Two young Frenchmen, Jean l’Archevêque and Jacques Groslet, spent much of 1688 living among the Caddo Indians of what is now East Texas. Sometime around the end of the year they took a precious relic of their European origins, a parchment with a painting of a ship on it, wrote two messages on it, tied a fine lace neckcloth around it, making a kind of fetish of its European origin that would be instantly recognized by any European, and sent if off in the hands of a friendly Indian. One of the messages can be read in full:
Sir:
I do not know what sort of people you are. We are Frenchmen. We are among the savages. We would like very much to be among the Christians, such as we are. We know well that you are Spaniards. We do not know if you will attack us. We are very vexed to be among beasts like these who believe neither in God or in anything. Sirs, if you are willing to take us away you have only to send something in writing. Since we have little or nothing to do, as soon as we see the note we will come to you.
Sir, I am your very humble and obedient servant,
Much less of Jacques Groslet’s note on the same parchment can be read; he says they are young men and have given the parchment to someone to bring to the Spaniards.
When the two young men finally met a Spanish party in May 1689, their skins were painted like Indians’ and they wore nothing but deer skins. They had been on their own among the Indians of Texas for about two years. The Spanish sent them on to Mexico City, and they were able to continue on to Spain before the end of 1689.
These two young men were among the last-known survivors of the effort of Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, to extend French power and trade down from the middle of North America and to plant an outpost on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle had the keen sense of strategic geography and commercial opportunity that is characteristic of all great founders of empires; he saw that the French, starting from their bases on the St. Lawrence, could create a real empire in the middle of North America before the Spanish or the English could stop them, by building on the beginnings they already had made in the fur trade, using large cargo vessels and permanent posts on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system. His vision did not even stop there: In 1684 he obtained royal approval and led almost three hundred settlers to found an outpost on Matagorda Bay, near the modern site of Corpus Christi, Texas. Very much on his mind were the silver mines of northern Mexico and the possibility of access to those areas via the river we now call the Rio Grande; he sent several small expeditions to probe up the river and make friends with the Indians there.
But La Salle’s choice of a location for a first settlement was disastrous. The area was low-lying and swampy, and it meagerly supported a sparse Indian population. Malnutrition and disease soon began to reduce the little colony. Its last two ships were driven aground and destroyed on coastal sandbars. It now seemed vital to open a route to the northeast and to get help from the French settlements in the Mississippi River valley. In January 1687 La Salle set out to the northeast at the head of a small party. The rivers were flooded, the Texas plains were almost impassable, his men became mutinous, and some were deserting. Finally, on March 19, La Salle was shot by his own men. Jean l’Archevêque apparently was among the mutineers, but not the actual assassin; Jacques Groslet already had deserted to try life among the Indians but later rejoined the French party. When the party set out northeast toward the Mississippi in May, the two young men turned back.
However homesick they may have been for Christian society, the young Frenchmen were far better off among the Caddo than they would have been among the Karankawa around La Salle’s fort on the coast. The Karankawa had killed most Frenchmen who fell into their hands and eked out a miserable existence scavenging whatever washed up on the beach. The Caddo had an ordered way of life, with regular cooperation in farming and house building, grave deliberation in governing, good order and lack of crime in their towns, that few parts of France could have matched in 1688. Growing corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, berries, and fruit in the good soil and mild climate of what is now East Texas, fishing and hunting deer and bear, they were less likely to go to bed hungry than peasants in many parts of France. Acknowledging a god in heaven, lighting all their fires from a perpetual sacred fire in a special temple, sending off their dead with moving ceremony, they followed a cycle of rites tied to the agricultural year. They made beautiful baskets and reed mats, sturdy leather clothing, and some of the finest pottery of aboriginal North America. Already in the 1680s they were getting trade goods from French settlements to the east and horses—descendants of those brought by the Spanish—from the tribes of the plains to the west. They were confident of their ability to welcome French or Spanish visitors without losing control of the situation. Later they won the respect even of the early missionaries who wanted to change their way of life at its roots.
