Abstract
Mr. João de Deus, an elderly Afro-Brazilian man, worked on the ground and contributed to the beginning of the modern Brazilian oil industry. His is a story of environmental hope and personal resilience with roots in the deep past and outcomes that reverberate to the present. João de Deus’s story reveals many layers of history beyond human activity, weaving together different temporalities and kinds of hope. This article layers different temporalities—geological, ecological, and human—to emphasize their interconnectedness. As a method, layering various chronological scales helps highlight how they collectively contribute to a complex and nuanced history of a particular individual, community, or place. It considers the simultaneous existence and impact of multiple historical layers, emphasizing the interplay of different historical timescales and historical actors. João de Deus, situated atop ancient geological layers potentially rich in oil, experienced life as a Black man in slavery-era Brazil. Amid the ecological presence of African oil palms and the emerging industrialization of the Maraú Peninsula, he found himself entangled in multiple concurrent histories of different chronological scales, all influencing his destiny.
One Story, Many Layers
This is the story of Mr. João de Deus, an elderly Afro-Brazilian man whose work on the ground contributed to the beginning of the modern Brazilian oil industry. It is a tale of environmental hope and personal resilience with roots in the deep past and outcomes that reverberate to the present. Stories of oil exploration typically fall into one of two categories: of oil barons and intrepid explorers who find the valuable resource, striking gushers that bring progress and prosperity; or of disenfranchised communities and workers who are on the receiving end of the displacement, pollution, and exploitation that usually follow a discovery.1 The story of João de Deus is neither, although it speaks to both ideas of faith in progress and marginalized local populations.
In 1943, Mr. João de Deus—then eighty years old—wrote a letter to the Brazilian National Petroleum Council to request payment for five years of labor he had performed in the remote Maraú Peninsula in the northeastern state of Bahia.2 In his letter, he wrote about the hardships he had gone through while guarding an oil drill rig from 1938 to 1943. Along with descriptions of the difficulties he faced, such as repeated bouts of fever and shortages of food, his letter highlighted the importance of finding oil to the progress of the country. He stated that he was entitled to payment—at the same time, he asked to be “freed” from his burden. As a Black person born prior to the abolition of slavery in Brazil, João de Deus was conscious of his right as a free worker while still resonating with the slavery experience. Based on the documentation available, he never received full payment for his five years of labor.3
How did he end up in the Maraú Peninsula, far from a major population center? Why were people looking for oil in Maraú Peninsula in the first place—and who were they? What else was happening in the region that might help explain João de Deus’s singular case? These are the questions that inspire this article. I attempt to answer them by layering various elements to tell the story—from the geological and ecological past to the current state of the peninsula, complete with the human groups that have inhabited the area for centuries.
As I add layers to the story, layers of hope also become visible. There is the immediate hope of João de Deus—who retained hope in a hazardous situation—and the slow hope of stories “that are inspired by anticipation and driven by the idea that things can be different. They are ‘slow’ in their unfolding, and they are slow because they come with setbacks.”4 The concept of “slow hope” emerges as a nuanced lens through which we can examine changes that unfold over extended temporal horizons. It invites us to pull the interconnected threads of time and environmental change, seeking to unravel narratives of slow hope embedded within human and natural history. By revealing the interplay between humanity and the environment over extended periods, slow hope contributes to a deeper understanding of the intricate ways in which human interaction with natural environments helps shape the ecological, cultural, and social landscapes we inhabit today.
As a method, layering different aspects of the past to tell one story sits somewhere in between big history and microhistory.5 Big history teaches us that humans are not alone in making history; everything that has ever happened in the planet is historical, if we just stretch our timescales far enough.6 In this case, delving into the geological past of the oil and gas found in southern Bahia will take us back several hundred million years and help explain why nineteenth- and twentieth-century humans were interested in that particular place. On the other hand, this narrative focuses on a single letter written on November 25, 1943. Trying to unpack all about one particular event, or an individual historical character is the modus operandi of microhistory. I have singled out João de Deus as the protagonist of this narrative and will attempt to fill in as many gaps as possible to reconstruct his trajectory. All I have to go by is a letter, five photographs, and a couple of follow-up telegrams. The additional layers of this story will draw on other sources (archival, geological, and ecological), as well as field work to reconstruct the wider context in which João de Deus existed.7
To use French historian Jacques Revel’s terminology, this article is a play on scales.8 Departing from tradition, the idea is not to go from the micro to the macro, in a historical synecdoche, but rather to weave together all these strands of the past, despite their varying lengths, and highlight their interconnectedness. João de Deus stood atop ancient geological layers of potentially oil-bearing sediments while surrounded by the ecological diaspora of African oil palms as he experienced life as a Black man in slavery-era Brazil and watched the budding industrialization of Maraú Peninsula. He was caught in the middle of many concurring histories, on varying chronological scales, that were happening around him. All these layers contributed to his own fate.
