Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
THE PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL,—CONTINUED.
I regret that my limits will not permit me to follow further the labours and enterprises of Vieyra and his brethren in behalf of the Indians, whom they sought far and wide in that immense region, and brought in thousands upon thousands into settlements, only to arouse afresh the furious opposition, and bring down upon themselves the vengeance of the colonists. But the history of this great strife between Christianity and Injustice, in Brazil, fills three massy quarto volumes, and runs through three centuries. It is full of details of the deepest interest; but there is no chapter, either in that history or any other, more heart-rending, than that of the transfer of the seven Reductions of the Jesuits lying east of the Uruguay. These were ceded by Spain to Portugal in 1750, in a treaty of demarcation.
"They contained," to use the words of Mr. Southey, "thirty thousand Guaranies, not fresh from the woods or half reclaimed, and therefore willing to revert to a savage state, and capable of enduring its exposure, hardships, and privations; but born as their fathers and grandfathers had been, in easy servitude, and bred up in the comforts of regular domestic life. These persons, with their wives and their children, their sick and their aged, their horses, and their sheep and their oxen, were to turn out, like the children of Israel from Egypt, into the wilderness; not to escape from bondage, but in obedience to one of the most tyranical commands that ever were issued in the recklessness of unfeeling power." Mr. Southey adds, "Yet Ferdinand must be acquitted of intentional injustice. His disposition was such, that he would have rather suffered martyrdom than have issued so wicked an edict, had he been sensible of, its inhumanity and wickedness."
This might more readily be credited, if, when the abominable enormity of the measure was made manifest to him, any disposition was shewn to stop the proceedings, or make reparation for the misery inflicted. But nothing of the kind took place. The Jesuits made immediate and earnest representations the Indians cried out vehemently against their expatriation; the colonists of both countries were averse to the measure; the very governors and officers proceeded tardily with it, in the hope that the moment the evil was discovered it would be countermanded; but no such countermand was ever issued. And what was there to hinder it? The King of Spain and the Queen of Portugal, were man and wife, dwelling in one palace, and of the greatest accord in life and sentiment; it had only to be willed by one of them, and it might, and would have been, speedily done. If ever there was a cold-blooded transaction, in which the lives and happiness of thirty thousand innocent people were reckoned of no account in the mere tracing of a boundary line between two countries, this appears to be one; and if ever the retribution of heaven was displayed in this world, it would seem to have been in the persons of the monarchs who issued this brutal order, and suffered it to stand, spite of the cries of the thousands of sufferers. Happy in each other, while they thus remained insensible to the happiness of these poor Indians, the queen was consumed by a slow and miserable malady, and the king, a weak man of a melancholy temperament, sunk heart-broken for her loss.
But meantime, commissioners and armies of both Spanish and Portuguese were drawing towards the confines of the doomed land, to carry into effect the expulsion of its rightful inhabitants. The Jesuits behaved with the utmost submission and propriety. Finding that they could do nothing by remonstrance, they offered to yield up the charge of the Reductions to whatever parties might be appointed to receive it. The natives appealed vehemently to the Spanish governor. "Neither we nor our forefathers," said they, "have ever offended the king, or ever attacked the Spanish settlements. How then, innocent as we are, can we believe that the best of princes would condemn us to banishment? Our fathers, our fore-fathers, our brethren, have fought under the king's banner, often against the Portuguese, often against the savages. Who can tell how many of them have fallen in battle, or before the walls of Nova Colonia, so often besieged? We ourselves can shew in our scars, the proofs of our fidelity and our courage. We have ever had it at heart to extend the limits of the Spanish empire, and to defend it against all enemies; nor have we ever been sparing of our blood, or our lives. Will then the Catholic king requite these services by the bitter punishment of expelling us from our native land, our churches, our homes, and fields, and fair inheritance? This is beyond all belief! By the royal letters of Philip V., which, according to his own injunctions, were read to us from the pulpits, we were exhorted never to suffer the Portuguese to approach our borders, because they were his enemies and ours. Now we are told that the king will have us yield up, to these very Portuguese, this wide and fertile territory, which for a whole century we have tilled with the sweat of our brows. Can any one be persuaded that Ferdinand the son should enjoin us to do that which was so frequently forbidden by his father Philip? But if time and change have indeed brought about such friendship between old enemies, that the Spaniards are desirous to gratify the Portuguese, there are ample tracts of country to spare, and let those be given them. What! shall we resign our towns to the Portuguese? The Portuguese!—by whose ancestors so many hundred thousands of ours have been slaughtered, or carried away into cruel slavery in Brazil? This is as intolerable to us, as it is incredible that it should be required. When, with the Holy Gospels in our hands, we promised and vowed fidelity to God and the king of Spain, his priests and governors promised us on his part, friendship and perpetual protection,—and now we are commanded to give up our country! Is it to be believed that the promises, and faith, and friendship of the Spaniards can be of so little stability?"
