In 1988, the northernmost part of Brazil became the state of Roraima. This kite-shaped territory has an area of 230,000 square kilometers, and embraces the valley of the Rio Branco, a northern tributary of the Amazon River system. Near the headwaters of this great river, the dense rainforests of Amazonia open in a natural savanna, a gently rolling plain that stretches eastward for some 300 kilometers to the upper Essequibo in what is now Guyana. This plain is closer to the Atlantic Ocean than it is to the main Amazon River, and it is separated from the rest of Brazil by hundreds of kilometers of tropical forests. How did it come to form part of the Portuguese colonial empire to the south rather than become part of the Dutch colonies to the northeast or of Spanish Venezuela to the northwest?

The plains of the upper Rio Branco were occupied by tribes speaking two major language groups: Aruak and Carib. These were the most common languages throughout the Caribbean and northern South America, and there was traditional hostility between the people who spoke them. In Roraima, this animosity has persisted almost to the present. We do not know which group of Indians reached the region first. The Aruak speakers, of whom the Wapixana are the largest surviving tribe, may have come via the Rio Negro and its tributary, the Uaupés. The Caribs migrated in from the north.

The first attempt at permanent settlement by Europeans in the upper Rio Branco was made by Spaniards in 1773. This was unexpected, because they entered the region from the northwest, crossing the difficult Paca-raima range from the Orinoco basin into the upper Amazon. It was particularly surprising that the first settlers of what is now Brazilian Roraima should have been Spaniards from Venezuela since the upper Rio Branco had been penetrated sporadically since the early eighteenth century by Dutch from the northeast and by Portuguese from the south. Both the Dutch and the Portuguese had far easier routes into the open savannas of the upper Branco. The Dutch came from the Caribbean, up the Essequibo and its tributary, the Rupununi, and then across level plains onto the Pirara-Tacutu headwaters of the Branco. The Portuguese paddled up the Amazon and Negro and then up its broad, straight tributary—the Rio Branco.

First Contacts

The earliest European approaches to the region were inspired by the legend of El Dorado, the “Gilded Man,” a native ruler so rich in gold that (according to some versions) he was anointed with the precious metal in an annual ceremony on a great lake. It had motivated the Spanish conquistadores in northern South America almost since the time of their arrival, and, in the 1580s, when Antonio de Berrío was exploring the llanos of New Granada and Venezuela in search of El Dorado, the local Achagua Indians told him that a saline lake called Manoa lay in the hills beyond the Orinoco. It was full of “great settlements and a very great number of people, and had great riches of gold and precious stones.”1 Manoa is the word for lake in the Aruak language of the Achagua, although the name could also be a corruption of Manao, a powerful tribe that lived on the middle Rio Negro and were known for trading gold objects which they obtained even from as far away as New Granada. Manoa, in any case, became closely linked to the El Dorado legend, and Berrío himself would seek this chimera obsessively in the interior of the Guianas.

English adventurers also appeared on the scene not much later. From the Iaos—a tribe living at the headwaters of the Maroni and Oiapoque Rivers in Surinam and French Guiana—they learned that there was plentiful gold in the soil of the plains of the upper Essequibo—and, in fact, prospectors still pan gold from the rivers flowing south from Mount Roraima. Today, anthropologist Iris Myers argues that the Iaos were forebears of Roraima’s Garib-speaking Makuxi, pronounced and spelled Makushi in English.2 In 1596, the Indians had also told Lawrence Keymis, a follower of Sir Walter Raleigh, that far up the Essequibo was a lake which the Iaos tribe called Rupununi and the local Caribs called Parima. This lake was “of such bignesse, that they know no difference betweene it & the maine sea. There be infinite numbers of canoes on this lake, and (as I suppose), wrote Keymis, it is no other then [sic] that whereon Manoa standeth.”3 Keymis and his master Raleigh became convinced that Lake Parima of the Iaos was the lake of El Dorado. Raleigh drew this lake on his maps, with the rich cities of Manoa and El Dorado on its banks, in the region between the upper Essequibo and the Branco; and it persisted on all later maps throughout the seventeenth century. Probably, the lake to which the Indians referred was Lake Amucu, the source of the Pirara tributary of the Tacutu. During the annual rainy season, from May to August, this small lake sometimes floods the plain and forms a water route that the natives used, to paddle between the Branco and the Essequibo River systems.

An aged Iaio Indian who met the English explorer Unton Fisher in 1609 said that he was on his way to the coast of Surinam to trade for metal tools with Dutch settlers. Metal knives, axes, and machetes have always been a most powerful attraction to Amazonian tribes otherwise dependent on bone, sharp woods, and occasional stone implements for their cutting tools; and the Dutch became important suppliers. Dutch settlers planted permanent colonies along the Guiana coast, from Surinam to Demerara on the Essequibo River, from the start of the seventeenth century. There they started sugar plantations, but they soon needed slave labor for this profitable but labor-intensive crop. This in turn led to a brisk trade of Dutch-manufactured goods in return for native labor or, worse, for Indian slaves captured from other tribes. Highly prized European goods were then traded from tribe to tribe so that when the Portuguese sent a massive expedition up the Amazon under Pedro Teixeira in 1637—39, they were alarmed to find Dutch trade goods even among the Indians of the Solimões River. The Spanish Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña, who traveled back down the Amazon with Teixeira in 1639, wrote that some Indians living on the Solimões west of the mouth of the Negro

have iron tools such as hatchets, machetes, mattocks and knives. When asked by the interpreters where these came from, they reply that they get them from some white men like ourselves who use the same weapons, swords and arquebuses, and who live on the seacoast. These men differ from us [Spaniards and Portuguese] only in the colour of their hair, which is yellow.4

Father Acuña went on to locate these fair-haired Europeans as living near the mouth of the Dulce (Sweet) or Felipe River, which was either the Orinoco or the Essequibo. He also noted that there was a trade route between the Solimões and middle Rio Negro via the Urubaxi River: this indicated that Dutch goods from Guiana were reaching the Amazon-Solimões by intertribal trade, carried mainly by the vigorous Manao tribe of the middle Negro.

From 1616 onward, a Dutch company from Zeeland operated a small trading post on Kijkoveral (Fort Island) at the junction of the Essequibo and Mazaruni Rivers. For half a century, the fort’s administrator and governor of the Dutch Essequibo colony was a man called Groenewegen, who married a Carib woman and had a great affinity with Carib-speaking tribes. Groenewegen maintained a network of factors called “outrunners “—traders who plunged deep into the interior to trade manufactured goods for Indian slaves and produce. These outrunners presumably went far up the Essequibo, perhaps to the Rupununi plains and the links with the Tacutu, Branco, and Negro Rivers. The goods they traded certainly found their way along this entire riverine route. By the end of the seventeenth century, there was ample evidence of Dutch manufactures deep inside Amazonia. The Portuguese therefore built a fort at the mouth or bar of the Negro, in a futile attempt to prevent this traffic with the hated Dutch from Surinam. The fort was called Barra (“Bar”) and later became the city of Manaus, named in memory of the Manoa tribe.5

Portuguese Slave Raids

The Portuguese were equally desperate for labor for their plantations in Pará and Maranhão at the mouth of the Amazon. Every year, heavily armed flotillas of canoes plied the rivers of Amazonia to barter, lure, or coerce Indians into slave labor. These troops of slavers were known as tropas de resgate, for resgate or “ransom” was the legal euphemism for slaving. Thus, there was a pretense that a prisoner of intertribal warfare might be rescued or “ransomed” from certain death and instead could be enslaved for the rest of his life. Ransom troops made their way up the Rio Negro and “descended” many Indians from the lower river. They traded for slaves with the Manao of the middle Negro; but the strong Manao tribe blocked access to the other tribes of the upper river. Some slavers may therefore have turned north and preyed on the tribes of the Rio Branco.

From about 1710, Diogo Rodrigues Ferreira, commander of Fort Barra (Manaus) needed Indians to build his fort. He accordingly made a series of expeditions up the Rio Negro, during which he claimed to have “explored the entrances and exits of the Rio Branco, a region where no white man had previously penetrated. He sent his adjutant Faustino Ferreira Mendes to penetrate those wildernesses, which he did, bringing back 212 Indians.”6

Portuguese missionaries were also active on the Amazon and its tributaries. Franciscans had been with the first Portugnese when they established Belém at the mouth of the river in 1616. After 1649, Jesuits, Carmelites, and Mercedarians became increasingly active, and they eventually divided the main rivers between their orders. The Rio Negro became the province of the Carmelites, who established a series of populous native villages along its banks—moving up the river in the wake of the slavers.

In 1719, the Carmelite missionary Jerónimo Coelho, who was in charge of the village of Santo Elias dos Tarumãs (later renamed Airão), applied to the king of Portugal for an extraordinary license to trade in his own right. Surprisingly, the king granted permission. Friar Jerónimo then sent his partner, Captain Francisco Ferreira (who may possibly have been the same as Faustino Ferreira Mendes), up the Branco as far as its headwaters. Ferreira brought back turtles, fish, forest produce, and Indians. In 1755, when Ferreira was over 80 years old, he wrote a competent description of the Rio Branco and all its major tributaries, saying that he had made numerous journeys up it during the first third of that century and that the great plains of the upper river were full of Carib-speaking Paraviana and Sapará and Aruak-speaking Wapixana Indians, all of whom were “easy to tame.” In 1775, another settler testified that Ferreira had brought down “an immense quantity of heathen [Indians] to fill our settlements on the Rio Negro, particularly Aracary [later renamed Carvoeiro, opposite the mouth of the Branco]; and those ‘descended’ Indians still live there.7 We cannot know for sure when either Faustino Ferreira Mendes or Francisco Ferreira and Friar Jerónimo Coelho first entered the Rio Branco. But it was probably even before the crushing defeat administered to the Manao by the Portuguese in 1728.

