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From Brazil's Central Highlands toAfrica's Ports: Trans-Atlantic andContinental Trade Connections in Goodsand SlavesJunia Ferreira Furtado aa Universidade Federal de Minas GeraisPublished online: 04 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Junia Ferreira Furtado (2012) From Brazil's Central Highlands to Africa's Ports:Trans-Atlantic and Continental Trade Connections in Goods and Slaves, Colonial Latin AmericanReview, 21:1, 127-160, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2012.661978

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From Brazil’s Central Highlands toAfrica’s Ports: Trans-Atlantic andContinental Trade Connections inGoods and SlavesJunia Ferreira Furtado

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

The vast extent of Brazil’s territory, with its geographical obstacles of mountains,

ravines, and rivers, the presence of hostile Indians, outbreaks of unknown tropical

illnesses, and the thick Atlantic forest that covered much of the coast, dogged

attempts by Portuguese colonizers to penetrate inland. Hence their settlements were

initially limited to the coastal regions. Comparing the approaches of Spanish and

Portuguese colonizers in the Americas, the historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda

likened the former to road-layers, making their systematic way slab-by-slab, in an

orderly and cohesive manner, and the latter to seed-spreaders, creating sparse and

scattered settlements, clawing around the coast like crabs (Holanda 1993, 61�85).

But in the eighteenth century, the discovery of gold and diamonds in the inner

captaincy of Minas Gerais reoriented the traditional trade routes of the Portuguese

Empire. While territorial occupation was concentrated along the Brazilian shoreline,

sea transport, established with Portugal and Africa, and, on a smaller scale, river

transport, between the coastal ports, were the main mechanisms used to move men

and merchandise (Mello 2002, 179�87). However, as the Portuguese made inroads

into the hinterlands, it became increasingly necessary to create new transport

channels that could join the existing sea routes to the fluvial and terrestrial

thoroughfares*trails, passes, and roads*then being opened, in order to effectively

link the coast and the backlands.

The Minas gold rush spawned an unprecedented population shift that came to be

known as The Great Invasion (Lima Junior 1978, 35).1 The first waves of migration

into the region were so intense that various restrictive measures were taken to prevent

an exodus from the Portuguese homeland. However, despite the authorities’ best

ISSN 1060-9164 (print)/ISSN 1466-1802 (online) # 2012 Taylor & Francis on behalf of CLAR

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2012.661978

Colonial Latin American Review

Vol. 21, No. 1, April 2012, pp. 127�160

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efforts, ‘by mid-century, voluminous contingents were concentrated in the richest

parts of the captaincy’ (Holanda 1985, 259�310).

Many of those who joined the migrations from the captaincy of Bahia, whether

Portuguese fresh off the ships at Salvador, native Luso-Brazilians, or African slaves,

headed for the gold fields along a road known as the Caminho da Bahia (Bahia

Road). This route also came to be called the Caminho dos Currais (Corrals Road),

after the numerous cattle ranches that sprang up along it during the late seventeenth

century to supply meat to the mining settlements. It was also the route used by the

cattle drivers coming down from Pernambuco (Furtado 1999, 267). This road played

a vital role not only in populating the mining fields, but also in supplying their

settlers with provisions, as it was a direct route from the port in Salvador. Many

authors affirm that the economic decline of this route, or its near abandonment,

came with passage restrictions imposed by the Crown in 1701 (Pimenta 1971, 22).

Others argue that it became redundant after the opening of the shorter Caminho

Novo (New Road), which linked the mines to the port in Rio de Janeiro (Santos 2001,

145).2 However, the present article aims to show, with reference to documentation

from the day, that traffic on the route remained intense throughout the eighteenth

century.

Seeing as it was initially opened to make the hinterlands accessible to cattle and

troops in search of pastureland and much-needed salt deposits, the Caminho da

Bahia naturally followed the courses of the Sao Francisco and Verde rivers (Ferreira

2001, 1:3�30). Though the circumstances of its opening are still obscure, the road

seems to have been cleared by cattle drivers heading south from Bahia and by

explorers heading north from Sao Paulo (Santos 2001, 115�28).3 Early on, the latter

settled in the valleys of the mid and upper Sao Francisco and Verde Grande, near the

mouth of the Velhas River, areas conquered from the Indians, where they established

villages and cattle ranches (Santos 2010, 23�24).4 A huge number of slaves were also

needed for mining and to work as laborers for their masters in the overpopulated

urban settlements that were created in the area. The route also made it possible to

exchange leather and tobacco (soaked in honey), products from the cattle farms of

the interior, plus gold produced in the mines, for slaves and other African products.

In short order, the Bahia Road connected the inner lands of Brazil to Africa’s Atlantic

ports, mainly those along the Mina Coast and Angola.

The fact that it crossed vast swathes of inhospitable and deserted land earned the

route a third name: O Caminho do Sertao (The Backlands Road). The term sertao

(pl. sertoes) derives etymologically from an eighteenth-century Portuguese term used

to designate a region distant from the sea on all sides or located ‘between lands’

(Bluteau 1739, 613). It was used for any hinterland region removed from the coast:

lands unknown, unexplored, or remote wilderness. Sertao could be terrain covered

with trees and thick vegetation or the very opposite, a stretch of parched desert. These

were frontiers, beyond the pale of civilization but nonetheless under its dominion,

internal to it, awaiting integration into the colony the Portuguese were constructing

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in America. In this sense, the sertao was at once external to, and part of, Portuguese

America.

Viewed as empty by the colonizers, these sertao badlands were actually inhabited

by the Tapuia Indians, who were still resisting Portuguese-style civilization, and so

were considered savages or braves (Neves 2007, 9�10). These tribes were gradually

exterminated or enslaved during the violent Barbarian Wars, largely waged against

them by the Paulistas, backwoodsmen from the captaincy of Sao Vicente, later Sao

Paulo (Puntoni 2002). The sertao was also a place of escape for runaway slaves,

especially those from the Reconcavo Baiano, the rural zone surrounding the city of

Salvador, where there were many sugarcane plantations. These sertao hideouts

became known as mocambos or quilombos.

Though considered wild, the sertoes supported numerous economic activities,

such as cattle raising, leather tanning, honey production, salt mining and the

extraction of other minerals, including saltpeter, essential in the production of gun-

powder and in gold and diamond mining. Trade was another constant activity in the

region, as the Caminho da Bahia was a route much used by merchants dealing

in many things, including slaves, saddle animals, and cattle, tying the hinterlands to

the port of Salvador on the coast and to those of Portugal and Africa on the far side of

the Atlantic.

Despite the best efforts of the colonizers, bent on their implacable advance inland,

the sertao often proved to be ruled by the ephemeral; a place where ranches were

established only to be abandoned to the bats and jaguars;5 where whole villages were

washed away by flash floods or deserted because of the harsh conditions; where trails

and passes were opened only to be swallowed back up by unruly nature. Were we to

look at the human landscape, we would see the settler’s daily struggle with the

caatinga, the scrubland vegetation that prevails in this semi-arid zone, and with

hostile Indians and runaway slaves. Yet the settlers fought even amongst themselves,

especially the Portuguese and the Paulistas. Not even the waterways were constant,

with many a river continuously or frequently running dry or almost dry. Seen from

this perspective, the sertao was a land fraught with impermanence and conflict, with

the ceaseless fight between man and nature and between man and man: white, Indian,

and black, the latter two trying to resist the Luso-Brazilian colonizers. That said, the

routes, ranches, military outposts, and missionary camps established there served as

centers of exchange*of goods and values*among these same inhabitants.

This article aims to discuss the progressive occupation of the terrestrial space of

the sertao using this road network*the Caminho da Bahia*and the local waterways

as its platform. To do so it will analyze some primary sources, including maps

and itineraries*what some have called ‘mental maps.’ In almost hegemonic fashion

(e.g., Magalhaes 1915; Abreu 1988; Prado Jr. 1979; Cortesao 1984; and more recently,

Moraes 2000), with rare exceptions (e.g., Santos 2010, Furtado and Safier 2006,

263�77; and Furtado 2005, 192�205), Brazilian historiography expounds the view

that the conquest of the sertao was a natural progression from the discovery and

occupation of Brazilian territory from the coast inwards. It also insists that this

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Figure 1 Caminho da Bahia. (Published in Marcio Roberto Alves Santos, Estradas reais:

caminhos do ouro e do diamante no Brasil. Belo Horizonte, 2001.)

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penetration was irreversible, given the decimation of the indigenous tribes by the

white colonizer (e.g., Prado Jr. 1979; Hemming 1978). Countering this view, the

present article will approach this occupation as a discontinuous process of social

construction in which native Indians, Portuguese and Brazilian colonists (referred to

by place of birth*Paulistas from Sao Paulo or Baianos from Bahia) and runaway

slaves both mixed and clashed (see also Puntoni 2002; Resende 2003; and Langfur

2006). We will also examine how they interacted with the Portuguese administrative

authorities who were trying to impose ‘order’ on the sertao.

The Sertao Road and its System of Routes

Most of the journey through the sertao was done by land along the various branches

of the Bahia Road, which tended to hug the course of the region’s rivers. The Sao

Francisco River and its network of tributaries were the most important of all. The

river, which originates in the central-western mountains of Minas Gerais and then

flows north and east to the Atlantic, was navigable for a long stretch between Salto,

near the estuary at the Paulo Afonso waterfall, ‘where the water plunged from high

with such force that the roar could be heard two day’s journey away,’ to the mouth

of the Velhas River in the captaincy of Minas Gerais. Even so, the system of sertao

waterways, which linked discontinuous backland territories, was used more as

a geographical marker and source of drinking water than as a means of transport.

Nevertheless, though land travel certainly predominated over the fluvial, there are

some accounts of passengers traveling down-river in canoes, ‘side-by-side in pairs,

lashed one to the other so as not to capsize in the current’ (Abreu 1739, 2:517,

520�21); a wise move, seen as the Sao Francisco has some nasty rapids. There are also

references to the region’s Indians, frequently seen on the river in their canoes. In fact,

the Portuguese would use the boats of friendly tribes, such as the Tupi, when the need

arose.6 The rivers ensured the perennial cycle of life and conferred a certain stability

upon the vast sertao that sprawled out around them. The Sao Francisco and its

tributaries supported an entire ecosystem of flora and fauna and the Lagoa dos Patos

(Duck Lagoon) reflected the natural bounty that so dazzled travelers into the

nineteenth century.7 For these and other reasons, the rivers set the course the land

roads would follow.