The Deep Past of Maraú Peninsula
The geological history of Maraú Peninsula dates to the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean in the Cretaceous period, around 140 million years BP. The breakup of the paleo supercontinent Gondwana is the genesis of both South American and West African coastlines.9 At the earliest stages of the dawn of the South Atlantic, a long string of salt lakes and inner seas formed in the cracks opening between the rifting landmasses. In these shallow waters, cyanobacteria, trilobites, brachiopods, mollusks, and other ancient forms of shellfish and invertebrates thrived. A sudden climate change in the Aptian age (125 to 113 million years BP) caused the mass evaporation of these saltwater environments, leaving behind thick layers of salt, fittingly named Aptian evaporites.10
Buried underneath huge domes of salt, stromatolites and coquinas (the rocks formed by fossilized cyanobacteria and paleo shellfish) slowly became petroleum and natural gas. Under intense heat and pressure, over the span of 140 million years while the continents continued rifting, these rocks underwent geochemical processes that ultimately turned them into the much-coveted hydrocarbons off the coast of Brazil and West African countries such as Nigeria, Gabon, Angola, and Namibia. In time the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean would be reconnected by the horrors of colonial slave trade, and Brazil would come to share, adapt, and reinvent much from West African cultures, religions, languages, and ecology.
The Camamu-Almada basin is the geological structure containing the Maraú Peninsula. A sedimentary basin, it was formed as part of the larger continental rifting that opened the South Atlantic Ocean. On geological maps, it looks roughly like a series of stretch marks, caused by the distension efforts of the rift. The Camamu-Almada basin is what geologists call a passive margin—that is, a margin created by rifting landmasses, which differs from the active margins of tectonic plates.11 It occupies nearly eighty-four thousand square kilometers on and off the coast of the state of Bahia, its larger part totally submerged. The basin extends into the ocean for more than 150 km, with just a thin stretch of land on its western border. Currently there are several oil and gas operations in the offshore portion of the Camamu-Almada basin. The largest one, Manatee Field, is also the largest producing field of natural gas in Brazil, containing proven reserves of around four billion cubic meters of gas.12
Sedimentary basins like Camamu-Almada contain almost all of the world’s hydrocarbons.13 This is due to the materials composing each layer: to generate hydrocarbons the deposits must contain organic matter, which does not occur in volcanic rocks or crystalline basement rocks. These deposits can range from dead leaves and trees to fossils and microfossils of paleo creatures, from marine, freshwater, or terrestrial environments. The combination of these factors (the type of organic matter plus the environment) yields different kinds of hydrocarbons.14
Sedimentary basins typically feature a wide variety of strata, with sediments deposited in different geological ages, spanning many hundreds of millions of years. Geologists can identify the layers using different techniques, which tell them not only the age but also the way the layers were deposited—by wind, erosion, evaporation, landslides, river flow, volcanic activity, and other exciting geological events. Currently there are several advanced technologies that help scientists identify these factors and locate potential sites where oil might be found, including three-dimensional seismic profiles and geochemical analysis as well as high-tech deep-water drilling equipment.15
For a long time, however, geologists could only rely on visible evidence to determine where to drill a well. In the beginning of oil exploration in the mid-nineteenth century it was seepages, bogs, exposed outcrops, and other surface evidence that guided their efforts. Early explorers in Bahia followed the seepages and mangroves around Maraú River and the inner islands of the peninsula.16 Limited by available technology, however, they could not access deeper layers, nor offshore reservoirs, which would remain untouched in the area until the twenty-first century.
