of eye, the Tapuia “rarely lose to beasts in the speed of their running.” Cannibals, they terrorized “the other barbarians and the Portuguese with their renown for cruelty.” In their hostilities they were animal-like as well; they proved to be “bloodthirsty, beyond that permitted by humanity or hatred.”¹⁶⁷ Jaboatão calls the Indians a people “notable for the barbarism of their customs and for the ferocity of their nature.” A little further on he associates them with animals: “A region [Brazil] so inhabited by human individuals, as by fierce animals, many of the latter as harmful as the former are inhuman; wild Indians, as brutish as these same irrational beings, and even appearing more irrational than these same brutes.” Jaboatão justified this assertion that indigenous people were more irrational than animals based on their cannibalism; no animal eats a member of its own species, and the indigenous people not only eat other Indians but eat ones that are close to them, relatives and friends.168

In colonial times, it was mainly the writings of Thevet and Léry that provided a positive counterpoint to the image of a mean, animal-like savage. In La cosmographie universalle, Thevet states that the Wild Men “are not such brutes that nature has not given them intelligence to speak of natural things,” and they were thus able to talk about the salty water of the sea and the composition of the land.¹⁶⁹ They also had a notion of good and evil, Thevet affirms two pages later. Léry goes further in his perception of the Other. Even though they were barbaric and cruel with their enemies, their savageness does not prevent these nations from taking into careful consideration “that which is said to them in a reasonable manner.”¹⁷⁰ Contrary to what was believed in Europe, the bodies of the Tupinambá were “neither monstrous nor extraordinary” when compared to those of the Europeans.¹⁷¹

But sympathetic portrayals did not thrive among the Portuguese, who, as Silva Dias and Buarque de Holanda observed, avoided the myth of the noble savage, leaning instead toward the idea of the “perro cochino [filthy mongrel].”¹⁷² Writing in the eighteenth century, the Jesuit priest André João Antonil saw the black slave as an animal: “There are years in which, because of the great mortality of slaves, horses, mares, and steers or the small cane yield, plantation owners cannot wholly fulfill that which they promised,” he stated, making no distinction between people and farm animals.¹⁷³

The European perception of America’s inviable humanity took a third form: demonization. Friar Vicente said the devil had lost his control over Europe (Christianized throughout the late Middle Ages) and had victoriously set up camp on the other half of the earth, in America, more specifically—as expressed in the text of my epigraph—in Brazil. The devil’s hellishness had even colored the colony’s name. For Friar Vicente, “Brazil” brings to mind the red flames of hell. Here the demon had been victorious, at least during the first stage of the struggle: the name of Santa Cruz had fallen into oblivion, and the designation championed by Satan won out. By spreading Christianity, the Portuguese sought to diminish the devil’s hordes of followers; after all, hell was in Brazil.¹⁷⁴ As the activities of the Soldiers of Christ progressed, two categories came into existence: “Indian Indians,” subjugated to the devil, and “converted Indians,” subjugated to God.¹⁷⁵ But the colony remained “Brazil,” bearing forever in its name the infernal stigma that had marked its birth.

The Indians are a people of the devil, the Jesuits affirmed repeatedly. “I do not even know a better sign of hell than to see a multitude of them, when they drink, because for this purpose they invite people from far away, and especially when they have . . . some flesh to eat that they bring on a wood grate,” Father Luís da Grã wrote to St. Ignatius of Loyola.176 They were demons not only in their eating habits but also in their manner of dwelling and dressing.

Each of these houses has two or three holes with no doors or locks: inside them live easily one hundred or two hundred people, each couple in its grouping, with no separation at all, and they live in one part and the other, with a great breadth in the middle, and all are as in a community, and upon entering the house one sees everyone that is in it, because all are in view of each other, with no separation or division. And since there are many people, they usually have fire day and night, summer and winter, because the fire is their clothing, and they are most miserable without fire. The house seems an inferno or labyrinth; some sing, others cry, others eat, others make flour and wines, etc., and the entire house burns with fires.¹⁷⁷