The Bahia Road was really a system of tracks and trails that, with some variations,

ran from Salvador in Bahia to Sabara and Vila Rica in Minas Gerais (Figure 1).

Travelers leaving from Salvador had to first cross All Saints’ Bay, rounding the island

of Itaparica along the way, and disembark at the village of Cachoeira, the gateway

to the Reconcavo Baiano, twelve leagues away. Here the traveler could choose between

two routes. The Joao Amaro Pass, the shortest way to Minas, was a long trail that left

from Sao Pedro o Novo and crossed the Paruassu or Paraguacu River to the

eponymous Vila de Joao Amaro. From there, the journey passed the Tranquiera

Ranch, the Serra de Chapada, the Campos Gerais, the major and minor Contas

Rivers, the hospice of the Carmelite monks, the Ras River and on to Parateca Ranch,

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at the junction of the Sao Francisco. It took an average of twenty-five to thirty-five

days to reach this point.8 At Parateca, on the banks of the Sao Francisco, the Joao

Amaro Trail met another branch of the Bahia Road, the Dona Joana Pass, named

after Joana da Silva Guedes de Brito, owner of almost all the farms the traveler had to

cross or stop at along the way. From Parateca, the milestone on this stretch of the

journey, the road followed the course of the river down to the confluence with one of

its tributaries, the Velhas River. This stretch of the road passed through the village of

Cachoeira and the hamlet of Tapuias before crossing the Giguitay and Rosario rivers

and finally arriving at the banks of the Velhas. The river’s name (Velhas means Old

Ladies) was a direct translation from the Tupi-Guarani � Guaimi (Costa 1997, 218).

The French geographer Jean Baptiste Bourgnion d’Anville, author of the Carte de

l’Amerique Meridionale, the first printed map of the Bahia Road (Figure 2), drafted in

1748, opted for this route from Parateca, having completed the first stretch of the

Joao Amaro Pass.

Figure 2 Jean Baptiste Bourgnion d’Anville, ‘Carte de l’Amerique Meridionale,’ 1749,

detail.

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Another branch of the road, opened by Joao Goncalves da Costa, was that which

snaked through the sertao to Malhada, on the banks of the Sao Francisco, and from

there to the hamlet of Mathias Cardoso. Following the right-hand margin of the river,

the road passed through Brejo do Salgado, Pedra de Angicos and Sao Romao, a

legendary Paulista enclave, and on to the shoal of the Velhas River, a tributary of the

Sao Francisco (Vianna 1935, 166�67). Here the Jesuits kept a chapel and founded the

villages of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso and Almas da Barra do Rio das Velhas

(now Guaicuı). It was here that the route met the two branches from Salvador and

continued through the Serra Vermelha along the banks of the Velhas River and, after

crossing the Ricudo, those of the Fondo, passing the villages of Fidalgo, Santa Luzia

and Sabara, until finally arriving at Vila Rica. These three derivations of the Bahia

Road joined together at the gravel bar where the Velhas and Sao Francisco rivers

meet.

However, there was also a fourth possibility, the only one that took its coordinates

from the Velhas rather than the Sao Francisco River. This fourth route split from the

others at Tranqueira, soon after the Contas River, and headed for Catite. From there,

it proceeded to the Lesser and Greater Verde Rivers and on to the Nossa Senhora

e Sao Jose chapel at a place called Formigas. It was on this route, at one of the cattle

ranches along the Gotoruba River, belonging to Januario Cardoso, that the barber-

surgeon Luıs Gomes Ferreira (Furtado 2007, 127�51), author of the famous surgical

treatise Erario Mineral (Ferreira 2001 [1735]), spent the night on one of his two

forays into Minas, where he hoped to make his fortune. Januario Cardoso was a

major landowner in the region, with two farms in the scrubland, the Angicos and

Joazeiro, where he raised oxen. ‘There the surgeon was taken to see one of his slaves,

who suffered from a tumor on the back of his hand’ (Furtado 2001a, 11). The greater

Verde River led to Montes Claros, from where the route crossed a vast stretch of

scrubland to Campo da Graca. There it joined the other routes, and from that point

on the Caminho da Bahia was a single road to Sabara, passing the Jaguara Ranch

along the way, and the villages of Fidalga and Santa Luzia.

Once in the captaincy of Minas Gerais, the route splintered into countless trails

interconnecting older and more recent mining fields. One of these bifurcations, for

example, occurred at Catite and passed through Minas Novas and Itamarandiba,

heading straight for the village of Tejuco. There were also direct connections between

the small settlement at the Velhas confluence and Tejuco, from which the traveler

could proceed to Vila do Prıncipe and, finally, to the capital, Vila Rica. As we can see,

the designations Caminho da Bahia or do Sertao or dos Currais were basically

umbrella terms for a series of bifurcating trails connecting Salvador and Vila Rica,

passing through the backlands of both captaincies.

The Road as Lived Space

Dangerous, long, and hard-going, the Bahia Road crossed flatter lands than the

steeper routes from Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro*the Caminho Velho and Caminho

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Novo, respectively*which skirted the cliffs of the Mar and Mantiqueira mountains

(Anastasia and Furtado 1999, 33�53). Even so, various stretches were not completely

level and near Sabara, in the mining fields, there was a gorge aptly named ‘Inferno’

(Hell), ‘because to cross it you ha[d] to take a bridge, less than twenty feet long, with

the river running some two hundred feet below’ (Brito 1999 [1732], 1:905). In other

words, you had to cross a horrendous precipice.

Though the topography of this wide scrubland region favored the traveler, the

vegetation was hostile to man. The caatinga brushwood, typical of semi-arid regions,

was thorny and scratchy, and the land was dry year-round. The specters of hunger

and thirst accompanied the entire journey, as did wild and venomous creatures,

bands of runaway slaves and Indian hunting parties, some of them cannibals. Their

frequent ambushes meant it was essential to make the journey in heavily armed

convoys. Fevers and other maladies could also befall these traveling parties, as

occurred with the surgeon Luıs Gomes Ferreira, who fell ill and spent five months

holed up at the Velhas River shoal, racked with some unidentifiable fever and certain

only of impending death, as he drifted in and out of delirium, muttering

incoherently. In his treatise, Erario Mineral, he claimed that the mosquito-borne

diseases that infested the Sao Francisco region were the worst he had ever seen and

that malaria hit everyone who passed through there. Describing the route, one native

of Minas wrote that the journey was slow and that ‘everything in these mysterious,

sinister lands was fierce and hostile to the human presence’ (Furtado 1999, 190).

An ex-voto (a small painting representing a scene of dangers passed, produced in

thanksgiving for answered prayers) displayed in the Sao Bento convent in Bahia

depicts the most common hazards travelers had to face along the route (Figure 3).

The painting, like a cartoon strip, shows a traveler setting sail from Portugal, gallantly

dressed and mounted on horseback. We then see him roaming the sertao, where he is

accosted by all manner of dangers: first a snake, then an alligator-like animal. He loses

his bearings and climbs a tree so he can find his way again, only to be attacked by

Indians and by a band of Paulistas. The rivalry between the Paulistas and all

newcomers was accentuated by disputes over the best mining fields and adminis-

trative posts. Armed clashes were frequent and between 1709 and 1711 the two

factions waged the so-called Guerra dos Emboabas.9 By the time our gallant traveler

ends his fraught and arduous journey, he no longer has his mount, his clothes are in

tatters, and he is barefoot and hatless, stripped of all the regalia of his status back in

Portugal. All men were equal before the hazards of the sertao, at least in terms of

appearance.

One of the major pitfalls for the traveler on the Bahia Road was the anguish of

thirst, which was why it was so important to be able to find rivers in the scrub. Those

who had experience on the route would often say that ‘the hardest part of this

journey is finding water,’ which was why, ‘seen as it was such a lengthy march [. . .],

one ha[d] to set off in October,’ which was when ‘the rains favor the traveler.’10 Many

and varied were the strategies employed to ensure water supply for the party and

their mounts. Not far beyond the other side of All Saints’ Bay there was a farm,

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Serrinha, with clean water which the travelers used to stock up on by filling pouches

‘made with two strips of sole leather,’ which were then slung over the mules’ backs.11

As not all of the rivers were perennial, water holes were dug into the dry beds, ‘known

in those parts as cacimbas, from which was drawn drinking water for the horses,’ as it

was generally too silted for human consumption. This meant the good water could be

saved for the travelers later on.

Wild and ferocious animals were everywhere and could attack the unsuspecting

traveler without warning. One account recalls that ‘the greatest danger is the jaguar,

and another [. . .] the mountain lion. [. . .] There are also many tigers, and another

species of jaguar called the sussuarana (cougar), which is almost orange-colored. [. . .]

Of the many poisonous snakes, there is the rat-snake; the jararaca; the rattle snake;

the coral; the cipo and the anaconda.’ The last-mentioned can eat ‘a whole bull or

horse, crushing it to break all its bones, and then sucking it in.’12

The names given to places and geographical features along the road reflect the

everyday experiences of these brushwood travelers. The Santo Antonio do Urubu

Ranch was so-called because the urubu (buzzard) was as ubiquitous there as the

Figure 3 Ex-voto de Nossa Senhora dos Remedios displayed in the Sao Bento convent in

Salvador in Bahia. (Published in Furtado et al., Cartografia da conquista das minas.

Lisbon: Kappa / Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2004.)