Meanwhile, the Dutch were approaching the Roraima region from the northeast. In 1714, the Dutch West India Company sent an expedition up the Essequibo from its Fort Kijkoveral at the mouth of the river. This venture, led by Commander Pieter van der Heyden, was to search for Lake Parima, still the presumed location of the fabulous cities of Manoa and El Dorado. Heyden took many of the axes, machetes, firearms, powder, and shot that the Indians valued so highly, and some of these goods found their way by intertribal trade to the Manao on the Negro. By 1723, the Manao decided to try to obtain such goods directly from the Dutch. A force of Manao paddled up the Branco, across the Lake Amucu watershed, and down the Essequibo. But, just as they were about to enter Fort Kijkoveral to trade with the Dutch, they became suspicious and fled. Local Caribs, fearful of losing their trading monopoly, incited the Dutch against the Manao: they claimed that this tribe was about to attack Dutch Guiana. A posthouder, Jan Batiste, was therefore sent up the Essequibo in 1724 with a large force of Caribs, intent on capturing as many Manao as possible.8

The Manao fell out with their former Portuguese friends at this same time. The official ransom troop of 1723, instead of engaging in the usual barter with the Manao, tried to seize some members of that tribe; and the Indians responded by attacking the slavers’ camp. The settlers of Pará were eager for a pretext to wage war on the Manao, because the latter prevented them from reaching the many docile Indians of the Uaupés and upper Negro rivers. They therefore wrote to the king of Portugal that the Manao chief Ajuricaba was killing the king’s subjects, possessed guns and fortified stockades, and, worst of all, was an ally of the Dutch who flew a Dutch flag from his canoe! A Jesuit missionary tried to reestablish peaceful relations with Ajuricaba, but an attempt to revive the former trade in captured slaves failed. Official war against the Manao was authorized.

A strong punitive force sailed up the Amazon and Negro in 1728. After a sharp campaign, Ajuricaba and other lesser chiefs were hunted down and captured. Ajuricaba was taken in shackles downriver to Belém do Pará. As he approached the town, the Indian chief and his men “rose up in the canoe in which they were coming in chains, and tried to kill the soldiers.” After a fierce struggle, “with some of his allies bleeding and others dead, Ajuricaba leaped into the sea with another chief and never reappeared dead or alive.”9 His gallant suicide earned Ajuricaba a minor place in the pantheon of Brazilian heroes. But the defeat of the Manao opened the way for slavers to ravage the upper Rio Negro and the Rio Branco.

During the next two decades, three ransom troops brought Indians from the Rio Branco. In 1736, Christovão Ayres Botelho took a large troop upriver, assisted by Indians led by Chief Donaire or Donari. Four years later, Botelho s cousin, Captain Francisco Xavier de Andrade, led what Ribeiro de Sampaio described as “the most complete enterprise ever made to that river. Accompanied by a brilliant force, and by various tribes of Indians with their chiefs, he went up as far as the Uraricoera, established his camp a short distance from the rapids on that river, and then dispatched parties by land who moved along its banks and penetrated the plains.”10 Andrade’s camp was on an island one day’s journey upstream from the eastern tip of Maracá Island, presumably near the Tipurema rapids. This was a logical location, at the boundary between continuous forests and the great open savannas that stretch from the upper Branco to the Rupununi and Essequibo in modern Guyana. One contingent went north toward Tepequem hill, led by the old explorer Captain Francisco Ferreira, “who was very expert about that country, having frequented it for many years.”11 It contained natives led by four chiefs, Manao or Baré, from Barcelos on the Negro. Another force struck southwestward on a challenging expedition. It was led by Domingos Lopes and two other whites, and was guided by Indians under three chiefs from Cumarú [later Poiares], three from Mariuá [Barcelos], and one from Pedreira [Moura], all aldeias on the south bank of the middle Negro. The group went in search of Sapará Indians, first across the open plains and then into the forests. It reached the upper Catrimani, not far from the Aracá headwater of the Demeni, then moved north to the Ucaiai tributary of the upper Uraricoera. This stream “flowed between hills, and they reported that it was of white water and full of turtles and fish; but very disease-ridden, so that they were obliged to turn back.12

Andrade’s expedition of 1740 up the Branco was one part of that year’s official ransom troop, under the overall leadership of a colorful Maranhão planter of Irish descent called Lourenço Belfort. In the following year, another official ransom troop under José Miguel Ayres joined Belfort’s on the Rio Negro. The slavers established permanent camps and raided the surrounding country for some years. At the end of the 1740s, however, a catastrophic measles epidemic destroyed native Indians throughout Amazonia. A careful count of mission records revealed over 2,700 dead in the villages of the Negro and Solimões, and it is thought that 40,000 people died in the region as a whole. A chronicler wrote that when José Miguel Ayres returned to the Rio Negro in 1748, on another ransom expedition, he found mostly the bones of the dead; yet “those who escaped the contagion did not escape captivity.”13 The 1748 ransom troop sent a raiding party up the Branco and Uraricoera that did bring back many Indians, although most quickly died of disease.

Meanwhile, the first European had reached Lake Amucu; Nicholas Horstmann, a German surgeon in the employ of the Dutch. Horstmann had been sent up the Essequibo in late 1739 to investigate the rumors of the elusive El Dorado. In May 1740, he crossed the watershed to Lake Amucu, “a large lake…completely filled with reeds.”14 Its shores contained no glittering cities of El Dorado, but the explorer continued on down the Tacutu and Branco rivers. Poor Dr. Horstmann was ruined by his daring expedition. When he reached Aracary on the Rio Negro after nine months’ travel, “having endured such great dangers of water and wild Indians, with whom … all the rivers are thickly populated, “he was, as he said, robbed and pillaged by a Carmelite friar, the missionary of the said village.15 The Portuguese authorities would not let Horstmann leave Brazil—he knew too much about the geography of the Rio Branco. Five years later in Belém do Pará, he handed his narrative to a passing French savant, Charles-Marie de La Condamine. Horstmann then went to Cametá, where, Ribeiro de Sampaio wrote, “he was still living in 1773 when I went to find him in that town, lamenting the futility of his enterprise.”16

The presence of the Dutch themselves on the upper Branco was revealed in 1750. In that year, a missionary friar, José da Magdalena, from Mariuá on the Negro, sent one Sebastião dos Santos Valente up the Branco to contact and bring back Indians, to restock mission villages denuded by the terrible measles epidemic. Valente reached the territory of the Paravilhana on the Tacutu. His efforts to entice the Paravilhana down to the Negro were, however, thwarted by three white Dutchmen and their five blacks and many native auxiliaries, who were already trading for slaves with these Indians. The Dutch had guns and they bombarded the Portuguese. No one was killed, but this shooting incident made a profound impression on the Portuguese authorities.

Valente and Magdalena reported further that the Dutch came every year and “carry off from the Rio Branco many people, some bound, others ‘ransomed.’ If we do not prevent them returning there, they will soon become masters of the Rio Negro. “18 Alarmed by this awful prospect, in May 1751 the king of Portugal ordered the governor of Maranhão to send missionaries accompanied by troops to win over and settle by gentle persuasion the Indians of Rio Branco. The following year, another order told the governor to build a fort and make a settlement on the excellent plains of that remote region. Nothing was done, although during the next 25 years there were occasional references to the need for a fort on the Rio Branco. The energetic Governor Francisco Xavier Mendonça Furtado tried to develop the Rio Negro in the late 1750s. He made the Indians build an imposing capital called Barcelos at the former mission village, Mariuá. He also “intended to build a redoubt or fort “19 on the upper Rio Branco.

In his 1755 report on the Rio Branco, Francisco Ferreira commented that the Tacutu headwater of the Branco was the route taken by the Dutch. Here, at the northeastern edge of the Branco basin, the flat, almost treeless savannas stretched across to the upper Essequibo. This was the only section of the Amazon’s northern watershed that was not defined by a line of hills and forests. It was an obvious and easy route for travel, well known to the Indians—and it became the only place where Brazil’s northern border was open to dispute.

In the areas of Portuguese penetration, the enslavement of Indians was finally outlawed in royal legislation of June 6, 1755; after that there were no more official ransom troops. In 1760, the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil, and subsequently the other missionary orders lost their influence over native affairs. Indians under Portuguese rule were declared free subjects of the crown. But this proved to be a false promise, for they were placed under the care of rapacious lay directors—soldiers and colonists who proved to be cruder, greedier, and more unscrupulous than the missionaries.

There still was not much European activity on the upper Branco. In 1766, the Portuguese sent Ensign José Agostinho Diniz to explore the area. His investigation of the lower Uraricoera and surrounding plains added nothing to existing knowledge, and he saw no sign of Dutch activity. We do know of a few incursions from Dutch sources. In 1764, Jan Stok penetrated the Rio Branco almost as far as the Portuguese missions on the Rio Negro. Five years later, one Jansse, posthouder of Arinda on the middle Essequibo, went up the Rupununi and erossed to the Maú tributary of the Tacutu. He was guided by the Carib-speaking Makuxi and then traded with the Aruak-speaking Wapixana (who had killed the French trader Louis Marcan in 1753). Jansse investigated a hill full of crystals, and noted that the upper Maú region “consists mostly of high mountains and rocks, bare, but wooded here and there with small shrubs, and great savannas.”20 His report does not appear to have led to further Dutch efforts.