Lord of the colonial lands, as Friar Vicente argues in my epigraph, the devil would not blithely hand his people over to the enemy; with each new step that evangelization took, he raged, demonizing nature and insinuating himself into daily life. A torrential stream could be inhabited by demons, Father Jerônimo Rodrigues speculates. Traveling from Paranaguá to Porto de Dom Rodrigo, he encountered a São Francisco River “so agitated that it seemed demons were visibly moving about there, which boiled in leaps toward the heavens, which caused astonishment.”¹⁷⁸ Along the entire course of their trip, the devil tried to make trouble. Failing to do so, “he put himself inside a whale, and so fiercely did he follow us in the wake of the canoe that he vexed us immensely.” First coming closer, then moving away, the bedeviled whale terrified the priests. “I, however, when I saw it so close and that it brought before it a heavy sea, threw it a small Agnus Dei.” Only then did the whale (devil) go away.¹⁷⁹

At the Carijó mission, when the Ignatians were preparing to celebrate the first masses “and take possession, on the part of God, of people that he had held in his power for so many thousands of years,” Satan made his strength felt. It was a peaceful day, sunny and “serene.” But when the priests were fixing the altar in preparation for the mass scheduled for the next day, “the damned one could not bear it, and ordering a tempest of lightning, thunder, wind, and rain, it seems that the demons were visibly about, and that indeed they were showing how they felt about our coming, and it was so great that, as well covered and well protected as our church was, the adornment and frontlet were made wet, and the image of Our Lady went from the altar to the ground, it seemed as if to see whether it could break the glass, and it was not even enough that the priest covered the altar with hides.” The devil’s malice did not stop there, however. The next day during mass thousands of flies covered the altar and the priest—“it was an astounding thing.” The finger of the devil was no doubt in both events: “And from that day on, in the two years we were there, never again were there such flies nor such tempests.”180 The struggle raged throughout the colony. “In this place we had many battles with the demon and even now we have them,” Father Pero Correia had written years before from São Vicente.¹⁸¹

It was basically in relation to the supernatural that the people of the colony paid tribute to the devil and confirmed their character as diabolical humanity. Assailed by fantastic illusions, the poor Indians—says Thevet—went about in terror, afraid of the dark and carrying fire with them when they went out at night. These illusions could not be explained by reasoning, for the indigenous peoples were deprived of true reason; they could only be explained by the Evil One’s relentless persecution of those who do not know God.¹⁸² Led into error by the Evil One, incapable of discernment because they did not possess reason, the indigenous people became more deeply mired in the error of idolatry, adoring the devil through his ministers, the pajés, “people of evil life, who have devoted themselves to serving the devil in order to receive his neighbors.”¹⁸³ When Léry describes an indigenous ceremony led by the pajés—which he confesses enthralled him—he associates it with the thing that most haunted the imagination of Europe’s seventeenth-century populations: the witches’ sabbat.¹⁸⁴ Festive, damned, threatening—in the words of Michel de Certeau—the world of the Beyond “re-appears, exiled, at the ends of the universe, at the far edges of the colonial enterprise.” In the New World, the missionary-explorer would serve as his exorcist colleague served on the other side of the Atlantic. “Unfortunately, travel literature has not yet been systematically studied as a tremendous complement to and displacement of demonology. And yet the same structures are to be found in both.”¹⁸⁵

Observed in the colonists’ habits and daily lives, confirmed in their magical practices and sorcery, the demonization of colonial people spread from the Indian—its first object—to the slave, eventually reaching the other members of the colony. To evade harsh punishment, the black slaves resorted to “diabolic arts.”¹⁸⁶ In the early eighteenth century, fearing slave rebellions and sensing uprising all around, the Count of Assumar, governor of Minas Gerais, saw nature itself goaded by the climate of rebellion in Minas, nerve center of the eighteenth-century Portuguese colonial economy. Everything was cold in that captaincy, save vice, which was always inflamed. “The land seems to exhale disturbances; the water breathes out riots; the gold rings out insults; the air parades liberty about; the clouds vomit impertinence; the stars inspire disorder; the climate is the tomb of peace and birthplace of revolt; nature is restless inside itself and, mutinous there within, like hell,” the governor stated.¹⁸⁷ Restless and rebellious, the Minas settlers and the inordinate numbers of slaves stirred nature itself to revolt. The possibility of its inhabitants gaining consciousness of their colonial condition underscored Brazil’s status as an immense inferno, where not even nature escaped—a nature that by itself, in isolation, was edenic.