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common crow. Other place names, such as Rancho da Fome (Hunger Ranch), Urtigas

(Nettles), Agreste do Boqueirao (Wild Gully) give some idea of the wild and hostile

nature of those parts. Olho d’Agua da Serra (Mountain Watering Hole), Lagoinha

(Little Lake), Canudos (Straws), and Pocoes (Big Wells), one of the rare places where

clean water could be found year-round, were all given names indicative of the

constant battle against thirst and the importance of the water supplies that could

slake it. Other names venerated the region’s abundant wildlife: the ranches Cabras

(Goats), Jacare (Alligator), Ovelha (Sheep); the rivers and streams Porcos (Pigs), Ras

(Toads), Araras (Macaws), Peixe (Fish), and Papagaio (Parrot); and even mountains,

the Giboias (Boa Constructors). Other places earned the names of the infestations

that plagued them, such as the village of Formigas (Ants). Various farms and other

sites took their names from trees and shrubs, such as Jenipapo Farm, named after ‘a

tree that bears a quince-like fruit [. . .] that spends a whole year on the bough before it

can be eaten’; the Jabuticabas13 and Canvieiras ranches, the Canabravas stream, the

Palmeiras (Palm Groves) Floodplain, Campo Grande (literally ‘Big Field’), the farms

Urtigas Mortas (Dead Nettles), Gameleira (Fig tree),14 and Imbuzeiro (Hog plum)15

all celebrated plants and fruits found along the road and the harsh nature of the

sertao vegetation.16

One of the greatest fears was attack by bands of runaway slaves, almost always well

armed. The proliferation of weapons, especially firearms, among mulattos and blacks

posed a major threat to the safety of travelers, and steps were taken to curb and

control their use. The Count of Assumar, Dom Pedro de Almeida, governor of Minas,

deeply concerned about the risk that went with road travel, published a proclamation

in 1719 that prohibited all blacks, ‘whether in the villages or on the roads,’ to carry

‘firearms, whether short or long, as well as knives, daggers, swords, clubs, or spiked

sticks.’ Such was the fear of ambush by slaves and runaway slaves that the authorities

determined that blacks could only carry utility blades, and solely when ‘accompany-

ing their masters on their travels.’17 Town councils all along the Caminho da Bahia

issued countless measures to control the consumption of liquor by blacks and

workers at the sugar mills, because of the disorder it caused, such as recurrent attacks

on travelers. Restrictions were also placed on the sale of gunpowder, which was ‘not

permitted outside the villages.’18 In the interests of resolving this problem and

tightening controls, the town councils in Vila Rica, for example, ordained that

gunpowder and lead could only be sold by one retailer in the village, ‘given the

violence that has pursued travelers on the trails and roads of Minas, resulting in

deaths, theft, and injury, caused by the sale of gunpowder and lead to carambola

blacks [another term for runaways].’19

The dangers these attacks posed to travelers on the Bahia Road were also depicted

in ex-votos from the day, representing the fate of hapless travelers beset by bands of

slaves or Indian braves (Figures 4 and 5). These clearly show that, despite the

prohibitions and restrictions, these armed bands of runaway slaves, Indians or

bandits remained a constant threat. For the men of the day, everything in these

mysterious and sinister hinterlands of Portuguese America was ferocious and

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inhospitable to man. ‘For example, Manoel Pereira Marante was traveling from his

home, some three leagues away, when ninety-six Blacks ambushed and surrounded

him, all armed with rifles, pistols and machetes. [After] robbing him, they led him to

a thicket where there were many corpses’ (Costa et al. 2004, 73). Aware of these

dangers, merchants using the road preferred to travel in heavily armed convoys. One

Portuguese merchant, Francisco da Cruz, author of a voluminous and valuable

correspondence about his time in the captaincy of Minas, was a perfect witness to

the day-to-day life on the roads, which he had to travel constantly in order to sell his

wares and charge his customers. He tells of how he, ‘his brother-in-law and two

friends [armed] a troop of forty Blacks and four Whites’ for protection on the road.20

In order to ensure efficient communication and distribution of goods between the

mines, the sertao, and Portugal or Africa it was important to coordinate these

journeys so as to coincide with the arrivals and departures of ships and fleets in

Salvador,21 which often caused no little disruption to trade. The speed of the convoys

and fleets set the pace for trade in the sertao. Many caravans began their journey with

a drum roll at dawn, followed by morning mass.22 The more intrepid Paulistas liked

Figure 4 Ex-voto to Sao Goncalo do Amarante, 1744. Museu de Arte Sacra de Amarante.

(Published in Furtado et al., Cartografia da conquista das minas. Lisbon: Kappa / Belo

Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2004.)

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to add an auditory element to their march. Their parties were usually accompanied

by a squadron of African slaves or acculturated Indians, while a group of colorfully

clothed captives would march ahead playing trumpets and bugles, announcing their

arrival along trails and upon entrance into villages. The idea was to intimidate the

bandits and display the travelers’ importance (Dias 2001, 74�75).

Such was the fear inspired by the Bahia Road that many of the merchants who

traveled it, the so-called viandantes, drew up their wills prior to departure, aware that

death could await them on any stretch of the way. An indication of this is the number

of wills registered by such merchants in Sabara, the journey’s end for those traveling

down from Bahia (Furtado 2001b, 397�416). While merchants trading out of fixed

residences would draft their wills while on their deathbeds, the viandantes affirmed

that the dangers and uncertainties of the journey were so grave that it was prudent to

declare their final testaments in advance (Furtado 1999, 97�99). One of these

merchants, Manoel Ferreira Leal, registered his will before leaving Salvador, declaring,

‘I am bound for Minas.’ ‘Should God decide to take me to him on this trip,’ Leal

continued, if there be a place of worship in the vicinity, ‘they should bury my corpse

in said chapel or church.’ However, he expressed his ‘trust in God,’ and prayed that he

‘not meet with death along the way, but make [his] arrival in said Minas.’23

When death did occur on the Bahia Road, the precarious conditions of the trails

through the sertao permitted no frills when it came to funeral rites and burial.

Figure 5 Ex-voto to Nossa Senhora do Vale, 1747. Paroquia de Amarante. (Published in

Furtado et al., Cartografia da conquista das minas. Lisbon: Kappa / Belo Horizonte:

Editora da UFMG, 2004.)

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In their wills, the merchants generally stipulated various complex and expensive

determinations for burial. However, these same wills authorized the executors to

make arrangements as they saw fit should death come in the vastness of the sertao,

out of reach of the mining villages or coastal towns. An example of this was the will of

one Jeronimo da Costa Valle, a traveler on the Caminho do Sertao, who determined

that if he were to pass away in the city of Bahia, he was to be buried after vigil at the

church of the Third Order of Carmel, of which he was a brother, but should he die in

any other region, he was to be buried ‘as the land allows, and wherever [was] most

convenient.’24 More resigned to his fate, the traveler Simao Alves Ferreira, who

frequently took the route, declared that ‘wherever in the Americas should my passing

occur, bury me in the most convenient manner and church.’25

The journey on the Bahia Road was done in legs, ‘Paulista-style,’ which basically

meant waking early and marching until ‘mid-day, or one or two in the afternoon at

the most, so that camp could be set and game or fish caught’ (Antonil 1982, 182).

The exception was the stretch between Agreste and the Ras River, as the distance was

considerable and there were no safe camping spots along the way, so travelers had to

set out at midnight and march through to dusk the following day, at Curral Falso.

The journey was made on foot, on horseback, or in hammocks carried by slaves or

Indians, as was the case with the merchant Antonio Mendes da Costa, who made

‘slow progress, because his wife was carried in a hammock across the whole state and

Indians had to be found to carry it on their backs’ (Lisanti Filho 1973, 1:336). Such

were the difficulties, that horses and beasts of burden were highly valued, even

though the traveler had to dismount at certain more perilous stretches.

Gradually, ranches and plantations popped up along the trail, as well as inns and

the odd village, providing shelter to the traveler and pasture to their animals. The

journey was broken up in such a manner as each leg ended at some resting place,

usually a farm or ranch. A map bearing the title Mapa do territorio da Capitania da

Bahia, compreendido entre o rio Sao Francisco, rio Verde Grande e o riacho chamado

Gaviao,26 drafted in 1759, shows a network of ranches offering shelter to travelers

along the road, dividing the journey into legs of roughly thirty-seven kilometers each,

a distance that could be covered in a day’s march, Paulista-style. Even with the

proliferation of villages and ranches, the journey always depended on the good will of

the ranchers and the accommodation was generally cramped and dirty. Shelter was

mostly in hovels, with shacks in which to store the merchandise offloaded from the

mules, so the animals could graze and rest. The mostly merchant clientele came

prepared with ‘bedding and kitchen utensils, [and] they never let the animals out of

their sight’ (Mawe 1978, 109). It was recommended to all prospective travelers that

they ‘bring bedding and covers, a provision of tea, sugar, candles, rum, salt, soap, two

lunch boxes, and a horn for water’ (Mawe 1978, 118).

The authorities of the two captaincies (Minas Gerais and Bahia) and the town

councils of the few villages along the route issued declarations and determinations

intended to keep the road in decent conditions of travel and relatively safe, as supply

to the countryside towns depended on it. Merchants were those who suffered most

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from the bad conditions and lack of safety on the roads, as they were in constant

transit, either shifting merchandise or transporting the proceeds of their sales.

One constant problem was road conservation on stretches under the charge of

the residents of surrounding lands. In 1722, the governor of Minas Gerais ordered

the military to verify that ‘the farmers [. . .] had kept the roads in order,’ and ‘pursue

those who had failed to maintain the roads on lands belonging to them.’27

At Parateca, where the road from Bahia met the Sao Francisco River, the route

changed its name to Estrada Real (Royal Road). The presence of the Crown was

heavier here, not only in the interests of security, but also to monitor and inspect the

goods coming into the mining fields, which were subject to taxation. Hence it was

mandatory for travelers into Minas to use only authorized roads, all other trails being

considered clandestine. The authorities built checkpoints along the road so they

could control all incoming and outgoing persons and goods and charge the

applicable duties and tariffs. These checkpoints were under military guard, with

companies patrolling the surrounding area in search of smugglers and clandestine

trails, which were promptly destroyed or blocked. In general, the checkpoints were

not fixed, but moved in accordance with strategic necessities. They were almost

always set up in places where the topography or geography made it difficult for

smugglers to find an alternative route. One of the most important checkpoints on the

Bahia Road was at the Velhas River shoal, as travelers had to pass there en route to the

mining fields. The shoal was a strategic post and it was here that various fees were

charged, such as the entradas*a levy on all saleable goods entering the captaincy*and the passagens, which were basically tolls on the river crossings.