Early Modern Transatlantic Connections in Maraú
In one of the pictures attached to João de Deus’s letter (fig. 1), he is standing next to mid-twentieth-century drilling equipment. This is the focal point of João de Deus’s request for payment, as he had stood watch over this machinery for five years without receiving any compensation for the work. The photograph also shows the broader environment and reveals yet another layer of the deeper past of the peninsula: two African oil palms stand in the background, flanking the engine of the drilling machine.
Like the ancient lakes that appeared in the cracks of Gondwana 140 million years ago, the presence of African oil palms in Bahian soil is evidence of old transatlantic connections between the West African and Brazilian coasts. Understanding the trajectory that led African oil palms to southern Bahia may also help explain how João de Deus himself got to be there. If the geological history can shed light as to why explorers went to Maraú looking for fossil fuels, the ecological past of the peninsula can help us place João de Deus’s ancestors in the region, as they were part of the same diaspora that brought African people and plants across the Atlantic Ocean.
Palm trees are pantropical plants. There are currently an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 species worldwide, spread mainly around the large latitudinal belt between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Palms have been useful to humans for millennia. The trees themselves are much older. Abundant in the fossil record, the earliest palms date to the Late Cretaceous, approximately eighty million years BP.17
The particular species featured in this story is the charismatic Elaeis guineensis, also known as African oil palm, native to West Africa. Today it is found in all tropical areas of the planet, being undisputedly the most economically important species of palm due to the mass industrialization of palm oil. Industrialized palm oil is ubiquitous in products ranging from Palmolive soap to KitKat bars and has been linked with large-scale deforestation in Africa and Southeast Asia. Palm oil has recently “outpaced soy to become Earth’s most produced, traded, and consumed” vegetable oil.18
The deep history of oil palms in West Africa, where they are originally from, has been attested by multiple methods and sources. From palynology to linguistics, expert analyses show how oil palms have coevolved with West African human groups for at least five thousand years.19 Once deemed primitive and harmful “slash and burn,” traditional agroecological swidden-fallow landscapes are now known to be beneficial to both local ecology and human groups engaging in these practices.20 In West Africa, the most important agroecological system was the palm-yam complex, with oil palms standing in swidden areas and growing alongside the tubers. For many centuries, this complex provided the dietary staples of several human groups in the region around the Gulf of Guinea, all the way south to present-day Namibia. Oil palms are also closely linked to the cultural and religious practices of the region. They feature in origin stories of many Yoruba-speaking groups and are traditional offerings to orishas—deities of Yoruba religion. Often culinary and religious practices intertwine, with food preparations based on palm oil being offered to orishas.
The Atlantic crossing of oil palms happened in tandem with the forced migration of millions of Africans, starting in earnest in the sixteenth century. The Middle Passage was a terrifying and brutal experience, stripping people of their human dignity and putting them through unprecedented suffering. The coevolutionary history of palms and people sheds light as to how and why these plants traveled together with captive Africans in slave ships. Combined with the widespread belief among Europeans that Africans would be better able to digest their own food staples, the deep connection and knowledge of oil palms led to the arrival of several parts of the plant, mainly seeds and kernels, on the other side of the Atlantic.21
Slave ships were often equipped with tools to process the palm kernels into oil, with women normally having the role of manufacturing the oil and cooking with it onboard. The precise trajectory of these kernels from ships to Brazilian environments remains elusive. Nevertheless, sources have placed emergent groves of tall oil palms growing in Bahia in the mid-1600s, putting their arrival in the first century of Portuguese colonization.22 Oil palms were likely inadvertently introduced multiple times, at multiple locations, where they spread and adapted: “On arrival in the Americas, those seeds, even if simply thrown out at port, could secure footholds on New World shores.”23
While central to enslaved Africans, oil palms were not of interest to Portuguese colonizers, who preferred large monocultures, like sugar plantations, to swidden fields. In Bahia, by the late 1500s sugar was at the center of a colonial economy, and its plantations held massive numbers of enslaved laborers. Trying to resist and escape the brutal experience of slavery was an everyday task for millions of Africans in colonial Brazil. Revolts were a more conspicuous way to do it, but managing the landscape to include familiar and useful plants was also an active form of resistance, allowing Africans and their descendants to continue their cultural, culinary, and religious practices. Both enslaved and free populations engaged in land management, cooking traditions, and religious ceremonies involving oil palms.
