Backlands (17 page)

It is true that the Afro-Lusitanian alliance was an old one, predating even the discovery. It goes back to the fifteenth century, to the
azenegues
and
jalofos
of Gil Eannes and Antão Gonçalves.
¹²
In 1530 more than ten thousand blacks walked the streets of Lisbon and the same was true of other places. In Évora blacks outnumbered the whites. The verses of a contemporary, Garcia de Resende, document this fact:

Thus, the mulatto originated outside our own country. The first intermarriage with the African occurred in Lisbon. Here in Brazil the number of these marriages naturally grew. However, the dominated race had no opportunities for development due to the social situation. With his powerful physique and humble nature, and without the rebellious tendencies of the Indian, the Negro carried on his shoulders the entire pressure of colonial life. He was a beast of burden tethered to unceasing labor. The old ordinances denounce the brutality of the age; they state that “one may cast off men and beasts if they become sick or maimed.” Furthermore, the undeniable fact is that the many imported slaves were concentrated on the coast. The great black border lined the coast from Bahia to Maranhão but barely penetrated the interior. Even when they were in open rebellion, the humble blacks who gathered in their small huts in the runaway slave colonies, or
quilombos
, seemed to avoid the heartland of the country. Palmares, with some thirty thousand runaway slaves, was only a few kilometers distant from the coast.

The fertility of the land along the coast tended to retain two of the three racial groups, and only the Indian was free. The extensive sugarcane culture, imported from Madeira, was responsible for the neglect of the backlands. Even before the Dutch invasion there were 160 sugarcane plantations from Rio Grande do Norte to Bahia. The cultivation of this crop progressed rapidly on an increasing scale.

The African population remained chained to the vast cane fields of the coast and initiated a process of racial crossings that were very different from what was happening in the hinterland of the captaincies. Out in those territories the Indian roamed free, inept for work and always in rebellion. If he was held in settlements, it was due to the perseverance of the missionaries. The institution of slavery, product of the colonists’ self-interest, left the priests more time for religious conversion than in the South. Even the pioneers, when they finally came to this last stop on their daring journey, had no fight left in them. Some, like Domingos Sertão, declared an end to their adventurous life and went after the profits to be made on the stock-breeding farms that had opened on those vast estates.

This is how the clear distinction arose between intermarriages in the backlands and on the coast. Since in both areas the white element was the common denominator, the mulatto arose on the coast and the
curiboca
, those of mixed Indian blood, in the backlands.

There is a positive trace of originality in the origins of the backlands population, if not of the North, then of subtropical Brazil. We shall try to summarize this, and in order not to digress too much we will stay close to the scene of the historical drama of Canudos. We will quickly follow the course of the São Francisco River, “the great highway of Brazilian civilization,” in the words of historian João Ribeiro.

We have seen in the quick overview given in previous pages that the river flows through the most diverse regions. At its wide headwaters, its swollen basin sweeps into its net of numerous tributaries half of Minas Gerais, in its zone of mountains and forests. The river narrows later, in its midsection, in the very beautiful landscape of the
gerais
.

Downstream from Juazeiro, in its lower course, the river becomes constricted between cliffs that litter its bed with boulders and twist its course seaward. There it loses its tributaries and flows in a narrow corridor of several hundred kilometers to Paulo Afonso, cutting through the desert tract of
caatinga
brushwood.

The three sections of this river give us a diagram of our own historical trajectory. It balances the influence of the Tietê River. This river had a course much more suited to colonial expansion, and it became the favored route for backlands pioneers seeking to enslave and subdue the savage Indian. The São Francisco became, at its headwaters, the center of mining activity; in its lower trajectory, the site of missionary work; and midcourse it harbored the classic cattle lands, the only way of life fully compatible with the social and economic conditions of the colony. The banks of the São Francisco were traveled alike by the
bandeirante
, the Jesuit, and the cattleman.