At each checkpoint there was a clerk who kept a log, in which everyone and

everything entering or leaving the captaincy was noted, whether travelers, goods, or

slaves. This was also where gold was exchanged for locally authorized specie. On

entrance into Minas, the merchants had to change their gold coins to silver and

copper, the only currency allowed to circulate in the captaincy. On the way out they

had to exchange all gold dust received in payment for their wares back into coins, as

it was prohibited for gold dust to circulate outside the captaincy,28 as it was so easy to

smuggle. Such was the Crown’s concern with controlling the circulation of gold that

the authorities erected the villages of Jacobina and Rio das Contas in Bahia in 1725 in

order to better monitor the final stretch of the road, in the vicinity of the Itapicuri

and Contas rivers (Neves 2007, 21). From that date on, the Royal Road status was

extended to the whole Caminho da Bahia.

Despite legislation to the contrary, the Crown faced increasing difficulties with the

opening of new clandestine tracks and trails, facilitated by the more level terrain and

scattered brushwood of the sertao. The prohibition against the opening of new trails

to and in Minas and the penalties applicable to infractors were determined by royal

decree in March 1720. In 1733, an order issued by the Conselho Ultramarino

(Overseas Council), testifying to how difficult it was to enforce these laws, reaffirmed

that ‘henceforth, no tracks or trails may be opened to any mine already discovered or

that might come to be so in the future.’29 As we have seen in this section, travel on the

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Bahia Road was constant, but fraught with danger and subject to draconian but hard-

to-enforce controls imposed by the Crown.

Settlement, Clashes, and Exchange

The conquest of the sertao began in the seventeenth century with the first land

concessions. At this time, two enormous allotments were made to Francisco Dias

d’Avila and Antonio Guedes de Brito. Of continental proportions, the first of these

covered all lands to the left of the Sao Francisco, and the second all territory to the

right of that same river (Neves 2007, 17). These two vast tracts of scrubland were

colonized throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the cost of constant

clashes with local tribes, such that, ‘whether through the formation of villages and

hamlets, or through the circulation of merchandise on the roads of the sertao,

violence by and against indigenous tribes became endemic, establishing a dynamic of

perpetual conflict’ (Puntoni 2002, 285). Incapable or unwilling to understand the

tribal diversity of these Brazilian lands, the Portuguese divided the Indians into two

groups: the Tapuia, considered a wild, cannibal, enemy tribe, and the Tupi-Guarani,

the friendlier coastal tribes. While war was waged against the former, the latter were

co-opted by the Portuguese.

Antonio Guedes de Brito was a famous Indian enslaver in the sertao, and he sold

his captives to the Paulistas and to the sugar mills of Bahia. In payment for his

services, he received vast swathes of land. In the eighteenth century, when the mines

were discovered in Minas, his lands had passed to his granddaughter, Joana Guedes

de Brito, after whom the Dona Joana Pass was named. She was the daughter of Isabel

Maria Guedes de Brito, fruit of a relationship between Antonio and an Indian

woman. In 1731, Joaquim Quaresma Delgado received orders from the viceroy of

Brazil, Vasco de Meneses, the Count of Sabugosa, to draft a map and itinerary of the

road along the Verde River*a tributary of the Sao Francisco in the brushland of

Minas Gerais*from the headwaters to the shoal (Vianna 1935, 158�207). In order to

do this, Quaresma traveled the whole region for months on end, passing through and

staying at numerous farms along the way, including the cattle ranches Boa Vista,

Batalha, Campos de Sao Joao, Itibiraba, Mocambo, Campo Grande, Retiro do

Curralinho, Santo Antonio do Urubu, Santo Antonio do Retiro, and Riacho dos

Porcos. Spread out almost in a row along the river, all of these properties belonged to

Joana da Silva Guedes de Brito. Isabel’s lands covered ‘over nine-hundred leagues of

territory conquered by her forebears.’ ‘In this vast district there are infinite inherited

estates on which tenants pay ten thousand reis a year for three leagues’ length of land,

with all the width they can plant on, as in terms of width no end has been discovered

to this sertao.’ The land seemed endless and its dimensions continental.30 Joana had

inherited a bevy of farms along the Bahia Road, but as she lived in Salvador, she

usually leased them out to third parties.

Her most famous leaseholder was Manoel Nunes Viana, a native of Portugal, who

became one of the most powerful men in the sertao; so powerful, in fact, that he

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thought little of defying orders from the Portuguese Crown. Nunes Viana and his

cousin, Manoel Rodrigues, raised large herds of slaughter cattle, cornering the meat

trade along the Caminho do Sertao. In or around 1709 they decided to refuse to pay

the taxes charged on their trade by the superintendent of Minas. The official at the

time was the Paulista Borba Gato, son-in-law of the famous bandeirante (back-

woodsman) Fernao Dias Pais Leme, considered one of the first and foremost

explorers of the mining region. The opposition between Nunes Viana and Borba

Gato reflected the generalized tensions between Paulistas, who believed that, as the

original discoverers of the mines, they had rights and privileges over the blow-ins,

and the new arrivals, i.e., those from Bahia, Pernambuco, and Portugal. These

tensions, which began where Nunes Viana ran his ranches, soon spread throughout

the whole mining region, sparking the War of the Emboabas (Romeiro 2008).

The sertao was propitious to disorder and the emergence of kingpins like Nunes

Viana, who often defied the Crown (Anastasia 2005). Areas remote from both the

mining villages and the city of Salvador were hard to control. The governor of Minas,

the Count of Assumar, complained that Nunes Viana, presenting himself as a sort of

attorney to Isabel Guedes de Brito, ‘ruled like a despot over that part of the country

that stretches to the shoal of the Velhas River, granting and refusing farms to

whomsoever he pleased and administering justice.’31 Moreover, he made farmers pay

to him the tithes due to Guedes de Brito. In short, he usurped the king’s main

privileges, rights and duties, namely to raise taxes, make land concessions, and mete

out justice. In 1718, Manoel Nunes Viana led a revolt among the people of the Velhas

River shoal against the governor of Minas, who was trying to tighten his grip on the

region and undermine Viana’s authority by setting up checkpoints and creating

the village of Papagaio nearby. As a show of power, Nunes Viana sought to destabilize

the government by cutting off the supply of meat to Minas (Anastasia 1998, 104�12).

The people of the Sao Francisco and Velhas Rivers would revolt again in 1736, this

time in protest against a recently created tax. It was basically a new way of charging

the quinto (fifth-part tax of production) on gold yields. As the new tax, known as the

capitacao (head-tax), was payable on all slaves, freedmen, and commercial establish-

ments (shops and markets) in the captaincy, it would also apply in the sertao, even

though the region produced no gold. The residents felt it was unjust to raise a gold-

related tax outside the mining zone (Anastasia 1998, 61�84). The leaders of the revolt

were the sertao kinglets Domingos do Prado, Pedro Cardoso, and his mother, Maria

da Cruz (Vasconcelos 1974, 131, 134�41), one of the major powerbrokers of the

sertao. Like the other leaders, Maria da Cruz, the widow of Salvador Cardoso, of

Bahia, was a large landowner who bred cattle and raised some crops. Her most

important farm was called Capao, located outside the village of Pedra de Baixo. As

the authorities would later ascertain, she organized various uprisings against the tax

that sent shockwaves through the sertao of the Sao Francisco basin that year. The

governor, Martinho de Mendonca, classified these revolts under three categories: first,

those promoted by a group of powerful figures who had ‘grown used to living by no

law other than their own will’; second, those launched by a handful of desperados

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who were capable of anything because they had nothing to lose; and, third, those

caused by the authorities themselves, who, while not directly involved, had

nominated people to posts who were not apt to fill them.32

All this instability and refusal to bow to the authority of those appointed by the

Crown meant the sertao was considered ‘a country inhabited by powerful men who

know no law other than force’ and who, by any means necessary, should be ‘brought

to order and to the book.’33 However, no matter how wary the authorities were

of these men (and women), it was to them*Paulistas, Baianos, or Portuguese*that

the Crown owed its presence in the hinterlands. Their names were recorded for

posterity in such locations as Dona Joana Pass, Joao Amaro Pass, Matias Cardoso

village, Fr. Curvelo village, the hamlet of Januario Cardoso, the Widow’s Ranch

(Maria da Cruz), the Paulista’s Ranch, Correira Bay, and Luiz Nunes Corral, all

revealing what was seen to be a victory of civilization over savagery.

Hard to detect in the sertao was the fugacious presence of the Indians, who were

either gradually exterminated to make way for cattle or integrated into Luso-Brazilian

civilization, leaving it to historians to recover their traces (Resende 2003; Langfur

2006). Referred to generically as Tapuia by the Portuguese and their Tupi allies, little

is known about these Indians. The term ‘tapuia’ in Tupi means ‘barbarian’ or

‘adversary,’ denoting the view they and their Portuguese sponsors shared of these

tribes, which were often associated with cannibalism (Figure 5). In the eighteenth

century, the Sao Francisco region attracted considerable contingents of Indians

fleeing from wars of extermination waged by the Paulistas in other areas. Given

the danger they represented to their ranches, which were under constant attack, the

Paulistas embarked on the wholesale extermination of the Araraos and Taboiaras

along the Velhas River (Santos 2010, 81). Corralled by powerful conquistadors, these

tribes struck alliances with whomever they could. Near Morrinhos there was ‘Januario

Cardoso village [loyal to the Paulistas], a Tapuia settlement.’ Records from the day

reveal that the Indians were ‘cherry-colored, with long straight hair’ and that

approach to or by a tribe could lead to a most unpleasant experience. One such

account, penned by three brothers with the surname Nunes, tells of how one of them

went to the village of Cardoso to ask for water, ‘but as no one could understand him,

they wanted to kill him. A colonel, a friend of his, who knew the language of the land,

arrived in time to save his life.’34 Here we see one important aspect concerning

travelers, the role of those who knew how to communicate with the natives, the so-

called linguas (tongues). In the sertao, these were mostly Paulistas, who were used to

contact with the natives from an early age.

