The Royal Timber in Late Colonial Bahia Open Access

At the time of its discovery by Europeans the greater part of Brazil was clothed in forest. In the colonial age the trees were to be a valuable resource, not least in supplying timber for the ships which linked the Portuguese settlements to the wider world. This article deals with the exploitation of the forest in the late colonial period, when timber had become scarce enough to be a locus of conflict in the region where the Portuguese first saw the forest, the southern coast of the present-day state of Bahia.¹

The Timber Industry to 1780

Shipbuilding began in Bahia with the arrival of the first royal governor-general in 1549.² It remained an important activity until well into the nineteenth century, keeping a dual aspect, public and private, throughout. Private shipyards built merchantmen for the Portugal and Africa runs, while the Royal Arsenal and Dockyard produced and repaired warships and Indiamen. In both cases the development in a plantation colony of an industry requiring skilled labor and substantial capital resulted from an abundant supply of timber higher in quality than that available in Portugal itself. The great variety of species in the rain forest offered a tree for every purpose; and as knowledge of the forest grew, so the quality of Bahian ships improved.³

Neither the Royal Arsenal nor the private shipyards ever enjoyed a monopoly on the supply of timber. In the first century-and-a-half of its existence, shipbuilding had to compete with the dominant sugar industry which utilized the forest of the Bahian Recôncavo primarily as a source of fuel.⁴ The voracious appetite of the sugarmills for fuel remained a critical economic factor throughout the colonial period, calling forth repeated legislative attempts to preserve and apportion the reserves of hardwood. But direct competition between sugar and shipbuilding was reduced after 1700 by the geographical separation of the two industries. The Recôncavo remained the sugar zone par excellence. Ship timber was sought beyond the Bay of All Saints, along the southern coast of the captaincy-general of Bahia.

This region, extending from the Island of Itaparica at the mouth of the bay to the borders of Espirito Santo, has a hot and humid climate. There is no dry season and the entire coast receives over 2,000 millimeters of rain a year.⁵ The heavy rainfall and the dense forest it created combined with the shortage of good harbors and navigable rivers to hinder the development of the region in colonial times. This problem was complicated by administrative arrangements. The southern coast was divided into the hereditary captaincies of Ilhéus in the north and Porto Seguro in the south, both only loosely subordinate to the viceroys and captains-general in Salvador. Successive donatários, most of them absentee Portuguese nobles, did little to improve their holdings. Power and wealth rested with the Jesuits who came to own no less than 145 kilometers of coastline in Ilhéus alone. They were also responsible for the welfare of the settled Indians who made up the bulk of the population.⁶

Thus situated, the Jesuits were not slow to perceive the potential value of the forest. However, they never succeeded in establishing a monopoly of the timber trade. The captaincy of Ilhéus contained a small population of Portuguese settlers who slowly came to be organized in regular towns.⁷ They too traded in timber and firewood with the capital and Recôncavo from an early date. The crown itself, through the colonial government in Salvador, eventually came to produce ship timber on its own account. From the early eighteenth century, the câmaras and captains-major of the coastal towns were instructed to provide timber in specified sizes and quantities for the royal needs. “Administrators” might be appointed to supervise operations when demand was high.⁸ Much of the timber thus produced was shipped to the Royal Arsenal in Lisbon; but as the century went on, the proportion used for the construction of warships in Salvador itself tended to increase.

The timber and shipbuilding industries were thus well established when in the mid-eighteenth century the long-neglected southern coast was brought under direct royal control. The two hereditary captaincies were resumed by the crown in 1759 and 1761, becoming comarcas— judicial and administrative districts—of the captaincy-general of Bahia. In the former year the Jesuits were expelled from the Portuguese possessions and their lands were sold at auction. In 1768 the new comarca of Ilhéus received a royal ouvidor of its own, who from the first was largely concerned with the supervision of the crown’s timber interests. His powers, staff, and salary came to reflect this, until by 1780 there had emerged a small, geographically detached, but distinct and permanent department of the central government of Bahia, the Reais Cortes charged with the administration of royal timber.⁹ Headed by the ouvidor in his capacity as Inspector of the Reais Cortes, working closely with the Arsenal and Dockyard in Salvador, it was based in the town of Cairú, close to the principal timber zone and the normal residence of the ouvidor.¹⁰

