THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
In 1621 the northern provinces, Ceara, Maranhao, and Para, had been
separated from the rest of Brazil and erected into an independent
government called the State of Maranhao. In Ceara the cattle-industry
flourished; around the beautiful bay of Maranhao the Azoreans multiplied
their colonies. Cotton, mandioc, and sugar were grown in large
quantities; the cotton manufacture soon became an important industry.
But the mysterious Amazon, whose entrance was guarded by the town of
Para, seemed most attractive of all. No civilised man had penetrated its
length since Orellana's adventurous voyage of a century before. In 1638
Jacome Raymundo, an able Brazilian, temporarily acting as governor of
Para, determined to explore the great river. The expedition which he
sent out found its way up the windings of the multitudinous channels,
and after eight months reached the first Spanish settlement in the east
of Ecuador. The Spanish authorities at Lima and Quito saw no particular
value in a route through a territory in which no gold or silver had
been discovered, and which by the Spanish policy could not be used for
commerce. But when, two years, later Portugal regained her independence
the expedition turned out to have been of vast importance. The
Portuguese had found the practicable route into the great river valley;
they controlled the mouth of the stream; and though the whole territory
lay west of the Tordesillas line Spain never asserted any effective
claim to it.
Meanwhile the conquest of the great interior plateaux to the south was
rapidly proceeding. The wars with the Dutch rather stimulated than
retarded it, for, so long as the Dutch commanded the sea, the widely
separated provinces were obliged to communicate by land, and the Indian
routes became better known to the Brazilians. Settlers driven from the
sugar plantations on the coast took up cattle-raising in the interior of
the northern provinces. In the extreme South, as early as 1635 the
Paulistas had rooted out the Jesuit settlements from the whole region of
the Parana. To the North they traversed the Sao Francisco valley and the
plateau of Goyaz. Manoel Correa explored the latter region in 1647, and
in 1671 another Paulista, Domingos Jorge, penetrated with a force of
subject Indians into the great treeless plains which extend beyond the
mountain ranges bounding the Sao Francisco valley on the north. These
plains are now the state of Piauhy. At about the same time the
cattle-raisers who had established themselves on the lower Sao Francisco
in Bahia, crossed over into the same territory of Piauhy. Within a short
time the Indians were reduced to submission, and the cattle ranges were
extended over the plains of Piauhy, southern Ceara, and the adjacent
provinces. This great conquest completed the junction of southern and
central Brazil with Maranhao and Para. Long lines of land communication
were established, and over them travel was more frequent than would seem
likely. Piauhy and Ceara soon produced an enormous surplus of cattle
whose export into other provinces brought about a revolution in the
alimentation of the coast Brazilians. The Indians along the north-east
coast were gradually incorporated, destroyed, or pushed back, though it
was not until 1699 that they were finally subdued in Rio Grande do
Norte. From this time dates the astonishing development of the
population of Ceara, who during this century have furnished nearly all
the labour for the gathering of rubber.
In the South, settlements multiplied up and down the coast from Rio
until nearly the whole of the present state was occupied. Rio and Sao
Paulo flourished with the profits of the clandestine trade with the
Spanish colonies. The Paulistas continued to spread in every direction.
By 1654 they had occupied the headwaters of the Parahyba and west as far
as Soracaba.
During the period just following the expulsion of the Dutch the
Portuguese government was not able to enforce its policy of commercial
exclusivism. Treaties with Holland and England gave the citizens of
those countries a right to trade with Brazil, and the colonists kept up
their commerce with the Spanish possessions. Municipal charters were
freely granted to Brazilian towns, and the existing franchises reformed
according to the most liberal model in Portugal--that of Porto.
Brazilians were relieved of the absurd feudal distinctions which
exempted nobles alone from liability to torture, and regulated the
clothes a man might wear. The extraordinary rapidity of Brazil's
increase in population and territory during the middle of the
seventeenth century was largely due to comparative freedom from
vexatious restrictions and exactions--commercial and governmental. By
the end of the century there were three-quarters of a million people in
Brazil--a fivefold increase in seventy years, in spite of the fact that
the most populous provinces had been the scene of war for twenty-four
years of that time.
But the Portuguese government lost little time in returning to the old
restrictive conditions. Since the loss of the Indies, Brazil was
Portugal's principal source of wealth, and aristocracy and Court made
the most of the unhappy colony.
Navigation companies were chartered and given a monopoly of all
commerce--export and import. The Jesuits renewed their efforts to gain
control of the Indians. In Sao Paulo they had no chance of success, but
in the North the celebrated Padre Antonio Vieira, one of the greatest
geniuses that Portugal has ever produced, was given a free hand. He
nearly smothered the whites of Maranhao and Para with a ring of
missions, and his successors established settlements on the Amazon which
finally spread so as to communicate with the Spanish missions in Peru,
Bolivia, and Paraguay. The Brazilians of Maranhao and Para did not
object to the occupation of the valley of the Amazon, but they bitterly
resented the Jesuit encroachments in their own neighbourhood. In 1684 a
rebellion finally broke out in Maranhao under the leadership of Manoel
Beckman. He paid the forfeit with his life, but his work had warned the
Portuguese authorities that they must not push their favours to the
Jesuits too far.
During the long Dutch war many Pernambucan negroes had fled into the
interior, where they had established themselves in independent
communities and refused to recognise white supremacy. They fortified
their villages with palisades, obtained wives by raids on the
plantations, elected chiefs, devised rude forms of administering
justice, and adopted a religion which was a mixture of the nature
worship of their African ancestors with the outward forms of
Christianity. In spite of numerous efforts to destroy them, these
strange republics lasted fifty years. It was not until 1697 that a
Paulista chief, Domingos Jorge, who was employed after the regulars had
failed, succeeded in shutting the negroes up in their great palisade at
Palmares. Seven thousand men took part in the assault, and of the ten
thousand negroes who defended it none were spared.
This was the only serious attempt at revolt on the part of the blacks
which ever occurred in Brazil. Except for a few easily suppressed
insurrections which mostly occurred in Bahia among the recent arrivals,
the negroes remained in abject submission until nearly the end of the
nineteenth century. The comparative mildness of the Brazilian treatment
of negroes, the practice of voluntary manumission, and the fact that no
impenetrable race barrier existed all contributed to make slavery a less
fearful thing in Brazil than in North America.
Both Spain and Portugal claimed the coast between Santos and the river
Plate under the treaty of Tordesillas, but neither nation had made any
serious attempt to take possession up to the end of the seventeenth
century. As a matter of fact, the Tordesillas line passed near the
southern boundary of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, but the
Portuguese maps pushed all Brazil eight degrees to the east, and
Portugal claimed that the line passed near the point where the Parana
and Uruguay unite to form the Plate. The Paulistas had made this claim
effective over much of the disputed territory.
For a century after the foundation of Buenos Aires the Spaniards failed
to occupy the north margin of the Plate, and in 1680 the Portuguese
fore-stalled them by founding a colony and fort, called Colonia,
directly opposite Buenos Aires. The Spanish governor promptly resented
this piece of audacity and captured the place, but was compelled to
restore it immediately by orders from Madrid. Louis XIV., who was then
arbiter of Europe, had no mind to allow a war to be precipitated over so
insignificant a matter as a post in an uninhabited part of South
America. However, the question of right to the territory was left open
for future determination. Colonia at that time was chiefly valued as an
_entrepot_ for clandestine trade with the Spanish provinces, but to its
existence can be traced Brazilian possession of the great states of
Parana, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande do Sul, and even Brazil's
dominance in the Upper Parana valley, a dominance which would have been
lost had Spain insisted upon the true Tordesillas line.