Bandits, mostly runaway or recently freed slaves, also sought refuge in the

backlands. In 1797, the inhabitants of the sertoes along the banks of the Sao Francisco

sent a petition to the Crown complaining about the armed gangs, blackguards, and

thieves that had infested the region (Carvalho 1936, 7). The most famous band to

terrorize the Sao Francisco was known as the Vira-Saia (The Turnskirts). This gang

operated between Sao Romao village in Minas and Jacobina in Bahia. The leaders

were Joao Nunes Giraldes and his wife Mariana de Jesus Mendonca, famous for her

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cruelty and perversity, and Jose Barbosa, known by the nickname Pestana

Garimpeiro. The name of the band, Vira-Saia, came from the fact that the leader

would inform his crew of the direction the gold convoys would be leaving from by

turning the skirt on a statue of The Virgin Mary in Vila Rica. Between 1797 and 1800,

the authorities of both captaincies hunted the band down until they finally managed

to wipe them out, something they only succeeded in doing because most of the

members and their families were holed up in Sao Romao suffering from malaria.

Over 100 people were arrested and taken to Vila Rica, which gives some indication of

the size of the band (Parrela 2009, 95�98).

Another group that took the inland expansion of the frontiers as an opportunity

to find refuge, land, and enrichment were the New Christians. Most were descendants

of Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Catholicism around 1496, during the reign

of Dom Manoel. As many of these were traders, the sertao, with its system of routes

connecting Bahia to the region of Minas, traveled by merchants transporting wares

and cowhands driving herds to supply the constantly growing population of the

mining fields, was a strategic refuge for their communities. Many of these families

settled near or on the numerous ranches that spread along these routes, providing

resting places for travelers. There were two main reasons for this: first, they felt

the place was remote enough to protect them from the claws of the Inquisition; and,

second, it was traveled enough to provide some link with the coast, upon which their

livelihood as traders depended. Among the New Christian settlers was the numerous

Nunes family, particularly the three brothers Sebastiao, Luıs, and Diogo, or Diogo

Nunes Henriques, who drove cattle on the road (Novinsky 1976, 89). Various

members of this family, which united in order to take advantage of the profitable

trade boom in Minas, did business amongst themselves.

The three Nunes brothers, for example, established themselves at Curralinho (Little

Corral*present-day Corinto), a semi-urban, semi-rural settlement back in 1700,

and a confluence for cattle ranches where the Bahia Road met the branch that led east

into the Serra do Frio, where, in 1720, diamond fields would be discovered (Barbosa

1995, 101). Curralinho was at once remote, tucked away in the scrubland, and visited

by travelers. This soon brought it to the attention of the Inquisition, which began,

at around this time, to turn its beady eye toward Minas Gerais, much to the

consternation of the New Christians who had gone there in search of a safe haven

only to wind up filling Inquisition jails.35 Twenty-five people were arrested or

denounced in Curralinho, and many of these were sent back to Lisbon to face

charges. Of these, three were women and the rest, men; nine in total bore the

surname Nunes. Scattered across Portugal, the Nunes clan came together at a farm

owned by the three brothers, lost in the backlands of the sertao of Minas. It was the

arrest of one of these, Francisco Nunes Miranda, a physician and resident of

Curralinho, apparently the first New Christian to be captured in Minas in the

eighteenth century, that triggered the discovery and persecution of the rest of the

Nunes family, whose members fell like dominoes (Fernandes 2000, 97). The Nunes

brothers were no exception, and all three were denounced to the Inquisition, though

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only Diogo was arrested and sent back to Portugal to stand trial and ultimately repent

at the Inquisitor’s table (Novinsky 1992, 28). His brothers managed to escape, with

Joao fleeing to France, where he died soon after, while Sebastiao emigrated to

England.36 At the time of his arrest, Diogo was fifty-three years old and presented

himself as a businessman, a sign of his enrichment as a trader in the captaincy.

He informed the tribunal that he did not know how to read or write, but that he

could sign his name. The sertao, for these people, was not some empty space, but

rather a melting pot of Portuguese, Paulistas, Indians, slaves, and New Christians;

a violent melting pot, rife with tension, conflict, and misunderstanding. As such, the

sertao was a genuine borderland, where distinct groups met and occasionally

interacted, but all too frequently clashed.

The Sertao as an Earthly Paradise

The discovery of the gold mines triggered a huge demand for itineraries that

described the roads into the region. It is thought that within the large New Christian

community, whose information networks are not well known, many of these

itineraries would have circulated, denoting the routes the refugees should follow into

the mining region. These networks extended beyond the various regions of Brazil,

Portugal, and Spain into Jewish colonies in Holland and, in particular, England.

Proof of this is the case of the Portuguese doctor Jacob de Castro Sarmento, whose

book, Materia Medica, written in 1735, contained itineraries and descriptions of the

gold and diamond fields of Minas Gerais, apparently directed towards the Jewish and

New Christian community (Sarmento 1735). To this day, the only known remnant of

what would appear to have been an extremely common source at the time remains

the itinerary drafted by one Francisco Tavares de Brito, published in Seville in 1732

(Brito 1999 [1732], 1:898�910). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes

Pertencentes a El rei de Portugal was based on the experiences of the three Nunes

brothers on the Bahia Road,37 and may well have been written as an itinerary to be

followed by other members of the clan or other New Christian families hoping to seek

refuge in Brazil.

The itinerary could best be described as a mental map, as it never assumed pictorial

form, but nonetheless comprised a genuine guide to the area. Two aspects reinforce

the idea that the text was intended to reproduce the routes through the region

for the benefit of prospective travelers. On one hand, the text described the route

with the utmost care, identifying the best stretches and the recommended ways to

take them. On the other, it was very clear on the dangers that could be faced, the

precautions that should be taken and the places where water and food stores could

be replenished. If the dangers described seem to liken the place to hell, the core trait

of the text is the recurrence of elements that exalted the animal, vegetal, and mineral

wonders of the region, painting it as a new Eden, open for settlement. These favorable

descriptions and praise for the region’s natural bounty of fruits and foods were not

restricted to the Nunes’ account, but reflected the central position the place had

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assumed in the cosmology of many Portuguese of the day: it was as if the sertao were

the earthly paradise reserved for and awaiting Portuguese occupation, despite the

claims and demands of its true discoverers, the Paulistas (Furtado 2009, 178�79).

If, since the sixteenth century, Brazil had been described in Edenic terms,38 this

repertoire shifted to Minas Gerais from the onset of the eighteenth. This notion of

the centrality of Minas, as a space destined for the Portuguese by the Portuguese, was

narrowed still further to the Bahia Road by the Nunes brothers, who ‘Edenized’ the

route and its surrounding sertao, seen as the ideal locale for a community of

New Christian refugees. The roots of this belief in an earthly paradise can be found in

the Christian-Catholic tradition and in Portuguese Sebastianism. What is curious

about the brothers’ account is that we can trace the phenomenon back to the Judaic

tradition and its belief in a promised land: the garden of delights promised by God

and revealed to the Jews by Moses during the flight from Egypt. The Edenic images

the Nunes brothers associated with Minas assume a whole new meaning when seen

in the light of the wandering fate to which the New Christians were submitted at that

time, in a throwback to the Biblical Exodus. Many elements attributed to the sertao

of Minas can be associated with those God listed to Moses as he led the Jews out of

Egypt toward the Promised Land. For example, when describing some islets on the

Sao Francisco River, the itinerary mentions that many of these still have no owners;

in other words, that they were there for the taking by Portuguese Jews then roaming

the world. In this sense, the Brazilian paradise presented itself as rather more

promising than the Old Testament Promised Land, insofar as the Bible foresaw a long

and terrible battle between the recently arrived Jews and the pre-existing populations

they would have to expel.

Another element that reinforces the paradisiacal view of the region is the

importance the itinerary attributed to the Sao Francisco, which the brothers

associated with abundance and assured sustenance for travelers. (We should not

forget the emphasis placed on the Nile crossing in descriptions of the flight from

Egypt.) If its bounty of fruits had been an indication of Brazil’s Edenic status since the

sixteenth century, in Jewish eschatology Moses tells us that God revealed to him that

the Promised Land lay alongside a river, the Jordan, dotted with islands rich in

melons. Hardly coincidentally, the Nunes brothers’ itinerary speaks of an islet in the

Sao Francisco so prodigiously bountiful that ‘the most excellent melons’ grew there

of their own accord and always within reach of the famished traveler. To ensure

the continuity of this abundance, all one had to do was leave the rind behind and

nature would take care of the rest. The brothers boasted of having picked, unaided,

‘thirty-six dozen’ such melons.39 Paradise was in the fruits of the earth, which

required no human sweat or toil to satiate the hungry. Even if the itinerary’s prime

aim was to guide the traveler through the region, it came wrapped in elements that

composed a collective vision of the mining fields as the earthly paradise itself. Yet that

Edenic vision concealed a land that was fought over tooth and nail by all comers, a

reality testified to in the dangers the brothers took care to describe*attack by snakes,

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Indians, and Paulistas*and in the list they made of the Indian tribes living in the

diamond region.

Trade on the Bahia Road

Trade on the Bahia Road was fundamental to the population that settled in the

mining region, as it allowed a range of products to reach the hinterland villages and

gave the local farmers a means of distributing their produce. Two bouts of famine are

known to have occurred in the early days of the occupation of Minas (1697/98 and

1700/01). Father Antonil, who kept an account of the influx, wrote that ‘you would

not believe how many of the first miners died from a lack of provisions, with many a

corpse found clutching a sprig of corn, their only means of sustenance’ (Antonil

1982, 169).

The remoteness of Minas, transportation difficulties, the countless middlemen,

and mounting taxes made goods hit unprecedented prices in Minas, turning trade

there into an attractive prospect. ‘These markets mobilized trade channels between

the captaincies interfacing on the Atlantic and the countryside; trade channels that

depended on land routes and waterways on which traveled muleteers, convoys,

merchants, and cattle drivers from all over Brazil, especially from Sao Paulo, Rio de

Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco, the main supply hubs to the mining region’ (Ellis

1958, 430).

