THE PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL,—CONTINUED.
I regret that my limits will not permit me to follow further the
labours and enterprises of Vieyra and his brethren in behalf of the
Indians, whom they sought far and wide in that immense region, and
brought in thousands upon thousands into settlements, only to arouse
afresh the furious opposition, and bring down upon themselves the
vengeance of the colonists. But the history of this great strife
between Christianity and Injustice, in Brazil, fills three massy quarto
volumes, and runs through three centuries. It is full of details of the
deepest interest; but there is no chapter, either in that history or
any other, more heart-rending, than that of the transfer of the seven
Reductions of the Jesuits lying east of the Uruguay. These were ceded
by Spain to Portugal in 1750, in a treaty of demarcation.
“They contained,” to use the words of Mr. Southey, “thirty thousand
Guaranies, not fresh from the woods or half reclaimed, and therefore
willing to revert to a savage state, and capable of enduring its
exposure, hardships, and privations; but born as their fathers and
grandfathers had been, in easy servitude, and bred up in the comforts
of regular domestic life. These persons, with their wives and their
children, their sick and their aged, their horses, and their sheep and
their oxen, were to turn out, like the children of Israel from Egypt,
into the wilderness; not to escape from bondage, but in obedience
to one of the most tyranical commands that ever were issued in the
recklessness of unfeeling power.” Mr. Southey adds, “Yet Ferdinand must
be acquitted of intentional injustice. His disposition was such, that
he would have rather suffered martyrdom than have issued so wicked an
edict, had he been sensible of its inhumanity and wickedness.”
This might more readily be credited, if, when the abominable enormity
of the measure was made manifest to him, any disposition was shewn to
stop the proceedings, or make reparation for the misery inflicted.
But nothing of the kind took place. The Jesuits made immediate and
earnest representations; the Indians cried out vehemently against
their expatriation; the colonists of both countries were averse to
the measure; the very governors and officers proceeded tardily with
it, in the hope that the moment the evil was discovered it would be
countermanded; but no such countermand was ever issued. And what was
there to hinder it? The King of Spain and the Queen of Portugal, were
man and wife, dwelling in one palace, and of the greatest accord in
life and sentiment; it had only to be willed by one of them, and
it might, and would have been, speedily done. If ever there was a
cold-blooded transaction, in which the lives and happiness of thirty
thousand innocent people were reckoned of no account in the mere
tracing of a boundary line between two countries, this appears to be
one; and if ever the retribution of heaven was displayed in this world,
it would seem to have been in the persons of the monarchs who issued
this brutal order, and suffered it to stand, spite of the cries of the
thousands of sufferers. Happy in each other, while they thus remained
insensible to the happiness of these poor Indians, the queen was
consumed by a slow and miserable malady, and the king, a weak man of a
melancholy temperament, sunk heartbroken for her loss.
But meantime, commissioners and armies of both Spanish and Portuguese
were drawing towards the confines of the doomed land, to carry into
effect the expulsion of its rightful inhabitants. The Jesuits behaved
with the utmost submission and propriety. Finding that they could do
nothing by remonstrance, they offered to yield up the charge of the
Reductions to whatever parties might be appointed to receive it. The
natives appealed vehemently to the Spanish governor. “Neither we nor
our forefathers,” said they, “have ever offended the king, or ever
attacked the Spanish settlements. How then, innocent as we are, can we
believe that the best of princes would condemn us to banishment? Our
fathers, our forefathers, our brethren, have fought under the king’s
banner, often against the Portuguese, often against the savages. Who
can tell how many of them have fallen in battle, or before the walls of
Nova Colonia, so often besieged? We ourselves can shew in our scars,
the proofs of our fidelity and our courage. We have ever had it at
heart to extend the limits of the Spanish empire, and to defend it
against all enemies; nor have we ever been sparing of our blood, or
our lives. Will then the Catholic king requite these services by the
bitter punishment of expelling us from our native land, our churches,
our homes, and fields, and fair inheritance? This is beyond all
belief! By the royal letters of Philip V., which, according to his own
injunctions, were read to us from the pulpits, we were exhorted never
to suffer the Portuguese to approach our borders, because they were his
enemies and ours. Now we are told that the king will have us yield up,
to these very Portuguese, this wide and fertile territory, which for
a whole century we have tilled with the sweat of our brows. Can any
one be persuaded that Ferdinand the son should enjoin us to do that
which was so frequently forbidden by his father Philip? But if time and
change have indeed brought about such friendship between old enemies,
that the Spaniards are desirous to gratify the Portuguese, there are
ample tracts of country to spare, and let those be given them. What!