Spanish Incursions

The Treaty of Madrid of 1750 was a diplomatic triumph for the Portuguese. It recognized their spoliation and occupation of most of the Amazon basin, and essentially created the boundaries of modern Brazil. The Portuguese empire thus expanded to occupy almost half the continent of South America. The treaty was also sensible in trying to place boundaries wherever possible along obvious geographical features. For the northern boundary, from the upper Rio Negro to the Dutch colonies in the Guianas, it declared that the dominions of the kings of Spain and Portugal should be separated by the watershed between the Amazon and Orinoco River systems. Thus, if a river flowed south into the Amazon it belonged to Brazil, and if it flowed north it was Spanish. The definition was so simple and unambiguous that this northern frontier has stood the test of time: it has never been disputed in almost two and a half centuries.

In the later part of the Seven Years War, Spain and Portugal were on opposite sides, and the Treaty of Madrid was canceled by the Convention of Pardo of 1761. It was largely reinstated in the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1777. However, during the 16-year lull between the treaties, the Spaniards made their attempt to penetrate and settle in the upper Rio Branco.

The three main missionary orders in Spanish Venezuela had agreed that “the Indians and lands on the frontiers of each territory are for the first missionaries who occupy them,”21 and in 1772 the Capuchins crossed the Pacaraima hills that form the watershed between the Orinoco and Amazon basins, seeking to contact new tribes ripe for conversion to Christianity. As they were at loggerheads with the civil governor of Guayana province, Manuel Centurión, they also wanted to press southward ahead of his troops.

The Spanish advance was at least in part a response to Dutch activities. For several decades, Dutch slavers and traders from the Essequibo had been moving westward, up the Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers, to trade with the Caribs of southern Venezuela, and in 1737 the Spanish governor of Guayana blamed the slave traffic for the “unremitting fury”22 of Carib attacks on the Orinoco missions. More recently, in 1750, the Dutch had instigated revolts by Caribs in four missions by telling the Indians that the missionaries intended to enslave them and prevent their trading with the Dutch. The Caribs enlisted forest tribes uncontacted by Europeans in their attacks on the missions, and by 1757 they were even recruiting allies among the Indians of the Uraricoera headwater of the Rio Branco. It was to counter this threat that the Spaniards explored and tried to settle the Caroní, Caura, and other southern tributaries of the lower Orinoco. An expedition of 1769-71, under Lieutenant Nicolás Martínez, went to the source of the Caura and brought back news of the lands beyond the Pacaraima hills. The first Spaniards actually to enter the upper Rio Branco were Capuchin Franciscan missionaries.

Friars Tomás de Mataró and Benito de la Garriga struggled south on a grueling journey up the countless rapids of the Caroní and Icabarú Rivers. They suffered hunger and thirst during the hill crossing, but finally emerged onto the upper Amajari River in what is now Brazil. The missionaries were escorted by 10 soldiers and 20 Carib mission Indians. The expedition stayed first with some Paravilhana and was amazed to find that this tribe had many guns, acquired from slave trading with the Dutch. After a fortnight’s rest they moved on to the Sapará. But these tribes knew all about Spanish cruelty against tribes in Venezuela, and some had migrated south to escape Spanish rule. They told the friars how they regarded the three European colonial powers: “The Portuguese were here on the pretext of traveling, but, as they took their leave, they seized and carried off many people. When we [Spaniards] go there, we would probably do the same. But the Dutch did not do this: instead, they bought [slaves] from them and gave them clothing and ammunition for hunting.”23 Such suspicions erupted into violence. On May 8, after some weeks of apparent friendship, the two tribes suddenly attacked their unwanted visitors. Both sides were armed with guns and there was a fierce fire fight that left various Indians dead or wounded, one Spanish soldier dead, and one friar with a musket ball in his arm. The expedition fled across the plains, and, after another tough journey, returned to its mission via the Paragua River. The missionaries reported that the region was full of Indians, but that they would be difficult to subdue because of their great affection for the Dutch. They were strong, proud, well armed with guns, and unafraid of Spanish firearms. According to the missionaries, “they sell the Dutch their relatives and other Indians, and there is a heavy traffic in paitos or slaves, whom they sell to those foreigners for firearms, clothing, and metal tools.”24

Spanish military forces moved south hard on the heels of the Capuchin missionaries. Governor Centurión sent a series of expeditions from Angostura (modern Ciudad Bolívar) up the Caroní River, toward the Gran Sabana and the Pacaraima hills. In 1773, a year after the missionaries’ journey, one such military expedition founded two settlements near the headwaters of the Caroní’s main tributary, the Paragua. Later that year, another Spanish force entered Brazil. The black sergeant, Juan Marcos Zapata, crossed the Pacaraima range with 13 soldiers and 12 Indians. Native guides showed him a route over the watershed from the Paragua to the upper Uraricaá, which he managed to descend despite its many rapids. Two days downriver, Zapata founded a small settlement called Santa Rosa after the patron saint of Lima. This was the first fixed European settlement in what is now Roraima. Four months later, Zapata moved down the Uraricaá to the Uraricoera and down it past the northern edge of Maracá Island. He founded a second base, San Juan Bautista, on a creek called Caya-Caya off the north shore of the Santa Rosa channel a few kilometers above the eastern tip of the island. This second camp was on the bio-geographical boundary between the forest and savanna, at the edge of the open plains that stretch eastward toward the Dutch Essequibo and Rupununi territories.

The Spaniards consolidated their incursion. In 1774, a Lieutenant Isidro Rondón took a further 10 soldiers and 15 Indians across the watershed, visited Santa Rosa and San Juan Bautista, and then pushed on down the Uraricoera and up the Tacutu. He was trying to reach Lake Parima (or El Dorado), which was thought to lie near Lake Amucu on the Rupununi plain. However, the well-armed Paravilhana Indians, possibly encouraged by the Dutch, decided to stop this expedition: they attacked Rondón’s force eight days up the Tacutu, killing one man, wounding others, and sending the survivors back to their base on the Uraricoera. The following year, more Spaniards crossed the watershed under Cadet Antonio López. He left San Juan Bautista in September 1775, taking 20 soldiers, 8 colonists or miners, and 30 Indians up the Tacutu and its small eastern tributary the Pirara and over toward the Essequibo.25

Meanwhile, by pure chance, the Portuguese authorities on the Rio Negro came to hear about these settlements and incursions. Gervais Leclerc from Liège, who was in the garrison of the Dutch fort Arinda at the junction of the Rupununi and Essequiho, deserted and made his way southwestward down the Tacutu. Indians told him about the Spanish camp, and he spent ten days there before escaping across country to a Paravilhana village. These Indians guided Leclerc down the big rapids near Caracaraí, and he then drifted alone down the Rio Branco.

Once they had convinced themselves that Leclerc’s story was true, the Portuguese authorities acted with speed and efficiency. Magistrate Ribeiro de Sampaio wrote to the governor of Maranhão and Pará: “We must consider the chance arrival of this stranger as extraordinarily fortunate. Spaniards on the Rio Branco, Sir, are a novelty as thunderous as it is dangerous!”26 Sampaio argued that a fort in that region was now imperative. There should also be a settlement beside the fort, “and the immense plains that surround these rivers should be stocked with cattle. Initially, cattle could be taken from towns on this river [Negro] and the Solimões, where they do not flourish because their only pasture consists of grass found on the streets.”27

The Portuguese started by consolidating their legal claim to that northern region. They based their claim on a history of penetration—for their legal title under the Treaty of Madrid had lapsed when that accord was canceled by the Treaty of Pardo of 1761. Sampaio therefore organized a series of formal interrogations of witnesses, at Barcelos on the Rio Negro during March and April 1775. He took evidence from anyone who had visited the upper Rio Branco or knew about expeditions there. The result was an auto de justificação, a valuable record of all journeys to that northern river—most of them in search of Indian slaves.

At roughly the same time, reinforcements were on their way up the Amazon from Pará. In early October 1775, a force of 58 Portuguese soldiers and officers and over 100 native auxiliaries paddled up the Rio Branco. They were commanded by Captain Felipe Sturm, a German army engineer in the Portuguese service who had already been active on the upper Rio Negro. Sturm’s force reached the upper river at the end of October and learned from Indians the location of San Juan Bautista and the fact that Cadet López de la Fuente was on the Tacutu with another force of Spaniards.

Sturm sent a small contingent up the Tacutu, but he took most of his men up the Uraricoera to tackle San Juan Bautista. Two soldiers who were outstanding woodsmen, Miguel Arcanjo and Duarte Miguel Migueis, were sent to reconnoiter. They reported that the Spaniards had built a fortified log building with inner and outer walls and four or five cannons that could fire stone balls mounted at its windows. Nearby were two new mud-walled buildings for living quarters and a manioc plantation and orchard. The two soldiers returned and had a friendly meeting with the Spanish sergeant, Juan Antonio Cuello, who commanded the small fort. On the other hand, when Captain Sturm arrived next day (November 14th) with all his force, he landed unopposed but refused to exchange courtesies with the Spaniards. Instead, he arrested the 13 men of the garrison, clapped them in irons, and sent them downriver to the Rio Negro.

Returning to the junction of the Uraricoera and Tacutu, Captain Sturm chose the best place he could find on the east bank of the Tacutu and quickly started building a fort. Trenches were dug to throw up an earth rampart. The work was already well advanced by December 4th, when six unarmed and destitute Spaniards suddenly came down the Tacutu. They had deserted from the expedition of López de la Fuente because of his harsh discipline. They were delighted to be rescued by the Portuguese— until they, too, were arrested and sent downriver.