Catechizing efforts combined with the “normatizing” measures of colonial authorities and church dignitaries and with the actions of the Holy Office, all for the purpose of homogenizing the diabolical, animal-like, inviable humanity of colonial Brazil. It was their duty to “correct the body of Brazil,” part its people from the devil, and draw them unto Christ,188 pacifying them.¹⁸⁹ In his Carta de doação (Donatary Charter) to Pero Lopes, written in 1535—even before the Jesuits arrived—Dom João III asserted that the colony’s idolaters and infidels should be brought into the Catholic faith with a view to populating and making good use of this land, punishing heretics, sodomites, and perjurers with the death penalty and handing down the verdict and order of execution “without appeal or grievance.”¹⁹⁰ The royal power itself was ahead of the church in the task of restraining the devil’s legions and converting hell into paradise, even if earthly.

Was hell a destiny? On July 23, 1763, Domingos Marinho, native of Vila Rica, confessed to the Inquisition that because he was suffering from “some infirmities,” he had summoned the curandeira [healer] Maria Cardosa and her 16-year-old godson Antonio, both of them freed blacks. They said a number of prayers while rubbing over his body first a small white stone and then a razor with a skein of cotton tied to it. They also prayed to the Most Holy Trinity, to St. Domingos, and to St. Francis, speaking “in their tongue.” Domingos Marinho had repented—or at least said he had. At the end of his confession, he declared: “This Minas is quite infected by the Demon.”¹⁹¹ Frightened, Domingos was speaking with the voice of the Inquisition, of the powers-that-be. He lived in Minas Gerais, which unquestionably synthesized the eighteenth-century colony.¹⁹² Twenty-six years later, the Inconfidência Mineira would demonstrate with blood—always blood—how the Indian-beast and the Indian-devil had merged in the damned body of the colonist in quest of a consciousness of the colonial condition. And the colony would remain a hell because of the inner demons it fortunately contained.

The Colony and Colonization: A Purgatory Come True

In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri indelibly fixed the image of purgatory, even vesting it with a geographical existence: it was a mountain where souls paid for their sins, purging themselves and awaiting the salvation that Final Judgment might possibly bring. But before it became embodied in Dante’s mountain, purgatory traveled a long path, constructed out of deliberations, dreams, and projections of the European imagination melded with age-old traditions originating in the ancient world. Elements of high culture and popular culture interlaced in the weaving of this purgatory. Between 1150 and 1250 popular beliefs thrived, finding their way into the elites’ sermons, coloring hagiographies, and even lending traditions to the elite formulation of purgatory. Although it was part of this process, the popular imagination never ceased to be viewed as threatening, as something that should be resisted. The councils that institutionalized purgatory—Second Lyons (1274), Florence (1438), and Trent (1563)—tended to keep all the rich imagination regarding purgatory outside the dogmas and truths of faith, accentuating the gap between popular culture and high culture.193

Purgatory eased the terrible tension of having one’s fate inexorably bound to the two extreme possibilities represented by hell and by paradise. It was an opportunity that unfolded before Christians, allowing for correction of errors and forgiveness of sins. This came to figure so importantly in the Christian mentality that a special saint was assigned to hear the pleas and prayers offered in name of those sent there: St. Luthgard.

The nascent Early Modern age found itself grappling with notions of a “world turned upside down,” a sign of the Renaissance’s pessimistic current of thought mentioned earlier. Madness was one of the favorite objects of such discourses, as Michel Foucault has shown. Countless critical essays have celebrated it: Desiderius Erasmus’s Praise of Folly; Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote; Francisco Gómez de Quevedo’s La hora de todos . . . ; Baltasar Gracián’s Criticón; Tomaso Garzoni’s L’ospidale de’ pazzi incurabili; and Sebastian Brandt’s The Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff).¹⁹⁴

As an object of the imagination, the ship of fools emerged during the Renaissance, “a strange ‘drunken boat’ that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals.”¹⁹⁵ A literary piece inspired by the old cycle of the Argonauts, at that time the ship was revived in a series of creative works, including Brandt’s Narrenschiff. “Fashion favored the composition of these Ships, whose crew of imaginary heroes, ethical models, or social types embarked on a great symbolic voyage which would bring them, if not fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth.”¹⁹⁶ Unlike so many other imaginary ships, the Narrenschiff really existed, carrying its load of fools from one place to another. In Germany, it was common practice to entrust the mad to boatmen, who would take them away.