shall we resign our towns to the Portuguese? The Portuguese!—by whose
ancestors so many hundred thousands of ours have been slaughtered, or
carried away into cruel slavery in Brazil? This is as intolerable to
us, as it is incredible that it should be required. When, with the
Holy Gospels in our hands, we promised and vowed fidelity to God and
the king of Spain, his priests and governors promised us on his part,
friendship and perpetual protection,—and now we are commanded to give
up our country! Is it to be believed that the promises, and faith, and
friendship of the Spaniards can be of so little stability?”
But the Spaniards and Portuguese advanced with their troops into
their country. The poor people, driven frantic by their grief and
indignation, determined to resist. They brought out their cannon,
made of pieces of large cane, covered with wet hides and bound with
iron hoops, and determined with such arms even, to oppose those more
dreadful ones, of which they had too often witnessed the effect. For
some time they repelled their enemies, and even obliged them to retire
from the territory; but in the next campaign, the allied army made
dreadful havoc amongst them. Yet they still remained in arms; and their
sentiments may be well understood by the following characteristic
extract, sent from one of their officers to an officer of the Spanish
troops,—“Sir, look well; it is a well-known thing, that since our Lord
God in his infinite wisdom created the heavens and the earth, with
all which beautifies it, which is to endure till the day of judgment,
we have not known that God, who is the Lord of these lands, gave them
to the Spaniards before he came into the world. Three parts of the
earth are for them; namely, Europe, Asia, and Africa, which are to
the east; and this remaining part in which we dwell, our Lord Jesus
Christ, as soon as he died, set apart for us. We poor Indians have
fairly possessed this country during all these years, as children of
God, according to his will, not by the will of any other living being.
Our Lord God permitted all this that it might be so. We of this country
remember our unbelieving grandfathers, and we are greatly amazed when
we think that God should have pardoned so many sins as we ourselves
have committed. Sir, consider that which you are about is a thing
which we poor Indians have never seen done amongst Christians!”
Poor people! how little did they know how feeble are the strongest
reasons drawn from the Christian faith, when addressed to those who
would resent as a deadly insult the true charge that they are no
Christians at all. In this case the Indians were the only Christians
concerned in this melancholy affair. Well might they say, “Your actions
are so different from your words, that we are more amazed than if we
saw two suns in the firmament.” Well might they ask, “What will God say
to you after your death on this account? What answer will you make in
the day of judgment when we shall all be gathered together?” Like all
other Europeans when doing their will on the natives of their colonies,
they cared neither for God, nor the day of judgment; they went on and
drove the genuine Christians, the poor simple-hearted Indians, to
the woods, or compelled them to submit. Their lands were laid waste,
their towns burnt; many were slain, many were dispersed, many died
heartbroken in the homeless woods,—and scarcely was all this misery
and wickedness completed,—when the news of the king’s death arrived,
and soon after, the annulment of this very treaty; so that these lands
were not to be yielded to the Portuguese, and all this evil had been
done, even politically, in vain. The poor people were invited to return
to their possessions, and the Jesuits to their sorrowful labour of
repairing the ravages so foolishly and heartlessly committed.
Mr. Southey thinks that the Portuguese in Brazil were more lenient
to the natives than the Spaniards in their South-American colonies.