Perhaps the young Frenchmen could not get over the sight of enemy scalps hanging in the houses. Perhaps they had seen a prisoner of war tortured to death. Perhaps they could not overcome their revulsion at the elaborate tattoos with which the Caddo covered their heads and chests, which Europeans usually described as “disfiguring.” Both the Frenchmen were tattooed, or perhaps just painted, on their faces and arms when the Spanish found them.
L’Archevêque and Groslet could not return to France because France and Spain were at war from 1690 to 1698. They were taken to Spain, then back to Mexico, and, their names Hispanicized as Archibeque and Gurule, joined in the reconquest of the upper Rio Grande Valley from the Pueblo Indians who had expelled the Spanish in 1680. L’Archevêque/Archibeque became a prosperous trader and interpreter and a respected adviser on Indian affairs at Santa Fe. In 1720 he accompanied an expedition out onto the high plains to the east against some Pawnee who apparently had a Frenchman advising them and was killed by the Pawnee. Today large numbers of Archibeques and Gurules, proud of their distinctive origins, may be found in New Mexico and in southern California.
In 1688 Europeans found themselves on American frontiers, along Atlantic coasts and islands from the Río de la Plata to the St. Lawrence, along inland rivers, and in a few places far inland like Potosí. Sometimes they were as completely on their own and dependent on the goodwill of the native people as L’Archevêque and Groslet. Sometimes they conquered and transformed a region as completely as the Spanish had at Mexico City and at Potosí. A few saw in a frontier of European settlement and power an opportunity for a new beginning for humankind. Sometimes European violence destroyed and built nothing. But some settlers worked patiently to make the land their own, even in the small space of Jamaica.
In 1688 Major Francis Price, his wife, and their three children were living in a substantial wooden house—three rooms on the ground floor, three on the second, kitchen, washhouse, buttery, and coach house in separate buildings—on his estate of Worthy Park in the beautiful Lluidas Vale in central Jamaica. Ringed with wooded mountains, its climate cooler than the coast, with good soil and ample but not excessive rain, the vale was one of the most promising agricultural areas in the entire island and one of the most comfortable places for a European to live. Originally forested, by 1688 it was supporting substantial herds of cattle. Dr. Hans Sloane, visiting Jamaica in 1688, noted that Lluidas Vale was especially famous for its excellent but expensive veal and that such backcountry farms also raised pigs, to be slaughtered, smoked, and sold as “jerked pork,” and turkeys to sell in Spanish Town, the largest coastal town, west of modern Kingston.
Major Price, so called from his rank in the colonial militia, twice served as a member of the assembly. In 1688 he and his fellow settlers frequently shared the small stage of island politics with an unusual royal governor, the duke of Albemarle, whom we shall encounter later in this book, and with an extraordinary representative of a kind of frontiersman very different from the peaceful and hardworking frontier farmers. Henry Morgan, lieutenant governor of the little colony, was a not very thoroughly reformed buccaneer, given official rank and powers and ordered to turn his considerable talents for war and intrigue to the suppression of other buccaneers. The buccaneers had had their origins as deserters and escapees who lived on their own on the islands. They hunted the large numbers of feral pigs and cattle, curing the meat on big wooden frames—boucans—over smoky fires for sale to colonies and ships. As the rulers of the islands, especially the Spanish on Hispaniola, sought to push them out, the buccaneers turned more and more to pillage of ships and towns. The English, the French, and the Dutch all commissioned them to attack the Spanish or other enemies at one time or another. Year after year the buccaneers brought the treasure of looted Spanish ports to Port Royal, on the coast of Jamaica near modern Kingston, to spend in orgies of drink, sex, and fighting that shocked even those accustomed to the dock areas of London and Amsterdam. In 1670 Henry Morgan led a march across the Isthmus of Panama to sack Panama City. From that year on, however, all the European rulers wanted to move toward peaceful development of their island colonies. They sought to promote trade, including trade in Spanish ports, and to suppress the buccaneers. Morgan did his part sometimes in campaigns against his former comrades. He died in August 1688. The gradual suppression of the buccaneers continued. In 1692 there was a great earthquake, and much of Port Royal sank beneath the ocean. One did not have to be a Puritan preacher to talk of divine punishment.