The Late Eighteenth-Century Crisis

The Inspector of the Reais Cortes was responsible for administering a system which combined direction and control by the royal authorities in Cairú, Salvador and Lisbon with considerable scope for initiative on the part of the inhabitants of the forest district. In particular, the dispersion of operations along the extensive coastline led to the continued appointment of “administrators” for individual cortes. These were local worthies, named by the inspector until current orders were filled; generally they were reappointed. Unsalaried, they were given commissions in the ordenanças, the traditional militia and police of the colony. Nor were opportunities to profit at the crown’s expense lacking. At the outset of each corte, an administrator received an advance from the Royal Treasury Roard in Salvador to cover the costs of labor and haulage. In theory accountable to higher authority, but in practice left to himself for months on end, an administrator could claim the wages of non-existent workers, fail to pay those who did appear, or sell timber felled for the crown to private persons.¹¹ The temptation to resort to such practices was strong and the risk slight, for the scrutiny of an administrator’s accounts was usually neither speedy nor unduly severe.¹²

The administrators were thus both royal officials and local entrepreneurs. They overlapped with the more numerous group of fabricantes, avowed producers of timber, who were often their relatives or associates. The fabricantes’ principal asset was land. Several of the most important acquired portions of the former Jesuit estates. For those who dealt in planks rather than roughly squared logs, a water-driven sawmill was also essential. The fabricantes of Jaguaripe on the southwest coast of the bay produced planking from the valuable vinhatico and potomujú, buying the logs from the poorer inhabitants of the region. Those of Pôrto Seguro specialized in brazilwood (and in its contraband), while those of the Ilhéus comarca were generalists. The fabricantes might be paid directly by the Royal Treasury Board, or by the Reais Cortes if they worked under the supervision of its officials or administrators. For most of them, the private shipyards of Salvador were their largest market; they also sold sugar chests and building timber to the millowners of the Recôncavo; but dealings with the crown brought important advantages, not least of which was privileged access to a supply of labor.

Closely associated with the fabricantes were the owners of the ox-teams and ships which carried logs and planking to Salvador. Transportation costs were high, usually exceeding those of labor in the forests.¹³ The crown bought a ship for carrying timber in 1790, but it proved unequal to demand at peak periods. The transport of timber formed an important source of income for the inhabitants of the southern coast, supplying many of them with the cash to invest in the cultivation of the rice and coffee in which Cairú and Camamú specialized.

These groups were the capitalists of the timber industry. The poorer residents of the district and especially the population of the Indian towns furnished the labor. Labor directors were instructed to place the Indians at the disposal of the administrators or fabricantes producing timber for the crown. The Indians, whose skill as woodsmen and loggers was acknowledged by contemporaries, were paid modest wages. Their numbers, however, were never adequate and were believed to be declining; the gap was made up by the settlers in the “Portuguese” towns, themselves largely Indian by descent. They were employed as master-carpenters and as such were exempt from military service. The use of hired slaves was known but appears to have been exceptional. This organization of labor, so strikingly different from the slavery of the Bahian sugar zone, had the advantage of flexibility and, therefore, cheapness. When the cortes were inactive, the laborers simply returned to the subsistence agriculture of their villages and towns. For the fabricantes the system had the further advantage that, given lax official supervision, directed Indian labor could be used for their private purposes.¹⁴