Local Indians appeared to be pleased to see the defeat of the hated Spaniards. Sturm reported that a Paravilhana chief who accompanied him at the capture of San Juan Bautista said how delighted he was to be rid of the Spanish, whom he misguidedly regarded as greater enemies than the Portuguese. This tribe urged Sturm to pursue the contingent still on the Tacutu, whom they had harassed when they tried to strike eastward from the Pirara overland to the Rupununi. The Spaniards hid their stores and sank their canoes; but all were found and removed by the Paravilhana.

After a delay, Sturm sent the skilled soldier Miguel Arcanjo up the Tacutu with 5 Indians. They met the Spanish cadet with his 20 men, in four canoes where the Surumú River joins the Tacutu. Each commander claimed the region for his respective monarch, but Arcanjo persuaded López de la Fuente to descend to the new Portuguese fort, assuring him that he had nothing to fear. When they reached the fort, the Spaniards were surprised to see its walls already well built along the river. Both sides fired salvos of greeting, and Arcanjo told the Spaniards that they should not reload their muskets, out of courtesy to the Portuguese flag flying over the fort. The Portuguese invited the Spaniards to come and rest in their barracks. “The cadet suspected nothing.… The troop was taken to one of the sleeping quarters. A cannon was mounted facing the door and pointing towards it, and all were taken prisoner.”28 They were sent down to the Rio Negro under armed guard in February 1776. Thus, in a mere three months and without firing a shot, Captain Felipe Sturm had rid the Rio Branco of some 40 Spanish invaders. Other contingents of Spaniards, including Sergeant Zapata, perished at the hands of Indians or trying to move across country. In that same period, Sturm also established the long-planned fort, which was to become the symbol of Portuguese control of Roraima.

The Portuguese authorities were relieved to be told that the Spaniards had merely been sent on “the wearisome discovery of the lake of El Dorado.”29 Their prisoners informed them that Governor Centurión had become excited by the same chimera that had lured Berrío and Raleigh two centuries earlier. An Indian had told the gullible governor that El Dorado was “a high hill, bare except for a little grass, its surface covered in every direction with cones and pyramids of gold … so that, when struck by the sun, its brilliance is such that it is impossible to observe without dazzling the eyesight.”30 This report found confirmation in the fact that the Spanish expeditions had moved directly toward Lake Amucu, yet the search for El Dorado was not necessarily the Spaniards’ sole motivation, and in any case the Portuguese were correct to react as if the Spaniards were invading the northern territory. Territorial claims were based on prior exploration; and though the expeditions might have been in pursuit of a fantasy, they had established two fortified settlements that could well have developed into permanent occupation.

Indian Villages

Captain Sturm now set about the long-delayed Portuguese colonization of the region dominated by his small fort. As early as January 2, 1776 he wrote to Joaquim Tinoco Valente, the governor of Rio Negro, requesting supplies for his fort and for “the new establishment of Indians on these rivers; 100 axes, 100 digging irons, 100 sickles, 24 canoe irons, 24 curved adzes, 50 half-hollow gimlets, 1,000 veronica medallions, 4 dozen mirrors, 4 packets of beads, 200 knives, and half an arroba of steel.”31

Six villages of Indians were soon founded on the banks of the rivers of the upper Branco. The largest was Nossa Senhora da Conceição, 90 kilometers up the Uraricoera on its south bank, opposite and upstream of the mouth of the Amajari. Conceição contained 372 Indians, mostly Carib-speaking Paravilhana and related Irimissana Sapará. Another small village, Santo Antonio e Almas, was founded two years later farther down the Uraricoera, on the left bank close to the river’s junction with the Tacutu (on land now belonging to the Indian foundation FUNAT’s São Marcos cattle ranch). São Felipe, with 209 Indians, also largely Paravilhana, was on the south bank of the Tacutu a short distance above the new fort—which had been named Fort São Joaquim. Two other villages were on the west bank of the main Rio Branco, roughly 18 and 35 kilometers downstream of the fort: Santa Barbara with 119 Indians and Santa Izabel (on the site of modern Boa Vista) with 201. These villages were stocked with Aruak-speaking Wapixana and related Aturaiú, and Carib-speaking Sapará, Tapicarí, and Waimara. The sixth village, Nossa Senhora do Carmo, was far away on the lower Rio Branco, on the west bank below the mouth of the Catrimani and almost 400 kilometers south of Fort São Joaquim. Carmo was inhabited by Aruak-speaking tribes.

By 1778, when Magistrate Francisco Xavier Ribeiro de Sampaio visited the region, the villages contained 1,019 people, of whom 302 were men aged between 15 and 60 and 228 were women aged between 14 and 50— the ages at which Indians were considered fit for labor. Sampaio marveled at how quickly the Indians had agreed to enter these villages. “It appears that those Indians were eager to come under our rule. “But he realized that they had done so out of self-interest: “They gave us to understand how much they depended on us [for tools, guns, cloth, etc.]. For, although the Dutch helped them with many things, it was in exchange for slaves; whereas under Portuguese rule they obtained what they desired without such violent means, either from royal munificence or from the fruits of their work. This encouraged them and facilitated the system of civil administration we proposed for them.”32

The Indians had been cruelly duped. To lure them into the new villages, the Portuguese authorities had been generous with the manufactured goods that the Indians so greatly appreciated. But the system “proposed for them” was the iniquitous directorate, a regime imposed throughout Brazilian Amazonia after the expulsion of the Jesuits and the limitations placed on other missionary orders from 1760 on. In this system, Indians were congregated in villages easily accessible on the banks of the main rivers. Each village was under the control of a layman director, usually a soldier. This director was expected to supply Indian laborers to work on government projects such as paddling canoes on expeditions; building forts and other public structures; shipbuilding; making cloth, tiles, or rope in factories; or exploiting the fish and turtles of the Amazon rivers. The director was allowed to take a hefty share of any produce of his Indians, generally the result of expeditions to gather marketable forest fruits, resins, and plants. The directorate system was a recipe for exploitation—directors had no interest in the welfare of their charges; they tended to become petty tyrants intent on extracting the maximum personal gain from the years they spent in the isolated villages. The works of David Sweet and my Amazon Frontier give many examples of the cruelty and inefficiency of the directorate system elsewhere in Amazonia.

The new villages were also intended to convert the Indians to Christianity. The vigorous Jesuit missionaries had been expelled from Brazil in 1760, and there were now far fewer Carmelites and Mercedarians. At first there were only two priests in the area: a Carmelite chaplain in the fort and a parish priest, Father José de Santo Antonio, looking after the villages near the fort. Another parish priest arrived in 1787. These encountered no opposition. Ribeiro de Sampaio commented in 1778: “As for religion, they readily accepted ours… They offered their children for holy baptism with much joy and readiness, and the parents showed no less desire to receive it.”33

One man at this time seemed to be aware of the cultural shock faced by Roraima’s Indians. The army officer, explorer, and future governor, Manuel da Gama Lobo d’Almada, saw the importance of protecting this remote frontier by trying to settle its tribes in villages under Portuguese rule. But he knew that

to descend these uncontacted tribes from the forest, where in their manner they live more comfortably than among us, we must persuade them of the advantages of our friendship. We must feed and clothe them, not fatigue them by demanding more work than they can do, and make sure they are paid promptly and without usury what they are promised and owed, which they have earned with the sweat of their brows and sometimes at risk of their lives.34

Gama Lobo d’Almada realized that forest Indians must have their own plantations of manioc, since they could not make their customary beiju bread, tapioca, tacacá porridge, or fermented drinks from the roasted manioc flour that the authorities sent up from the Rio Negro. “As a result, it is natural that we continually see some dying and others deserting as soon as they start to suffer the lack of the food with which they were reared.”35

Other Portuguese officials were far less sensitive, while the attempt to impose Christianity on the Indians was coupled with clumsy efforts to change their way of life. One commander of Fort São Joaquim noted, for example, that

we try, gently enough, to forbid the abominable customs they have always practiced—such as burning the bodies of the dead in the houses in which they died, or each man having as many wives as he pleases… They are also very astonished to be forbidden to anoint themselves with urucum [red anatto] body paint, and to be forbidden many other perverse and abusive customs that they are very loath to abandon.36

A more serious problem came from the soldiers who lived in the villages as directors. They started to demand virtually unpaid labor from Indian men and women, whom they mistreated and “forced to do too much work, both outside and within their villages.” It became impossible to keep Indians in the new villages by force. “They can flee with ease, for they are in their own territory with the trails open before them.”37

Native Resistance

Trouble broke out in 1780, only four years after the settlements were founded. The Paravilhana chief Cupitá, of São Felipe near Fort São Joaquim, decided to leave with some of his people. Summoned by the fort’s commander, the chief “replied that he had nothing to do in the fort where he was no longer given clothing, and that he would go only where he wished.”38 A bungled attempt to arrest Chief Cupitá caused all the in-habitants of São Felipe to desert and burn their village. Similar arrests of chiefs of the Paravilhana at Conceição on the Uraricoera, of a chief at Santo Antonio e Almas, another at Santa Bárbara, and others at Santa Izabel, led to increasing unrest, even though most chiefs were later released. “The hatred among the Indians of Conceição grew steadily. When they saw the multiple arrests of their chiefs added to their other causes of discontent— which were the frequent labor quotas imposed on them and the violent abuse they suffered from the soldiers—almost all decided to withdraw, which they did.”39

The belligerent commander of the fort decided to send two chiefs of the Tapicari Sapará of Santa Izabel in irons to Barcelos, capital of the captaincy of Rio Negro. But he made the mistake of sending them in a canoe paddled by members of their own tribe. When the canoe stopped near the big rapids at Caracaraí, these paddlers overpowered and killed the five soldiers escorting their chiefs into captivity. The Sapará then awaited another canoe that they knew would be coming down the Rio Branco with a load of turtles, and surprised and killed its two soldiers. “Inspired by anger and revenge, they tortured one soldier, José Ferreira, who had previously been a canoe master and had greatly mistreated them during journeys. They dragged him, half dead, repeating the words ‘Pull! Pull!’ that he used to shout when he lashed them to make them paddle.”40 Fearing harsh reprisals, all the Indians fled from the villages of the upper Rio Branco in October 1781. The only exceptions were 40 people under Chief Surusuraimé at Santo Antonio and the village of Carmo far away on the lower river.