Because of its ecological adaptability, African oil palms found a new home in southern Bahia, emerging in the mangroves, forests, and beach environments of Maraú Peninsula. Because of resistance to enslavement, captive and Maroon communities of Africans and their descendants managed and harvested these groves. This combination of factors created “landscapes of resistance,” “botanical gardens of the dispossessed.”24 In Bahia, African oil palms blended with native landscapes and became deeply associated with Afrodiasporic populations. The current Afro-Brazilian names of both the plant and its oil—dendezeiro and dendê—are, unsurprisingly, of Bantu origin.25 Dendê is one of the biggest symbols of Bahia today. It features prominently in the regional cuisine, whose main dishes are all infused with palm oil. It also infuses the religious practices of Candomblé, the main Afro-Brazilian religion and a cornerstone of the Afro-Bahian cultural legacy. To the practitioners of this religion, dendê is sacred.
Recasting João de Deus
It is an exercise in historical imagination to suggest that João de Deus partook of sacred palm oil victuals in Candomblé ceremonies. The two oil palms standing behind him in that photograph appear to be roughly between four and six years old and regularly harvested, judging by their size and marks along their trunks, characteristic of the pruning of fronds.26 It would not be far-fetched to imagine that João de Deus consumed the product of those palms—in fact, it seems unlikely that a twentieth-century Bahian would not consume dendê. To process the palm, someone in his community would have to rely on ancestral botanical knowledge of how to harvest the fruit and manufacture the oil.
Carrying, using, and transmitting this botanical knowledge, several generations resisted slavery. Many people in the Maraú area are themselves the great-grandchildren of formerly enslaved and marooned Africans. Currently, Maraú Peninsula is home to no less than seven certified quilombola communities, with hundreds of Afro-Bahian families having obtained the right to live and own the land their ancestors inhabited after escaping captivity.27 Around their homes, the landscape is still teeming with African oil palms growing among mangroves, just as in the photo of João de Deus. This allows us to recast João de Deus not as a solitary, stranded man in a forgotten place but as the descendant of a resisting community, holder of ancestral ecological knowledge and practices. This recasting also reveals a layer of slow hope, where ancestral knowledge is passed on, despite the many difficulties he and his community faced throughout several generations.
In his letter he reports relying almost exclusively on shellfish for food. Fieldwork corroborated this statement. In informal conversations, locals identified his clothing on the photograph as that of the fisherfolk of the region. The place he mentioned in the letter was the right spot for catching shellfish. Had he been elsewhere on the peninsula, his diet would have consisted of other varieties of seafood. One thing, however, would have likely remained the same: the thick, bright orange dendê oil that seasoned his food, whatever he managed to catch. On a full belly, he might have found reason to be grateful and make offerings to his ancestors and orishas. Those, too, would have been infused with the sacred oil.
João de Deus stated he was eighty years old in 1943, so his date of birth would have been in or around 1863. With its multiple Maroon communities, Maraú Peninsula would not have been a bad place for a Black person to be born more than twenty years before the end of slavery in Brazil. When asked whether they thought João de Deus could have been born into slavery, local people responded: if he was really a local fisher in the 1940s, he might very well have been born in one of the nearby Quilombos as a free person, even back in 1863.28
Back to 1863: Industrialization Arrives in Maraú
There is one more strand that needs to be woven into the story of João de Deus and his 1943 letter. After establishing the deep geological history beneath his feet and the long ecological past around him, I turn to what was the center of his claim: the industrial machinery. The letter stated that he was guarding oil drilling equipment.29 This would be valuable and useful, as would the engine standing between the palm trees. Having cast João de Deus as the holder of ancestral ecological wisdom, here we see him in a different role: as the guardian of the tools of modernity.
The drilling machine João de Deus guarded was a mid-twentieth-century apparatus. But the peninsula had seen several attempts at fossil fuel industrialization prior to that. In 1864, around the time João de Deus was born, a concession to an English citizen introduced the first mention of the word petróleo in an official Brazilian document, when the country was still an empire.30 Thomas Denny Sargent was granted the right to “extract turf, petroleum, and other minerals” for ninety years in the area between Camamu and Ilhéus, where Maraú Peninsula is located.31 He may have been the first to include petroleum in his petition, but he was not alone in looking for fossil fuels in the area.