But the Spaniards and Portuguese advanced with their troops into their country. The poor people, driven frantic by their grief and indignation, determined to resist. They brought out their cannon, made of pieces of large cane, covered with wet hides and bound with iron hoops, and determined with such arms even, to oppose those more dreadful ones, of which they had too often witnessed the effect. For some time they repelled their enemies, and even obliged them to retire from the territory; but in the next campaign, the allied army made dreadful havoc amongst them. Yet they still remained in arms; and their sentiments may be well understood by the following characteristic extract, sent from one of their officers to an officer of the Spanish troops,—"Sir, look well; it is a well-known thing, that since our Lord God in his infinite wisdom created the heavens and the earth, with all which beautifies it, which is to endure till the day of judgment, we have not known that God, who is the Lord of these lands, gave them to the Spaniards before he came into the world. Three parts of the earth are for them; namely, Europe, Asia, and Africa, which are to the east; and this remaining part in which we dwell, our Lord Jesus Christ, as soon as he died, set apart for us. We poor Indians have fairly possessed this country during all these years, as children of God, according to his will, not by the will of any other living being. Our Lord God permitted all this that it might be so. We of this country remember our unbelieving grandfathers, and we are greatly amazed when we think that God should have pardoned so many sins as we ourselves have committed. Sir, consider that which you are about is a thing which we poor Indians have never seen done amongst Christians!"
Poor people! how little did they know how feeble are the strongest reasons drawn from the Christian faith, when addressed to those who would resent as a deadly insult the true charge that they are no Christians at all. In this case the Indians were the only Christians concerned in this melancholy affair. Well might they say, "Your actions are so different from your words, that we are more amazed than if we saw two suns in the firmament." Well might they ask, "What will God say to you after your death on this account? What answer will you make in the day of judgment when we shall all be gathered together?" Like all other Europeans when doing their will on the natives of their colonies, they cared neither for God, nor the day of judgment; they went on and drove the genuine Christians, the poor simple-hearted Indians, to the woods, or compelled them to submit. Their lands were laid waste, their towns burnt; many were slain, many were dispersed, many died heart-broken in the homeless woods,—and scarcely was all this misery and wickedness completed,—when the news of the king's death arrived,, and soon after, the annulment of this very treaty; so that these lands were not to be yielded to the Portuguese, and all this evil had been done, even politically, in vain. The poor people were invited to return to their possessions, and the Jesuits to their sorrowful labour of repairing the ravages so foolishly and heartlessly committed.
Mr. Southey thinks that the Portuguese in Brazil were more lenient to the natives than the Spaniards in their South-American colonies. I must confess that his own History of Brazil does not give me that impression. It is true that they did not succeed in so speedily depopulating the country; but that in part, must be attributed to the more warlike and hardy character of the people, and to the fact that Brazil did not for a long time become a mining country. By the time that it did, all the Indians that the horrible man-hunters of San Paulo could seize in their wild excursions, were wanted in the cultivated lands and sugar plantations, and negroes were imported in abundance—the English for a long time supplying by contract four thousand annually. The final expulsion of the Jesuits deprived the Indians of the only body of real friends that they ever knew. Finer materials than those poor people for civilization, no race on the earth ever presented. Had the Jesuits been permitted to continue their peaceful labours, the whole continent would have become one wide scene of peace, fertility, and happiness. What a contrast does Brazil present, after the lapse of three centuries, and even after the introduction of European royalty! The people are described by modern travellers as living in the utmost filth, idleness, licentiousness, and dishonesty. "The Indians are driven into the interior, where," says Mr. Luccock, "they form a great bar to civilization; their animosity to the whites being of the bitterest sort, and their purposes of vengeance for injuries received, so long bequeathed from father to son, as to be rooted in their hearts as firmly as the colour is attached to their skin. Under the influence of this passion, they destroy every thing belonging to the Europeans or their descendants, which falls in their way; even the cow and the dog are not spared. For such outrages they pay dearly; small forts, or military stations, being placed around the colonized parts of the district, from whence a war of plunder and extermination is carried on against them. In this warfare not only are fire-arms made use of, but the lasso, dogs, and all the stratagems which are usually employed against beasts of prey." Mr. Luccock met with one man who had been thus engaged against the Indians forty years, and was on his way to ask some honorary distinction from the sovereign for his services!
