Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
THE PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL.
Though we now make our first inquiry into the conduct of the Portuguese towards the natives of their colonies, and enter upon so immense a scene of action as that of the vast empire of Brazil, our notice may happily be condensed into a comparatively small space, because the features of the settlement of Paraguay by the Spaniards, and that of Brazil by the Portuguese are wonderfully similar. The natives were of a like character, bold and warlike, and were treated in like fashion. They were destroyed, enslaved, given away in Encomiendos, just as it suited the purpose of the invaders; the Jesuits arrived, and undertook their defence and civilization, and were finally expelled, like their brethren of Paraguay, as pestilential fellows, that would not let the colonists "do as they pleased with their own."
Yanez Pinzon, the Spaniard, was the first who discovered the coast of Brazil, in A.D. 1500, and coasting northward from Cape Agostinho, he gave the natives such a taste of the faith and intentions of the whites as must have prepared them to resist them to the utmost on their reappearance. Betwixt Cape Agostinho and the river Maranham, seeing a party of the natives on a hill near the shore, they landed, and endeavoured to open some degree of intercourse; but the natives not liking their appearance, attempted to drive them away, killed eight of them, wounded more, and pursued them with fury to their boat. The Spaniards, of course, did not spare the natives, and soon afterwards shewed that the natives were very much in the right in repelling them, for on entering the Maranham, where the natives did receive them cordially, they seized about thirty of these innocent people and carried them off for slaves.
Scarcely had Pinzon departed, when Cabral, with the Portuguese squadron, made his accidental visit to the same coast. In the following year Amerigo Vespucci was sent thither to make further discoveries, and having advanced as far southward as 52°, returned home. In 1503, he was sent out again, and effected a settlement in 18° S. in what was afterwards called the Captaincy of Porto Seguro. One of the very first acts of Portugal was to ship thither as colonists the refuse of her prisons, as Spain had done to her colonies, and as Portugal also had done to Africa and India; a horrible mode of inflicting the worst curses of European society on new countries, and of presenting to the natives under the name of Christians, men rank and fuming with every species of brutal vice and pestiferous corruption.
Ten years after the discovery of Brazil, a young noble, Diego Alvarez, who was going out on a voyage of adventure, was wrecked on the coast of Bahia, and was received with cordiality by the natives, and named Caramuru, or the Man of Fire, from the possession of fire-arms. Here he married the daughter of the chief, and finally became the great chief himself, with a numerous progeny around him. Another man, Joam Ramalho, who also had been shipwrecked, married a daughter of the chief of Piratininga, and these circumstances gave the Portuguese a favourable reception in different places of this immense coast. In about thirty years after its discovery the country was divided into captaincies, the sugar-cane was introduced, and the work of colonization went rapidly on. The natives were attacked on all sides; they defended themselves with great spirit, but were compelled to yield before the power of fire-arms. But while the natives suffered from the colonists, the colonists suffered too from the despotism of the governors of the captaincies; a Governor-general was therefore appointed just half a century after the discovery, in the person of Thome de Sousa, and some Jesuits were sent out with him to civilize the natives.
Amongst these was Father Manoel de Nobrega, chief of the mission, who distinguished himself so nobly in behalf of the Indians. The city of Salvador, in the bay of All- Saints, was founded as the seat of government, and the Jesuits immediately began the work of civilization. There was great need of it both amongst the Indians and their own countrymen. "Indeed, the fathers," says Southey, "had greater difficulties to encounter in the conduct of their own countrymen than in the customs and disposition of the natives. During half a century, the colonization of Brazil had been left to chance; the colonists were almost without law and religion. Many settlers had never either confessed or communicated since they entered the country; the ordinances of the church were neglected for want of a clergy to celebrate them, and the moral precepts had been forgotten with the ceremonies. Crimes which might easily at first have been prevented, had become habitual, and the habit was now too strong to be overcome. There were indeed individuals in whom the moral sense could be discovered, but in the majority it had been utterly destroyed. They were of that description of men over whom the fear of the gallows may have some effect; the fear of God has none. A system of concubinage was practised among them, worse than the loose polygamy of the savages. The savage had as many women as consented to become his wives—the colonist as many as he could enslave. There is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races—there is a perpe-tual contradiction between their lust and their avarice. The planter will one day take a slave for his harlot, and sell her the next as a being of some lower species—a beast of labour. If she be indeed an inferior animal, what shall be said of the one action? If she be equally with himself an human being and an immortal soul, what shall be said of the other? Either way there is a crime committed against human nature. Nobrega and his companions refused to administer the sacraments of the church to those persons who retained native women as concubines, or men as slaves. Many were reclaimed by this resolute and Christian conduct; some, because their consciences had not been dead, but sleeping; others, for worldly fear, because they believed the Jesuits were armed with secular as well as spiritual authority. The good effect which was produced on such persons was therefore only for a season. Mighty as the Catholic religion is, avarice is mightier; and in spite of all the best and ablest men that ever the Jesuit order, so fertile of great men, has had to glory in, the practice of enslaving the natives continued."