Administrators, fabricantes, and the owners of oxteams and ships taken together totaled perhaps fifty or sixty individuals. They formed the upper class of the timber districts. Not comparable in wealth or prestige with the sugar magnates of the Recôncavo or the merchants of Salvador, they nonetheless monopolized local positions of power, profit and dignity and had a vested interest in the loose administrative system by which substantial quantities of public money found their way to the small settlements of the southern coast. From the point of view of the crown, that system offered the advantages of flexibility of supply and low fixed administrative costs, together with a certain amount of working capital supplied by the fabricantes. The Reais Cortes can thus be seen as a variant of the familiar pattern of colonial Brazilian government in which the crown, in return for revenue and recruits, legitimized the control and exploitation of the countryside by local elites. In the case of the timber industry, however, contemporary observers agreed that the system led to waste and inefficiency.¹⁵ These drawbacks were felt more acutely in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when demands on the supply of land and timber and the financial resources of the crown rose sharply. The volume of shipbuilding, especially in the private yards, increased so greatly that by 1795 the Bahian shipyards could be described as having built the greater part of the Portuguese marine.¹⁶ Such private shipbuilding pushed up costs by competing with the crown for the limited supply of skilled labor and raw materials. Competition for timber in particular became more acute as the value of more Brazilian species was recognized; and the huge timbers needed for warships all too often were sawed into easily transportable sizes suitable for merchantmen.¹⁷

While demand for timber grew, the forests themselves seemed to be disappearing, in part due to shipbuilding. But the spread of manioc cultivation was a more immediate danger. This staple food of the colony was grown by small or medium farmers (roceiros) who practiced slash-and-burn agriculture in the virgin forest, where the soils gave high yields for several years after clearing. The official correspondence of the time is replete with references to the devastation wrought by this method, its enduring effects, and the ruin of the timber industry which inevitably ensued.¹⁸ But such reports placed the government in Salvador in a dilemma. A reliable, abundant and cheap supply of manioc flour for the capital and sugar zone had been a goal of the colonial authorities for over a century. Despite legislative attempts to enforce its cultivation in the sugar zone, manioc had come to be heavily concentrated in certain districts on the west coast of the bay and in the Ilhéus and Pôrto Seguro comarcas, close to the main timber areas. Conflict between the two was long-standing, and tended to sharpen as the population of the capital and Recôncavo grew and demand for timber rose. In the 1790s, when a boom in sugar exports forced up food prices, creating considerable hardship and contributing to the political unrest of the time, an adequate supply of manioc was more important to the government than ever.¹⁹

Nonetheless, steps were taken to defend the forests. Officials and administrators of the Cortes were empowered to expel or imprison roceiros found working forest land.²⁰ These measures had little, if any, effect. Reports on the rapid dwindling of timber reserves remained as frequent as ever. In the 1790s, however, they reached a government which faced increasingly acute financial difficulties. The prosperity which the collapse of St. Domingue had brought to the Bahian sugar industry was not immediately reflected in the revenues of the Bahian government, while the latter were charged with a host of new expenses arising from the war with revolutionary France. In these circumstances, the costs of the Reais Cortes, the Arsenal and the construction of warships inevitably came under scrutiny. They were directly related to the war effort and normally formed the largest items of expense after the payment of the civil, ecclesiastical and military employees. From the following table it can be seen that together they often accounted for over a fifth of total expenditure. The outbreak of war did not bring about a sustained and immediate increase in expenditure under the three heads, in part because a program of frigate construction had been completed a few months before. But they were substantial items, capable of rapid growth if the war continued for any length of time. Efficiency and economy in their administration were therefore highly desirable.

All signs thus indicated a similar course. The administration of the Reais Cortes was overdue for reform. Given the intellectual climate of the times, two broad courses of action were open to the crown. Tradition pointed to an increase of direct royal control over the production of timber. The economic ideas of contemporary Great Britain, already familiar to the Brazilian intellectual elite, suggested the complete opposite: the crown should withdraw from the industry except as a purchaser of timber produced by private enterprise. The turn of the century was to see a clash between the two.