Though one of the first roads to be opened inland, the Bahia (or Sertao or Corral)

Road was subject to numerous restrictions imposed by authorities eager to control

or block the movements of travelers across this vast, flat, and largely open stretch of

land, geographical features that made it substantially more difficult to maintain

a tight grip over gold and diamond smuggling. Over long periods of time, royal

orders and other determinations by governors sought to prevent suppliers coming

into the mining region from taking this route, with the exception of cattle, as most of

the livestock producers were in the hinterlands of Bahia. Provisions of this kind were

contained in royal decrees and orders issued by the first governors of Minas Gerais,

and the legislation was tough. The Regimento das Minas de 1702 sought to regulate

and limit commercial activities along this route. The king complained that ‘because

so many people from Bahia or [the sertao] send and bring cattle for sale in Minas,’

there was the risk of ‘considerable embezzlement of my quintos, as what is sold is

exchanged for gold dust, meaning that whole quantity is open to misappropriation.’

Hence items 14 and 15 of the regulations determined that ‘the Superintendency

council expressly prohibit the introduction of blacks to those parts,’ warning that ‘this

prohibition is to be inviolably enforced.’ Lastly, it was ordained that ‘no individuals

from the district of Bahia travel the Caminho do Sertao from Minas with any

produce or articles other than cattle.’40

Despite all these orders forbidding the trade of anything but cattle on the road, it

was practically impossible for merchants to obey them, as they transported the most

varied merchandise. Such was the stringency of the legislation that it sparked revolt

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amongst the traders. When the king sent bailiffs to Sete Lagoas to confiscate goods,

insisting that ‘only cattle or other foodstuffs could pass,’ the merchants on the route

‘gather[ed] at Maquine and prepare[d] to defend themselves, as the envoys [were]

many and well-armed.’ Eventually, apprised of the impossibility of enforcing the

restrictions and of the rising tensions in the sertao, the king gave in and granted

‘permission so that all may pass on payment of the royal dues, of which were raised

some seventy-five arrobas of gold each year.’41 The cargo of the merchant Lucas

Pereira do Lago, from Bahia, an assiduous user of the Road, is a good example of the

diversity of products and overlapping of the slave, horse, and other trades. At the

time of his death he was preparing to ‘travel to Minas, taking slaves, horses and all

other products required for the journey and for business.’42

Off the European vessels at the port of Salvador, traders brought back merchandise

of all kinds, ranging from essential items, such as tools for farming and mining and

medicines for health, to foodstuffs, such as cured hams, and other articles, including

towels, clothing, fabrics, adornments, and ornaments, such as statues of saints,

oratories, and jewelry. From Asia came porcelain, along with myrrh, cinnamon, and

other spices, frequently used in the confection of remedies. Shiploads of valuable

African slaves also made port, providing the manpower that drove the entire

economy. Traders did not only establish contacts along the coast, but inland as well,

connecting the hinterlands of the sertao*the producers of agricultural produce*with the mining towns*the consumers of that produce, and the source of all the

gold. The ledgers a Portuguese merchant named Antonio Pinheiro Netto presented to

his brother in Lisbon concerning his business in Minas listed ‘ship’s lard and barrels

of local flour [da terra].’43 Local flour was basically manioc or corn flour and it was a

staple of the local diet, especially for slaves. Like all farms in the sertao, those of Isabel

Guedes de Brito produced not only cattle, but also ‘corn, beans, vegetables, yams

(which is planted), and peanuts, which grow on the root, unlike other plants, [and

that] bear some resemblance to fava.’44 And all of this was for consumption in Minas.

Traders drove cattle down from the sertao ranches to the mining towns while other

herds came down from Pernambuco or Piauı. The Nunes brothers mention that the

town of Mathias Cardoso, which ‘is half-way to Minas,’ attracted ‘some Mineiros

[looking to do] business with folks from Pernambuco and Bahia, who brought down

Blacks, weapons, horses, salt, sugar, cut dresses, shirts, cattle, gunpowder, bullets,

[and] lead of all sorts.’45 In fact, pretty much anything could be found on the Bahia

Road, and in 1711, having accepted the fact that their prohibitions were unenforce-

able, the authorities lifted their restrictions and trade went on as intensely and

continuously as ever, with its gamut of merchants plying their trades (Furtado 1999).

Traders of the Sertao

Indeed, the settlement of Minas attracted all manner of traders drawn ‘to the fantastic

business they were doing with the Paulistas, who paid high prices for the bare

necessities’ (Lima Junior 1978, 35). Among these were representatives from

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Portuguese trading houses, or their Brazilian branches in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, as

well as countless free agents who ended up getting involved in merchant activity.

These traveling salesmen, the viandantes, or ‘men of the road,’ were a constant

presence on the Bahia Road. Despite the generally low level of commercial

specialization, as everyone peddled a little of everything, these merchants went by

different designations depending on their core stock: the viandantes sold sundry

merchandise; the condutores traded in cattle and horses, the comboieiros sold slaves,

and the tratantes were debt collectors or agents representing other traders (Furtado

1999, 260�72). Many of these were involved in trade between Brazil and Africa, which

was a two-way channel, turning the ocean into a veritable ‘river called the Atlantic’

(Costa e Silva 2003), across which slaves were exchanged for all sorts of goods, such as

the tobacco and leather produced in the backlands between Bahia and Minas Gerais.

But viandante remained the generic term for ‘men of the road’ in Minas, those

‘who bought and sold provisions’ (Novinsky 1976, 178), and transported the most

diverse merchandise. The viandantes were generally not free agents, but were usually

hired by the large trading houses in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, or Minas Gerais’ main

villages to move merchandise from the coast to the country or by smaller merchants

hoping to profit on resale. The viandantes were fundamental to the establishment of

commercial networks between the two captaincies and generally charged a percentage

on the goods they transported. One such merchant was Jeronimo da Costa Valle,

from Barcelos, who owned six pack-mules. At the time he wrote his will, he was

bound for Minas with a consignment of thirty-two slaves, including Brazilian

veterans and new arrivals, and his receivables included a pair of loans at six percent

interest per month.46 Costa Valle was Portuguese, white, single, and had no fixed

assets, all of which greatly facilitated the itinerant life.

The comboieiros were those who mainly made their living transporting slaves

inland from the coast. They transported other goods, too, as was the case of Manoel

Ferreira Leal, mentioned earlier, who traveled between Bahia and Minas with his four

pack-mules. Leal was constantly on the road, and his main business was the internal

slave trade, hence his self-designation as comboieiro (‘convoyer’) in his will. However,

he was known to handle other goods for merchants and residents in Sabara. When he

died, in transit, he was in the process of moving sixteen slaves for resale in the mining

area, but that was not all. Also in his possession were a bottle rack, two bottles, a pair

of rifles, and a set of spoons, forks, and silver plates to be delivered to one Pedro

Ferreira de Andrade*‘orders paid for in advance.’ Other articles included a box of

soap and a wicker basket full of trinkets, ‘all at the behest and risk of Manoel

Rodrigues de Lima.’47

An example of a Minas trader who hired the services of viandantes and comboieiros

was one Jose Ribeiro Manso, a store owner. Manso mentions that he had ‘various

condutores in his employ, including the aforementioned Leal.’ At the time of his death

he was expecting a cargo of foodstuffs to be delivered to him in Sabara.48 Another

was Militia Captain Pedro Mendes Simoes, who declared before the Inquisition that

he was a sugarcane farmer from Rio de Janeiro. Though a cane-grower by trade, he

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also dabbled in commerce, as was common at the time. He transported a range of

merchandise belonging to people in Bahia, such as the colonel Bernardino

Cavalcante, Friar Manoel Fernandez, and the fellow trader Manoel Barbosa Leal.

The priest’s consignment was of taffeta and drugs, while Manoel Barbosa Leal’s was a

pair of slaves. The business dealings between the cane-grower/trader, the colonel, and

the priest would seem to have been longstanding, as Simoes owed the officer money

from earlier cargoes transported to the mines and had an outstanding loan with the

cleric (Novinsky 1976, 228�30). The farmer and tratante Manoel Nunes Vizeu had a

similar relationship in Minas with the Bahia-based traders Balthazar de Alemeida, for

whom he sold slaves shipped from Angola, and Luıs Mendes, for whom he sold a

trunk of garments from India (Novinsky 1976, 209�11).

The capital that financed the majority of the merchants traveling the Bahia Road

was commonly put up by big businessmen in Bahia and Minas Gerais. Manoel Pinto

de Souza bankrolled two viandantes with whom he forged partnerships. He and his

compadre financed a venture that transported slaves to the mines. He also bankrolled

a horse-trading business in the sertao run by Francisco Fernandes Lima.49 The

comboieiro Manoel Ferreira Leal had various debtors, some of whom were relatives, as

it was common at the time for family ties to extend into business, with one member

benefitting the other. He also owed a sum to a cousin in Bahia, on which he was

paying ‘interest of six and one-quarter percent.’50 These financiers were not always

male, as we can see from documentation concerning one Maria de Freitas, born in

Cachoeira in the Reconcavo Baiano, and resident in Minas Gerais. At the time of her

death she had financed a cargo being brought down from Bahia by the viandante

Joseph da Costa. Maria was married, childless, and a member of the All Souls’

confraternity, in whose catacombs she was buried. Hers was no small estate, as she

owned a farm with farmhouses, seven slaves, a reserve of gold dust, four horses, and

various jewels. Her inventory included stocks of satin, bottle racks, and two pack-

mules with packsaddle, a basket full of towels, silver cutlery, and various fabrics, all of

which were in the hands of her viandante, or itinerant factor.51

The commercial networks established between Minas and Bahia were based on ties

of dependency and cronyism, which frequently overlapped with those of family.

Prime examples of this were the Henriques, Avila, and Miranda families, all New

Christians, who pooled capital to do business in Minas from their retreat in the

sertao, where they had gone to escape the Inquisition. Diogo de Avila Henriques

seems to have been the main financier of his family’s business. At the time of his

arrest by the Inquisition in 1726, he and some associates in Bahia had a train of slaves

en route to Minas. The agreement was that they would ‘share whatever profits or

losses came of the venture.’ Diogo’s cousin, Gaspar Henriques, took care of most of

the transportation of slaves and agricultural produce between Bahia and Minas.

Another cousin resident in Salvador was Diogo de Avila, who, alongside the merchant

Jacinto Barbosa, also co-financed many of these journeys (Novinsky 1976, 79�84).