In 1688 the interior of Jamaica harbored yet another kind of frontier, the settlements of the escaped slaves, or Maroons. They were especially prevalent in the cockpit country, full of limestone cliffs and sinkholes, where a single armed watchman might be able to protect the narrow access to a cliff-bound sinkhole where hundreds of people planted their gardens and lived in peace and freedom. The Maroons also had their origins in the days of Francis Price; slaves of the Spanish had been left to run more or less free and to herd cattle in the interior. Some of them had had small farms in Lluidas Vale, had been pushed out by the English, and had retreated toward the less accessible mountains to the west. There were reports of slave escapes in 1684 and 1686 and of a bigger outbreak in 1690; soon these people were to form the nucleus of growing settlements of fugitives from the growing numbers of slaves on the sugar plantations.
There was a persistent conflict of interests in the Caribbean between settlers like Francis Price and merchant groups, especially the Royal African Company, that wanted to sell slaves not just to English settlers but to the highest bidders, who often were the Spanish. The Spanish took no direct part in the African end of the trade at this period, but their American possessions were the ultimate destination of perhaps one-fifth of all slaves that reached the New World in the late seventeenth century. Fearing Protestant pollution of their Catholic realm and breach of their monopolies of gold and silver, the Spanish forbade almost all trade between their settlers in America and other Europeans. Spanish settlers got their slaves by welcoming foreign ships to their ports in violation of royal commands, by going to Jamaica, Curaçao, and so on to trade, and by taking advantage of a major legal concession called the asiento, in which a Spanish or foreign merchant combine received, in return for a large advance on the duties it would owe and other contributions to the Spanish crown, a near monopoly of the legal delivery of slaves to Spanish American ports. In 1688 this practice had led to the baroque tangle of the Coymans asiento.
A baroque style can be seen in more facets of this period than literature and the arts, for Sor Juana and Purcell and Vivaldi. In politics and trade there also were many cases of elaborate structure and formal argument from which the underlying realities emerged only occasionally but dramatically. In the early 1680s the asiento was held by a Spanish merchant house headed by Juan Porcio. It is clear that he in fact obtained many of his slaves from the Dutch and that the residents of Cartagena and other mainland Spanish ports also were delighted to trade with any Dutch or English ship that came along, no matter what was said in Madrid. Porcio encountered financial difficulties in 1684 and was unable to make his payments to the crown, alleging that the local authorities in Cartagena were working against his interests.
In 1685 the authorities in Madrid began negotiations with Balthasar Coymans, a Dutch resident in Cádiz, who clearly was working for the interests of the important Amsterdam merchant house of Johan Coymans, which was less openly fronting for the Dutch West India Company and the interests of its slave trade emporium at Curaçao. An agreement soon was reached under which Balthasar Coymans was to administer the asiento originally granted to Porcio, making an immediate payment toward some frigates for the Spanish navy being built in Holland and an advance on the dues he would be liable for on goods imported to Spanish America.
Porcio of course had wanted the Spanish court to give him new concessions and financial assistance, not take his asiento away from him, and now he sought allies in his attacks on the new arrangement. He found them especially in ecclesiastical quarters, where it was feared that heretic ships in Spanish American ports would lead to contamination of the Catholic faith, especially among recent converts whose faith still was inadequately nurtured and disciplined. The discussions now wound on with the complexity and slowness for which the Spanish court was famous. The objections of the churchmen made a good deal of sense to the dimly conscientious and devout Carlos II, and late in 1686 he appointed a special commission to study the question. But in 1687 the Dutch government and the West India Company showed their hands, alleging that the contract with the heirs of Balthasar Coymans, who had died in 1686, was a firm royal commitment and could not be reconsidered by a commission of dubious authority. In June 1688 the commission delivered an opinion that the Dutch must recognize its authority before discussions could proceed. The Dutch, in any case, had continued to ship slaves and goods to Curaçao to be sold in Spanish American ports, asiento or no; in 1688 they had about five thousand slaves ready for sale in Curaçao. Of course the local Spanish authorities were happy to tolerate the trade with them. In 1689 the Spanish court canceled the Coymanses’ asiento and returned the contract to Porcio. The Coymanses continued to protest, and Madrid continued to form committees to study the matter, but the Coymanses’ objections were ignored, and the Spanish apparently never returned the first payments Balthasar Coymans had made back in 1685. But the Spanish in America remained dependent on supplies of slaves and goods from the Dutch and from the growing trades of the English and the French.