Royal Control versus Free Enterprise

In 1796 the direction of affairs in the Portuguese Empire passed to men who were heirs to the Pombaline tradition of active government and rational reform. For Brazil the most significant of them was Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, who in 1796 took office as Colonial Secretary. This event was welcome news for a small group of Brazilians who had been educated since 1772 at the reformed university of Coimbra. These men, who have been called the “Generation of the 1790s,” were aware of Brazil’s backwardness and generally prepared to cooperate with the Portuguese government for development. Sousa Coutinho knew many of them personally.²¹

The new regime early displayed energy and initiative, and it did not overlook the problems of the Bahian Cortes.²² In March 1797, Sousa Coutinho issued a carta régia which vigorously reasserted royal rights and privileges. All woods along the coast or on navigable rivers were declared royal property. No further sesmarias (land grants) were to be awarded in those areas, and those existing were to be resumed by the crown. Grants elsewhere would compensate the owners. The forests were to be surveyed and mapped; those of IIhéus and Alagoas, being of special value, were to be entrusted to judge-conservators, who were to be the ouvidors of the two comarcas. Together with the governor and the navy intendant of Bahia, the judge-conservators on their appointment were to meet and draw up recommendations for imparting greater efficiency to the Reais Cortes while respecting established rights.²³

In law this carta régia simply reaffirmed long-standing royal rights over ship timber on private land.²⁴ Such rights were clearly difficult to enforce in Brazil; but they had been upheld negatively, in that the crown paid for labor and freight only, never for timber itself. But the carta régia broke new ground by proposing to resume sesmarias carrying ship timber. In principle, sesmarias were granted on the condition that they be developed, but in practice were held outright. To resume them would have constituted an arbitrary extension of royal power, with disturbing implications for almost every major landowner in Brazil.

That Sousa Coutinho received informed advice before issuing the carta règia seems certain. Its most likely source was Baltazar da Silva Lisboa, the member of the “Generation of the 1790s” destined to be most intimately concerned with the attempt to reform the Bahian Cortes.²⁵ Born in Salvador in 1761, Silva Lisboa was a first-generation Brazilian and the younger brother of José da Silva Lisboa, the economist and future viscount of Cairú. After a successful career at Coimbra (where, although graduating in law, he studied the natural sciences as well), in 1786 he was appointed juiz de fora of Rio de Janeiro. In that post he found himself enmeshed in the political conflicts of the early 1790s and displayed a talent for making enemies of widely varying views, among them the Viceroy Count of Resende. The latter eventually succeeded in relieving Silva Lisboa of his post; the Overseas Council in Lisbon, however, promptly cleared him of the viceroy’s charges.²⁶ The full story of this episode suggests a man of intelligence, probity and zeal, but little political sense, qualities which were to be in evidence during his stay in Bahia.

Silva Lisboa was still in Lisbon when Sousa Coutinho took office. A Bahian and a royal magistrate, he was also something of an authority on the flora of Brazil, having been entrusted with a botanical expedition by Viceroy Luís de Vasconcellos e Sousa. That Sousa Coutinho should turn to him for advice on the problems of the Bahian Cortes is a reasonable assumption; what is certain is that in May 1797 Silva Lisboa was named ouvidor of Ilhéus and first judge-conservator of the Reais Cortes. As such he would be primarily responsible for the formulation and enforcement of the new policy. The ouvidor of Alagoas, José de Mendonça de Mattos Moreira, was named judge-conservator for that comarca, while José Francisco de Perné, a professional naval captain, was appointed navy intendant and as such head of the Arsenal and Dockyard.²⁷ These and other appointments were certainly intended by Sousa Coutinho to form a team on which he and Silva Lisboa could rely.

Silva Lisboa’s first duty was to acquaint himself with the territory under his care. This he accomplished by extensive traveling, during which he and his small staff showed great energy and persistence in surveying and demarcating the main timber-producing districts. The surviving records of these surveys reveal a society of small and medium proprietors, many of the latter well-known as administrators or fabricantes,²⁸ Only a minority, however, could produce a clear title extending back to a royal sesmaria or even to the sale of the Jesuit holdings in 1763. The scheme to resume sesmarias was therefore not only provocative but in some degree irrelevant. Certainly Silva Lisboa took no steps to enforce it. When claimants to land appeared, their titles, good or bad, were recorded, and they were told to plant only on land already cleared or with second growth (capoeira) and on no account to fell the paus reais (also madeiras da lei, royally-owned hardwoods suitable for shipbuilding) on their holdings. The judge-conservator recorded any large stands of ship timber, and noted the navigability of rivers. Finally, at each stop he solemnly took possession of all unclaimed land for the crown.