Furthering the family connections, Gaspar Henriques served as a debt collector in

Bahia for another relative based in Minas, the trader David Miranda. On behalf of his

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brother-in-law, Joao de Morais Montezinhos, from Bahia, he transported a group of

slaves to the village of Sao Jose in Minas, all of whom had been sold prior to his arrest

by the Inquisition (Novinsky 1976, 123�25). Gaspar Henriques purchased some

furniture and two slaves from Diogo de Avila Henriques, even though his cousin still

owed him his share of the proceeds from their joint undertakings (Novinsky 1976,

123�25).

The commercial networks that connected the traveling merchants on the Bahia

Road and the inhabitants of the mining region were complex and diffuse. The lists of

accounts payable and receivable these men left behind them at the time of their

deaths could be quite extensive. Simao Alves da Ferreira, a traveling salesman, had

debts due to him in Santa Luzia, Mato Dentro, and Rio das Velhas. In Morro

Vermelho his debtors included ‘the black woman Rosa Correia, for two shipments

from the kingdom [Portugal]’ and ‘Jeronimo Soares, for a package of salt and corn.’52

Manoel Madureira Pinto, who, in 1733, was in Bahia preparing to travel to Minas,

had some ‘horses and related articles’ and ‘various debtors in Minas [. . .], whose due

sums were recorded in [his] ledgers.’53 Fernando Gomes Nunes, a tratante in Minas

Gerais and Goias, whose business was the transportation of foodstuffs, Asian fabrics,

and slaves from Bahia, had fourteen horses for business, as well as two pistols and two

revolvers for protection against the perils of the road. Shortly before his death he

traveled with three mules laden with a range of merchandise, all belonging to the

merchant Manoel Sampaio de Freitas and the mill-owner Diogo Henriques Ferreira.

In Bahia, Nunes owed money to Antonio Goncalves Maciel, an official at the mint,

and to a physician who had traveled from India and passed on merchandise for sale in

Minas. He was also owed by numerous residents of Minas for foodstuffs he had sold

there on credit, which gives some indication of the kind of business he did between

the coast and the hinterlands. His debtors included the barber-surgeon Luıs Gomes

Ferreira, author of Erario Mineral, a salesclerk in Serro do Frio, and a priest in

Guarapiranga who bore the unusual nickname of Quatro Olhos (Four-eyes)

(Novinsky 1976, 105�7). Illustrative of the many cases in which a single big

businessman would hire the services of various viandantes working the Bahia Road

and of the diversity of stock they would carry were the Portuguese Jose Ribeiro

Manso, owner of a shop in Sabara, who put ‘various cargoes [. . .] into the hands of

Manoel Leal, [. . .] and other merchants besides [. . .], as listed herein’;54 and the slave

and livestock trader Rafael Monteiro Heires, who kept a ledger of debits and credits,

as he transported merchandise for so many different clients that he could not rely on

memory alone.55

Examination of the cargoes transported by some of the merchants on the Bahia

Road reveals that, despite the different job titles they assumed*viandantes,

comboieiros, tratantes*there was little or no specialization among them, as they

all carried a diverse stock and collected debts. These merchants closed contracts

with large and small businesspeople on the coast and in Minas, who financed and

promoted their dealings. These business ties constituted bonds of dependency

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and hierarchy that often overlapped with family connections, thus mixing blood and

business.

On the Gulf Stream, or ‘a River Called the Atlantic’56

This heavy commerce did not constitute a one-way traffic flowing into Minas. In

addition to their payments in gold, viandantes making the return journey to Salvador

carried back with them a range of goods produced on the farms of the sertao and

Bahian Reconcavo, particularly tobacco and leather, which were used to barter for

slaves in Africa. ‘In the third slave cycle, the one from [Africa’s] Mina [Coast], the

slave trade in Bahia did not follow the classic system of the triangular journey

[Africa-Portugal-Brazil], but was conducted on the basis of reciprocal and

complementary exchanges: tobacco for slaves’ (Verger 2002, 30�31).57 ‘Not just

any tobacco: specifically the tobacco rolls made in Bahia.’ Considered a third-class

tobacco by the Portuguese, the Bahian product, which was soaked in honey or cane

syrup and wrapped in leather to prevent it from drying out and losing its flavor, was

much appreciated by the nobles of the Benin coast (Costa e Silva 2004, 43). In fact,

recent historiography has accentuated the complementarity between both sides of the

Atlantic*Brazil and Africa*shaping this commercial arrangement out of a bipolar

configuration (Alencastro 2000).

The influx of slaves from Bahia into Minas was considerable and grew constantly

over the course of the first half of the eighteenth century. An estimated forty percent

of the slaves that arrived from Africa during this period were forwarded to the mines

(Goulart 1975, 165)*i.e., an average of 1,560 captives per year (Ribeiro 2005, 195).

Many of the slaves transported by the comboieiros had been ordered in advance by

residents of Minas, but others had been purchased, either on the trader’s own

investment or with the backing of some financier in Bahia, for auction in the

backlands. Of the sixteen slaves Manoel Ferreira Leal transported from Bahia in 1726,

‘two blacks and a ladina [Brazil-born] woman [were for] Joam Costa Souza, one slave

boy for Paulo de Macedo, and another for Manoel Rodrigues Rios.’58 Of the thirty-

two slaves in the convoy of Jeronimo da Costa Valle in 1740, only seven had owners

awaiting their delivery.59 The merchant Pedro Nunes de Miranda, who owned a farm

in Borda do Campo, declared that he was due payment on four folk healer or ‘witch-

doctor’ (curandeiro) slaves auctioned off in Minas (Novinsky 1976, 230).

The businessmen of Bahia were an important link between the slave-hungry

mining lands and the African coast. By extension, so too were the traveling merchants

that constantly made the journey back and forth along the Caminho do Sertao,

buying and selling merchandise. The New Christian Diogo de Avila Henriques was

a case in point, as he had business dealings with various members of his clan,

including his cousins Diogo de Avila and Gaspar Henriques, who was the main agent

transporting and selling the family’s merchandise in Minas in return for a five to

eight percent commission on sales. Based in Bahia, Diogo de Avila Henriques was

a major importer of slaves from Angola, most of whom he sold through middlemen,

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such as Joao Lopes Alvares and Jeronimo Rodrigues, a slave-seller in Minas

(Novinsky 1976, 79�84). He also ordered the purchase of leather in the sertao,

most of which was used to make boot soles which he sent to Porto, Portugal, to be

sold by his father, Jorge Henrique Moreno. The surplus was sent to Minas for sale or

used for barter in Angola.

Like Diogo Nunes Henriques, based in Cachoeira, Antonio de Miranda also

supplied leather to tobacco producers in the Reconcavo. Leather was used to package

tobacco exports from Bahia, which were generally exchanged for slaves in Guinea.

However, Antonio de Miranda pursued other lines of business besides tanning. For

one Agostinho Pereira, a pardo (mixed blood man of color) who lived along the Bahia

Road, Miranda delivered a consignment of cotton for resale in Minas. This load and

three slaves were bought from Diogo Nunes Henriques, for whom the tanner doubled

as a middleman in this profitable business (Novinsky 1976, 50�53). Not only were the

relationships between traders intricate, but we can also identify the existence of

networks of intermediaries.

The business connections of Belchior Mendes Correa were complex and illustrative

of New Christian merchant networks that linked the sertao to the Atlantic. In

Salvador, Domingos Goncalves and Jacome Jose, a butler to the viceroy Vasco

Fernandes Cesar, were partners in a shop and a tobacco-rolling factory. The tobacco

was then shipped off in boatloads to Angola and the Mina Coast, where it was

exchanged for slaves. This same partnership imported olive oil, vinegar, and gloves

from Portugal, china from the Orient, and flour and rice from the countryside of

Bahia, all of which was resold to viandantes, who distributed these wares and goods

throughout the sertao. The partnership also brokered business between foreign

merchants and businesspeople in Minas. Documents show that the viandante Joseph

Rodrigues de Menezes transported a cargo belonging to the ‘foreigners Olive and

Medices,’ a pair of Italian merchants, sent to him by the partnership (Novinsky 1976,

64�70). This intriguing cargo belonged to none other than the famous Italian

merchant family, the Medici, which casts new light on the inexistence or inefficacy

of a Portuguese monopoly on Brazilian trade, as the recent historiography would

suggest.60 The closer we look at the direct trade going on between Bahia and

the African coast, the Atlantic islands, and the rest of Europe, the harder it becomes

to defend the argument that all exportation from Brazil had to be intermediated

by Lisbon.

Jose da Costa, a storeowner in Salvador, was another who did business directly

with Angola and Portugal. From Angola, he brought slaves, hardtack (used to feed

slaves aboard ship), and heavy cotton cloth. From Portugal, he imported fabrics,

clothing, swords, olive oil, cutlery, and shotguns for resale in Minas, Pernambuco,

and the southern outpost of Nova Colonia do Sacramento,61 mostly at the

viandante’s own risk. In Angola, he also loaned money to royal functionaries, such

as the governor Paulo de Tarso e Albuquerque, whose attorney in Bahia was to repay

the sum (Novinsky 1976, 154�57). Another international trader was the physician

Manoel Mendes Monforte, who exported sugar to Ilha Terceira in the Azores; satin

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stockings and trinkets to Sao Tome and Principe, from where he received a female

slave and a barrel of soap; fabrics to Angola, where he also bought slaves; and items

from Britain bound for Nova Colonia do Sacramento. He was also known to lend

money, at interest, in Bahia and in Minas, occasionally capitalizing other traders.

In Minas, he sold flasks of medicine from Portugal to one Joseph da Cunha de

Macedo. From Hamburg, Germany, where he had an agent in his employ, he received

hats, baize, and fine linen as payment for some boxes of sugar sent some years earlier.

There is also evidence that this New Christian doctor also brokered papal pardons

for other New Christians, as well as other documents, such as clearance-for-marriage

certificates and declarations of ‘clean blood’ (i.e., of pure Portuguese, Roman

Catholic ancestry), as obtained for one Januario Cardoso de Almeida, a resident on

the banks of the Sao Francisco (Novinsky 1976, 198�206).

We can see that the traders who established relations between Minas and Bahia in

the first half of the eighteenth century comprised a highly homogeneous social layer.

They created complex and diffuse commercial networks that were hierarchical and

interwoven, often mixing business and family (many being New Christian clans).

