Stilt-root subsistence: Colonial mangroves and Brazil's landless poor

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 83, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 223-253

  Miller, Shawn W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649544334     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: 15271900     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-83-2-223     Document Type: Article

References (117)

1. For the more-common conflicts between councils and clergy, see C. R. Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia, and Luanda, 1510-1800 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 88-91
2. Vivaldo Coaracy, O Rio de Janeiro no século dezessete, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olímpio, 1965), 83-84
3. While the sciences have advanced mangrove studies in the last 25 years, historical approaches are rare. Philip D. Curtin, "African Enterprise in the Mangrove Trade: The Case of Lamu," African Economic History 10 (1981): 23-33, describes the East African rafter trade with the Persian Gulf and the evolution of conservation policy in the twentieth century
4. and Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 24, 196-97, concisely addresses the human impact on Brazil's mangroves
5. Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: n.p., 1817), 2:60, was not alone in his opinion that "the mangroves entirely destroy the beauty which it is natural to suppose diat the rivers of the country of which I am treating would possess. Until they are destroyed, a dull sameness presents itself." He removed the mangroves along his property and pronounced the change pleasing
6. As examples of the struggles over mangrove use, see Governor Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses to the councils of Cairu, Camamu, and Boipeba, Bahia, 25 Aug. 1721, Documentos históricos (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, 1929-55), 44:125-28
7. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, Annaes do Rio de Janeiro, 4 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Seignot-Plancher, 1835), 4:274-78
8. Even late in the colonial period, Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Marti us, in Viagem pelo Brasil, 1817-1820, 3 vols. (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1981), 2:138, described the Bay of All Saints and its islands as "covered, in general, along the shoreline, with thick forests of mangrove"
9. and John Mawe, in Travels in the Interior of Brazil, 2nd ed. (London: Longman et al., 1821), 134, noted of Rio de Janeiro that "in the precincts of the city, there is an extensive flat, covered with mangroves," referring to the region known as the Mangue, which would be later drained and filled in the mid-nineteenth century to create the neighborhood of Cidade Nova
10. Simão de Vasconcellos, Chrónica da Companhia de Jesu do estado do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: A.J. Fernandes, 1865), 22
11. The fruits of two of the mangroves were edible, but consumption was insignificant; while the leaf was not edible, Willem Piso noted that the salt collected from the surface of three siriúba leaves was sufficient to season a soup. Guilherme Piso, História natural e médica da Índia ocidental, trans. Mário Lobo Lêal (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1957), 430. Considering the price of monopoly salt in the colony, this practice may have been common
12. The red mangrove's roots were also the source of the shipworm (Teredo navalis), the wooden ship's most insidious enemy. Hulls served not only as hosts, but as vectors of transmission to many of the world's ports. Infected mangroves were easily toppled by winds. Infected ships had to be replanked or risked sinking. Only in the late eighteenth century was an effective defense discovered in copper sheathing. Louis-François de Tollenare, Notas dominicais tomadas durante uma viagem em Portugal e no Brasil em 1816, 1817, e 1818 (Salvador: Livraria Progresso Editora, 1956), 343-44, is apparently the only source to describe the shipworm in Brazil's mangroves
13. Fernão Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1978), 58
14. H. Luederwaldt, "Os manguesaes de Santos," Revista do Museu Paulista 11 (1919): 372
15. Sebastião da Rocha Pita, História da América Portuguesa (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1976), 35, 46
16. Piso, História natural e médica, 186-87
17. Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 1:79
18. Georg Marggraf, História natural do Brasil (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 1942), specimen no. 464
19. Cardim, Tratados da terra, 58
20. Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1971), 289
21. Among the more common, which were all classed under the term marisco, were sernambis, ameijoas, tarcobas, mexilhões or sururus, berbigões or sarnambitingas, búzios, longuerões, perseves, caramujos, pernambins, caramuhos, unhas de velha, and periguaris. See Pita, História, 34
22. and Luís dos Santos Vilhena, A Bahia no século XVIII (Salvador: Editora Itapuã, 1969), 695
23. When in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-sixteenth century, the Calvinist missionary Jean de Léry renamed himself leri-assu, "big oyster," to the delight of the Indians, who declared they had never met a Frenchman by that name. Considering his frequent descriptions of native cannibalism, we can assume a certain bravado in taking the name of a popular food. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. J. Whately (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 162
24. Sousa, Tratado descritivo, 291
25. Tollenare, Notas dominicais, 342-43
26. The treaty was published in Stuart B. Schwartz, "Resistance and Accommodation in Eighteenth-Century Brazil: The Slaves' View of Slavery," Hispanic American Historical Review 57 (1977): 80-81