I must confess that his own History of Brazil does not give me that
impression. It is true that they did not succeed in so speedily
depopulating the country; but that in part, must be attributed to
the more warlike and hardy character of the people, and to the fact
that Brazil did not for a long time become a mining country. By the
time that it did, all the Indians that the horrible man-hunters of
San Paulo could seize in their wild excursions, were wanted in the
cultivated lands and sugar plantations, and negroes were imported in
abundance—the English for a long time supplying by contract four
thousand annually. The final expulsion of the Jesuits deprived the
Indians of the only body of real friends that they ever knew. Finer
materials than those poor people for civilization, no race on the
earth ever presented. Had the Jesuits been permitted to continue
their peaceful labours, the whole continent would have become one
wide scene of peace, fertility, and happiness. What a contrast does
Brazil present, after the lapse of three centuries, and even after the
introduction of European royalty! The people are described by modern
travellers as living in the utmost filth, idleness, licentiousness, and
dishonesty. “The Indians are driven into the interior, where,” says Mr.
Luccock, “they form a great bar to civilization; their animosity to the
whites being of the bitterest sort, and their purposes of vengeance
for injuries received, so long bequeathed from father to son, as to be
rooted in their hearts as firmly as the colour is attached to their
skin. Under the influence of this passion, they destroy every thing
belonging to the Europeans or their descendants, which falls in their
way; even the cow and the dog are not spared. For such outrages they
pay dearly; small forts, or military stations, being placed around
the colonized parts of the district, from whence a war of plunder and
extermination is carried on against them. In this warfare not only are
fire-arms made use of, but the lasso, dogs, and all the stratagems
which are usually employed against beasts of prey.” Mr. Luccock met
with one man who had been thus engaged against the Indians _forty
years, and was on his way to ask some honorary distinction from the
sovereign for his services_!
Instead of a country swarming with labourers and good citizens, as it
would have been under a Christian policy, Brazil now suffers for want
of inhabitants, and the barbarous slave-trade is made to supply the
whole country with servants. Ten thousand negroes are annually brought
into Rio alone, whence we may infer how vast must be the demand for
the whole empire; and of the estimation in which they are held, and of
the sort of religion which still bears the abused name of Christianity
there, one anecdote will give us sufficient idea. “Two negroes,” says
Mr. Luccock, “being extremely ill, a clergyman was sent for, who on
his arrival found one of them gone beyond the reach of his art; and
the other, having crawled off his bed, was lying on the floor of his
cabin. As we entered, the priest was jesting and laughing in the most
volatile manner—then filled both his hands with water, and dropped
it on the poor creature’s head, pronouncing the form of baptism. The
dying man, probably experiencing some little relief from the effusion,
exclaimed, ‘Good—very good.’ ‘Oh,’ said the priest, ‘it is very good,
is it?—then there is more for you;’ dashing upon him what remained in
the basin. Without delay he resumed his jokes, and in the midst of them
the man expired.”
We must now quit South America, to follow the European _Christians_
in their colonial career in another quarter of the globe. And in thus
taking leave of this immense portion of the New World, where such
cruelties have been perpetrated, and so much innocent blood shed by
the avarice and ambition of Europe, we may ask,—What has been done
by way of atonement; or what is the triumph of civilization? We have
already quoted Mr. Ward on the present state of the aborigines of
Mexico, and Mr. Luccock on those of Rio Janeiro. Baron Humboldt can
furnish the reader with ample indications of a like kind in various
parts of South America. Maria Graham tells us, so recently as 1824,
that in Chili, Peru, and the provinces of La Plata, the system of
Spain, which had driven those realms to revolt, had diffused “sloth
and ignorance” as their necessary consequences. That in Brazil,
“the natives had been either exterminated or wholly subdued. The
slave-hunting, which had been systematic on the first occupation of
the land, and more especially after the discovery of the mines, had so
diminished the wretched Indians, that the introduction of negroes was
deemed necessary: _they_ now people the Brazilian fields; and if here
and there an Indian aldea is to be found, the people are wretched, with
less than negro comforts, and much less than negro spirit or industry:
_the Indians are nothing in Brazil_.”