Yet, according to the same authority, the country had not been entirely without priests; but they had become so brutal that Nobrega said, "No devil had persecuted him and his brethren so greatly as they did. These wretches encouraged the colonists in their abominations, and openly maintained that it was lawful to enslave the natives, because they were beasts; and then lawful to use the women as concubines, because they were slaves. This was their public doctrine! Well might Nobrega say they did the work of the devil. They opposed the Jesuits with the utmost virulence. Their interest was at stake. They could not bear the presence of men who said mass and performed all the ceremonies of religion gratuitously." Much less, it may be believed, who maintained the freedom of the natives.
Such were the people amongst which the Jesuits had to act, yet they set to work with their usual alacrity. Fresh brethren came out to their aid; and Nobrega was appointed Vice-provincial of Brazil. They soon ingratiated themselves with the natives by their usual affability and kindness. They zealously acquainted themselves with the language; gave presents to the children; visited the sick; but above all, stood firmly between them and the atrocities of their countrymen. When the Jesuits arrived, these atrocities had driven many tribes into the fiercest hostility, and so evident was it that nothing but these atrocities had made, or kept them hostile, that when they heard the joyful report that the Jesuits were come as friends and protectors of the Indians, and when they saw their conduct so consonant to these tidings, they brought their bows to the governor, and solicited to he received as allies! How universally, on the slightest opportunity, have those called savage nations shamed the Europeans styling themselves civilized, by proofs of their greater faith and disposition to peace! Amicable intercourse and civilization are the natural order of things between the powerful and enlightened, and the weak and simple, if avarice and lust did not intervene.
Nobrega and his brethren soon produced striking changes on these poor people. They persuaded them to live in peace, to abandon their old habits, to build churches and schools. The avidity of the children to learn to read was wonderful. One of the natives soon was able to make a catechism in the Tupi tongue, and to translate prayers into it. They taught them not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but to sing in the church; an accomplishment which perfectly enchanted them. "Nobrega usually took with him four or five of these little choristers on his preaching expeditions. When they approached an inhabited place, one carried the crucifix before them, and they began singing the Litany. The savages, like snakes, were won by the voice of the charmer. They received him joyfully; and when he departed with the same ceremony, the children followed the music. He set the catechism, creed, and ordinary prayers to sol fa; and the pleasure of learning to sing was such a temptation, that the little Tupis sometimes ran away from their parents to put themselves under the care of the Jesuits."
Fresh coadjutors arrived, and with them the celebrated Joseph de Anchieta, who became more celebrated than Nobrega himself. Nobrega now established a college in the plains of Piratininga, and sent thither thirteen of the brethren, with Anchieta as schoolmaster. If our settlers, in the different new nations where they have located themselves, had imitated the conduct of this great man, what a world would this be now! what a history of colonization would have to be written! how different to the scene I am doomed to lay open. "Day and night," says the historian, "did this indefatigable man labour in discharging the duties of his office. There were no books for the pupils; he wrote for every one his lesson on a separate leaf, after the business of the day was done, and it was sometimes day-light before his task was completed. The profane songs that were in use, he parodied into hymns in Portugueze, Castilian, Latin and Tupinamban. The ballads of the natives underwent the same travesty in their own tongue." He did not disdain to act as physician, barber, nor even shoemaker, to win them and to benefit them.