From the 1850s onward, Brazil’s imperial government granted several concessions for the private exploration of what was then called bituminous shale as well as turf, lignite, coal, oil, and other minerals in locations within the narrow terrestrial strip of the Camamu-Almada sedimentary basin. The shales and sandstones of the area oozed thick oils and attracted Brazilian and British entrepreneurs,32 whose nineteenth-century geological vocabulary was imprecise, so concessions typically listed a number of possible products. Bituminous shale was the catchall term used to identify a number of fossil fuels similar to petroleum and natural gas; turf could mean several forms of peat, coal, or coal-like materials.33
After the onset of the Industrial Revolution fossil fuels, particularly coal, were coveted resources and had not yet been found in economically viable quantities in Brazil. The country was dependent on English coal. By the mid-nineteenth century, interest in finding coal, oil, and gas heightened. To encourage this search, the Brazilian Empire granted several concessions for mineral exploration to private citizens. None led to any substantial discoveries of oil or gas. Historians and other analysts of this era typically list the lack of government incentive and the limits of private funding as reasons why these explorations failed.34
Geological realities and technological limitations also played an important role in Maraú. Simply put, the turf was not retrievable with existing technology. Today, hydraulic fracking makes it possible to extract different forms of hydrocarbons, generically labeled nonconventional oil.35 Other extraction methods, like surface mining and in situ recovery of oil sands as well as offshore drilling technology, were still undeveloped. All these methods are incredibly polluting and harmful for the environment, so it was probably a good thing that nineteenth-century explorers did not have them at their disposal in Maraú.36 In any case, current geological knowledge informs us that the Maraú Peninsula does not have commercially viable quantities of fossil fuels on land; instead, they lie a few kilometers offshore, in the submerged part of the Camamu-Almada basin, trapped within the Jurassic Sergi Formation.37
Misleading surface evidence, however, was abundant. Provincial records, travelers’ accounts, and official documents from the nineteenth century all attest to the knowledge of oil seepages and the existence of the so-called turf around the mangroves of Maraú River, which flows into the inner side of the peninsula.38 This attracted several English capitalists to the area, who brought with them industrial machinery and the promise of progress. The most significant enterprise, the only one to actually lead to any industrialization, was a processing plant to manufacture illuminant oils, paraffin, candles, soap, and kerosene. After acquiring an existing concession for mineral exploration from another English businessman, John Cameron Grant and someone identified as Lord Walsingham started the firm John Grant and Co. in 1884.39
The business was short-lived, and the factory closed in 1893. The plant was a massive investment. It was fitted with fifty-two large Henderson retorts, a novel technology at the time, to capture hydrocarbons from the turf. Imported from Scotland, these retorts were designed to distill the abundant Scottish shale found in and around the dank bogs of the country. These could not be further away from the tropical environment of Maraú. Underneath the groves of African oil palms, native mangroves, and sandy beaches, mineral realities were quite distinct. While also bearing hydrocarbons, the Maraú turf did not yield profitable results, causing the plant to shut down nine years after its opening.40
Foreign entrepreneurs brought heavy, expensive industrial machinery to Bahia, imagining they would be able to industrialize ancient natural environments for progress and profit. Little did they realize their machines would not work on the geology of the tropical peninsula, which was entirely different from the frigid Scottish peat bogs. In hindsight, this industrial adventure was doomed to failure from the start.
Secondary sources and scholarly research point to social reasons, on top of economic or technological ones, for the failure.41 To build and operate the factory, around three hundred to four hundred people were employed, mainly locals. In a few pictures that document the early stages of the operation, it is clear that most, if not all, locals are Afro-Brazilian.42 The local employees were paid Black laborers at a time when enslaving Africans and their descendants was still legal.43 The factory started operating before abolition and was active for a few years after that. This created the first opportunity for the Afro-Bahian local population to engage in paid industrial work.