The governor of Pará, João Pereira Caldas, was furious when he heard of this “rebellion.” He asked his superiors in Lisbon for permission to wage war on the tribes of the Branco. “I consider it essential to punish these barbarians: namely to chastise them by fire and sword.”41 But the answer from Lisbon was conciliatory. The secretary of state recommended gentle treatment, because “you will find that as a rule disturbances originate either in acts of violence by our side, or from our demanding of the Indians more labor than they can perform.”42 The aggressive and maladroit commander of Fort São Joaquim was therefore replaced, in July 1782, by the kinder quartermaster, João Bernardo Borralho. And on February 28, 1784, Governor Caldas issued a general pardon for the Rio Branco Indians in the name of the queen of Portugal.

The geopolitics of the region had meanwhile changed again with the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1777, which once more defined the border between Spanish and Portuguese America as the Orinoco-Amazon watershed. Having agreed on these frontiers, the Spanish and Portuguese governments sent boundary commissioners to explore and survey the remote parts of South America in which they lay. Portugal sent a brilliant team of surveyors and naturalists to Amazonia, and the result was a remarkable spate of exploration during the 1780s. In quick succession, some of Brazil’s greatest explorers made their way up all the rivers of what is now the state of Roraima. Captain Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra and Dr. Antonio Pires da Silva Pontes went up the Tacutu and across the plains to the Rupununi in February-March 1781, then up the Uraricoera and Uraricaá and Amajari in March-April. Naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira followed their route up the Tacutu and also investigated the Surumú toward Mount Roraima in April-June 1786, then went up the Uraricoera as far as Maracá Island. A future governor of Rio Negro, the aforementioned Colonel Manoel da Gama Lobo d’Almada, paddled up the Uraricoera and Uraricaá and crossed the Pacaraima range into Venezuela (repeating in reverse the route of the Spanish expeditions of the previous decade) in January-April 1787. He then investigated the Tacutu and across to the Rupununi, as well as up the Surumú and Cotingo to the foothills of Roraima, in June-July 1787. Two other surveyors, Dr. José Simões de Carvalho and Sargento-Mór Euzebio Antonio Ribeiros, ascended the Catrimani and descended the Demeni in August-September 1787.

Much of the credit for these expeditions must go to the Indians who guided them and paddled the canoes up countless rapids. Nevertheless, it was a golden era of exploration, with feats that would be challenging even in the late twentieth century. The outstanding team of Portuguese explorer-surveyors produced fine, accurate maps of the region.

Following the royal pardon of 1784, the Portuguese authorities started to entice tribes back to a new set of villages on the Rio Branco. Of the original settlements of 1776-81, only Carmo on the lower river survived. Quartermaster Borralho used Surusuraimé, the only chief who had remained friendly to the colonists, and the trackers Miguel Arcanjo de Bittencourt and Duarte José Miguel Migueis (or Migueires) to make a series of bold expeditions to contact the fugitive tribes. They went up the Tacutu, Amajari, Mucajaí, and Surumú Rivers and across the savannas and into the forests in pursuit of their quarry. Chief Surusuraimé spent six months with his own Paravilhana people on the upper Tacutu and persuaded them that conditions in the colonial settlements would be greatly improved. Gradually, small groups of Indians returned during 1784 and 1785 : Chief Cupitá of the Paravilhana; Chief Ananay of the Makuxi (a tribe that had scarcely been represented in the earlier villages); Chief Cassamari of the Wapixana; and Chiefs Oruaimé, Miquiapa, and Pixau of the Paravilhana formerly at Conceição on the Uraricoera all decided to test the sincerity of the royal pardon.

By the end of 1784, three new villages had been created for the returning Indians; Santa María on the left bank of the Rio Branco, below the main rapids now called Bem-querer, close to modern Vista Alegre; another São Felipe on the west bank just below the rapids, close to modern Caracaraí; and another aldeia called Nossa Senhora da Conceição on the east bank in the midst of the rapids. The siting of the new villages was deliberate. It was intended that their inhabitants should help boats navigate the rapids and also that they should cut the plentiful timber in that area. There were also strategic reasons for locating the aldeias far down the Rio Branco. It was considered important that they should be between Fort São Joaquim and the Rio Negro and far from the Indians’ former homes beyond the fort.

Expeditions to contact Indians continued every year, with varying degrees of success. Most Sapará refused to return to the village regime, but a few Carib-speaking Makuxi (a tribe that had been particularly active in slave raiding for the Dutch) agreed to settle in the lee of the fort. By 1789, there were 1,051 Indians settled in six villages, of whom the majority were Aruak-speaking Wapixana or Carib-speaking Paravilhana. Gama Lobo d’Almada in 1787 recorded the following populations: 215 people in 16 huts in Carmo, the only one of the original villages of 1776 to survive the revolt of 1781, largely because it lay far downstream on the lower Branco; 165 in 12 huts in Santa María, mostly Wapixana with some Paravilhana formerly in Santa Bárbara; 244 in 19 huts at São Felipe, mostly Wapixana; 286 in 22 huts at Conceição, mostly Paravilhana; 21 Indians in a new village called São Martinho, on the site of modern Boa Vista; and 23 Makuxi beside Fort São Joaquim. The new Conceição also contained 13 Waika. At that time, the name Waika was applied to a number of different tribes, but it later came to refer only to the Yanomami and related Xiriana of the upper Amajari. Those may thus have been the only Yanomami (now the largest surviving forest tribe in South America) to accept colonial rule.

The military presence controlling these villages was very small: only 2 officers and 32 men in Fort São Joaquim and 2 junior officers and 6 soldiers in the villages as directors. To this total of 42 military should be added two soldiers’ wives, a priest at Carmo, and a missionary at São Felipe.

Things started to go wrong again. In mid-1787, the villages of São Felipe and Conceição were struck by disease, possibly tuberculosis, which caused “sudden deaths from chest pains and bleeding from the mouth.”43 In November 1787, the priest at São Felipe begged the commander of the fort for emergency supplies of manioc flour because the village’s crop had been destroyed by plant lice. The Indians had eaten all the manioc from their own and the communal plantations, and many had gone in desperation to scrounge for food on the plains. There was no manioc to plant for the coming harvest. The missionary exclaimed: “It brings tears to my eyes to see so much misery and deprivation, and to be unable to remedy it.”44 By the end of the year, the director of Conceição noticed his Indians removing nails from canoes to make metal arrow heads. He asked the fort commander for guns and ammunition, because “Your Honor knows well that I am in the midst of enemies.”45

Finally, in 1790, the Makuxi living opposite the fort “rebelled.” Indians working in a fish-salting factory “went on strike” and threatened their overseer with knives; a chief fired a musket at Portuguese soldiers; and horses were stolen from the fort’s new stud. The Makuxi fled. An expedition sent in pursuit recaptured most of the fugitives, but two were killed in a skirmish. Four soldiers were also killed during these disturbances of 1790.

Most Indians in the new villages obeyed the colonial administrators and did not desert. Despite this, the fort commander Lieutenant Sá Sarmento and Gama Lobo d’Almada, who was now governor of Rio Negro, decided on a drastic solution. The once sympathetic Lobo d’Almada now agreed with the hard liners. He ordered that the inhabitants of all the villages other than Carmo be sent into remote exile. Their people were uprooted and banished to new locations thousands of kilometers from their homelands. One village was relocated at Arvellos (Coari) on the Solimões, another at Borba on the Madeira, and the rest at Vila Nova da Rainha (modern Parintins) on the Amazon. The governor wrote to the directors of places receiving these deportees that, had they remained on the Rio Branco, “they were all ready to commit their habitual cruelties.” He trusted, however, that they would make good settlers now that they had lost all hope of regaining their homes. “Therefore treat them with pity and do them all possible good, to please them and keep them contented. The cruelties they have committed should inspire in you only caution and careful surveillance of these people; but do not hate them.”46 There was also a proposal to restock the deserted Branco villages with Indians from the Madeira River who had committed no “crime” in colonial terms.

We have scant information about Indian settlements during the 1790s, since there were no longer any literate explorers or officers reporting from the Rio Branco. There was evidently some repopulation of one or two villages. But when Portuguese officer Francisco Rodrigues Barata traveled through the region in 1798, he found only 30 people in Santa Maria and an equally small number in Carmo village on the lower river. São Felipe had only 10 to 15 people, and the new Conceição had vanished. Barata concluded that the banishment of many former inhabitants to remote parts of Amazonia had caused others to flee and brought about the final collapse of the villages.

It is possible that the traditional hostility between Caribs and Aruaks may have heightened the tensions in the Rio Branco villages. Aruak-speaking Wapixana and Aturaiú, who had been bested in conflicts with Caribs moving south away from the Spaniards, seem to have sought the protection of Portuguese rule most readily. Fighting between Caribs and Aruaks continued. There was a report of a massacre of Wapixana by Caribs on the upper Tacutu in 1786; and in 1798, Rodrigues Barata met a Wapixana war party attacking Makuxi on the Surumú.