But it was not merely in such peaceful and blessed acts that the Jesuits were obliged to employ themselves. They were soon called upon to save the very colonies from their enemies. The French entered the country, and the native tribes smarting under the wrongs which the Portuguese had heaped plentifully on them, were only too glad to unite with them against their merciless oppressors. The Jesuits defended their own settlements, and then proceeded to give one of the most splendid examples in history of the power there is in Christian principle to suspersede wars, and to extort attention and protection even from men in the fiercest irritation and resentment of injuries. While the Portuguese were making war on the Tamoyos, and other martial tribes, Nobrega denounced their proceedings as heaping injustice upon injustice, for the natives would, he said, trust in the Portuguese if they saw any hope of fair treatment—any safety from the man-hunters. But when the Indians were triumphant, and had surrounded Espirito Santo, and threatened the very existence of the place, Nobrega and Anchieta set sail for that port, everybody looking upon them as madmen rushing upon certain destruction. A more fearful, and to all but that noble faith in truth and justice which is capable of working wonders, a more hopeless enterprise never was undertaken. As they entered the port, a host of war-canoes came out to meet them; but the moment they saw that they were Jesuits, the Indians knew that they came with peaceful intentions, and dropped their hostile attitude. Spite of all the exasperation of their wrongs, and the natural presumption of success, they carried the vessel without injury or insult into port, and listened with attention to the words of the fathers.
For two months these excellent men lived in the midst of those exasperated Indians, nay, one of them remained there alone for a considerable time, labouring to soothe their wrath, to convince them of better treatment, and dispose them to peace. The fiercer natives threatened them daily with death, and with being devoured, but the better spirits and their own blameless lives protected them. They built a little church, and thatched it with palm-leaves, where they preached and celebrated mass daily, and at length effected a peace, and the salvation of the colonies; for they found that a wide-spread coalition was forming amongst the Indian tribes to sweep their oppressors out of the land.
One would have thought that such instances as these of the wisdom and sound policy of virtue, would have been enough to persuade the Portuguese to adopt more righteous measures towards the natives; but avarice and cruelty are not easily eradicated—a famine broke out—they purchased the Indians for slaves with provisions! Nothing can equal the blindness of base minds. Whenever affairs went wrong with them, the Portuguese had recourse to the Jesuits, and the Jesuits by their influence with the Indians, achieved the most signal service for them. They marched against the French, and drove them out. They built towns; they protected the state from hostile tribes. A Jesuit, with his crucifix in his hand, was of more avail at the head of armies than the most able general; but these things once accomplished, all these services were forgotten—the slave-hunters were at work again, and the colonies fell again as rapidly into troubles and consequent decline. By the end of the century, from the discovery of Brazil, the Jesuits had collected all the natives along the coast as far as the Portuguese territories reached, into their aldeas, or villages, and were busy in the work of civilization. Nothing indeed would have been easier than for them to civilize the whole country, had it been possible to civilize the Portuguese first. But their conduct to the natives was but one continued practice of treachery and outrage. When they needed their aid to defend them from their enemies, out marched the natives under their Jesuit leaders, and fought for them; and the first act of the colonists, when the victory was won, was to seize on their benefactors and portion them out as slaves. The man-hunters broke into the villages and caried off numbers, having, in fact, depopulated the whole country besides. There is no species of kidnapping, no burnings of huts, no fomenting of wars between different tribes; no horror, in short, which has made the names of Christians so infamous for the last three hundred years in Africa that had not its parallel then in Brazil.