Places of pilgrimage and places of passage (crossroads) as well as markets were other locations where the mad were taken; perhaps these ships of fools were boats on pilgrimage.¹⁹⁷ Abandoned at such spots, “lost,” through their absence these lunatics purified the places from whence they had come. But their exile was not merely a socially useful measure or one that guarded citizens’ safety; it approached a rite and joined the roster of other ritual exiles.

The role of water and its relation to madness is fundamental in the European oneiric universe. While transporting them far away, the water purifies the mad. Furthermore, navigation abandons individuals to the uncertainty of their fate. “Each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks.”¹⁹⁸ Imprisoned on a ship, “the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. . . . He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.”199

In the late sixteenth century, already one hundred years after the discovery of America, the judge-demonologist Pierre De Lancre “sees in the sea the origin of the demoniacal leanings of an entire people: the hazardous labor of ships, dependence on the stars, hereditary secrets, estrangement from women—the very image of the great, turbulent plain itself makes man lose faith in God and all his attachment to his home; he is then in the hands of the Devil, in the sea of Satan’s ruses.”²⁰⁰

Like De Lancre, Luíz Vaz de Camões would contrast the productive chores of agricultural labor with the fortuitousness and unpredictability of maritime adventure. This is the tone of the old man of Restelo’s speech, which Antonio Sérgio, a liberal historian of the early twentieth century, would posit as representing two national policies: one of rootedness (Dom Dinis) and one of flux (Dom Henrique)—where unfortunately, according to this historian, the latter got the upper hand.²⁰¹

This concurrence between De Lancre and Camões is not incidental. De Lancre judged crimes of sorcery, a serious offense in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Camões sang the feats of overseas expansion and meditated on the destiny of the Portuguese people, worried about the inconstancy of colonial activities. The fickle sea carried brave sailors far away, making them “prisoners of passage,” or passengers par excellence, as Foucault saw them. The sea also carried away Portugal’s damned children, those who had to a greater or lesser degree breached the laws of the kingdom or the laws of God. And so it purged the metropolis of its evils; the overseas possessions were the “dungeon of its delinquents.”²⁰²

In the late fifteenth century overseas expansion thus impelled a merger vital to the history of European culture; it articulated and recombined European formulations on purgatory, on the purifying role of maritime crossings, and on banishment as purification—all different manifestations of a great rite of passage.

Once discovered, the colonial world catalyzed access to purgatory; with gold from America, Columbus wanted to save sinful souls and take them to paradise.²⁰³ From the very outset, in the European imagination the overseas world was thus associated with the region where the price of sin was paid, the “third place” about which Martin Luther would speak critically.

In 1602 Manuel Godinho Cardoso had written an account of a shipwreck involving the Santiago that had taken place some twenty years earlier. In his moving description, the shipwrecked people squeezed onto a reef, crowding one on top of another, waiting for boats and rafts to come to their rescue. As the tide rose, those who did not know how to swim drowned, “and those who knew how drowned as well, avoiding death a little longer, however.” Searching the waves for the boat that would save them, with water up to their chests, many spent the whole night “in a perpetual scream because of the coldness of the water and unbearable pain. No voices could be heard other than sighs, moans, and great laments.”204 This description no doubt evokes the sufferings of souls on the mountain of purgatory. Purgatory and the purgation could begin with the crossing that led to the world of the overseas colonies, perpetually haunted by the terror of monsters, extraordinary accidents, and death due to disease. Enduring dreadful suffering, pervading the vessels with a fetid odor, one-fourth and even one-third of the voyagers died during the crossing, victims of scurvy, veritable scourge of the seas, the “cruel and ugly disease” to which Camões refers.²⁰⁵

Writing about the truce that had just been signed by the Spanish and Dutch, Friar Vicente denounced its ephemeral character and, highly perceptive once again, laid bare the colonial system’s deep structures. “New wars” were to be expected “in these overseas parts, for these are always the ones to pay for our sins and for those of others as well,” he stated.²⁰⁶ The colonies were thus fated to serve as an immense purgatory for the sins of the Old World.