Even after the end of slavery, paid work would typically involve farming in conditions very similar to enslavement, so the idea of moving into an industrial setting was very attractive to locals.44 The local tale of the factory’s demise involves dissatisfied workers who went on strike—or in some accounts one dissatisfied worker who requested late payments. In either case, the story goes, John Grant shot and killed an employee. Despite being found not guilty in court, the social repercussions of the crime made the situation unsustainable for Grant, who left not only Bahia but the country entirely. Nature quickly reclaimed the area, and the factory was in ruins just a few years later.45
Meanwhile, the area around the peninsula—particularly Maraú village—still held enslaved people, but many were marooned and some born free. Toward the end of the slavery era, social norms had shifted to allow enslaved people to work for wages, shared with their enslaver. João de Deus himself would have been around twenty-one when the factory started operating. It soon became the largest employer of the region. Given the likelihood that he was in fact a local—either free or enslaved—it would be possible to glimpse a young João de Deus as a factory worker. If ancestral knowledge helped him survive on shellfish and palm oil, maybe prior work experience at the factory could have secured him the job of looking after the drilling equipment—just another exercise in historical imagination. Even if he had not directly worked in the factory, as a local he would have received news of it. In any case, João de Deus likely witnessed the first attempt of industrialization on the peninsula.
The Letter: Past and Present
João de Deus was standing at the crossroads of rural survival and industrial inception, on top of rich mineral fuels, surrounded by diasporic African oil palms. Pumping through his veins was the blood of African ancestors. With him were the tools of modernity he was charged with keeping. The letter provides a snapshot of his present at the same time as it reveals deeper layers of past histories and slow hopes. The account João de Deus produced on November 25, 1943, takes us back 140 million years to unearth more about his existence. Combined with an interdisciplinary approach, historical research allows a single letter to provide multiscalar glimpses into the past, where human, ecological, and geological history meet.
In 1943, government technicians went to Maraú to collect the forgotten equipment.46 It had been left there five years earlier and was now needed in new drilling operations around Salvador, where oil had finally been found. João de Deus was there, dutifully waiting. After being relieved of his task, he did not get any payment. This was what prompted João de Deus to write his letter, which ends this way:
Broken by physical and moral suffering in Taipu Mirim, the petitioner, aged 80, is only requesting payment for a service he rendered with dedication and sacrifice, effectively and uninterruptedly, under the worst possible conditions, as few would have, to be able to deliver intact after so many years, that which was entrusted to him, and now represents a priceless cooperation to the country’s efforts. Thus, he confidently awaits Your Excellency’s orders and expresses gratitude in advance for a swift resolution, given that these wages are the last crumbs that he waits for at the end of his long, yet honorable journey.47
After some back and forth between state and federal authorities, the legal department of the National Petroleum Council decided it was not the agency’s responsibility to pay for the 1,890 days João de Deus stood watch. He had requested a daily wage of five cruzeiros (Brazil’s currency at the time), or a total of Cr$9,450.00.48 It is heartbreaking to know João de Deus was probably never paid in full.49 Renewed hope may come from knowing Maraú Peninsula never succumbed to industrialization. Instead, it became a protected area. In its rural parts the Maroon communities survive. João de Deus’s hopes may have been dashed, but his descendants—maybe not direct biological ones, but part of the same Afrodiasporic community—are now custodians of the land. His story is an invitation to reflect upon the enduring lessons embedded in the slow currents of history, fostering a perspective that highlights the agency of individual actors who cultivate resilience, patience, and, above all, slow hope in their personal journeys.
From slavery-era Brazil to budding industrialization, from Africa to Bahia, João de Deus had a great vantage point in Maraú Peninsula to observe nearly a century of change unfold (figs. 2 and 3). Living off shellfish and palm oil, he contributed, as so many Afro-Brazilians before and after him, with his hard (and often unpaid) work to modern-day Brazil. His personal hope to be recognized as a modern-era worker was shattered. But ultimately there is hope in his story—of the long, slow kind. While João de Deus never got paid in full, the other layers of the story provide a hopeful outlook in the longue durée. Hope that keeps the oil palms standing tall among the mangroves, in a partnership that nourishes the fishing communities of Maraú to this day. Hope that enabled Afro-Bahians to remain in their ancestral land—not without fight, resistance, and opposition. But the inhabitants of the peninsula prevailed: they resisted socially, ecologically, and culturally. They went from being forcefully enslaved to becoming owners and custodians of the land in a few generations. With slow hope, they still resist the push of development and speculation as the lands around their communities become increasingly coveted, high-end tourist destinations.