That the system of exterminating the Indians has been continued to the
latest period where any remained, we may learn from a horrible fact,
which she tells us she relates on good authority. “In the Captaincy of
Porto Seguro, _within these twenty years_, an Indian tribe had been
so troublesome that the Capitam Môr resolved to get rid of it. It was
attacked, but defended itself so bravely, that the Portuguese resolved
to desist from open warfare; but with unnatural ingenuity exposed
ribbons and toys, infested with small-pox matter, in the places where
the poor savages were likely to find them. The plan succeeded. The
Indians were so thinned that they were easily overcome!”—_Voyage to
Brazil_, p. 9.
But if any one wishes to learn what are the wretched fruits of all the
bloodshed and crimes perpetrated by the Spaniards in America, he has
only to look into Sir F. B. Head’s “Rough Notes on the Pampas,” made
in 1826. What a scene do these notes lay open! Splendid countries,
overrun with a most luxuriant vegetation, and with countless troops of
wild horses and herds of wild cattle, but thinly peopled, partly with
Indians and partly with the Gauchos, or descendants of the Spanish,
existing in a state of the most hideous hostility and hatred one
towards another. The Gauchos, inflamed with all the ancient demoniacal
cruelty and revenge of the Spaniards,—the Indians, educated, raised,
and moulded by ages of the most inexpiable wrongs into an active
and insatiable spirit of vengeance, coming, like the whirlwind
from the deserts, as fleet and unescapable, to burn, destroy, and
exterminate—in a word, to inflict on the Gauchos all the evils of
injury and death that they and their fathers have inflicted on them. As
Captain Head scoured across those immense plains, from Buenos Ayres,
and across the Andes to Chili, he was ever and anon coming to the ruins
of huts where the Indians had left the most terrible traces of their
fury. It may be well to state, in his own words, what every family of
the Gauchos is liable to:—
“In invading the country, the Pampas Indians generally ride all night,
and hide themselves on the ground during the day; or if they do travel,
crouch almost under the bellies of their horses, who, by this means,
appear to be dismounted and at liberty. They usually approach the huts
at night, at a full gallop, with their usual shriek, striking their
mouths with their hands; and this cry, which is to intimidate their
enemies, is continued through the whole of the dreadful operation.
“Their first act is to set fire to the roof of the hut, and it is
almost too dreadful to fancy what the feelings of a family must be,
when, after having been alarmed by the barking of the dogs, which the
Gauchos always keep in great numbers, they first hear the wild cry
which announces their doom, and in an instant afterwards find the roof
burning over their heads.
“As soon as the families rush out, which they of course are obliged
to do, the men are wounded by the Indians with their lances, which
are eighteen feet long; and as soon as they fall, they are stripped
of their clothes; for the Indians, who are very desirous to get the
clothes of the Christians, are careful not to have them spotted with
blood. While some torture the men, others attack the children, and
will literally run the infants through the body with their lances, and
raise them to die in the air. The women are also attacked; and it would
form a true but dreadful picture to describe their fate, as it is
decided by the momentary gleam which the burning roof throws upon their
countenances.
“The old women, and the ugly young ones, are instantly butchered; but
the young and beautiful are idols by whom even the merciless hand of
the savage is arrested. Whether the poor girls can ride or not, they
are instantly placed upon horses, and when the hasty plunder of the
hut is concluded, they are driven away from its smoking ruins, and
from the horrid scene which surrounds it. At a pace which in Europe is
unknown, they gallop over the trackless regions before them, feed upon
mare’s flesh, sleeping on the ground, until they arrive in the Indian’s
territory, when they have instantly to adopt the wild life of their
captors.”