Through these proceedings the inhabitants of the southern coast inevitably came to learn more of what the crown had in store for them. From the surviving records they appear to have accepted this with surprising meekness, at least in Silva Lisboa’s presence.²⁹ Signs were not wanting, however, that this apparent acquiescence was deceptive, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that currying official favor was not the only tactic the timber producers adopted. Even before the ouvidor’s arrival the men of Cairú had petitioned the governor for leave to fell or burn any timber on their own land.³⁰ They predicted a shortage of manioc and higher food prices should this expedient be denied them. In his reply Dom Fernando José de Portugal pointed out that manioc could legally be grown in the capoeiras, which should be clearly separated from the forests—an unsatisfactory answer since the capoeiras were universally believed to yield poor crops.³¹ Silva Lisboa’s appearance on the scene did nothing to reassure the petitioners. He not only proclaimed long-disregarded royal rights, but went on to attack a host of malpractices in the cortes themselves. Supervision was intensified. Wages, prices and freights were reduced by royal fiat. An official of the Cortes was arrested for “not complying with his obligations,” an act for which there were few if any precedents.³²

A climate of uncertainty and tension began to grow in the timber zone, but plans for reform went ahead nonetheless. After delays due to the illness of Mendonça de Mattos Moreira, meetings to draw up new regulations for the Cortes were held in Salvador in September of 1798. A draft regimento was prepared and Silva Lisboa was instructed to determine whether any obstacles to implementation existed. This he did, and after further meetings a revised draft (usually called the plano) was sent to Lisbon in January 1799. Two cartas régias of July 11 and 12, 1799, gave it legal force as a provisional regimento for the Reais Cortes.³³

The plano reaffirmed the royal ownership of all madeiras da lei wherever found, and reserved all timber on crown land in Ilhéus and Alagoas to the Royal Navy. On the other hand, no mention was made of the resumption of sesmarias; and the rights of landowners to plant in the capoeiras and to use their timber other than the madeiras da lei were explicitly confirmed. Private individuals could fell the paus reais on private land for use in merchant shipping with a license from the judge-conservator and under his inspection. Taken altogether, the plano represented a retreat from the full rigor of the carta régia of March 1797, especially as regarded the resumption of sesmarias. This change no doubt reflected the findings of Silva Lisboa’s surveys as described above.

In compensation, one entirely new restriction was introduced which was to be of decisive importance in the eventual failure of the reform. Vinhático, potomujú, tapinhoã and ottí, the species from which the finest planks and boards were made, were declared to be madeiras da lei and part of the royal domain. They could be freely cut, but sold only to the Royal Arsenal for a price stipulated by its head, the navy intendant. Private individuals who wished to buy such planking could do so only from the Arsenal for “preços proporcionados,” that is, at a mark-up. Thus the royal claim to ownership of the madeiras da lei was to serve as the legal basis of a monopsony. The woods of Jequiriçá and Jaguaripe, from which the best planking came, were placed under the jurisdiction of the judge-conservator (as were the forests of northern Pôrto Seguro). That official was enabled to discharge his increased duties by relieving him of the post of ouvidor in Ilhéus and by giving him a larger staff and the handsome salary of one thousand milreis a year.³⁴

Implementation of the plano began as soon as it had been forwarded to Lisbon in January 1799.³⁵ The new officials were appointed; the work of surveying continued; and the royal rights were again proclaimed. This activity, however, took place against a background of mounting opposition to reform. As early as November 1798, Silva Lisboa found it necessary to suspend one of the most senior administrators for real or imagined insults to himself. His action was upheld by the governor, but in such a way as to suggest that doubts existed concerning Silva Lisboa’s ability to handle a situation requiring tact.³⁶