In the future, when we have a more complete set of documents that will permit us to reconstruct colonial life from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, it is possible that the cowboy of the North, who is completely forgotten today, will be given the recognition he deserves. He had a decisive influence on the life of our country. As brave and fearless as the
bandeirante
, and as practical and persistent as the Jesuit, he had the advantage of an additional strength that was lacking in the other two—he was rooted in the land.

As far as the
bandeiras
were concerned, there were two aspects to the expeditions’ activities, which have often been confused with each other. Sometimes they went in search of land and other times their prey was man. They looked for gold and slaves, and on their way they discovered large tracts of land, which they did not cultivate and then abandoned, leaving them more deserted than they found them, as they moved quickly through villages and abandoned mines. Their history, sometimes as confusing as the purposely indecipherable notes in their logs, followed the alternating paths of these two quests, gold and slaves. Their success depended on the personal character of the adventurers and on how well the expedition was planned. Their most useful contribution was in discovering new lands, which they regarded as an incidental consequence of their efforts and to which they gave little thought.

With Glimmer’s 1601 expedition the illusion of the “Emerald Mountains” was gone. From the middle of the sixteenth century this vision had lured one failed expedition after the other to the flanks of the Espinhaço Range—men of the likes of Bruzzo Spinosa, Sebastião Tourinho, Dias Adorno, and Martins Carvalho. Once the magical land of the North that had been conceived by the romantic imagination of Gabriel Soares had disappeared, most of the seventeenth century was overshadowed by the dark legends of slave hunters, personified by the brutal hero Antônio Raposo. Around this same time the always elusive sightings of the mysterious “
Sabará-buçú
” and the silver mines also vanished. These dreams were revived by the unsuccessful expeditions of País Leme, who retraced the footsteps of Glimmer after almost a century. Arzão kept the dreams alive with his gold nuggets, and in 1693 he followed the path of Tourinho and Adorno. Finally, the quest was taken up by Bartolomeu Bueno in Itaberaba and Miguel Garcia in Ribeirão do Carmo. The backlands explorations regained their original mystique and once more spread through the country from the heart of the mining region, aptly named Ouro Prêto, or “black gold.”

During this period the only events of note were the conflicts with the Dutch on the coast and the astounding incursion of the
bandeiras
into the central northeastern plateau. Meanwhile, along the middle section of the São Francisco a process of settlement began causing results that would only later become apparent.

The early history of the river goes back a long way. The expeditions to the Moréia mines were an influential factor in the beginning. While relatively unknown, these forays reached all the way to the vice-regency of Lancastro, clearing the way for successive bands of settlers to the highlands of Macaúbas, beyond the Paramirim. There were no direct routes along the coast. These would have been shorter but were barricaded by thick mountain walls and dense forests. The explorers gained access to the backlands on the São Francisco, which offered just two entries, one at the source and another at its mouth. The great river brought men from the South together with those from the North and from the outset it took on the aspect of an ethnic unifier. It was a very long band of water that joined two societies living without knowledge of each other. They came from all points of origin: the Paulistas of Domingos Sertão or the Bahians of Garcia d’Ávila; the Pernambucans of Francisco Caldas, with their small allied armies of Tabajara Indians, or even the Portuguese followers of Manuel Nunes Viana who set out from his ranch, the Fazenda do Escuro, the Dark Ranch, in Carinhanha, to put down the
emboabas
, the Portuguese who were also hunting for gold on the Rio das Mortes. Whoever these new settlers were or wherever they came from, when they reached the heart of those backlands they rarely turned back.

The settlers were richly compensated by the fertile and readily accessible land for the fading mirage of the coveted mines. The geology of the region created topographical formations in which the highlands, the last spurs and ridges of the maritime cordillera, were flanked by vast plateaus. The flora was complex and diverse, interlaced with forests that were not as big or impenetrable as those on the coast. The charm of the fields and the rustic beauty of the plains would suddenly disappear into the enormous wastes of the
caatinga
. The unique hydrography of the region, with symmetrical tributaries running east and west, linked it to the coast on the one side and to the central plateau on the other. All of these conditions served to attract and connect the sparse population. Cattle ranching flourished as one of the livelihoods best suited to the region. The unusually rich soil did not lack the essential element of salt, which was found in the brackish wetlands of the salt licks.