The recognition of slow hope serves as a poignant reminder that environmental narratives are written by humans and nature in different temporalities. It leads to a fuller appreciation of the historical and environmental processes that unfold over generations. The intergenerational transmission of knowledge, values, and practices becomes a cornerstone in the cultivation of resilience in the face of evolving landscapes. All of these are visible in this story. The story of João de Deus is a journey through epochs and eras, uncovering the interplay between human societies and their ecological surroundings. Now, João de Deus’s life joins a thickening “stream of stories of slow hope” that may one day become a powerful river of environmental histories of hope.50
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John McNeill for his thoughtful feedback and comments on this text, as well as Lise Sedrez and my colleagues at the UFRJ Nature and History Laboratory, who were early readers of the story of João de Deus. The people of Maraú were essential in my fieldwork, kindly opening their homes and memories to help reconstruct this story. Many of their comments and remarks pointed me in the right direction. I would also like to thank Case Watkins for his analysis of the oil palms in the pictures and Rosane Coutinho of the Brazilian National Archive for authorizing the use of the images above. Finally, I thank Simone Müller and Ayushi Dhawan of the Rachel Carson Center for the invitation to be part of this special section.
Notes
Yergin, Prize; Frehner, Finding Oil; Galpern, Money, Oil, and Empire; Tinker Salas, Enduring Legacy; Santiago, Ecology of Oil; Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude.” All these stories include geopolitical repercussions of oil.
The letter was addressed to Colonel Joao Carlos Barreto, then president of the CNP (João de Deus to Barreto, November 25, 1943, National Petroleum Council Collection/Brazilian National Archive, Rio de Janeiro, Box 1298/File 3518).
Slavery was fully abolished in Brazil only in 1888. Prior slavery laws include the 1871 Free Womb Act, stating that children of enslaved mothers would be free at birth, and the 1885 Elderly Act, which freed enslaved persons at sixty. Neither law had any significant impact on enslaved populations. A free child would still be raised by enslaved parents, at constant risk of being wrongfully enslaved. Also, very rarely did enslaved people survive to be sixty, with average life expectancy of captives being between eighteen and twenty-three years of age (Schwartz, Segredos internos).
Levi, “Microhistory and Global History”; Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms; Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; Brown, Big History; Christian, Maps of Time. As for layered narratives, a good example is Smith, “Anxieties of Access.”
Fieldwork in Maraú Peninsula was conducted for two weeks in early December 2020. During this period I visited two towns, fishing villages, beach communities, churches, and archives and spoke to several community elders and leaders as well as local residents.
Bottini et al., “Climate Variability and Ocean Fertility”; Guerra-Sommer et al., “Climate Change during the Deposition.”
Active margins are typically associated with tectonic movements causing earthquakes. Passive margins are margins of continents and other landmasses, but not the edge of a tectonic plate—they are more associated with accumulation of sediments of oil-generating potential (McClay and Hammerstein, “Introduction”).
The Manatee Field sits in shallow waters fifteen to thirty meters deep, around ten kilometers off the coast of Bahia. It was discovered in 2000 and produces an average of eight thousand cubic meters of natural gas per day. It is a veritable land and seascape of the Anthropocene, with its pipelines reaching 145 km in length, taking its production to distributing centers around Salvador. The natural gas found within the basin is 130 to 200 million years old (Valente and Ferreira, Bacia de Camamu-Almada).
Hydrocarbons are organic chemical compounds (gas, liquid, or solid) composed of carbon and hydrogen. They are the principal constituents of fossil fuels (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “hydrocarbon,” https://www.britannica.com/science/hydrocarbon [accessed March 30, 2022]).
Currently called the Serra River.
“Those and other analyses associate early oil palm groves with human communities, hunting camps, and migratory routes in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea region. As humans harvested palm fruit and processed oil from its mesocarp, they derived and distributed viable seeds, thereby propagating the palm through mutually beneficial, socioecological processes. Scientists thus recognize groves of oil palms growing in forested areas as evidence of prior human settlement” (Watkins, Palm Oil Diaspora, 50–51).
“Ecological research since the mid-twentieth century has demonstrated the efficacy of such ancestral systems, linking traditional swidden-fallow landscapes with enhanced floral and faunal biodiversity, higher returns on labor investment, food security, nutritional balance, and overall resilience and reliability, especially when compared to monocultures” (Watkins, Palm Oil Diaspora, 56).
