Discovering South America: Brazil

20

Brazil

The embattled Indians found an ally in members of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. Priests from this Roman Catholic teaching and missionary order had arrived in Bahia in 1549 with Thome de Souza, Brazil’s first governor. A group of Jesuits, led by Manoel da Nobrega and José de Anchieta, eventually created a system of aldeias (villages) to convert the Indians. By the 1560s and 1570s the Jesuits had gathered thousands of indigenous people in protected aldeias . The colonists, now more than ever unable to find an adequate supply of forced labor, expanded the slave trade. The Portuguese had begun the Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s, carrying black Africans to Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. Beginning in the mid-16th century, and particularly during the 17th century, African slaves replaced Indians on the plantations of Brazil. Conditions on the plantations were typically quite harsh, and many slaves resisted their fate. Quilombos , communities of runaway slaves, were common throughout the colonial era. They ranged from small groups hidden in the forests to the great society of Palmares. Located in northeastern Brazil, Palmares—whose population may have reached as high as 20,000—survived for much of the 17th century. Its inhabitants repelled dozens of military incursions before finally succumbing to a Portuguese colonial force in 1694. The arrival of thousands of African slaves transformed areas of Brazil into multiracial societies. Amerindian, European, and African peoples inter- mingled. For every white colonist in the early 17th century, there may have been as many as three African slaves. Some 80 percent of the people of the northeastern coast today are descendants of Africans. In the 1690s, gold was discovered in Minas Gerais, creating the first gold rush in the Western Hemisphere. Brazilians and Portuguese flooded into the