Such doubts can only have been increased by the discovery that Silva Lisboa, without consulting the governor, had forwarded the first, unrevised draft of the plano to Sousa Coutinho, who had enthusiastically approved it.³⁷ Dom Fernando José behaved with restraint. He told Sousa Coutinho that he would await the latter’s decision on the second draft and sent a letter of reasoned rebuke to Silva Lisboa.³⁸ Nonetheless this episode, which Silva Lisboa never adequately explained, marks a turning-point in his relationship with the governor. An ouvidor had an undoubted right to correspond directly with the crown; but the circumstances of the case could only lead the governor to suspect Silva Lisboa of attempting to establish, through the cultivation of his personal ties with the minister, a virtually autonomous position for himself. Dom Fernando José has been little studied. Honest, conscientious and erudite, he was a moderate by disposition, and ten years as governor had impressed on him the practical limits to the the royal power in Brazil. The “Tailors’ Conspiracy” of 1798, revealing serious disaffection in the colony, made him more inclined than ever to tread delicately in enforcing new and unpopular royal claims. Dom Fernando José continued to uphold Silva Lisboa against open resistance to reform.³⁹ But subsequent events were to show that Silva Lisboa could no longer count on his superior’s wholehearted support in a crisis.

This breach was serious because the plan of reform had acquired a formidable enemy armed with personal influence and the latest ideas of the day. José de Sá Bittencourt e Accioli was one of the most notable members of the “Generation of the 1790s.” Elder brother of the distinguished economist and administrator Manuel Ferreira da Câmara Bittencourt e Sá, he had graduated from Coimbra in 1787.⁴⁰ Implicated in the Minas Conspiracy of 1789, he had been arrested in Bahia in 1791, but subsequently released. By 1798 he was in Lisbon and, like his brother, in close touch with Sousa Coutinho, who in July 1799 entrusted him with the construction of a saltpeter works at Montes Altos in the Bahian sertão and with the opening of a road between it and the southern coast. Sá Bittencourt received support from the crown for these projects on a scale which could have left no doubt of the official favor he enjoyed.⁴¹

There were several points of potential conflict between Sá Bittencourt and Silva Lisboa. The former’s road required the same Indians needed to fell the latter’s timber. Sá Bittencourt’s family held large estates in the Ilhéus comarca, including the only sugarmill at Camamú. Plans to restrict the rights of landowners could not fail to affect them, especially since Sá Bittencourt himself took an interest in the timber industry.⁴² Moreover, Sá Bittencourt had been arrested as a suspected republican conspirator, while Silva Lisboa, as juiz de fora of Rio de Janeiro, had at least formally cooperated in the suppression of such ideas. It is not surprising that, when Sousa Coutinho sought Sá Bittencourt’s views on the draft plano of January 1799, the latter produced a long and detailed attack on every one of its major provisions.⁴³

These observations were sent to the authorities in Bahia for their comments without informing them of the author’s identity. They are essentially a statement of the absolute property rights of landowners and of the economic benefits certain to flow from unrestricted private enterprise in timber. These principles, which were asserted rather than argued, were buttressed by a number of practical considerations. Proprietors owned all the trees on their land and could dispose of them freely. Expropriation must be accompanied by full compensation. Any other arrangement would damage both the merchant marine and the Royal Navy by ruining the landowners who supplied them with ship timber, something the Reais Cortes would never be able to do alone. Restrictions on felling would also lead to a shortage of manioc, dependent as it was on the use of virgin land, and by producing a further shortage of chests and building timber for the all-important sugar industry would lead to both unemployment and a fall in the revenues of the crown. At the same time, agriculture and logging were complementary, since the worker in the cortes had to eat, while all forms of agriculture in Brazil needed timber for their installations and would accordingly see the need to conserve the forests. In the same spirit Sá Bittencourt asserted that the crown might reserve the forests in the far south, in Pôrto Seguro, which were large enough to build warships forever; but, once landowners had full and clear title to their timber, it would be in their own interests to conserve it.