The ultimate baroque concealment of the asiento was that it legalized, commercialized, and quantified the involuntary transportation of many thousands of terrified and miserable Africans and made possible their sale and continued enslavement in the Americas. Modern works on the slave trade often include maps showing a tangle of black lines of varying widths from various African ports, coalescing in mid-Atlantic and then diverging to destinations from the Caribbean to the Río de la Plata. Slaves from Angola mostly stayed within the Portuguese sphere and were sold in Brazil. Those from the many ports and kingdoms between the Senegal and the Niger usually passed through the West Indies and either stayed there or were sold in Spanish mainland ports.
The black ship rocked out beyond the surf, sometimes scarcely visible in the hot, damp air. On the shore the slaves were sold to the Europeans, branded, and taken out in longboats to the ship. By the time the ship completed its cargo and set sail, many of the captives had already spent several weeks on board, locked up belowdecks at night, brought out on deck during the day for meals and for regular enforced dancing and other exercise. Many of them were convinced that when the ship arrived on the far side of the water, the white men would eat them. Some were watching for a chance to overpower the watchful crew and escape to the shore before it was too late. Others were refusing to eat, believing that if they starved to death, their souls would return to the African shore.
Desperation was especially acute as the ship hoisted sail and left the shore behind. Sailors stood on the fore and aft decks with lighted fuses, ready to discharge small cannons toward the crowd of slaves at any sign of disorder. The lucky ship caught a good wind and made a quick voyage. But if it was unlucky or too late in the season, it might spend days or weeks becalmed before it got away from coastal waters. The captain of course was concerned to keep his cargo alive; a dead slave thrown to the waiting sharks was a loss on his account books. The best captains paid careful attention to the feeding of their slaves—primarily cornmeal mush, seasoned with peppers that were thought to prevent or moderate intestinal disorders. On a well-managed ship, overcrowding was avoided, the holds were regularly cleaned out with vinegar and hot water, and the routine of regular exercise was kept up. But much depended on luck, not only with the winds but in the avoidance of contagious diseases that despite all precautions might sweep through the holds, killing half the slaves, or even all, and in a few cases all the crew as well.
Modern historians may not agree with seventeenth-century (or twentieth-century) ideas on the importance of the bullion trade, but they are far more likely than contemporaries were to recognize the vast changes on both sides of the Atlantic resulting from the African slave trade. In 1688 European condemnation of the enslavement of Africans, a vital element in European political debate a hundred years later, had scarcely begun. (Later in this book we look at one of the first pieces of antislavery literature, Oroonoko, published in 1688, and at its author, Aphra Behn.) When participants in the slave trade in the 1680s wrote about it, their views and even their language betrayed not the consistent defensiveness of men reacting against moral and political attacks on their livelihoods but inconsistency and ambivalence. On one page they might exclaim that there was no difference between the Africans and themselves except skin color and call them “poor wretches” then turn to self-pity on the next page and call themselves “slaves” to the dreadful business.
Doing our best with patchy figures, we might hypothesize for 1688 a total English purchase of slaves on the coasts of Africa of five thousand. The Portuguese trade from Angola to Brazil was larger, perhaps shipping seven thousand, while the Dutch West India Company, with fine bases on the African coast and a thriving slave depot at Curaçao, may have shipped another three thousand, and the Danes, Prussians, and French still another two thousand, for a speculative total of seventeen thousand. The English Royal African Company records trade in 1688 at the mouth of the Gambia, on the Gold Coast, at Whydah, and at Benin and Calabar, all areas where it had permanent forts of its own or well-established places of business in coastal towns under African administration. But one-third of the company’s total investment was in goods for voyages to the Windward Coast, a stretch roughly equivalent to the modern coasts of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire. There were no forts, no settled European presence on these coasts. Ships seeking trade kept close to shore, and Africans with slaves or other goods to sell signaled their presence by smoke signals. Some thought it a slow and uncertain trade, but the traders and the companies liked the lack of the fixed expenses and local entanglements of fort or settlement, and down to 1690 the Windward Coast trade was an important contributor to Africa’s total trade with the European ships. Thereafter the Windward Coast could not offer either the security the Europeans needed when they were at war with each other or the reliable and increasing supplies of slaves needed as the trade grew in the eighteenth century. Still, it remained important for some traders some of the time. Since there were no permanent European observers onshore, even less than usual is known about the organization of trade on the African side of the Windward Coast. But somehow it was efficient enough, and African resistance to selling other Africans was low enough, that this zone without permanent ports or European stations provided as many as a thousand slaves to company and other British merchants in the one year 1688.