Later in 1798 there was a third and final rebellion. Carib-speaking Paravilhana and Aruak Wapixana combined in an attempt to end colonial rule: they killed their director, a squadron of soldiers, and some settlers. The official reaction was very violent. A punitive expedition was sent from Belém do Pará under Lieutenant Leonardo José Ferreira. The Indians tried to organize a resistance, but were slaughtered on the west bank of the Rio Branco above Lake Arauari, at a place that became known as Praia do Sangue (Beach of Blood, now called Praia da Desgraça or Beach of Tragedy). Seventy Indians fled from the massacre, but were captured and deported to join earlier exiles at Borba and Parintins.

Depopulation of the Rio Branco was now extreme. The village of Santa Maria below the rapids was reconstituted with a few of its Indians at a place called Santa Maria Nova, on high ground less than one hundred kilometers from the river’s mouth. By 1822, André Fernandes de Souza wrote that the only villages on the river were Carmo and Santa Maria Nova; and in 1841 the latter’s survivors were incorporated as laborers on a fazenda called Arari. By 1860, French traveler A. de Belmar wrote that many Indians had abandoned the region and had moved into British Guiana. The image of Our Lady of Carmo was taken upriver to be the patron saint of the village that became Boa Vista, and by 1885 Henri Coudreau could find no vestige of Santa Maria. Dorn Pedro Eggerath, a later bishop of Rio Branco, blamed the Praia do Sangue repression for “the absolute decadence of the mission villages, which are now no more than names.”47

The Introduction of Cattle

When the first European explorers saw the savannas of the upper Rio Branco, they immediately appreciated their potential for raising cattle. There were many references to these fine grasslands; but nothing was done until the arrival in the region in 1787 of Colonel Manoel da Gama Lobo d’Almada, the future governor of the Captaincy of Rio Negro. He praised the Rio Branco: “Those fertile plains are covered in excellent pastures for cattle, studded with clumps of bush that would afford shade for the animals during the fiercest heat, irrigated by creeks which render them fertile, and with innumerable lakes from which is drawn a quantity of mountain salt.”48

The far-sighted Gama Lobo d’Almada put his vision into reality by taking the first European cattle up to the northernmost extremity of Brazil. He found that when the Spanish boundary commissioners went home after spending some years negotiating with their Portuguese opposite numbers at Ega (Tefé) on the Solimões, they left behind them a few cows and bulls. These were shipped up the Negro and Branco and became the progenitors of the future herds of the upper Rio Branco. Gama Lobo d’Almada probably released these animals on the west bank of the Rio Branco, opposite Fort São Joaquim.

Six years later, in 1793, the fort’s commander Nicolau de Sá Sarmento founded a ranch for himself in the triangle of land between the lower Uraricoera and Tacutu Rivers, and called it São Marcos. A rich settler from the Rio Negro, Captain José Antonio Évora, founded a ranch called São José on the east bank of the Branco on land behind the fort. And the land opposite became known as Fazenda São Bento or do Rei (king’s ranch). Roraima’s first three cattle ranches thus lay on the three sides of the Y formed by the Uraricoera and Tacutu joining to become the Branco. Canon André Fernandes de Sousa explained that “the three fazendas had their lands close to one another, but were unconnected so that their cattle should not mix.”49 The lands of each stretched away from the river banks for hundreds of kilometers toward the distant frontiers of Brazil.

By 1798, army officer Francisco Rodrigues Barata reported that the king’s fazenda had some three hundred head of cattle and the two private ranches each had as many more: a total of nine hundred head. Canon Fernandes de Souza said that the herds increased marvelously.

There were no better cattle in the state [of Pará] than those of the Rio Branco in fecundity, in bulk and in nutriment, which is due to good pasture permeated with saltpetre. The king’s farm made good progress in the time of its originator Brigadier [Gama Lobo d’Almada]; but after his death his successors.… abandoned it. The cattle have been divided into herds and dispersed over the vast plains, so that it is impossible to count them. But it is said that thus, without a shepherd and exposed to jaguars, they have multiplied so greatly that the Dutch come and make salt meat of them, as is common knowledge. … It was always a day of pleasure for us all when, every three months, Évora’s canoe arrived at the landing-stages of Barcelos laden with salt meat, hides, butter, and cheese, all at moderate price, which helped everybody.50

After the deaths of Captain Sá Sarmento and Captain Évora, the state claimed that they owed it money and therefore took over their cattle ranches. São Marcos, São José, and São Bento came to be known as fazendas nacionaes, and were administered by a succession of administrators. Some of these officials were competent, but most were idle, self-interested, or corrupt. As a result, the three ranches developed very slowly, although their herds of cattle multiplied, more by neglect than good husbandry, on the broad grasslands of Roraima. For the rest, after the total failure of efforts to settle the region’s Indians into directorate villages, the only evidence of Portuguese and subsequently Brazilian control of this northernmost territory was Fort São Joaquim and its small isolated garrison. Parts of the fort’s parallelogram of earthworks were faced in stone, and it was defended by some cannon and mortars—some of which had been taken from the Spanish settlements of the 1770s. As of 1838, the explorer Robert Schomburgk wrote that “it is built of red sandstone and has fourteen embrasures, mounted with eight nine-pounders, in tolerable condition. It is garrisoned with a commandant and ten privates of the provincial militia. A small chapel and five houses constitute the village; and a priest visits the fortress every two or three years, to administer to the spiritual wants of the inhabitants.”51

A Final Assessment

The Portuguese acquired Roraima by a combination of luck and enterprise. They were lucky that a handful of adventurers had gone up the Rio Branco on nefarious slaving expeditions in the first half of the eighteenth century. This was just enough for them to be awarded the entire Rio Branco in the Treaty of Madrid of 1750. They were also lucky that the Dutch did not move into the upper Rio Branco more aggressively. For the savannas of the upper river extend unbroken toward those of the Rupununi-Essequibo, and (as noted at the outset) they are closer to the Atlantic coast than to the main Amazon River.

The Portuguese authorities did react decisively to eliminate the Spanish incursion from Venezuela in the 1770s. They did well to send the energetic Felipe Sturm, who captured the Spaniards so swiftly and bloodlessly, and who founded Fort São Joaquim. They also did well to send some brilliant explorer-surveyors during the 1780s. These cartographers’ maps consolidated Portuguese rule just as effectively as did the tiny fort and its token garrison. One of them, Manoel da Gama Lobo d’Almada, also introduced the first cattle to the grasslands of the Rio Branco.

Portuguese Indian policy was as disastrous a failure here as elsewhere in Brazil. By the close of the eighteenth century, all attempts at settlement or missionary activity in Roraima had long since been abandoned. The plains Indians were alienated, diminished from disease, and often exiled to distant parts of Amazonia. Thus, by the end of the colonial period, the Portuguese presence in this northernmost part of Brazil consisted only of a small fort and a few cattle. But that was enough to establish their undisputed claim to the vast area of the Rio Branco basin—what is now the newly designated state of Roraima.

*

This paper forms part of the Maracá Rainforest Project, organized by the Royal Geographical Society of London, at the invitation of the Brazilian Environment Secretariat (SEMA), in conjunction with the Amazon Research Institute (INPA). The research was done on a personal grant from the British Academy.

1

See Iris Myers, “The Makushi of British Guiana—A Study in Culture-contact,” Timehri. The Journal of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana, 26 (Nov. 1944), 16-38; Robert Harcourt, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana (1613), C. A. Harris, ed., Hakluyt Society 2d Series, 40 (London, 1928), 80, 86-87, 95 and the report by Unton Fisher, ibid., 177-183; Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautifull Empire of Guiana, with Manoa (which the Spaniards Call El Dorado) (1596), reprinted in The Principan Navigations of the English Nation, Richard Hakluyt, ed. (London, 1859), V. T. Harlow, series ed., 8 vols. (London, 1962), VII, 272-350; and Joannes de Laet, L’histoire du Nouveau Monde: Ou, description des Indes Occidentales (Leiden, 1640), 580.

2

Laurence Keymis, “A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana” (1596), in The Principall Navigations, VII, 368; John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado (London, 1978), 178.

3

Antonio de Berrío to king of Spain, Santafé de Bogotá, May 24, 1585, in Don Antonio de Berrío, gobernador del Dorado, Pablo Ojer, ed. (Caracas, 1960), 52.

4

Cristóbal de Acuña, S.J., Nuevo descubrimiento del gran río de las Amazonas (Madrid, 1641), chap. 64; Clements Markham, trans., Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, Hakluyt Society, 1st Series, 24 (London, 1859), 108-109; David Sweet, “A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Amazon Valley, 1640-1750,” 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1974), I, 252; Rev. George Edmundson, “The Dutch on the Amazon and Negro in the 17th Centnry,” English Historical Review, 19 (1904), 2-3, 11—14; Nádia Farage, “As muralhas dos sertões: Os povos indígenas no Rio Branco e a colonização” (Master’s diss., Universidade Federal de Campinas, São Paulo, 1986), 125-130.