Sá Bittencourt’s comments show evidence of having been written in haste, being repetitive and full of simple misreadings of the plano. But they are held together by a clear appreciation of the laissez-faire economic principles expounded by Adam Smith some twenty years earlier. His willingness to apply those principles indeed had limits, for he said nothing of giving the Indians freedom to sell or withhold their labor, but his case was an impressive one nonetheless. Detailed replies were prepared for Sousa Coutinho’s attention by both Silva Lisboa and the navy intendant. The former had no difficulty in establishing the crown’s case by law and precedent, areas which Sá Bittencourt had wisely avoided, nor in showing that almost all land titles in the area were clouded at best. Silva Lisboa went on to argue that most of the local proprietors had accepted the new system peacefully, especially because it in no way hindered their gaining a livelihood. Only a minority of the most prosperous fabricantes of timber and the large-scale manioc farmers had caused trouble by stirring up the people. Among these he named Sá Bittencourt, whose authorship of the anonymous observations Silva Lisboa may well have suspected. If the countryside was abandoned to such men, the forests within an economic distance from Salvador would soon be gone; and the more southerly regions had no suitable ports, as Silva Lisboa knew from personal inspection. The Cortes could certainly supply all the timber needed for both navies, if half-a-dozen fabricantes had been able to do so; in any case, private felling had not been prohibited outright.⁴⁴ Perné, the navy intendant and a loyal ally of Silva Lisboa’s, repeated these arguments and added a number of technical points.⁴⁵ Both men roundly accused the anonymous author of thinking only of the gains of a few rich men, and never of the public good.

The crown’s choice between greater control and laissez-faire was thus clearly juxtaposed for the first time. In practice neither was to prevail. Local interests managed to make the 1799 plano inoperative, but not to bring about the completely free system recommended by Sá Bittencourt. In the course of 1799 and early 1800, resistance to the new arrangements became steadily more open and widespread.⁴⁶ Complaints and petitions attacking both the plano and the judge-conservator began to flow to Salvador and Lisbon in increasing numbers. Silva Lisboa, once so confident of local goodwill, was reduced to banging on his desk and shouting so loudly at some fabricantes that the whole population of Cairú gathered to hear him.⁴⁷

Decisive resistance came from two groups: the sawmill owners of Jaguaripe and Jequirigá, and the merchants and shipowners of Salvador. The former had been reluctant to comply with their new obligation to sell only to the Arsenal, but after some delay they did so. By August 1799 planks were being sent to the Arsenal and there resold to the private shipyards at a useful profit to the crown.⁴⁸ The fabricantes were quick, however, to profit from a weakness in the new regime. Although the plano had maintained full legal force from July 1799, it was also provisional in the sense that it was expected to be revised in the light of practical experience by a further meeting of the responsible officials, on this occasion with the leading men of the timber zone present. The summons to attend such a meeting in early 1800 was the signal for organized resistance by the sawmill owners. In effect, they went on strike. No planks reached the Arsenal or the private shipyards after early March. At the meeting itself in April, the sawmill owners proved unyielding even when offered a higher price. They were supported by the other fabricantes and administrators present, also by José de Sá Bittencourt himself, who, having returned to Bahia, was present at the meeting.⁴⁹ Work on the ship-of-the-line then slowed. Shipbuilders and merchants began to murmur against an Arsenal which would neither sell them planking nor allow them to buy it elsewhere. Some of them had the governor’s ear; others petitioned the crown directly. For their part, Silva Lisboa and Perné, seeing the threat to the plano, sought Sousa Coutinho’s support in a series of agitated letters.⁵⁰

The deadlock thus created lasted until August 1800, when the governor ended it, coming down decisively on the side of the owners by suspending the chapters of the plano which established the Arsenal’s monopsony. He gave as his reasons the disappearance of planking, the intractability of the sawmill owners and the representations made to him by private individuals. The unnamed individuals presumably included the merchants and shipowners whose affairs were threatened by the producers’ strike.⁵¹ In all likelihood Dom Fernando José was also influenced by the arguments of Sá Bittencourt and still more by the known influence of the latter with Sousa Coutinho. In a time of foreign war and internal unrest, the continuing shortage and high price of manioc, as well as the widespread and persistent opposition which Silva Lisboa had aroused in his comarca, no doubt also played their parts in the governor’s decision to yield to the demands of a determined minority.