On the eve of Pentecost in 1688 Father Antonio Vieira of the Society of Jesus preached a sermon in the chapel of the Jesuit College in Bahia in Brazil. He began with the double image of the tongues of fire that appeared above the apostles on that day of dread and grandeur and of God’s destruction of the Tower of Babel by the multiplication of tongues: “Such was the transgression, and such the chastisement in ancient times, but today we are on the eve of a day on which, turning from justice to mercy, and wanting to build a tower of his own, God took the trace of the transgression, and from the chastisement his instruments. . . . This tower is the Catholic Church. . . . What were the instruments with which God struck down and chastised the Tower of Babel? They were the new and various tongues into which the universal tongue which all spoke was divided and multiplied. Thus for this the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, in the form of tongues, many, and divided.”
Father Vieira’s sermons were masterpieces of baroque rhetoric. In this one we see a brilliant use of reversal, as language becomes first an instrument of God’s wrath and then of His church and of the work of the Holy Spirit. There was a growing fascination with the multiplicity of tongues and with the lost Adamic language as ocean-crossing Europeans discovered the full variety of human speech. But Father Vieira had more in mind than the elaborate recalling of a key moment in the work of the Holy Spirit in the church. He was speaking to fellow Jesuits of all ages, including novices, and he did not like the trend of language learning and language use among his confreres of the Jesuit Province of Brazil.
Vieira, a vigorous preacher, was arguing for major changes in mission policy. Already eighty years old, he had just begun a three-year term in the important office of Visitor of the Jesuit Province of Brazil. He had grown up in Bahia and run away from his parents to the Jesuit College, where he now was preaching. As a novice he had served in an inland mission and learned to speak the Tupi-Guarani language used to communicate with most Brazilian Indians. Everywhere in the world the Jesuits took seriously the need to learn the languages of the people to whom they wished to preach, becoming the European world’s first masters of the languages of the Huron, the Iroquois, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Tamils of southern India. In the Brazilian Jesuit colleges and missions of Vieira’s youth it was said that Tupi-Guarani was used as much as Latin.
It probably was talent as a preacher that led to his selection in 1641 as one of the bearers of assurances of Brazilian loyalty to João IV of Portugal, who had just broken away from Spanish rule and reestablished an independent Portuguese monarchy. João was generally sympathetic to the Jesuits, and Vieira became influential at court. On a visit to Amsterdam he had long conversations with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, who was writing a prophetic work titled The Hope of Israel. Those conversations, recurring apocalyptic prophecies about the coming triumphs of the Portuguese monarchy as God’s instrument, and Vieira’s deep identification with the missions to the Indians began to interact in his fertile mind.
In 1653 Vieira returned to Brazil as superior of the Jesuit missions in the Amazon basin. For him and his colleagues this was the greatest frontier. Every journey up the enormous river seemed to lead to an exploration up a different tributary and the discovery of more Indian peoples, strange and frequently alarming in their body paint and their dress or lack of dress, sometimes dangerous with their poison darts shot from blowguns but more often just wary and responsive to patience and kindness. Along the rivers where traders came and went the missionaries usually could find someone who spoke Tupi-Guarani, but beyond those first contacts they had to deal with an ever-growing Babel of languages that taxed even their zeal and commitment to language learning. Many of their first-stage conversions no doubt represented quite limited understanding and commitment, largely responses to the kindness, gifts, and medicines of the Jesuits and efforts to tap the new sources of supernatural power they seemed to represent. But the conversions were counted in the tens of thousands in Vieira’s first two years. That meant trouble between the Portuguese settlers and the Jesuits, who tried to protect their converts from the labor levies of the settlers and the dissipations of the frontier towns. Vieira tried to be conciliatory, hoping to draw the settlers into his vision of a glorious multiracial Christian destiny for the Amazon. Since there was no printing press in the region and many of the settlers couldn’t read anyway, his skills as a preacher were especially vital. But there was no end of conflict.