America’s detractors almost always viewed it as purgatory. Knivet was not exactly a detractor, but neither did he edenize nature. Far from his native land, naked, living in discomfort, Cavendish’s colleague pondered the reasons that had led him to abandon the certain for the uncertain: “I sat down remembering my self in what state I was, and thinking what I had been, I began to curse the time that ever I heard the name of the Sea, and grieved to think how fond I was to forsake my natural Country where I wanted nothing: then was I out of all hope either to see Country or Christian again.”²⁰⁷ Food was scarce; and when some was found, the men would gorge themselves till “they lay all vomiting that they were not able to stand.”²⁰⁸ At the tip of South America, the Englishman suffered from cold. “Our men [froze], and many of them lost their toes, as I myself for one, for in one night that I lay moist of my feet, I lost three of my toes on one of my feet, and four of the tops of the other foot.”²⁰⁹ Some men lost both feet, while others lost their noses, like the blacksmith Harris. Whether reality or imagination, this was a dreadful place where terrible things happened, for which men often were to blame owing to their sins. In the River Plate region, the soldier Antonio Rodrigues and his companions indulged in all types of immoderation, unleashing divine wrath: “Clearly it can be seen that Our Lord permitted so much evil because of our sins,” the Jesuit soldier would state. “Now I wish I were twenty years old and could live a long life, to go with some priests of our Society, for I have more experience in this land, and to spend my energy and life teaching these people.”²¹⁰ This land invited sin and, at the same time, was the place where it could be purged.

The New World was hell primarily because of its different humanity, animal-like and diabolical, and it was purgatory primarily because of its colonial condition. Opposite it stood Europe: the metropolis, place of culture, land of Christians. In Europe, heaven was therefore closer, and the divine word clearer and more intelligible. In the colony, everything was hazy and blurred. “The words that in those parts seemed clear here become obscure to me; I know not if it is from living among people who are always eating each other and walk about covered in human blood,” Father Azpilcueta Navarro stated, thus localizing the truth of faith and its negation on one and the other side of the colonial system.211 It was up to the European metropolis to redeem the Americans from the world of perdition and sin where they dwelled and to correct it. Catechizing was the way to fulfill the metropolis’s salvational duty; but should it prove insufficient, the natives of the land should be removed from the sinful place in which they were immersed. The colony would always be a danger; and the Jesuit colégio, imbedded in it, appeared to be an oasis of salvation. Nóbrega was the astute formulator of the following position: “In this land, Father, we have before us a great number of heathens, and a great want of laborers. All possible means of attaining them should be embraced, and the Society perpetuated in these parts, to remedy such perdition of souls. And if it is dangerous to raise them here, because there are more opportunities for not maintaining one’s chastity after they are grown, send them to Europe before this time, both the mestizos and the children of heathens, and from there send as many young students as possible to study here in our Schools, because in these there is not as much danger.”²¹²

In the face of so much sinfulness, there was no sure remedy other than strictness and punishment. Nóbrega accused the bishop of Bahia of excessive compromise, inappropriate for the huge purgatory that the colony was. “The Bishop has other ways of proceeding, through which I believe sins will not be removed and people will be robbed of as much money as they can earn, and the earth will be destroyed. His clergy absolve as many paramours as there are, and the [bishop] and his preacher, who is the visitor, give them such preaching that they sin and raise themselves up, leaving the way to heaven very wide for them, and Our Lord Christ says that it is narrow.”²¹³

It is once more the astute Jesuit who perceives the colony’s double role as purgatory: rooting out sin and purifying souls while also guaranteeing the continuity of the production of wealth by a purified—that is, a standardized—population. If no money is earned, the land is destroyed; the colony becomes meaningless if it does not produce wealth, for this is its primary function. One must suffer, producing bread by the sweat of one’s brow; this is our role in the valley of tears that is earthly life. Nothing is accomplished without effort, for the way to heaven is narrow.