Instead of a country swarming with labourers and good citizens, as it would have been under a Christian policy, Brazil now suffers for want of inhabitants, and the barbarous slave-trade is made to supply the whole country with servants. Ten thousand negroes are annually brought into Rio alone, whence we may infer how vast must be the demand for the whole empire; and of the estimation in which they are held, and of the sort of religion which still bears the abused name of Christianity there, one anecdote will give us sufficient idea. "Two negroes," says Mr. Luccock, "being extremely ill, a clergyman was sent for, who on his arrival found one of them gone beyond the reach of his art; and the other, having crawled off his bed, was lying on the floor of his cabin. As we entered, the priest was jesting and laughing in the most volatile manner—then filled both his hands with water, and dropped it on the poor creature's head, pronouncing the form of baptism. The dying man, probably experiencing some little relief from the effusion, exclaimed, 'Good—very good.' 'Oh,' said the priest, 'it is very good, is it?—then there is more for you;' dashing upon him what remained in the basin. Without delay he resumed his jokes, and in the midst of them the man expired."
We must now quit South America, to follow the European Christians in their colonial career in another quarter of the globe. And in thus taking leave of this immense portion of the New World, where such cruelties have been perpetrated, and so much innocent blood shed by the avarice and ambition of Europe, we may ask,—What has been done by way of atonement; or what is the triumph of civilization? We have already quoted Mr. Ward on the present state of the aborigines of Mexico, and Mr. Luccock on those of Rio Janeiro. Baron Humboldt can furnish the reader with ample indications of a like kind in various parts of South America. Maria Graham tells us, so recently as 1824, that in Chili, Peru, and the provinces of La Plata, the system of Spain, which had driven those realms to revolt, had diffused "sloth and ignorance" as their necessary consequences. That in Brazil, "the natives had been either exterminated or wholly subdued. The slave-hunting, which had been systematic on the first occupation of the land, and more especially after the discovery of the mines, had so diminished the wretched Indians, that the introduction of negroes was deemed necessary: they now people the Brazilian fields; and if here and there an Indian aldea is to be found, the people are wretched, with less than negro comforts, and much less than negro spirit or industry: the Indians are nothing in Brazil."
That the system of exterminating the Indians has been continued to the latest period where any remained, we may learn from a horrible fact, which she tells us she relates on good authority. "In the Captaincy of Porto Seguro, within these twenty years, an Indian tribe had been so troublesome that the Capitam Môr resolved to get rid of it. It was attacked, but defended itself so bravely, that the Portuguese resolved to desist from open warfare; but with unnatural ingenuity exposed ribbons and toys, infested with small-pox matter, in the places where the poor savages were likely to find them. The plan succeeded. The Indians were so thinned that they were easily overcome!"—Voyage to Brazil, p. 9.
But if any one wishes to learn what are the wretched fruits of all the bloodshed and crimes perpetrated by the Spaniards in America, he has only to look into Sir F. B. Head's "Rough Notes on the Pampas," made in 1826. What a scene do these notes lay open! Splendid countries, overrun with a most luxuriant vegetation, and with countless troops of wild horses and herds of wild cattle, but thinly peopled, partly with Indians and partly with the Gauchos, or descendants of the Spanish, existing in a state of the most hideous hostility and hatred one towards another. The Gauchos, inflamed with all the ancient demoniacal cruelty and revenge of the Spaniards,—the Indians, educated, raised, and moulded by ages of the most inexpiable wrongs into an active and insatiable spirit of vengeance, coming, like the whirlwind from the deserts, as fleet and unescapable, to burn, destroy, and exterminate—in a word, to inflict on the Gauchos all the evils of injury and death that they and their fathers have inflicted on them. As Captain Head scoured across those immense plains, from Buenos Ayres, and across the Andes to Chili, he was ever and anon coming to the ruins of huts where the Indians had left the most terrible traces of their fury. It may be well to state, in his own words, what every family of the Gauchos is liable to:—
"In invading the country, the Pampas Indians generally ride all night, and hide themselves on the ground during the day; or if they do travel, crouch almost under the bellies of their horses, who, by this means, appear to be dismounted and at liberty. They usually approach the huts at night, at a full gallop, with their usual shriek, striking their mouths with their hands; and this cry, which is to intimidate their enemies, is continued through the whole of the dreadful operation.
"Their first act is to set fire to the roof of the hut, and it is almost too dreadful to fancy what the feelings of a family must be, when, after having been alarmed by the barking of the dogs, which the Gauchos always keep in great numbers, they first hear the wild cry which announces their doom, and in an instant afterwards find the roof burning over their heads.
"As soon as the families rush out, which they of course are obliged to do, the men are wounded by the Indians with their lances, which are eighteen feet long; and as soon as they fall, they are stripped of their clothes; for the Indians, who are very desirous to get the clothes of the Christians, are careful not to have them spotted with blood. While some torture the men, others attack the children, and will literally run the infants through the body with their lances, and raise them to die in the air. The women are also attacked; and it would form a true but dreadful picture to describe their fate, as it is decided by the momentary gleam which the burning roof throws upon their countenances.
