In 1978, John Hemming published the book Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indian, 1500-1760. He ended the book with a quote from Basílio da Gama’s poem “O Uruguai” in which the hero, an Indian, laments: “Peoples of Europe, if only the sea and wind had never brought you to us! Ah, it was not for nothing that nature extended between us that vast flat expanse of waters.” Hemming continues, “Once that ocean was crossed, the steady defeat of the American natives became inevitable” (p. 486).
In Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians, Hemming tells the second part of the story of this inevitable defeat, taking us up to the early decades of this century. Perfecting a style developed in Red Gold, Hemming masterfully orchestrates myriad isolated voices into a single chorus singing of the disasters visited on the Brazilian Indians by the Europeans. The book consists of 24 chapters divided into four sections followed by two appendixes (“Travelers and explorers who had contact with Indians” and “Chronology”), a bibliography, and a section of notes and references. This last section is long (76 pages) and is filled with valuable information that supplements the text in a highly satisfactory manner.
Portugal established permanent colonies in Brazil in the 1540s, and for over two hundred years left missionaries in charge of the Indian inhabitants. The most successful of these missionary orders was the Jesuits, who, due in part to their success, were expelled from the Portuguese empire in 1759. This expulsion marks the beginning of the story told in Amazon Frontier.
In 1755, the crown of Portugal issued a law that “restored to the Indians of [the Amazon Basin] the liberty of their persons, goods, and commerce” (p. 1); replacing missionary control with a system known as “The Directorate” which named white “directors” in charge of Indian villages. This system and the abuses it engendered is the subject of part one of Amazon Frontier. There was a great demand for Indians and their services: they were needed as paddlers on long expeditions, as laborers in royal shipyards, as farmers on plantations, and as collectors of “drogas do sertão,” the valuable forest products. There was little concern for the well-being of the Indians themselves. Part two, entitled “Independence,” begins with the Portuguese court’s move to Brazil and takes the story up through the beginning of the rubber boom. In these two parts Hemming writes eloquently on how the Europeans’ basic misunderstanding of tropical ecology destroyed not only many of their attempts at agriculture, but also their basic Indian policy. To quote an early governor, it was impossible to force Indians “to emerge from their forests to live in Christian order and urbanity” (p. 111), because such urbanity required permanent villages and the tropical soils did not permit the permanent agriculture necessary to support such villages.
The book continues with part three on the rubber boom and part four entitled “1840-1910: Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Indian Resistance.” Both parts relate the countless stories of European contact with Indian groups and the ensuing result. Rubber tappers in search of untapped wealth, farmers in search of land, missionaries in search of heathen souls, and adventurers in search of tropical tales pushed to all corners of Brazil. In many cases, they found deserted river banks, testament to the slavers, army press gangs, and disease that had decimated native villages well before their arrival. At the time of first European contact, there had been approximately three and a half million Indians. By 1910, and the close of Hemming’s tale, there were less than a million.
John Hemming is a master of detail; he has panned an extraordinary range of primary and secondary literature for nuggets of history. He focuses on the stories of individual actors, and is able to weave these individual stories into a coherent, beautifully worded fabric. As well as a gifted writer, Hemming is a careful scholar who documents and footnotes all important details. This is an excellent, dense book which should be read by all interested in the historical and contemporary situation of indigenous peoples in South America. It is timely, for the situation of the Indians in Brazil is once again threatened by proposed changes in the new Brazilian constitution. Hemming would not be surprised.