5

The first fort at what is now the city of Manaus was started in 1694. In the following year, a canoe captain, Antonio de Miranda e Noronha, found good-quality Dutch trade goods in the huts of nearby Indians, who told him that they had obtained them from the headwaters of their river. Miranda e Noronha to Gov. Carvalho, Belém, May 25, 1695, in Limites entre le Brésil et la Guyane Anglaise: Annexes du premier mémoire du Brésil, Joaquim Nabuco, ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1903), I, 9-10. Seven years later, the Carmelite provincial Friar Vitoriano de Pimentel also found Dutch goods among Indians of the Rio Negro, but he reported that “the men of Surinam have not yet had direct contact with the Indians of the Rio Negro, more because of the great distance involved than from fear of the fort.” Pimentel, “Relação… das missões do Rio Negro e Solimões” (Lisbon, 1705), in Manuel Maria Wermers, O. Carm., “O estabelecimento das missões carmelitanas no Rio Negro e nos Solimões (1695-1711),” Actas: V Colóquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros, 2 vols. (Coimbra, 1963), II, 545; Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” I, 270; Farage, “As muralhas,” 122.

6

Bernardo Perreira de Berredo, governor of Pará, to the king, Belém, 1719, in Nabuco, Limites entre le Brésil et la Guyane Anglaise, premier mémoire du Brésil: Le droit du Brésil (Rio de Janeiro, 1903), 141.

7

Capt. Francisco Xavier Mendes de Moraes testifying before Ouvidor Francisco Xavier Ribeiro de Sampaio, Barcelos, Apr. 19, 1775, in Limites: Annexes, I, 105. Ribeiro de Sampaio collated this and other interviews of the Auto de justificação of 1775 into his “Relação geographico-historica do Rio Branco” (1778), trans, in British Foreign Office (hereafter BFO), Question de la frontière entre La Guyane Britannique et le Brésil: Annexe, 4 vols, (London, 1903), I, 127-133, which mentioned the early explorations of Capt. Ferreira. Ferreira’s “Noticia do Rio Branco” was included in a dispatch by Gov. Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado to his brother, the future Marquis of Pombal, Mariuá (later called Barcelos), Apr. 19, 1755, in Limites: Annexes, I, 77—78.

The remarkable trading empire of the Carmelite Friar Jerónimo Coelho is described in Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” II, 656-658. Also, Edmundson, “The Dutch on the Amazon,” n. 21. The Carmelite historian André Prat says that Friar Jerónimo established a mission called Santa Maria far up the Branco near Caracaral in 1725, but he gave no reference for this claim, and it is mentioned by no one else. Prat, Notas históricas sobre as missões carmelitanas no extremo norte do Brasil, séculos XVII e XVIII, 2 vols. (Recife, 1941-42), II, 12, 53. A report about the Negro River system, written in 1764 probably by Father José Monteiro de Noronha, said that Friar Jerónimo Coelho “often traded with the Dutch,” but there is no mention of his having gone up the Branco in person. Anon., “Synopse de algumas noticias geographicas para o conhecimento dos rios por cuja navegação se podem communicar os dominios da Coroa portugueza no Rio Negro com os de Hespanha…in Limites: Annexes, I, 90.

8

Storm van’s Gravesande’s dispatch to West India Company, Feb. 22, 1763, in Storm vans Gravesande: The Rise of British Guiana, C. A. Harris and J. A. J. de Villiers, eds., 2 vols., Hakluyt Society, 2d Series, vols. 26-27 (London, 1911), II, 414-415, 464; Minutes of the Court of Policy, Essequibo, in Rijksarchief The Hague, Jan. 5, Apr. 10, Sept. 20, Oct. 4, and Oct. 19, 1723, all in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 20. See also Limites: Annexes, III, 7—9, 113-114; Artur Cézar Ferreira Reis, História do Amazonas (Manaus, 1931), 86-87; Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” II, 532-533; and Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (London, 1978), 640.

There has been debate on whether the Magnouws or Manoas mentioned by the Dutch as having been on the Essequibo were the same as the powerful Manoa of the middle Rio Negro. Richard Baldwin assumed that these references were to a branch of the Makuxi called Monoiko, and this group certainly lived far closer to the Essequibo than the Manao of the Negro. (Baldwin, “Rupununi District Record Book. Section II, Historical,” The Daily Argosy, Georgetown, Feb. 18, 1944.) However, Storm wrote that the Manoas or Magnouws were dissatisfied with the treatment they received from the Portuguese of Brazil—which would indicate that they were from the Rio Negro, since there were at that time no Portuguese among the Makuxi. Myers presents both arguments fully, but she favors the origin on the Rio Negro. Myers, “The Makushi,” 4-5.

9

João da Maia da Gama to the king, Belém, Sept. 26, 1727, in Limites: Annexes, I, 37.

10

Ribeiro de Sampaio, “Relação geographico-historica do Rio Branco da América Portugueza” (1778), in Limites: Annexes, II, 10 or in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 129.

11

Testimony of Capt. Francisco Xavier de Andrade, Barcelos, Apr. 20. 1775, in Limites: Annexes, I, 108. The northern raiding party included the slaver Manoel Dutra from Cametá on the lower Tocantins and a number of Indian chiefs from the middle Rio Negro, some of whom also testified.

12

Ibid., Capt. Andrade’s testimony. 108-109. The same information was given by Chief Theodosio José dos Santos from Barcelos, who was also in this contingent. The raiders were probably on the upper Mucajaí rather than the Catrimani. However, had they got as far as the source of the Catrimani, they would indeed have been near the upper Demeni— although not to its tributary the Aracá which is farther west. They clearly had expert Indian guides who knew the geography of these rivers well.

Lourenço Belfort was one of the most energetic planters of Maranhão. He introduced Carolina rice successfully to that province, and was eager to procure slaves for his vast plantations along the Mearim. It was said that he brought down a thousand Indian slaves from the Rio Branco region alone. Artur Cézar Ferreira Reis, A política de Portugal no vale amazónico (Belém. 1940), 20; Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” II, 599-601, 620-621.

13

Constantino Chermont, quoted by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Viagem philosophica ao Rio Negro (1783-87) (Belém, 1983). 77. There were many references to the devastating smallpox epidemics. José Gonçalves da Fonseca wrote in 1749 that recent epidemics of smallpox and measles had wiped out two-thirds of the Indians near the mouth of the Madeira, and that those newly descended from the Branco were particularly vulnerable. (“Primeira exploração dos rios Madeira e Guaporé em 1749,” in Memorias para a historia do extincto Estado do Maranhão, Cândido Mendes de Almeida, ed., 2 vols. [Rio de Janeiro, 1860], II, 292). See also Ribeiro de Sampaio, “Auto de justificação,” in Limites: Annexes, I, 103, 109; José de Moraes, S.J., “Historia da Companhia de Jesus na extincta Provincia do Maranhão e Pará” (1758), ibid., 1; João Lúcio de Azevedo, Os Jesuítas no Gráo-Pará; suas missões e a colonização (Belém, 1901), 190-191; Sweet, “A Rich Realm,” II, 737; Farage, “As muralhas,” 115.

14

Nicolas Horstmann, “Jornada q. fiz ao sonhado Lago de Parima o do Oro no anno de 1739, in Storm vans Gravesande, I, 170 and Charles-Marie de la Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale (Paris, 1745).

15

Horstmann, “Jornada,” 171.

16

Ribeiro de Sampaio, Diario da viagem que em visita … do Rio Negro fez … no anno de 1774 e 1775 (Lisbon, 1825), 101.

17

Ferreira, “Noticia do Rio Branco,” in dispatch of Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, Mariuá, Mar. 29, 1755, in Limites: Annexes, I, 78.

18

Friar José da Magdalena to Francisco Pedro de Mendonça Gurjão, Mariuá, June 25, 1750., Limites: Annexes, I, 55; royal order to Mendonça Gurjão, gov. of Maranhão and Pará, Lisbon, May 11, 1751; royal order to the next gov., Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, Lisbon, Nov, 14, 1752; and decision of Conselho Ultramarino to same, Lisbon, Apr. 16, 1753, all ibid.

19

Anon., “Synopse de algumas noticias,” in Limites: Annexes, I, 92. See also Mendonça Furtado to his brother Conde de Oeiras (later Marquis of Pombal), Mariuá, July 6, 1755, ibid., 81—83, about the need for a fort on the Rio Branco. The Manao of the Rio Negro rebeled in 1757, capturing several missions and even attacking the capital Barcelos. In 1762, one of their chiefs, Capt.-Maj. Estevão, fled up the Rio Branco with many of his men, hoping to reach the Dutch possessions. But these Manao were attacked and killed or captured by the Paravilhana, who had Dutch firearms. Gov. Pereira da Costa cited this incident as another reason for building a fort on the upper Rio Branco, in his dispatch to the gov. of Grão Pará, Barcelos, Sept. 2, 1762, in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 69.

20

Storm van’s Gravesande dispatch of June 3, 1769, in Storm van’s Gravesande, II, 619. On Ensign Diniz’s expedition of 1766, see Ribeiro de Sampaio to Gov, João Pereira Galdas, Barcelos, Mar. 27, 1775, in Limites: Annexes, I, 97. Diniz went up the Uraricoera to its first set of rapids, then turned east up the Tacutu to the Maú. The arrival of this Portuguese expedition was also mentioned in a Dutch document of Nov. 19, 1766, in Limites, premier mémoire du Brésil: Droit, 143. On Jan Stok’s journey, see van’s Gravesande, “A Brief Treatise Goncerning the Honorable Company’s Trading-Places” (Aug. 1764), ibid., II, 465. On Louis Marcan, see van’s Gravesande’s dispatch of June 3, 1769, ibid., II, 617.

21

Fray Félix de Tárragas testimony, in Por la Venezuela indígena de ayer y de hoy: Relatos de misioneros capuchinos en viaje por la Venezuela indígena durante los siglos XVII, XVIII, y XX, Cesáreo de Armellada, O.F.M. Cap., ed. (Caracas, 1960), 117. The agreement between the missionary orders was the concordia of Mar. 20, 1734.