In 1655 Vieira was back in Lisbon, lobbying effectively for new regulations protecting Indian converts and for the appointment of a governor who would enforce them. In Lenten sermons in Lisbon he dwelled on the sinfulness of old Europe and the image of the Jews following the pillar of fire in their Exodus to the Promised Land. The Portuguese already had opened up new promised lands in their world-girdling voyages, and now they must follow God’s will into their empire, especially Brazil, where the sins of the Old World would be redeemed and history would open out toward the universal victory of Christ. Vieira returned to the Amazon. A long journey to the Ibiapaba Mountains in 1659 led to many conversions. He began filling out his millennial expectations for the Amazon in a work he titled The Hopes of Portugal, much of it written in dugout canoes. He continued his dual strategy of conciliating the settlers and protecting the Indians—to no avail. In 1661 the settlers rebelled and expelled the Jesuits from the Amazon.
Vieira again took the Jesuit case to Lisbon. He preached that prophecies in the Bible, especially the prophecy of a fifth empire in the Book of Daniel, referred to the coming Christian realm in the New World. It was not he commenting on Scripture, he said, but Scripture commenting on him and his experiences. The fact that these prophecies had not yet been fulfilled confirmed that they were indeed prophetic. The Book of Daniel’s mysterious phrase translated as either “bells with wings” or “ships with wings” was a prophetic anticipation of the war canoes of the Indians of the Amazon with big drums on their bows.
The death of João IV in 1656 had given new openings for anti-Jesuit forces. From 1663 to 1668 Vieira was held in house arrest and in prison by the Inquisition and pressed to recant his more extreme prophetic views. His conviction of his own prophetic rightness deepened by his stay in prison, he denied the jurisdiction of the Inquisition but submitted to royal authority and went into self-imposed exile in Rome, where he was forbidden to preach but had many admirers. In 1681 he returned to Brazil. There he abandoned his efforts to draw the settlers into his visions of Christian empire, worked to expand missionary efforts in areas remote from Portuguese settlement, and turned the Jesuit novitiate at São Luis de Maranhão into a seminary for the Amazon missions. Thus it was that in 1688, the newly appointed Visitor, he was haranguing several generations of younger colleagues about the decline of Jesuit learning of Amerindian languages and even arguing that they ought to learn some of the languages spoken by the African slaves in the coastal areas.
Later in 1688 Vieira preached a sermon in celebration of the birth of a royal prince and heir in Lisbon. (Another royal infant of destiny, like the one in London in the same year, whose birth was to seal the fate of the House of Stuart!) This news rekindled his hopes that the Portuguese monarchy would fulfill its worldwide destiny and become the prophesied fifth empire. He did not know that the infant prince had lived for only eighteen days. Vieira largely retreated from public life in 1691 and died in 1697 at the age of eighty-nine.
In the eighteenth century the Jesuits made some advances in conversion and protection of their converts in the Amazon, against continued furious settler opposition, until they were expelled from the Spanish and Portuguese empires and their society was suppressed in the 1750s and 1760s. The real transformation of the Brazilian frontiers began soon after 1688, as word filtered out to the coastal Cities of gold strikes in the inland area that soon was called Minas Gerais, the “general mines.” Gold rushes, a diamond rush, armed struggles between bandeirantes and other settlers, and savage government efforts to get the revenue created a brutal frontier world. Brazil and Portugal entered an age of opulent church and palace building that could not entirely conceal a frontier world with little room for Father Vieira’s dreams of the final frontier of the human spirit.