One and a half centuries later, another clever Jesuit would complete Nobrega’s thoughts. Referring to the process of cleaning and purifying sugarcane, Antonil stated that the prime objective was to use every last drop of the liquid. “In this fashion, there is no loss of one single drop of that sweet liqueur, which costs so much blood, sweat, and tears to gather.”214 Purifying sugar—the seventeenth-century colony’s finest product—was a task befitting the colonial purgatory; in purifying the product, souls were purified.

But this purification was neither random nor unconditional. The best sugar is the sugar that spends more time purifying. “If it is purified hastily, it will yield little.” The better the cane, the less time it takes to purify. The purifying process yields not only clean, pure white sugar; it also yields dark sugar, brown sugar. And, contradiction of contradictions, it is dark, dirty clay that permits production of clean white sugar. “It should be no cause for admiration that the clay, which is by nature filthy, is the instrument that purifies sugar through its washings, as if reminding us of our own clay, and of the tears with which once filthy souls are purified and whitened.”²¹⁵ The transparency of this analogy between the purgatory of souls and the purgatory of sugar leaves not a shadow of doubt: homogenizing the population through catechizing efforts and producing profitable goods for the foreign market were the two great purging roles of the colonial purgatory; they should be accomplished at all costs, mixing blood, sweat, and tears as well as—paradoxically—dismissing the sweetness and not weighing the hardships implied in achieving this greater task.

In the theological justification of the colonial system, Brazil is once again a purgatory-colony. Here Portuguese Christians faced the question of enslaving their fellow human beings; and in this ultimate of contradictions, the church figured importantly by devising and disseminating a theology that justified slavery. Eduardo Hoornaert offers a brilliant analysis of Vieira’s role in this regard; the Jesuit “compared Africa to hell, where the Negro was a slave in body and in soul; Brazil, to purgatory, where the Negro was freed in his soul by baptism; and death, to the entrance into heaven.” Brazil was a kind of transition place between the land of slavery and of sin (Africa) and heaven, the place of final liberation. In Vieira’s view, the path to heaven was the solution for the slave, and slavery was a kind of pedagogy.²¹⁶

Although Hoornaert’s reading offers one possible explanation, to me it seems incomplete. Perhaps the best formulation is to be found in Antonil, who wrote some years later. Boasting a more modern mentality, adapted to nascent capitalism, and aware of the role of productive labor, the Italian Jesuit had a more accurate understanding of the colonial system’s structure. “Brazil is hell for the Negroes, purgatory for the whites, and paradise for the mulatos and mulatas,” he stated in an outstanding synthesis.²¹⁷ Contrary to Vieira’s explanation—where the slave has a way out, through death—the universe of the colonial system affords the slave no possible way out. Hell is not only the African continent, submerged in sin; hell is the place from which there is no escape ever, not even through death: the infernal fire burns eternally. In an effort to solve the impasse created by this irreversibility, Europeans conceived of a third place: the mountain of purgatory, where souls would suffer till Judgment Day, when they could then earn their right to enter heaven. In the sixteenth century, purgatory was a reality, a hope for the Christian.

Slavery was thus the metropolis’s necessary hell within the colony. No redemption was possible; without slaves, the colonial world would capsize. Offering the slave a way out through salvation was an ideological artifice embraced by Vieira, among others. In a more modern author, like Antonil, who was more concerned with economic issues, this artifice would become transparent. The colony was truly the black people’s hell.

For whites, the system afforded a range of possibilities. As the ruling stratum, they dealt the cards within the colonial system and formed the link between the damned land of the colony and the metropolis—which, if it was not paradise (and sometimes it actually was), at least was closer to heaven.218 Colonial purgatory was an option for those white people who were burdens, misfits, or undesirables in the metropolis. Even when life in the colonies implied extreme hardship, it still left open the possibility of eventually returning to life as an inhabitant of the metropolis. Banishment was the supreme mechanism by means of which Portuguese whites could purge their sins in the colony-purgatory.