27. Luederwaldt, "Os manguesaes de Santos," 311. Mangroves are important for offshore fishing not only because they serve as nurseries but because shrimp and mullet are collected here for bait
28. Cardim, Tratados da terra, 63, 178, 193
29. The arrangements under which northeastern fisherman attracted occasional labor for the hauling of nets in the 1960s are described in Shepard Forman, The Raft Fisherman: Tradition and Change in the Brazilian Peasant Economy (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), 48-50
30. and Antonio Alves Câmara, Pescas e peixes da Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Leuzinger, 1911), 124, described gangs of 80-100 hauling nets ashore. Oxen had been recently introduced to haul nets due, in part, to theft. Haulers sometimes buried fish in the sand, slipped them into pockets, or hid them under hats. Blood running down a worker's face betrayed the fact that a hatted fish had set its teeth into his scalp
31. John Black, An Authentic Narrative of the Mutiny on Board the Ship Lady Shore with Particulars of a Journey through Part of Brazil (Ipswich: n.p. [1798]), 58
32. James George Semple Lisle, The Life of Major J. G. Semple Lisle (London: W. Stewart, 1799), 254
33. Mangrove Forest Management Guidelines (Rome: EAO, 1994), 49
34. Shawn W. Miller, "Fuelwood in Colonial Brazil: The Economic and Social Consequences of Fuel Depletion for the Balkan Recôncavo, 1549-1820," Forest and Conservation History 38 (October 1994): 189-90
35. Juan Lopes de Sierra, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil: The Funeral Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonça by Juan Lopes Sierra, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz, trans. Ruth Jones (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979), 43
36. For Bahia's fuelwood exports from 1757 to 1759, see the "Mapas de exportação," Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (hereafter AHU), Bahia, nos. 2814-15 (18 May 1757)
37. and the fleet export statistics published in Boletim Internacional de Bibliografia Luso-Brasileira, vol. 9 (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkia, 1968), 627, 645, 647
38. Armando Magalhães Correa, O sertão carioca (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 1933), 74. This refers to all fuel cut into small proportions and bundled into feixes. Mangrove was not the exclusive fuel even in the early colonial period, but it was preferred initially for its high quality, easy access by water transport, and common status. Tt appears that only as local mangrove sources were depleted did residents begin pushing into the upland forests, but here they often ran into the defensible private rights of landholders
39. Corrca, Sertão carioca, 75-76. There is no evidence that canals were dug in the colonial period, and it may have been that mangroves were abundant enough that this was unnecessary
40. Coaracy, Rio no século dezessete, 83-84, 197
41. Frei Vicente do Salvador, História do Brasil, 1500-1627, 7th ed. (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1982), 64
42. see also Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, Riqueza do Brasil em madeiras de construção e carpinteria (Rio de Janeiro: n.p., 1823)
43. Curtin, "African Enterprise in the Mangrove Trade," 24, observes that the dimensions of many Persian Gulf homes were determined by the length of mangrove rafters taken from the Kenyan coast
44. For a recent study of the broader Brazilian timber sector, see my Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000)
45. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 150, 242
46. Spix and Marti us, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:192
47. See also Coaracy, Rio de Janeiro, 83-84
48. In addition to clay, sugar millers also required ashes rich in alkali to purify sugar while it was still in liquid form. Along with a couple of other trees, mangrove served this purpose well due to the high concentrations of soda (20%) and potassium (35%) in its ash, which was saved and slaked with water to create lye. See Lisboa, Annaes do Rio de Janeiro, 253-54
49. and D. A. Gonsalves, "Os compostos de sódio na economia nacional," Boletim do Ministério de Agricultura, Indústria e Comércio, Rio de Janeiro 24, nos. 7-9 (1935): 5, 8-9
50. Benedicto Calixto, "Algumas notas e informações sobre a situação dos sambaquis de Itanhaen e de Santos," Revista do Museu Paulista 6 (1904): 502
51. Salvador, História da Brasil, 75
52. Dean, With Broadax, 24, 197, describes the wastefulness of the open firing of shells and notes how many questions remain regarding the origins of the middens
53. Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, 59
54. Saint-Hilaire, in Viagens pelo distrito dos diamantes e litoral do Brasil, trans. L. de Azeredo Pena (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1941), 342, observed that true limestone, which was of higher quality, was quarried north of Cabo Frio and there reduced in kilns burning tingoassuiba wood, but also stated that Rio relied almost entirely on shells
55. Representação de Silvestre de Sousa, Macacu, 29 Oct. 1817, BNRJ-SM, codice 250, 12, nos. 4, 5
56. Pedro Soares Caldeira, O corte do mangue: Breves consideraçõ es sobre o antigo e atual estado da Bahia do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: J. Villeneuve, 1884), 8, IHGB, Biblioteca
57. Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem pelas províncias de Rio de Janeiro e Minas Geraes, trans. C. Ribeiro de Lessa, 2 vols. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1938), 1:24
58. Thomas Ewing, Life in Brazil; or a Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), 112-13. Lime eats human tissue and in the interest of public health was used to speed the decomposition of the dead
59. Vasconcellos, Chrónica da Companhia de Jesu, 22
60. Tannin was also taken from the leaves of the white mangrove, but the bark of the red predominated as concentrations ranged from 15 to 35 percent. Marcelo Pinto Marcelli, Ecologia liquênica no manguezais do sul-sudeste Brasileiro (Berlin: J. Cramer, 1992), 6