“African species were likely put aboard every single ship that crossed the Middle Passage. They were stowed as provisions, meat, medicines, spices, lamp oil—even flavorings to improve drinking-water quality. Slave ships became the unwitting vessels of Africa’s botanical heritage by carrying seeds, tubers, and the people who valued them to the Americas” (Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, 65–66).
This estimate is based on the necessary time for the trees to grow and spread into groves.
Derived from ndende, a Kimbundu Bantu term for Elaeis guineensis, according to Watkins, Palm Oil Diaspora, 91.
Thanks to Dr. Case Watkins, who provided this expert analysis of the photograph.
Quilombola is the Afro-Brazilian term for the descendants of marooned Africans. Quilombo is the historical term for the places they settled in. There are currently 5,971 certified communities in Brazil. Bahia is the state with most, with 1,046 (IBGE, “Quilombolas no Brasil”). Literature on quilombos in Bahia and around Brazil is vast and varied, most of it in Portuguese. A great example published in English is Reis and Gomes, Freedom by a Thread.
Maroon communities in the area were isolating from COVID-19 in late 2020, with no visitors allowed. Therefore, fieldwork still needs to be done and it is possible that further information on João de Deus comes to light, particularly regarding descendants.
Along with the letter and the five photographs, João de Deus sent an itemized list of the equipment in his possession (João de Deus to Barreto, November 25, 1943, National Petroleum Council Collection/Brazilian National Archive, Rio de Janeiro, Box 1298/File 3518).
The Brazilian Empire began after independence in 1822 and lasted until 1889, when it became a republic.
Moura, Em busca do petróleo brasileiro, 50.
The presence of British people and the influence of the British Empire in nineteenth-century Brazil is a well-documented chapter of Brazilian history. See Freire, Ingleses no Brasil; Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization; Guimaraes, A presença inglesa; Nascimento, Ingleses na Bahia.
Moura, Em busca do petróleo brasileiro.
Quaglino and Mattos Dias, A questão do petróleo no Brasil; Victor, A batalha do petróleo brasileiro; Moura, Em busca do petróleo brasileiro. As an example, all discuss the failed attempt of Eugenio Ferreira de Camargo, credited as the first to find traces of oil in Brazil, in São Paulo State, circa 1897.
Unconventional oil refers mainly to oil shale and oil sands, as well as some extra-heavy oils, which require different extraction techniques, other than vertical wells.
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “What Are the Oil Sands?,” https://www.capp.ca/oil/what-are-the-oil-sands/ (accessed March 30, 2022); Leahy, “This Is the World’s Most Destructive Oil Operation.”
Vaitsman, O petróleo no imperio e na republica; Moura, Em busca do petroleo brasileiro; Teixeira, Oberlaender, and Rebouças, Historia do petróleo na Bahia; Castro, “Vestígios de uma fábrica britânica.”
Lord Walsingham was possibly Thomas de Gray, 6th Baron Walsingham. The same concession later changed hands to another group of British entrepreneurs (Castro, “Vestígios de uma fábrica britânica”).
An interesting analysis of these pictures is found in Castro, “Vestígios de uma fábrica britânica.”
At the time, slavery was still legal in Brazil, but British citizens were barred from owning slaves after abolition in the British Empire. Not all adhered to this prohibition, but in this case the local factory did pay wages to its Black workers.
Vaitsman, O petróleo no imperio e na republica; Teixeira, Oberlaender, and Rebouças, História do petróleo na Bahia.
Exploratory efforts in Maraú continued into the twentieth century under government agencies and private initiative (Inventario Fundo Secretaria da Agricultura/Bahia State Archive, Salvador, Subgrupo Pareceres Códice 55/344/2347—Período 1932–1946—Volume 1; Códice 124/395/2369—Período 1938—Volume 1).
National Petroleum Council Collection/Brazilian National Archive, Rio de Janeiro, Box 1298/File 3518. Translation by the author. Currently, Taipu Mirim is known as Taipu de Dentro.
Currently, this amounts to roughly US$70 for five years of work.
In the correspondence, a Bahia State government official admits they paid João de Deus for a few months in 1938 but shows no indications that the state would pay the outstanding amount. The file ends with the copy of a telegram sent to João de Deus informing him that he would not be paid.