The conditions of the Portuguese Empire in America that provoked Father Vieira’s dreams were at least as violent and sordid as those of the West Indies, and on a much larger scale. The bases of the Portuguese were along the Atlantic coast of what is now Brazil. The first important source of wealth for the settlers and the home government, beginning in the 1530s, had been the sugar plantations of the northeast, in decline in 1688, as West Indian production began to grow. Sugar production in the New World was inseparable from the exploitation of African slave labor. Far to the south the Portuguese had a small colony at Sacramento on the Río de la Plata that was above all a center for the smuggling of silver out the back door of Spanish America, from the mines of Potosí. A bigger center at São Paulo was the opening into a complex system of inland river valleys that were incessantly explored by Brazil’s most famous frontiersmen, the bandeirantes. The business of the bandeirantes was enslaving Indians. Themselves often of Indian or mixed parentage, usually speaking Indian languages among themselves, they became prodigious horsemen and fighters, and in their hunt for more captives they developed an unparalleled knowledge of much of what is now Brazil. As Spanish Jesuits developed large colonies of Indian converts in Paraguay, the bandeirantes found it much more profitable to raid those settlements, seizing at one stroke large numbers of Indians who already had learned how to till the white man’s crops and herd his cattle and avoiding the hard, dangerous work of chasing Indians dispersed over their native territories. In the middle and late seventeenth century the Portuguese authorities were encouraging the bandeirantes to employ their knowledge of the backcountry and talent for survival in it to prospect for gold and other minerals.
In addition to wary native peoples, marauding bandeirantes, and struggling plantation owners, the frontiers of Portuguese settlement in Brazil were dotted with settlements of escaped slaves called quilombos. The most famous of these settlements, the quilombo of Palmares, in 1688 probably had endured in more or less the same location for more than a hundred years. In broken country southwest of Recife covered by palm forests—palmares in Portuguese—the settlement sometimes had as many as twenty thousand residents, grew all its own food, and was defended by more than three miles of wooden palisades and by armed men posted in various directions. The quilombo had its own smiths and managed to obtain fresh supplies of tools and weapons from the coastal towns. Slaves fled to it regularly, and some Portuguese, to the great indignation of their neighbors, made payments to the quilombo and traded with it in order to be left in peaceful possession of frontier farms.
From the early 1600s on, improvised armies of Portuguese settlers launched one expedition after another into the difficult country to attempt to destroy this and other quilombos; there were twelve such expeditions between 1666 and 1687. Usually the Palmares warriors put up some resistance but then fled into the woods when the attackers set their palisades on fire, only to return and settle down again once the Portuguese had withdrawn. In 1677 and 1678 the Portuguese made more serious efforts under more competent leadership but, still unable to wipe out Palmares, offered its leaders peace and some autonomy within the framework of the Portuguese colony. Most of the leaders were ready to accept, but some of the more militant younger ones, led by one Zumbi, melted into the woods to continue the struggle, and the agreement unraveled. Zumbi, who was said to have a Portuguese wife, acquired in the following years a formidable reputation as a military commander, and an aura of lost-cause heroism clings to him in Brazilian popular lore down to our own time.
In the 1680s the Portuguese leaders of the coastal towns complained frequently about Palmares raids in their rural districts. Decisive action must be taken to get rid of the problem once and for all, they wrote; the higher authorities ought to send in regular troops. But in the same documents they also complained constantly of their general impoverishment and the inability of the towns to meet even their current fiscal obligations. Then, in 1687–88, the area faced major Indian attacks and a yellow fever epidemic. But already in 1687 the negotiations that were to change the terms of the conflict had begun. Bandeirante groups had started to wrest land from the Indians and settle inland. In 1687 the towns and the bandeirantes already were moving toward an agreement, finally approved in 1691, by which the bandeirantes would contribute their forces and be rewarded after the extinction of the quilombo of Palmares by grants of title to much of its land. The bandeirantes were defeated in a first campaign in 1692; but when they returned in 1694, both sides seem to have understood that it was war to the death, and after a twenty-two-day siege Palmares fell, and its remaining people were killed or enslaved.
We have noticed that many slaves in Brazil had been brought from Angola, mostly sold in the violent trade from Luanda that had so thoroughly undermined the kingdom of the Kongo. In that trade slaves who managed to escape before they reached Luanda sometimes were able to form improvised settlements under war chiefs in remote mountain areas. They were called quilombos. The name and the practice had come to Brazil from Angola, on the ships of misery and terror.