The Colonial Era, 1500-1815
Frontier Expansion That Shaped Brazil
Under the Treaty of Tordesillas, everything to the east of the line that ran from pole to pole
370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands was to be Portugal's to exploit. The exact
reason for Portugal's interest in having the line so far to the west is debatable, but the
Portuguese may have been trying to keep the Castilians away from the sure route to the
East. Very practically, the line's placement gave Portuguese vessels en route to India ample
room to pick up winds and currents that took them around the southern end of Africa, a
feat carried out by Vasco da Gama on his voyage of 1497-99. The Portuguese also may
have known that western lands or islands lay on their side of the line. On the modern map
of Brazil, in the north the line cuts across the eastern end of the Ilha de Maraj, and in the
south it passes through Laguna on the coast of Santa Catarina. Because most of presentday Brazil lies to the west of the line, clearly the Portuguese expanded successfully on this
initial division.
The territorial aggrandizement, which is one of the main themes of Brazilian history, was
both accidental and a matter of state policy. Uncertainty as to the detailed geography of
South America persisted into the twentieth century, so it is understandable that Portuguese
officials professed to believe into the eighteenth century that the estuaries of both the
Amazon and the Ro de la Plata were on their side of the Tordesillas Line. The two river
systems were, in the words of the Jesuit Father Simo de Vasconcellos, "two keys that lock
the land of Brazil . . . two giants that defend it and demarcate between us [Portuguese] and
Castille." Several centuries of penetration along these river systems gave Brazil its
distinctive shape. It could be said that today's Brazil owes its vast territory to the native
Indians who served as skilled trackers, warriors, porters, food suppliers, and paddlers for
the Portuguese expeditions, and to the Indians whose potential as slaves lured the
Portuguese inland.
The Portuguese empire at the outset was a commercial rather than a colonial one. Portugal
lacked sufficient population to establish colonies of settlers throughout its maritime
empire. The Portuguese practice was to conquer enough space for a trading fort and a
surrounding enclave from which to draw on the wealth and resources of the adjacent
country. A map of this maritime commercial domain would show a series of dots
connected by sealanes rather than continuous stretches of territory. French competition
forced the Portuguese shift to colonialism in Brazil. This shift involved the gradual move
from trading for brazilwood to cultivating sugarcane, which required control of great
expanses of land and increasing numbers of slaves. The first to burst past the Tordesillas
Line were the slave hunters. The shift to colonialism was also facilitated by the union of
the Spanish and Portuguese crowns between 1580 and 1640. Although the two
governments on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas were kept separate, trade and
travel controls became lax. An active contraband trade developed between Brazilian
settlements and Buenos Aires, and Portuguese moving overland appeared in Asuncin,
Potos, Lima, and even Quito.
Expansion along the Atlantic coast had been gradual. Using the model of the Atlantic
islands, the crown in 1536 divided the Brazilian coast into fifteen donatory captaincies
(donatrios ). To induce settlement, the crown offered ten leagues of coastline as personal
property, a percentage of the dyewood trade, control over trade of enslaved natives, as well
as the exclusive right to build mills. In 1580 Brazil comprised the area from Pernambuco in
the north to So Vicente in the south. With Spanish assistance thereafter, the Portuguese
expanded north to Paraba, then west through Cear and Maranho against the natives and the
French, until they founded Belm in 1616. Beginning in 1621, these possessions were
divided into the state of Maranho (embracing the crown captaincies of Cear, Maranho, and
Par) and the state of Brazil, centering on Salvador, Bahia. The reassertion of Portuguese
independence under the Braganas in 1640 led to sporadic conflict in frontier areas and to
policies seeking to hold back Spanish advances. In the Amazon and Ro de la Plata river
basins, the Spanish rather than the Portuguese had been first on the scene. The Spaniards
included lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, who journeyed from the coast of Santa Catarina to
Asuncin in 1540, and Francisco de Orellana, who descended the Amazon in 1542.
The most important Spanish advances were the mission settlements, where the Jesuits
Christianized native peoples. Two areas of particular importance lay adjacent to the river
systems that delimit Brazil in the south and in the north: the Paran-Paraguay Basin in the
south and the Mamor-Guapor Basin in the north. From 1609 to 1628, the Jesuits founded
eight missions among the Guaran peoples between the Paran and Paraguai rivers in what is
now southern Paraguay. They pressed deep into what is today the state of Paran, between
the Iva and Paranapanema rivers, to establish fifteen more in what was called Guair
Province.