These conditions favored the rise of an extensive region of cattle ranching that already at the dawn of the eighteenth century ranged from northern Minas Gerais to Goiás to Piauí to the borders of Maranhão and Ceará on the northwest and the rich highlands of Bahia on the east. The zone was populated and it became autonomous and strong, but it remained isolated because the chroniclers of the time paid no attention to it and thus it was forgotten not only by the distant metropolis in Lisbon but by local governors and viceroys as well. It did not produce taxes or revenues to feed the avarice of the monarch. The region became a contrast, however, to the turmoil on the coast and the wild ways of the mines, in João Ribeiro’s words, “almost the only tranquil oasis of our culture.” With the exception of rare contingents of settlers from Pernambuco and Bahia, most of the wealthy cattlemen who prospered here came from the South and were descendents of the same enthusiastic and energetic people who conducted the
bandeiras
.

According to the valuable information found in Pedro Taques’s genealogy of São Paulo families, there were many who set out for those distant lands in continuous migrations. If we accept João Mendes de Almeida’s historical opinion, it is plausible that “the São Francisco valley, populated since the eighteenth century by Paulistas and their families, had become their almost exclusive colony.” It was only natural that Bartolomeu Bueno, when he discovered Goiás, would find surprising evidence of predecessors, anonymous pioneers who had certainly arrived from the east, after crossing the Paranan Range. When the famous gold rush of 1697 began and rowdy bands of immigrants stampeded up the eastern slopes of the Espinhaço Range, along the thalweg of the Rio das Velhas, the strongest of them overtook the others and advanced in an opposite direction like a reflux from the north. These were the bands of Bahians, a term which like that of Paulista would become a generic one and would apply to all northern settlers. The Bahians were possibly those who first discovered the Caeté mines.

There was already a race of mestizos arising in the middle valley of the great river that was identical to the daring
mamelucos
who had been born in São Paulo. It is not too risky to hypothesize that this extraordinary type of Paulista was born and then declined in the South, his demise complete since it occurred in the same region that gave him its name. In this place he was reborn. Free of the dangers of migrations and mixed marriages, he was able to preserve the virile and adventurous nature of his forebears. Here he remained, totally divorced from the rest of Brazil and the world, walled in from the east by the Serra Geral, and cut off from the west by the wide sweep of the
campos gerais
, which extend to Piauí. To this day the backlander believes that he resides in an infinite land.

The environment attracted him and kept him there. The waterways on either side of the meridian discouraged dispersion of the population and, in fact, aided the unification of the extremes of the country, bringing them together in space and in time. This rough population assured a consistency in the interior that was lacking on the coast. It was a mix of northeasterners fighting for autonomy and southerners looking for new lands that they stocked with fat herds of cattle that moved up the valley of the Rio das Velhas or found their way down to the headwaters of the Parnaíba. It was this little-understood and forgotten society that became the vigorous seed of our nationhood.

The founding pioneers overcame and replaced the savage and now began to capture and enslave him, using his abilities in the new industries that they were establishing. Then the inevitable intermarriage occurred. Soon a race of pure
curibocas
appeared that had almost no discernable African blood, which is easily visible today in the average type of the population of the region. They were born of the fierce embrace of victor and vanquished. They were raised in a rebellious and adventurous society, on richland. They developed their ancestral traits of strength and courage in the tough school of those vast plains, where still today the puma roars unleashed and the swift-footed rhea roams. And later they had to learn to survive on the ragged mountainsides, crumbling from mining operations, when the Bahians drafted the cowboys from their roundups to labor in the mines.