Pedro, Paula, and the Refugees

Chapter 5, “Pedro, Paula, and the Refugees,” uses three case studies to refocus the narrative onto the humans who lived in, were taken from, or left Palmares. First is Pedro Soeiro, a Palmares elite, who colonial forces captured and sent to Portugal in the early 1680s. Second is a group of Palmares refugees who turned themselves in at a colonial fort, securing legal freedom but required to serve as forest guides for the fort’s soldiers. The relationship may be understood not through the standard lenses of freedom and slavery and instead vis-à-vis other exploitative labor regimes, especially pawnship. Third is Paula da Silva, who colonial forces kidnapped as a child and then gifted to an Indigenous officer in the colonial army and his wife (also Indigenous). Together, these examples illustrate multiple paths out of Palmares and animate demographic data compiled to estimate the number of Palmaristas taken prisoner, which the chapter places in conversation with the statistics compiled in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.