And paradise? It excluded the colonial system, which was the negation of paradise that had to be avoided. The colony was paradise only for mulatos—people who did not live in infernalized captivity, who had escaped from it and turned against it, often refusing to perform systematic labor, inventing instead a new state of being through their mixing of bloods and their singular lifestyle. Their existence was a major testing ground for suppression of the system, and Antonil grasped that paradise would be theirs, even if, in the early days of the eighteenth century, this was merely a possibility.

From its birth, and even before that, the colony had been the purgatory of banished whites. As tradition has it—and it matters little whether this is fact or fiction—at least one exiled man had lived in Brazil prior to its discovery: the legendary João Ramalho, who supposedly arrived around 1490.²¹⁹ In various passages, Caminha mentions the exiled men who came over with Cabral’s squadron: Afonso Ribeiro, manservant to Dom João Telo, sent by the captain to “go among [the indigenous peoples] and learn their lifestyle and habits”;²²⁰ and another two, unnamed (would one of them have been Afonso Ribeiro himself?), who were to be left in the discovered land to learn the indigenous language, thus becoming interpreters.²²¹ Convinced of their roles, they set off on the long path of purgatory, taking communion with their departing companions.²²² On May 2, as the squadron set sail for Calicut, they stayed behind on the beach, crying.²²³

Banishment, a little-studied topic, has inspired equivocated interpretations.²²⁴ It has even contributed to the development of deterministic, pessimistic, and covertly racist analyses like that of Paulo Prado, who endeavors to attribute a hapless Brazilian history to the fact that “all the filthy scum of the old civilizations” ended up there.²²⁵ Colonized by a people “already infected with the germ of decadence,” the Brazilian colony heightened the moral degeneration; the only ones to escape this “overseas degeneration” would be those “ethnic groups segregated and cleansed by an appropriate mixing of bloods”—whatever he may mean by “appropriate mixing of bloods.”226 In a literal reading of colonial chroniclers, Prado thus perpetuated the image of an inviable colonial humanity, where banishment provided one of the chief reasons for this disqualification. Biased as it was, Prado’s viewpoint nevertheless comprehended the hell-purgatory-paradise complex cemented together by the colonial system: “The transplanted Portuguese man thought of nothing but the overseas homeland: Brazil was banishment or purgatory.”²²⁷

As a ritual exile, banishment was part of age-old traditions present in the European imagination; in the Early Modern age, the colonial system endowed it with a new meaning. The act of cleansing was still the crux of the matter but now in a new context, articulating metropolis and colonial world. Medieval passengers on the ship of fools, the Portuguese lepers were now deported to Cape Verde, where they would supposedly be cured by eating turtles and washing themselves in their blood.²²⁸

Throughout the colonial period, the tendency was to purge one’s sins and serve out more serious sentences not where an infraction had been committed but elsewhere. The misappropriation of tobacco in Brazil was punished by banishment to Angola.²²⁹ Those accused of offenses and then tried and convicted by the Inquisition’s tribunal in Portugal often served out their sentences in Brazil or were sent to Angola or other places in Africa. The relation between the specific offense and the place where cleansing occurred varied during the colonial period. A preliminary examination reveals that in the seventeenth century those accused of sorcery were sent primarily to Brazil; in the following century, however, Portuguese sorcerers began serving their sentences on the Atlantic islands or, more and more often, in Portugal’s coutos. Coincidentally, it was during the eighteenth century that the colonial system was being rethought.²³⁰

Defined in relation to the colonial system, purgatory had a geographical, spatial existence as well. “The most depraved and perverse persons in the Kingdom” were exiled to Brazil, and that was how it had to be. But to keep this people from disintegrating into an inviable humanity, it would be necessary to “people [Brazil] with better persons than so far have come to it.”²³¹

Jaboatão chronicles the disorder reigning in Espírito Santo during the early colonization, to which bad government and “excesses in customs” both contributed. “In those early days, there came to these parts, save some noble persons of distinction, unruly peoples, some for their crimes, some banished, and thus they lived, as disorderly men, given over to all kind of vices.” It did not take long for purgation to come. “Disorders of nature always bring punishment from Heaven,” and this came in the form of the war the heathens fought against the white settlers.²³²