The Triumph of Local Interests

Dom Fernando José de Portugal, having settled the immediate crisis, forwarded a third draft of the plano to Lisbon, from which the chapters creating the Arsenal’s monopsony had been dropped, and in which the imprescriptible property rights of all subjects were explicitly safeguarded. Landowners were guaranteed full rights to clear and sell timber from their own land, except on any land held by sesmaria near existing cortes.⁵² It is reasonable to see Sá Bittencourt’s influence behind this provision, the wording of which recalls that of his observations of the previous year. In Lisbon, however, the governor’s volte-face caused concern. Sousa Coutinho, with Silva Lisboa’s lengthy appeals before him, expressed the fear that there had been great laxness in dealing with the landowners. The governor designated to replace Dom Fernando José (who had recently been named viceroy of Brazil) was told to consider the revised draft with care, but also to ensure that the rights of subjects were not allowed to injure those of the crown.⁵³

These suspicions were well-founded but unavailing. No further action was taken either at Lisbon or at Salvador to adopt the revised plano. Sousa Coutinho was soon promoted to the presidency of the Royal Treasury, where he was no longer directly concerned with the Cortes. Dom Fernando José de Portugal left to take up his viceroyalty in September 1801. Their successors, the viscount of Anadia and Francisco da Cunha Meneses, were men of lesser ability and cautious outlook. On the question of the Cortes they adopted a policy of masterly inactivity, neither repealing the plano of July 1799 nor approving the revised version of Dom Fernando José. From Cairú, Silva Lisboa argued, remonstrated and asked to be allowed to resign, without result.⁵⁴ Sousa Coutinho continued to support him and the principle of royal control, but without effect.

Silva Lisboa remained as judge-conservator until 1818, administering what was, in essence, the system as it had existed before 1796. Bahian shipbuilding flourished, thirteen merchantmen being built in 1810 alone; but the forests continued to disappear. Silva Lisboa urged stricter controls and the enforcement of the 1799 plano; other voices echoed his, but no action was taken.⁵⁵ After Independence, the centralization of both revenue and the construction of warships at Rio gradually proved fatal to the Bahia Cortes and Arsenal.

The attempt during the period 1796-1800 to conserve the Bahian forests in the interests of the crown was thus a failure. As such it was no more than a chapter in the long history of the deforestation of Brazil, with all its consequences for the soil, the fauna and the inhabitants. But the manner of its failure may be helpful to an understanding of the government and society of the time. The crown, in the person of an exceptionally able and energetic minister, who commanded the services of some of the best-educated Brazilians of the day, was unable to override the vested interests which had grown up in the timber and shipbuilding industries over the preceding century. This occurred even though the most powerful social group in the colony, the sugar magnates of the Recôncavo, saw no threat to their interests in the crown’s plans for reform and (apart from Sá Bittencourt) remained aloof from the dispute throughout. The landowners and sawmill owners of Ilhéus and the merchants and shipbuilders of Salvador showed themselves fully capable of bringing enough pressure to bear on the local representatives of the crown to ensure abandonment, partly explicit, partly tacit, of the plano of 1799. The degree to which colonial Brazil was governed and could only be governed in the interests of the local elites was strikingly confirmed.

But the episode has a more specific significance as well. It was one of the earliest occasions in which the Brazilian elites made use of the doctrines of classical liberal economics to defend their position. Silva Lisboa was certainly as fully aware of those doctrines as Sá Bittencourt; his brother was the most notable exponent of them Brazil has ever produced. But while Silva Lisboa, a trained crown magistrate, was prepared to subordinate the economic freedom of the individual to a long-term general good, Sá Bittencourt perceived how the new economic teaching, suitably amended, could further the interests of the class of great landowners to which he belonged. What might have appeared mere selfishness acquired intellectual and ethical respectability, while the interests of society and the conservation of the forests were left to the workings of the invisible hand. The failure to reform the Reais Cortes and the triumph of the principles expressed by Sá Bittencourt portended developments in nineteenth-century Brazil.

Author notes