< Chapter 1 – 1.2 Feitoras and Engenhos >
The tree that lent its name to the nation of Brazil was also one of the colony’s chief exports in the sixteenth century. When the Portuguese saw the blood-red inside of these trees, which grow in abundance along Brazil’s Atlantic coast, they called them pau-brasil, pau being Portuguese for “wood” and brasil a derivative of brasa, or “ember.”
Brazilwood was prized at this time in Europe for the distinctive color of its wood and a red dye it produced. Its discovery by European merchants sparked a fever of harvesting. While Portugal theoretically had a trading monopoly on the region, pirates and foreign nationals consistently tried to bypass Portuguese merchants. Key in the harvest of brazilwood were the Tupí people, the natives of Brazil’s southern coast, with whom Europeans traded for their labor or, more commonly as demand grew, whom they coerced or enslaved.
French Visions of the Portuguese Shoreline
“How the People Cut and Bring the Bresil to the Ships” by André Thevet (1575). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library’s Archive of Early American Images.
In this illustration, native Brazilians chop down trees and tote them to nearby European ships. The artist, André Thevet, was French, as was the book in which this image first appeared, so it is likely that Thevet was depicting one of France’s attempts to trade along the Brazilian coast, which lasted from 1504 to 1615. When the picture was published in 1575, its caption acknowledged the contentiousness of the French presence, noting that Portugal had claimed a significant stretch of untapped Brazilian coastline as its own.
The Portuguese claim purportedly stretched from the Tropic of Capricorn (which intersects with South America on the Atlantic side in the present-day state of São Paulo) north to the “promontory of the Cannibals.” Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library suggests this alluded-to promontory may have been near the present-day Guianas. If that assumption is correct, then the Portuguese crown was claiming over 3,000 miles of coastline.
Earlier in their overseas expeditions, such a broad swath of land would not have mattered much to Portuguese interests, because settlement was not in the small country’s equation. It was only in the mid-1500s that the old system of erecting trading posts (feitorias) and exchanging goods with local populations fell out of favor. Imposing political control had been a goal far subordinate to that of building a vibrant trade network, but declining returns from trade posts in the Indian Ocean, combined with competition from the French and Spanish, forced the crown’s hand toward settled colonization as a means of ensuring future revenue.
Given the amount of effort being expended to harvest this timber, it is safe to conclude that the Indians in the above image are chopping down brazilwood, which was the region’s first cash crop. Pau-brasil could be processed into a fine red dye prized by elites because red connoted power. Previously, dyes came from the east, often from China, but now Portugal had a direct line to a lucrative export that could be sold to European weavers.
At the point when this illustration was made, Brazil was still a vast unknown. In art, the curvaceous naked bodies of indigenous women reflected its fertile allure. Here, we see not only naked bodies, but also a narwhal peeking its head out of the waters in the lower right. The unicorn-like sea creature suggests that there is something mythically mysterious about this new world, an uncharted place potentially overflowing with tropical riches that were waiting to be taken.
Portrayals of Native Brazilian Labor
“Le Bois du Bresil Trouué Avec Plusierus Autres Arbres Non Veuz Ailleurs Qu’en Ce Païs” (1558). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
The author of this image, Thevet, was a Franciscan monk who traveled to Brazil and stayed only ten weeks to write articles based on his observations. In this light, how was he trying to portray Brazil and its people and what message was he trying to convey to his audience?
Further Reading
- Warren Dean’s With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, an environmental history of the country’s western coast during the colonial period, chronicles “what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times.”