Gandavo’s whole line of argument is centered round the idea that the metropolis must be purged of its evils through colonization, which should serve to attract—thus the edenization of nature—dispossessed peoples. Responding to Alviano’s allegation that “Brazil was settled first by banished persons,” Brandônio goes a bit further: in the colonial purgatory, the evil nature of metropolitan people is corrected. In Brandônio’s words: “Thou shalt know that these men, who firstly came to people Brazil, in a short while, given the largesse of the land, were made wealthy, and with their wealth rid themselves of their evil natures, to which the necessities and poverty they suffered in the Kingdom had compelled them. And the children of these people, already enthroned with this same wealth and rule over the land, cast off their old skin, like snakes, in all ways displaying the most honorable behavior.”233 Being the place of cleansing, the colony attenuated sins as the colonizing process advanced. The greater the harmony between the activities undertaken and the interests of the metropolis, the faster this purging would progress. The laborious efforts of the good settlers thus widened their path to heaven—barred to black slaves.

Born into a capitalist nation, João Maurício de Nassau had a lucid perception (not always found among the Portuguese) of the colony’s role as purgatory and as the dungeon of delinquents. He typified Brazil as “a fertile land and fortunate country.” But he added: “Without settlers, these lands can neither be of use to the Society nor capable of forestalling enemy incursions. If in this manner the proposition cannot be achieved, I would wish that the prisons of Amsterdam be opened and that the galley slaves be sent here, so that, tilling the earth with their spades, they may correct their wickedness, wash away their prior infamy through honest sweat, and return to the Republic not harmful but useful.”²³⁴ Purging sins and cleansing Europe, the colony would make it possible to transform an onus into something useful. This reversal would be possible, however, only through great effort—“honest sweat”—where the qualifier serves, along with the edenic vision, to alleviate the harshness of the labor.²³⁵

Brazil—Earthly Paradise owing to its nature and hell owing to the peculiar humanity it sheltered—was purgatory owing to its relationship to the metropolis. The damned could reach heaven through honest effort, daily labor, and subjugation to the will of the metropolis. The colonial system perpetuated purgation; it cast undesirable elements to the colony, promising them Eden (as in Gandavo’s propagandistic discourse) and initiating their purification with the ritual exile represented by the crossing of the Atlantic. Once in Brazilian lands, the settlers dreamed of the distant metropolis and saw their stay in the New World as temporary; the promised paradise had been transformed into purgatory.

For the white settlers, heaven was their return to the metropolis; for the black slaves, salvation through faith. So long as the colonial system was in force, for both groups purgatory could metamorphose into hell: for whites, if they refused systematic labor and embraced confrontation with the metropolis—that is, revolt; for blacks, if they cloistered themselves within their own cultural universe, living in quilombos, turning their backs on Christianization and on endorsement of the colonizers’ cultural and political values, killing off masters, and seeking their freedom. Escaping hell, or even purgatory, meant breaking free of the colonial condition. For whites, it meant no longer exhausting themselves in the daily toil that brought glory to the metropolis, purifying sugar and sins. For blacks, it meant no longer being slaves, becoming citizens instead. Under the colonial system, blacks would always live in hell, and whites in purgatory. Antonil was crystalline in his formulation.

Hell and purgatory could be confused, as was the case in Europe. Describing the countless forms of torture afflicting souls in purgatory, Le Goff defined the “third place” as a hell of a specific duration. Through “honest effort,” the white settlers could to some extent control the length of their suffering. The slaves, captives until death, were fated to suffer eternally; for them, not even purgatory was possible.

Within this being and not being, nothing defined the condition of a great purgatory better than the condition of being a colony. For this reason, as long as it lasted, there would always be a purgatory at the heart of the colonial system.

An edenic nature, a demonized humanity, and a colony viewed as purgatory were the mental formulations with which the Old World cloaked Brazil during the first three centuries of its existence. Within these notions, centuries-old European myths and traditions blended with the cultural universe of Amerindians and Africans. Monsters, Wild Men, indigenous people, black slaves, exiles, and settlers who bore the thousand faces of the scorned, the inhabitants of colonial Brazil frightened Europeans, who were unable to grasp their singularity. These hybrid, multifaceted, and early modern beings could relate to the supernatural only in a syncretic fashion.