61. Manoel da Cunha Meneses to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Lisbon, 12 Aug. 1780, ABNRJ 32: 473
62. Manoel Ayres de Cazal, Corografia brazílica, ou Relação histórico-geográfica do Reino do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Na Impressão Régia, 1817), 2:16
63. Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Travels in Brazil in the Years 1815, 1816, 1817 (London: Sir Richard Philips and Co., 1820), 207
64. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 484
65. José Jobson de Andrade Arruda, O Brasil no comércio colonial (1796-1808) (São Paulo: n.p., 1972)
66. and Boletim Internacional, 619-47
67. In the late nineteenth century, much of the tanning industry of the northeast had moved inland and began to use angico as a tannin source. This is not due to any real decline in mangroves, which were still noted as extremely abundant despite human depredations, but rather due to a move of the industry to the interior where cattle were produced and now slaughtered. See S. Froes Abreu, Informações sobre a indústria do couro na Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério de Agriculture, 1926), 18-20
68. The importance and legal nebulosity of tidelands, the so-called terrenos de marinhas, is evidenced by the fact that between 1680 and 1865 there are nearly three hundred laws, decrees, and provisions dealing with the issue, some of them directly with mangroves. See Lima, Collecção de leis . . . sobre terrenos de marinhas (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1865)
69. Lisboa, Annaes do Rio de Janeiro, 4:277
70. Koster, Travels in Brazil, 2:62
71. Cunha Meneses to Melo e Castro, Lisbon, 12 Aug. 1780, ABNRJ 32: 473
72. Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:163, 192
73. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa te Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, Nova Valença, 28 Oct. 1799, AHU, Bahia, no. 20,456
74. Alvará, 27 Feb. 1701, in ABNRJ 31: 90-91
75. For other road building attempts to interior Ilhéus, see B.J. Barickman, "'Tame Indians,' 'Wild Heathens,' and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," The Americas 51 (January 1995): 353-56
76. Vilhena, A Bahia no século XVIII, 486
77. Many Portuguese-speaking scholars, and some English speakers, employ the term "subsistência" and its cognate "subsistence" to refer to the production of any food crop, even if for markets. I use it in its restricted English sense - that is, to the nonsurplus production of foodstuffs for household consumption. Jacob Gorender, in O escravismo colonial (São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1978), 297, uses the terms "auto- subsistência" and "autoabastecimento" to achieve this sense in Portuguese
78. Works with relevant observations on this class are Gorender, O escravismo colonial, 291-301
79. Smart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), 65-69
80. and B. J. Barickman, A Bahiart Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780-1860 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 118-19, 130-35
81. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (New York Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 252-53
82. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 66. There were no traditional commons in Brazil, but the landless who resided with permission on the land of others were generally permitted to hunt on portions of the property as well
83. Concerning the availability of land, even in the Bahian Recôncavo, see Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 97-99
84. Tollenare, Notas dominicais, 95, 97, also noted that despite the moradores' wariness of outsiders, the men were quite interested in his double-barrel shotgun, and the women were fascinated by both his eyeglasses and the tailoring and quality of his white clothes, which he claimed were inferior to their own work
85. Louis Couty, A escravidão no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1988), 102
86. Vilhena, Bahia no século XVIII, 926-28
87. Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 1:84, 2:178, also wrote that some of the poor of Ilhéus planted bananas and cassava, but only very little. And they described the poor in the region of Jacarepaguá near Rio de Janeiro as destitute, sickly "people of color" living in poor fishing shacks, the abundance of fish making it such that even the planting of bare essentials - some corn, melons, sweet potatoes, and cane - was rarely accomplished. The tenant class was exempt from the dízimo, a tax of 10 percent on farm produce, but some landlords collected it for their own needs. How much this contributed to slave provisioning is impossible to determine, but it may have served as a disincentive to farming and an inducement to harvesting the common mangrove's "tax-free" goods
88. Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, 133-35
89. Prison and armed guards were frequently used to coerce wage laborers, including non-Indians, into royal timbering operations; see Luís Caetano Simões de Lima to governor, Jequiriçá, 21 Dec. 1779, Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, Seção Histórica (hereafter APB), 201-20, no. 4
90. and Miller, Fruitless Trees, 114-16
91. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), 4-7, 179
92. Jerónimo de Melo e Castro to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Paraíba, 20 Mar. 1792, IHGB, Archive, 1,1,13, fol. 41
93. António Manuel da Prata to [governor?], n.p., 12 Jan. 1792, IHGB, Archive, 1,1,13, fols. 42-44
94. Silva Lisboa to Sousa Coutinho, Cairu, 20 Mar. 1799, ABNRJ 36: 109
95. Wied-Neuwied, Travels in Brazil, 159, also commented on the begging poor near Caravelas in southern Bahia, who accosted him with petitions. Wied attributed their indigence to indolence: "[T]oo poor to purchase slaves, and too indolent to work themselves, they prefer starving."