"The old women, and the ugly young ones, are instantly butchered; but the young and beautiful are idols by whom even the merciless hand of the savage is arrested. Whether the poor girls can ride or not, they are instantly placed upon horses, and when the hasty plunder of the hut is concluded, they are driven away from its smoking ruins, and from the horrid scene which surrounds it. At a pace which in Europe is unknown, they gallop over the trackless regions before them, feed upon mare's flesh, sleeping on the ground, until they arrive in the Indian's territory, when they have instantly to adopt the wild life of their captors."
Scenes of such horrors, where the mangled remains of the victims were still lying around the black ruins of their huts, which Captain Head passed, are too dreadful to transcribe. But what are the feelings of the Gaucho towards these terrible enemies? Captain Head asked a Gaucho what they did with their Indian prisoners when they took any.—"To people accustomed to the cold passions of England, it would be impossible to describe the savage, inveterate, furious hatred which exists between the Gauchos and the Indians. The latter invade the country for the ecstatic pleasure of murdering the Christians, and in the contests which take place between them, mercy is unknown. Before I was quite aware of those feelings, I was galloping with a very fine-looking Gaucho who had been fighting with the Indians, and after listening to his report of the killed and wounded, I happened, very simply, to ask him how many prisoners they had taken. The man replied with a look which I shall never forget—he clenched his teeth, opened his lips, and then sawing his fingers across his bare throat for a quarter of a minute, bending towards me, with his spurs sticking into his horse's sides, he said, in a sort of low, choking voice, 'Se matan todas,'—we kill them all!"
Here then we have a thinly populated country inhabited, so far as it is inhabited at all, by men that are inspired towards each other by the spirit of fiends. It is impossible that civilization can ever come there except by some fresh and powerful revolution. We hear of the new republics of South America, and naturally look for more evidences of good from the spirit of liberty: but in the towns we find the people indolent, ignorant, superstitious, and most filthy; and in the country naked Indians on horseback, scouring the wilds, and making use of the very animals by which the Spaniards subjugated them, to scourge and exterminate their descendants. In the opinion of Captain Head, they only want fire-arms, which one day they may get, to drive them out altogether! And what are they whom they would drive out? Only another kind of savages. People who, calling themselves Christians, live in most filthy huts swarming with vermin—sit on skeletons of horses' heads instead of chairs—lie during summer out of doors in promiscuous groups—and live entirely on beef and water; the beef, chiefly mare's flesh, being roasted on a long spit, and every one sitting round and cutting off pieces with long knives. The cruelty and beastliness of their nature exceeding even that of the Indians themselves.
This then is the result of three centuries of bloodshed and tyranny in those regions—one species of barbarism merely substituted for another. What a different scene to that which the same countries would now have exhibited, had the Jesuits not been violently expelled from their work of civilization by the lust of gold and despotism. "When we compare," says Captain Head, "the relative size of America with the rest of the world, it is singular to reflect on the history of these fellow-creatures, who are the aborigines of the land; and after viewing the wealth and beauty of so interesting a country, it is painful to consider what the sufferings of the Indians have been, and still may be. Whatever may be their physical or natural character[1] . . . still they are the human beings placed there by the Almighty; the country belonged to them; and they are therefore entitled to the regard of every man who has religion enough to believe that God has made nothing in vain, or whose mind is just enough to respect the persons and the rights of his fellow-creatures."
The view I have been enabled in my space to take of the treatment of the South Americans by their invaders, is necessarily a mere glance,—for, unfortunately for the Christian name and the name of humanity, the history of blood and oppression there is not more dreadful than it is extensive. I have not staid to describe the conduct of the French, Dutch, and English, in their possessions on the southern continent, simply because they are only too much like those of the Spaniards and Portuguese—they form no bright exception, and we shall only too soon meet with these refined nations in other regions.
Note.—The fate of Venezuela ought not to be quite passed over. It is a striking instance of the indifference with which the lives and fortunes of a whole nation are often handed over by great kings to destruction as a mere matter of business. Charles V. of Spain being deeply indebted to a trading house of Augsburgh, the Welsers, gave them this province. They, in their turn, made it over to some German military mercenaries, who overrun the whole country in search of mines, and plundered and oppressed the people with the most dreadful rapacity. In the course of a few years their avarice and exactions had so completely exhausted and ruined the province that the Germans threw it up, and it fell again into the hands of the Spaniards, but in such a miserable condition that it continued to languish and drag on a miserable existence, if it has even recovered from its fatal injuries at the present time.
- ↑ "I sincerely believe they are as fine a set of men as ever existed, under the circumstances in which they are placed. In the mines I have seen them using tools which our miners declared they had not strength to work with, and carrying burdens which no man in England could support; and I appeal to those travellers who have been carried over the snow on their backs, whether they were able to have returned the compliment; and if not, what can be more grotesque than the figure of a civilized man riding upon the shoulders of a fellow-creature whose physical strength he has ventured to despise?"
Head's Rough Notes, p. 112.