From 1629 to 1631, the Guair missions were attacked by slave hunters, known as
bandeirantes (see Glossary), from the Portuguese town of So Paulo. According to the
governor of Buenos Aires, these attacks resulted in the enslavement of more than 70,000
Guaran. Consequently, the Jesuits decided to evacuate some 10,000 survivors downriver
and overland to sites between the Rio Uruguai and the Atlantic, in what became the state of
Rio Grande do Sul. Other Jesuits fleeing the Guair missions set up missions among the
Itatn people on the eastern bank of the Rio Paraguai in what is now Mato Grosso do Sul,
only to be destroyed brutally by bandeirantes in the 1630s and 1640s. By 1650 only
twenty-two of forty-eight missions remained in the whole region. The Jesuits stopped the
slave hunters in the south by arming and training the Guaran, who dealt a significant blow
to their oppressors in the Battle of Mboror in 1641. This victory ensured the continued
existence of the southern Spanish missions for another century, although they became a
focal point of Portuguese-Spanish conflict in the 1750s. Broadly speaking, the Battle of
Mboror stabilized the general boundary lines between the Portuguese and the Spanish in
the south.
In the north, the Spanish had established the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1561 and
from there planted missions in the Mamor-Guapor Basin in about 1682. Called the Mojos
and Chiquitos, these mission provinces were in what is now lowland Bolivia fronting on
the states of Mato Grosso and Rondnia. By 1746 there were twenty-four mission towns in
the Mojos and ten in Chiquitos. The bandeirantes again carried the flag of Portugal into the
region, first attacking the Chiquitos missions for slaves and then discovering gold in Mato
Grosso (1718-36). Unsure where these gold discoveries were in relation to the Spanish
territories, the members of the Lisbon-based Overseas Council, which administered the
colonies, ordered a comprehensive reconnaissance and the drawing of accurate maps. In
1723 Francisco de Melo Palhta led an expedition from Belm to the Guapor, reporting to
Lisbon the startling news about the numerous prosperous Jesuit missions. Moreover, the
question of fixing borders had become more urgent in 1722, when a respected French
cartographer placed the mouths of the Amazon and the Ro de la Plata on the Spanish side
of the Tordesillas Line.
Because the Guapor rises in Mato Grosso and flows into the Mamor, which enters the
Madeira, and then into the Amazon, these rivers formed a natural border. Moreover, the
headwaters of the Paraguai were close and offered the possibility of linking the Amazonian
and La Plata systems. In 1748 Lisbon created the Captaincy of Mato Grosso as its rampart
on the Peruvian side and later in the century erected Fort Prncipe de Beira on the Guapor.
In northern Amaznia, in what were then the royal states of Maranho and Par, the
Portuguese, worried about Dutch traders from Guiana (modern Suriname) and Spaniards
from Venezuela, built fortifications at bidos, Manaus, Tabatinga, and on the Rio Branco
and Rio Negro during the eighteenth century, thereby solidifying their claims. As it turned
out, it was easier to secure the vast North region than it was the South.
In 1680 the Portuguese had built a fort at Colnia do Sacramento on the eastern La Plata
shore opposite Buenos Aires to guard their claim and to capture a share of the contraband
trade with silver-rich Potos. According to the Overseas Council, Lisbon adopted the policy
of fortifying and settling the coast below Santa Catarina, because "the continuation of these
settlements will be the best means of deciding the question of limits . . . between the two
crowns."
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Iberian powers were ready to admit the fiction of
Tordesillas and to redraw their lines in South America on the basis of uti possidetis (that is,
ownership by occupation rather than by claim). The Portuguese gave up Colnia do
Sacramento, and in return received the lands of the Jesuit order's seven missions in western
Rio Grande. This exchange led to the Guaran War of 1756, which destroyed the missions
and contributed to the Jesuit expulsion from Portuguese (1759) and Spanish (1763)
possessions. With the Treaties of 1750, 1761, and 1777, Brazil took on its modern shape.
The lines were drawn for the nineteenth-century struggles over the East Bank (Banda
Oriental, or present-day Uruguay) of the Rio Uruguai and the Ro de la Plata, the war with
the United Provinces of the Ro de la Plata (1825-28), and the Paraguayan War, also known
as the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70).
Thus, as a result of slave hunting, gold prospecting, and Portuguese royal policy, the
Tordesillas Line became obsolete, and Portugal obtained more than half of South America.
When Brazil became independent in 1822, its huge territory was comparable in size with
the Russian and Chinese empires.