Besides, for more than a hundred years, Brazil was the constant scene of war and contention between the European powers terming themselves Christian. French, English, and Dutch, were in turn endeavouring to seize upon one part or other of it; and every description of rapine, bloodshed, and treachery which can disgrace nations pretending to any degree of civilization was going on before the eyes of the astonished natives. What notions of Christianity must the Indians have had, when these people called themselves Christians? They saw them assailing one another, fighting like madmen for what in reality belonged to none of them; burning towns, destroying sugar plantations; massacring all, native or colonist, that fell into their hands, or seizing them for slaves. They saw bishops contending with governors, priests contending with one another; they saw their beautiful country desolated from end to end (down to 1664), and every thing which is sacred to heaven or honourable or valuable to men, treated with contempt.—What was it possible for them to believe of Christianity, than that it was some devilish compact, which at once invested men with a terrible power, and with the will to wield it, for the accomplishment of the widest ruin and the profoundest misery?
Through all this, under all changes, whoever were masters, or whoever were contending—the Indians experienced but one lot, slavery and ruin. Laws indeed were repeatedly enacted in Portugal on their behalf—they were repeatedly declared free—but as everywhere else, they were laughed at by the colonists, or resisted with rebellious fury.
Amid this long career of violence, the only thing which the mind can repose on with any degree of pleasure, is the conduct of the Jesuits, the steady friends of justice and the Indians; and towards the latter part of this period there arrived in Maranham one of the most extraordinary men, which not only that remarkable order, but which the world has produced. This was Antonio Vieyra, a young Jesuit, who had left the favour of the king and court, and the most brilliant prospects, for the single purpose of devoting himself to the cause of the Indians. His boldness, his honesty of speech and purpose, his resolute resistance to the system of base oppression, operating through the whole mass of society around him—were perhaps equalled by his fellows; but the greatness of his talents, and the vehement splendour of his eloquence, have few equals in any age. Mr. Southey has given the substance of a sermon preached by him before the governor at St. Lewis, which so startled and moved the whole people, by the novel and fearful view in which he exhibited to them their treatment of the Indians, that with one accord they resolved to set them free.
It is worth while here to give a slight specimen or two of this extraordinary discourse. His text was, the offer of Satan:—"All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."—"Things," said he, "are estimated at what they cost. What then did the world cost our Saviour, and what did a soul cost him? The world cost him a word—He spoke, and it was made. A soul cost Him his life, and his blood. But if the world cost only a word of God, and a soul cost the blood of God, a soul is worth more than all the world. This Christ thought, and this the devil confessed. Yet you know how cheaply we value our souls? you know at what rate we sell them? We wonder that Judas should have sold his Master and his soul for thirty pieces of silver; but how many are there who offer their own to the devil for less than fifteen! Christians! I am not now telling you that you ought not to sell your souls, for I know that you must sell them;—I only entreat that you will sell them by weight. Weigh well what a soul is worth, and what it cost, and then sell it and welcome! But in what scales is it to be weighed? You think I shall say. In those of St. Michael the archangel, in which souls are weighed. I do not require so much. Weigh them in the devil's own balance, and I shall be satisfied! Take the devil's balance in one hand, put the whole world in one scale and a soul in the other, and you will find that your soul weighs more than the world.—'All this will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.' …. But at what a different price now does the devil purchase souls from that which he formerly offered for them? I mean in this country. The devil has not a fair in the world where they go cheaper! In the Gospel he offers all the kingdoms of the world to purchase a single soul;—he does not require so large a price to purchase all that are in Maranham. It is not necessary to offer worlds; it is not necessary to offer kingdoms, nor cities, nor towns, nor villages;—it is enough for the devil to point at a plantation, and a couple of Tapuyas, and down goes the man upon his knees to worship him! Oh what a market! A negro for a soul, and the soul the blacker of the two! The negro shall be your slave for the few days you have to live, and your soul shall be my slave through all eternity—as long as God is God! This is the bargain which the devil makes with you."
Amazing as was the effect of this celebrated sermon, of course it did not last long. But Vieyra did not rest here. He hastened to Portugal, and stated the treatment of the Indians to the king. He obtained an order, that all the Indian settlements in the state of Maranham should be under the direction of the Jesuits; that Vieyra should direct all expeditions into the interior, and settle the reduced Indians where he pleased; and that all ransomed Indians should be slaves for five years and no longer, their labour in that time being an ample compensation for their original cost. Here was a sort of apprenticeship system more favourable than the modern British one, but destined to be just as little observed.