At the top of these mercantile pyramids were the major businessmen of the two

captaincies, who financed the activities of traveling merchants transporting

merchandise along the Bahia or Sertao roads. These viandantes and comboieiros

joined the two regions, shuttling between them with a range of merchandise, from

foodstuffs to slaves and cattle, while thwarting all attempts to enforce legislation

designed to curb their operations. In addition to African slaves, the port in Salvador

received all manner of goods from the Plate River estuary, Portugal, Africa, India and

even Italy and Germany, and from there it was packed on mules bound for Minas.

Along the Caminho do Sertao these merchants traded for local produce, such as

leather and tobacco, which were essential currency when bargaining for slaves. Thus a

dotted line was drawn between the coast of Africa and the hinterlands of Minas. If,

from this perspective, the sertao was one big trading pit, it was also a place of refuge

and conflict. In this remote but busy region, Portuguese, Paulistas, Baianos, Tapuia

and Tupi Indians, New Christians, freed or runaway slaves met and clashed. Their

disputes imposed a certain dynamic upon the backlands, high on the agenda of

advancing Portuguese colonialism, it is true, but also a flashpoint of resistance against

it. In this sense, the colonization of inland Brazil was neither unequivocal nor

irreversible. Urban centers appeared and disappeared over time, and ranches were

settled only to be abandoned in capitulation to the precariousness of life in the sertao.

The Indians posed fierce if intermittent resistance to the white man’s sequential

attempts to enslave or exterminate them. For all of these reasons the sertao was,

effectively, an inland frontier at which different peoples met, interacted and clashed.

Archives

AHU Arquivo Historico Ultramarino, Lisbon

ANTT Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon

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APM Arquivo Publico Mineiro. Secao Colonial (SC), Belo Horizonte

MO, CBG Museu Ouro, Casa Borba Gato, Sabara (Minas Gerais)

RBC Robert Bosch Collection, Stuttgart

Notes

1 ‘The gold of Minas was a magnet for the people of Brazil, and it was by this allure that much of

the population of its captaincies (especially of the province of Bahia) rushed there in its pursuit’

(Pita 1976, 232).2 Marcio Roberto Alves dos Santos argues that the Crown’s prohibitions were ineffective and that

‘it was only when the city of Rio de Janeiro consolidated itself as the major entrepot for the

captaincy of Minas Gerais that the Bahia Road lost its importance’ (Santos 2001, 145).3 Especially Mathias Cardoso, Antonio Goncalves, Bras Esteves Leme (1715), and the brothers

Domingos and Francisco Dias do Prado (1727). The Paulistas discovered the gold and were the

first settlers in Minas Gerais. Their expeditions of discovery were known as bandeiras (flag

missions) and the explorers themselves as bandeirantes.4 Santos offers the major contribution to our understanding of the occupation of the sertao

linking Bahia and Minas and the use of the road between the two.5 ‘On a ranch, known as ’do Paulista, [so-called] because it was once home to these men, there had

been many cattle, but the ranchers decided to leave because of the number of jaguars, which

killed their cows. To this day you can still see the ruins of houses and corrals from this

settlement.’ Stuttgart. Robert Bosch Collection (hereafter RBC) n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da

America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de Portugal, relatada pelos tres irmaos chamados

Nunes os quais rodarao muytos annos por estas partes. In: Jean-Baptiste Bourguigon d’Anville, a

collection of eight manuscripts and treatises, of which five refer to Brazil, 4.6 Suggestion made by the Diamond Intendent, Tomas de Barros Barreto, as a means of

transporting saltpeter between Juazeiro and the Paulo Afonso waterfall, which had been mined

in the Serra dos Montes Altos, near Tejuco (‘Ofıcio do Desembargador Thomaz Roby de Barros

Barreto, Tejuco, 22 March 1758,’ 1909, 281).7 For example, the German traveler Johann Moritz Rugendas, who depicted the lagoon in one of

the watercolors he produced in Brazil. His paintings can be seen in Rugendas 1998.8 RBC n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 1�2.9 The etymology of the word ‘emboabas’ is unclear and its meaning is flexible. Sometimes it was

used to refer to the Portuguese alone, while on other occasions it could designate all non-

Paulistas, from Portugal, Bahia, Pernambuco, etc. It was also used to distinguish those who

originally opened the mines, i.e., the Paulistas, from all later arrivals, who were accused of

exploiting a resource they had done nothing to locate in the first place. On other occasions the

term can be understood as referring to all travelers who arrived via the Bahia Road, as opposed

to the route from Sao Paulo. See Russell-Wood 1999, 100�18.10 The seasons in Minas Gerais are quite distinct, with a dry season that stretches from April to

September and a rainy season from October to March. As gold panning was mostly done in

riverbeds, the activity was pursued during dry season, which meant most traveling through the

sertao was done during the rains.11 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 1�2.12 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 7�8.13 A very popular fruit tree.

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14 The wood from this large tree was frequently used to make utensils, while rubber could be

extracted from its bark.15 A tree native to the Brazilian semi-arid region whose roots have tubers that retain water. The

plum-like fruit is much appreciated.16 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 1�20.17 Belo Horizonte, Arquivo Publico Mineiro (hereafter APM), Camara Municipal de Ouro Preto

06, ff. 12v�14.18 APM. Secao Colonial (hereafter SC) 18, f. 13.19 ‘Carambola’ or ‘quilombolo’; former slaves from maroon colonies. See ‘Atas da Camara

Municipal de Villa Rica (1711�1715)’ 1927, 307.20 Lisbon, Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo (hereafter ANTT) Testamentaria de Francisco

Pinheiro, Carta 167, maco 29, f. 271.21 In the interest of protecting cargo vessels from pirates on sea routes, it had already been

prohibited for ships to cross the Atlantic between Brazil and Portugal outside of convoys. Each

fleet consisted of merchant ships escorted by warships. During the eighteenth century, there were

three annual convoys to Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro, respectively, as well as a

secondary fleet bound for Maranhao and Para. Ships were obliged to set sail from Portugal

between October and mid-February, but departures from Brazil were more erratic, generally

leaving in March, April, or May, in the case of ships from Rio (Furtado 1999, 99�102).22 ‘Encontrando quilombos . . . ,’ (Anais da Biblioteca Nacional 108 [1988], 56�57) cited in Souza

1997, 1:66�67.23 Sabara, Museu Ouro (hereafter MO), Casa Borba Gato (hereafter CBG) Testamento L3(8), ff.

116v�26v.24 MO, CBG Testamento L3(8), ff. 107�16.25 MO, CBG Testamento L2(6), f. 98v�103v.26 Lisbon, Arquivo Historico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), Mapoteca, n.167/980.27 APM. SC. 21, f. 10.28 This was in force only until 1725, as thenceforth gold dust circulation was prohibited inside the

captaincy as well. To prevent smuggling, smelting houses were created to process all raw gold

into bars that could be exchanged for gold coins at the captaincy’s checkpoints.29 APM, SC 10, f. 4.30 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, p. 3.31 APM, SC 11, ff. 55�56.32 ‘Motins do sertao. Carta de Martinho de Mendonca ao Secretario Antonio Guedes de 23 de

dezembro de 1737,’ 1986, 1: 664�70.33 ‘Motins do sertao. Carta de Martinho de Mendonca de 29 de junho de 1736 e 17 de outubro de

1737,’ 1986, 1: 649, 662.34 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 5.35 Though the Holy Office was never officially installed in the captaincy, lay officers with ties to the

institution had powers to denounce, arrest, and even confiscate the property of New Christians

suspected of Judaism, some of whom were sent back to Lisbon to stand trial.36 ANTT, Inquisicao de Lisboa, Processo de Diogo Nunes Ribeiro, n.7488.37 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal. For a more complete assessment of this itinerary, see Furtado and Safier 2006, 263�77.38 There is an existing historiography on the search for Eden in the Americas, as example see

Holanda 1994, Souza 1986, and on applications of these notions to the Minas sertao, Langfur

2006, 49�54.

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39 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 11.40 PM, SC 01. Regimento dos Superintendentes, guarda-mores e mais oficiais deputados para as

minas de ouro, ff. 37�38.41 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 6.42 MO, CBG. Testamento de Lucas Pereira do Lago, L6(12), ff. 127�32.43 ANTT. Testamentaria de Francisco Pinheiro. Carta 138. Maco 18, ff. 880�81.44 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 7.45 RBC. n.555 (1). Noticias das minas da America chamadas Geraes pertencentes a el rei de

Portugal, 5.46 MO, CBG. Testamento de Jeronimo da Costa Valle, L3(8), ff. 107�8.47 MO, CBG. Testamento de Manoel Ferreira Leal, L3(8), ff. 116v�26v.48 MO, CBG. Testamento de Jose Ribeiro Manso, L7(13), ff. 104v�12.49 MO, CBG. Testamento de Manoel Pinto de Souza, L4(9), ff. 97�101.50 MO, CBG. Testamento de Manoel Ferreira Leal, L3(8), ff. 116v�26v.51 MO, CBG. Testamento de Maria de Freitas, L3(8), ff. 94v�101v.52 MO, CBG. Testamento de Simao Alves da Ferreira, L2(6), ff. 98v�103v.53 MO, CBG. Testamento de Manoel Madureira Pinto, L2(6), ff. 80v�83.54 MO, CBG. Testamento de Jose Ribeiro Manso, L7(13), ff. 104v�12.55 MO, CBG. Testamento de Rafael Monteiro Heires, L2(6), ff. 70v�76v.56 Costa e Silva 2003.57 The Portuguese referred to the coastal region stretching from Cape Palmas to the river Volta as

the Costa da Mina or Mina Coast. See Law 2005, 247�67.58 MO, CBG. Testamento de Manoel Ferreira Leal, L3(8), ff. 116v�26v.59 MO, CBG. Testamento de Jeronimo da Costa Valle, L3(8), ff. 107�8.60 The slave trade with Africa at the port of Rio de Janeiro was also monopolized by local traders.

See, among others, Florentino 1997.61 A Portuguese territory established in 1690 on the banks of the River Plate directly opposite

Buenos Aires, then under the jurisdiction of the government of Rio de Janeiro. It was via

smuggling in the Colonia do Sacramento that the Portuguese had access to the silver produced in

Spanish America.

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