96. Allen W. Johnson, in Sharecroppers of the Sertão: Economics and Dependence on a Brazilian Plantation (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971), 17-18, notes the demise of the Indian in Ceará and points out subsistence agricultural strategies as the primary indigenous legacy
97. John Hemming, "Indians and the Frontier," in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 156
98. James T Lemon, "Household Consumption in Eighteenth-Century America and Its Relationship to Production and Trade: The Situation among Farmers of Southeastern Pennsylvania," Agricultural History 41 (January 1967): 59-70
99. This has been argued from at least the Praieira Revolution of 1848 and has since been repeated by many. See Amaro Quintas, O sentido social da Revoluçao Praieira [por] Amaro Quintas (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçao Brasileira, 1967), 16, 96-99, 112
100. F. J. Oliveira Vianna, Populações meridionais do Brasil (São Paulo: Monteiro Lobato e Cia. Editora, 1922), 60-61, 69
101. and Caio Prado Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 328-29, 332
102. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations, 2 vols. (London: 1833)
103. Miguel Calmon, Ensaio sobre o fabrico do assucar (Bahia: n.p., 1834), 5
104. Scott, Moral Economy, 6
105. Coude de Vimieiro to Sargento-mor Pantaleão Rodrígues de Oliveira of Camamu, Bahia, 30 Nov. 1718, Documentos históricos, 44:100
106. Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses to vilas of Camamu, Cairu, and Boipeba, Bahia, 25 Aug. 1721, Documentos históricos, 44:125-28. While the role of the leaves and trees in the fishery's ecology was generally understood, many blamed the astringent bark, some of which fell in the water during stripping, for the sudden disappearance of the fish
107. Ordem do Marques de Angeja, 14 Nov. 1715, Bahia, Documentos históricos, 54:69
108. Vasco Fernandes César de Menezes te Câmara of Camumu, Bahia, 9 Oct. 1721, Documentos históricos, 44:151
109. Cópia da provisão régia, D. João to Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses, n.p., 9 July 1724, BNRJ-SM, I-31,29,39, no. 3
110. The inner layer was more difficult to remove but had the highest concentrations of tannin. In modern barking operations, both layers are taken, although sometimes law requires that only the bark on one side of the tree be stripped, which allows the tree to recover. In both cases, however, during the period that the tree requires to repair itself, leaf production nearly ceases, which might explain why some colonists claimed barking did kill the tree; see Miguel de Lobo de Carvalho, Ouvidor in Ilhéus to [governor?], Camamu, 19 Jan. 1771, APB, 182, no. 8
111. José da Silva Lisboa, "Carta muito interessante . . . para o Dr. Domingos Vandelli" [1781], ABNRJ 32 (1910): 506. "O povo da Bahia he de hum carácter pacífico e dócil: as desgraças públicas o fazem gemer, mas não blasphemar."
112. For municipal acts regarding food supplies in the city of Salvador, see Cartas do Senado: Documentos históricos do Arquivo Municipal do Salvador Bahia (Salvador, Brazil: Publicação da Secretária de Educação e Cultura, Prefeitura do Município, 1951-62), 3:32-33
113. and Documentos históricos da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, "Senado da Câmara - Bahia, 1696-1726" (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1950), 87:58, 68, 154, 157
114. On Spain's justification for oyster conservation in New Spain see Lane Simonian, Defending the Land of the Jaguar (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1995), 35
115. Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:193
116. Edna Mascarenhas Sant'Anna and Maria Helena Whately, " Distribuição dos manguezais do Brasil," Revista Brasileira de Geografia 43 (Jan.-Mar. 1981): 47-63
117. Caldeira, O carte do mangue, 6, 9, 12, 21, 22, 24