22

Carlos Sncre, gov. of Guayana, report of Aug. 15, 1737, in Documents and Correspondence in British Guiana and Venezuela, 2 vols. (London, 1896), I, 68.

23

Report by Fr. Benito de la Garriga, in Armellada. Por la Venezuela, 131.

24

Ibid., 138. Nine years later, the Erimissana group of Sapará told two Portuguese explorers about the skirmish on the Amajari River. They said that it was caused by “the imprudence of those missionaries, who had come to penetrate those dominions.” Capt. Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra and Dr. Antonio Pires da Silva Pontes to Gov. Caldas, Barcelos, June 19, 1781, in Limites: Annexes, I, 158. The Portuguese explorers erected a cross at the site of the massacre. The two Capuchin friars had left their base on the Caroní River in Venezuela on Feb. 18, 1772, crossed the Pacaraima hills, and entered what is now Brazil on about Apr. 15, left Brazil again five weeks later on about May 23. and regained their mission on Aug. 5.

25

The best accounts of the Spanish expeditions of 1773-75 were: a report of interrogations of the captured Spaniards that Gov. Caldas forwarded to Lisbon with his dispatch, Belém, Feb. 28, 1776, in Limites: Annexes, I, 135-136; Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, “Tratado historico do Rio Branco” (1786) in Limites: Annexes du second mémoire du Brésil, 3; Manoel da Gama Lobo d’Almada, Descripção relativa ao Rio Branco e seu territorio, reprinted in Limites: Annexes, I, 258; Don Miguel de Centurión to the gov. of Rio Negro, Guayana, July 27, 1776, ibid., 139-140.

26

Ribeiro de Sampaio to Gov. Caldas. Barcelos, Mar. 27, 1775. in Limites: Annexes, I, 96.

27

Ibid., 98.

28

Rodrigues Ferreira, “Tratado historico,” 72-73. Capt. Sturm went down to the Rio Negro, seriously ill. But he returned to the upper Rio Branco in 1776 to supervise the building of the fort and settlement of the Indians, and died there in Sept. 1778. The black sergeant, Juan Marcos Zapata, who founded the Spanish outposts on the Uraricaá and Uraricoera, went overland from the Maracá channel (south of Maracá Island) to the Mucajaí with 14 Spaniards, intent on capturing Wayumara Indians, Instead, this tribe managed to kill Zapata and his men at the first set of rapids on the Mucajaí. Rodrigues Ferreira, “Jornal do Rio Branco,” in Limites: Annexes du second mémoire du Brésil, III, Documents faisant suite au tome second du second mémoire, 49. The Spanish authorities in Venezuela were furious at the capture of their troops. They sent an envoy to Barcelos in 1777, with letters insisting that the Uraricoera and Tacutu Rivers lay within Spanish territory and demanding the release of all Spaniards with their weapons. The Portuguese replied that this was incorrect, and it was many months before the Spaniards were returned to Venezuela.

29

Francisco Xavier Ribeiro de Sampaio, “Diario da viagem que em visita, e correição das povoações da Capitania de S. José do Rio Negro fez … no anno de 1774 e 1775,” in Limites: Annexes, II, 1-94.

30

Don Manuel de Centurión, instructions for the expedition to El Dorado and Lake Parima, Guayana, Dec. 28, 1771, in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 90.

31

Capt. Sturm to Joaquim Tinoco Valente, mouth of the Tacutu River, Jan. 2, 1776, in Limites: Annexes, I, 127.

32

Ribeiro de Sampaio, “Relação geographico-historica,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geographica do Brasil, 13 (1850), 250-251, 272. Locations of the extinct native villages were given in Rodrigues Ferreira, “Jornal do Rio Branco,” 26-30 and in João Bernardes Borralho, Informação particular do Rio Branco” (1783), in Limites: Annexes du second mémoire, 43-57. On the horrors of the directorate system, see Hemming, Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (London, 1987), 4-17, 40-61.

33

Ibid., 251.

34

Gama Lobo d’Almada, “Descripção relativa,” 266.

35

Ibid., 267.

36

Lt. Pedro Manoel Parente, commander of Fort São Joaquim, to Gov. Caldas, Aug. 20, 1781, in Limites: Annexes, I, 207.

37

Ibid.

38

Rodrigues Ferreira, “Tratado histórico,” 78.

39

Ibid., 82. Also, Almeida Serra and Silva Pontes to Gov. Caldas, Barcelos, June 19, 1781, in Limites: Annexes, I, 165.

40

Ibid., 82-83. Also, Gama Lobo d’Almada, “Descripção relativa,” 266.

41

Caldas, now chief boundary commissioner, to Secy, of State Martinho de Mello e Castro, Barcelos, Jan. 19, 1782, in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 142—143.

42

Martinho de Mello e Castro to Gov.-Gen. of Pará, Lisbon, July 7, 1783, ibid., I, 144.

43

Joáo Bernardes Borralho to Caldas, Fort São Joaquim, Nov. 28, 1787, in Farage, “As muralhas,” 296.

44

Friar José de Santo Antonio to Bernardes Borralho, São Felipe do Rio Branco, Nov. 18, 1787, in Dorval de Magalhães, Roraima. Informações históricas (Rio de Janeiro, 1986), 151.

45

Manoel Vicente Ferreira to Bernardes Borralho, N. S. da Conceição, Dec. 3, 1787, ibid., 297. Details of the campaigns to lure the Indians back to the villages emerge from a mass of correspondence, largely from the commander of Fort São Joaquim, Bernardes Borralho, published in Limites: Annexes, I, 210-227 in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 145-168. They are summarized in Rodrigues Ferreira, “Tratado historico,” 84-94. The Waika tribe mentioned here lived in the area between the upper Amajari and Parimé Rivers. It may thus not have been Yanomami, although that Indian nation was known as Waika until recently. The Pemon (also known as Taurepáng or Arekuna) of the Venezuelan Gran Sabana use “Waika” as a nickname for the Akawaio and Patamona. However, I think that the Waika mentioned here were probably Shiriana and thus close relatives of the Yanomami.

46

Gama Lobo d’Almada to directors of places receiving deported Branco Indians, Barcelos, May 14, 1790, in Limites: Annexes, I, 227 and BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 200—202. Francisco José Rodrigues Barata, “Da viagem que fez à colonia de Surinam o Porto Bandeira José Rodrigues Barata” (1798), Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográphico Brasileiro, 8 (1846), 1-53; Lourenço da Silva Araujo e Amazonas, Diccionario topographico, historico, descriptivo da comarca do Alto-Amazonas (Recife, 1852), 258-259.

47

Pedro Eggerath, O vale e os índios do Rio Branco (Rio de Janeiro, 1924), 10; André Fernandes de Souza, “Noticias geographicas da Capitanía do Rio Negro,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geographico Brasileiro, 10 (1848), 453; A. de Belmar, Voyage aux provinces brésiliennes du Pará et des Amazones en 1860 (London, 1861), 101; Antônio Teixeira Guerra, Estudo geográfico do Território do Rio Branco (Rio de Janeiro, 1957), 128; Antônio Ferreira de Souza, Noções da geografia e história de Roraima (Manaus, 1969), 91; Rodrigues Barata, Diario da viagem, 16-20; Farage, “As muralhas,” 340-341. On the hostility between Caribs and Aruaks, see Miguel Arcanjo Bitencourt to João Bernardes Borralho, Apr. 26, 1786, in BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 172 or IV, 14; Rodrigues Barata, Diario, 27; and Emanuele Amodio and Vicente Pira, “História dos povos indígenas de Roraima—Makuxi—Ingaricó— Taurepáng e Wapixana,” Boletim: Arquivo Indigenista da Diocese de Roraima, 10 (Boa Vista, Mar. 1985), 28-29.

48

Gama Lobo d’Almada, “Descripção,” in Limites: Annexes, I, 261 or BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 188. Ribeiro de Sampaio summarized earlier references to Roraima’s potential for cattle in his Diario da viagem, 99; his letter to Gov. Caldas, Barcelos, Mar. 27, 1775, in Limites: Annexes, I, 98; and particularly in his “Relação geographico-historica,” 269-270, BFO, Question de la frontière, I, 133. When explorers Almeida Serra and Silva Pontes were in the upper Rio Branco in 1781, they commented that no cattle had yet reached those lush plains: “Report to Governor João Pereira Caldas,” Barcelos, June 19, 1781, in Limites: Annexes, I, 164. Quartermaster Bernardes Borralho reported the same about Rio Branco in 1783, in Limites. Second mémoire du Brésil: Annexes, III, 26, as did Rodrigues Ferreira, “Diario da viagem philosophica pela Capitanía de São-José do Rio Negro” (1786), of which there is a nice modern edition published in Belém in 1987.

49

Andre remandes de Sousa, Noticias geographicas da Capitanía do Rio Negro no grande Rio Amazonas” (c. 1820), Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geographico Brasileiro, 10 (1848), 453; Henri Coudreau, Voyage au Rio Branco aux montagnes de la lune, au haut Trombetta (Paris, 1884-85), 24. Rodrigues Barata traveled across the region in 1798, but doubted whether cattle could flourish there because of the lack of shade and the distances they had to travel for water. See his Diario da viagem, ibid., 8 (1846).

50

Fernandes de Sousa, ibid.

51

Robert Schomburgk, “Report of the Third Expedition into the Interior of Guayana, Comprising the Journey to the Sources of the Essequibo … and to Fort San Joaquim on the Rio Branco, in 1837-38 "Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 10 (1840), 180.