Scenes of such horrors, where the mangled remains of the victims were
still lying around the black ruins of their huts, which Captain Head
passed, are too dreadful to transcribe. But what are the feelings
of the Gaucho towards these terrible enemies? Captain Head asked
a Gaucho what they did with their Indian prisoners when they took
any.—“To people accustomed to the cold passions of England, it would
be impossible to describe the savage, inveterate, furious hatred which
exists between the Gauchos and the Indians. The latter invade the
country for the ecstatic pleasure of murdering the Christians, and in
the contests which take place between them, mercy is unknown. Before
I was quite aware of those feelings, I was galloping with a very
fine-looking Gaucho who had been fighting with the Indians, and after
listening to his report of the killed and wounded, I happened, very
simply, to ask him how many prisoners they had taken. The man replied
with a look which I shall never forget—he clenched his teeth, opened
his lips, and then sawing his fingers across his bare throat for a
quarter of a minute, bending towards me, with his spurs sticking into
his horse’s sides, he said, in a sort of low, choking voice, ‘Se matan
todas,’—we kill them all!”
Here then we have a thinly populated country inhabited, so far as it
is inhabited at all, by men that are inspired towards each other by
the spirit of fiends. It is impossible that civilization can ever come
there except by some fresh and powerful revolution. We hear of the new
republics of South America, and naturally look for more evidences of
good from the spirit of liberty: but in the towns we find the people
indolent, ignorant, superstitious, and most filthy; and in the country
naked Indians on horseback, scouring the wilds, and making use of the
very animals by which the Spaniards subjugated them, to scourge and
exterminate their descendants. In the opinion of Captain Head, they
only want fire-arms, which one day they may get, to drive them out
altogether! And what are they whom they would drive out? Only another
kind of savages. People who, calling themselves Christians, live in
most filthy huts swarming with vermin—sit on skeletons of horses’
heads instead of chairs—lie during summer out of doors in promiscuous
groups—and live entirely on beef and water; the beef, chiefly mare’s
flesh, being roasted on a long spit, and every one sitting round and
cutting off pieces with long knives. The cruelty and beastliness of
their nature exceeding even that of the Indians themselves.
This then is the result of three centuries of bloodshed and tyranny
in those regions—one species of barbarism merely substituted for
another. What a different scene to that which the same countries would
now have exhibited, had the Jesuits not been violently expelled from
their work of civilization by the lust of gold and despotism. “When we
compare,” says Captain Head, “the relative size of America with the
rest of the world, it is singular to reflect on the history of these
fellow-creatures, who are the aborigines of the land; and after viewing
the wealth and beauty of so interesting a country, it is painful to
consider what the sufferings of the Indians have been, and still may
be. Whatever may be their physical or natural character[12] ... still
they are the human beings placed there by the Almighty; the country
belonged to them; and they are therefore entitled to the regard of
every man who has religion enough to believe that God has made nothing
in vain, or whose mind is just enough to respect the persons and the
rights of his fellow-creatures.”
The view I have been enabled in my space to take of the treatment
of the South Americans by their invaders, is necessarily a mere
glance,—for, unfortunately for the Christian name and the name
of humanity, the history of blood and oppression there is not more
dreadful than it is extensive. I have not staid to describe the conduct
of the French, Dutch, and English, in their possessions on the southern
continent, simply because they are only too much like those of the
Spaniards and Portuguese—they form no bright exception, and we shall
only too soon meet with these refined nations in other regions.
_Note._—The fate of Venezuela ought not to be quite passed over. It
is a striking instance of the indifference with which the lives and
fortunes of a whole nation are often handed over by great kings to
destruction as a mere matter of business. Charles V. of Spain being
deeply indebted to a trading house of Augsburgh, the Welsers, gave
them this province. They, in their turn, made it over to some German
military mercenaries, who overrun the whole country in search of
mines, and plundered and oppressed the people with the most dreadful
rapacity. In the course of a few years their avarice and exactions
had so completely exhausted and ruined the province that the Germans
threw it up, and it fell again into the hands of the Spaniards, but in
such a miserable condition that it continued to languish and drag on a
miserable existence, if it has even recovered from its fatal injuries
at the present time.