talion of infantry was sent to carry theim- provised citadel by force. Nearly a year had elapsed since the first assault, and the Indians, thinking themselves for ever rid of their adversaries, had at last ceased to guard the barricades. They were accordingly reposing quietly in their cabins, when a discharge of musketry reminded them that they were not forgotten. At the same instant a mass of soldiers precipitated themselves upon their frail habitations and commenced demolishing them. Resistance was impossible; and what is more, the Indians lose all courage in the presence of firearms. They fled, and at last concluded to take their household gods farther away. The joke of the matter is, how ever, that a few days afterwards the fazendoiro received a bill of twenty contos de reís (nine thousand dollars) to cover the legal and other expenses of the expedition. He had received ten contos for the property, and it therefore cost him four thousand five hundred dollars for the privilege of disposing of it. This is only a slight specimen of 'agreeabilities' of every kind which one meets at almost every step in this privileged country, when he undertakes to solve the grand question of la colonisaçao.
PORTUGUESE ENCROACHMENTS—'THE WHITE MEN TREAT US LIKE DOGS.'
This expropriation of the Indians is one of the natural results of conquest as understood by the faithful subjects of His Majesty the King of Portugal. A French traveller, Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, who visited the province of Rio Janeiro in 1816, relates that one day, a few leagues from the capital, he fell in with a deputation of Indians, who were on their way to request of Dom João VI. authority to set apart, in the ancient forests of their ancestors, a square league of land, where they might build a village and find a shelter from the intrusion of colonists. This tribe, which belonged to the Indios Coroados, (crowned Indians,) a few remnants of whom are still found on the Upper Parahyba, then occupied nearly the entire valley of that river. Before venturing to meet his royal majesty face to face, they sought the chief of the province, the Baron d'Ubá, and one of them addressed him in the following language: 'This land is ours, and the white men occupy it. Since the death of our gran capitão,[1] we are hunted on every side, and we have not even a place to lay our head. Tell the king that the white men treat us like dogs, and beg him to give us some land, where we can build a village.'
THE BOTOCUDOS—CHRISTIAN BARBARITY.
Of all the Indian tribes that have made themselves celebrated by their resistance to the invasion of the conquistadores, the Botocudos hold the first rank, and have marked the annals of conquest with bloody pages. It must be said, to the shame of men of our race, that the children of the wilderness were overwhelmed with ferocity by the disciples of Christ. The latter, finding gunpowder too slow, borrowed from Nature the assistance of one of the most cruel scourges she ever let loose upon mankind. Articles infected with the small-pox were sent as presents to the Indians, who soon perished by thousands, struck down by an invisible evil, whose cause they could not suspect. A few scattered remnants of these unfortunates still roam the forests of their forefathers, awaiting in dread the day when the axe of the Portuguese shall deprive them of their last refuge. Their redoubtable arrows, six feet in length, do not, when closely examined, at all correspond to the idea one has conceived of them. Nearly all I have seen were made of reeds, and seemed more like harmless playthings than instruments of death. These ultra primitive weapons, in a country where iron is found on the surface of the soil almost in a native state, gives one an
- ↑ This great captain, an uncle of the Baron d'Ubá, was a Portuguese, José Rodriguez da Cruz, who had founded a colony of Indians on the banks of the Parahyba.
