Adrift on an Inland Sea: Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands by Hal Langfur

Author:Hal Langfur
Format: epub

Consumption, Communication, and Conciliation

From the earliest era of colonial settlement, charges of cannibalism proliferated when Europeans sought to seize territory. This correlation reminds us to exercise extreme caution in accepting such accusations at face value. Scholars who continue to debate the veracity of the accusations leveled against Brazil’s eastern Indians are far from the first to do so.³³ In the aftermath of the declaration of war, the cadre of eager northern European naturalists that descended on the eastern forests took particular interest in verifying the practice of cannibalism, but they arrived at no consensus concerning its pervasiveness or characteristics. It will likely never be known exactly to what extent, in which circumstances, or even definitively whether, the Botocudo, the Puri, and other groups in the region engaged in this practice. Some of the foreign visitors accused Brazilian settlers and officials of inventing denunciations to justify the appropriation of land and the enslavement of seminomadic forest dwellers. Others gathered evidence to support these claims. Among the most thorough in his investigations and circumspect in his conclusions, Wied, the German prince and naturalist, posited what for the era was something of a compromise position. He rejected the idea that the Botocudo ate human flesh as part of their subsistence diet. He even questioned whether the practice was part of their ancestral tradition. He did not doubt, however, that it existed as an Indigenous resistance strategy, sowing terror among colonists.³⁴

The enduring question of verification and its implications for royal policy can draw attention away from a related issue even more pertinent for understanding relations between these Native peoples and the state. For the crown and its highest authorities, charges of cannibalism justified extermination and enslavement where assimilation proved impossible. But as numerous sources emerging from frontier encounters attest, there was nothing inevitable about this connection between cannibalism and violent conquest. A number of dissenting local officials put into practice approaches counter to the violent ones espoused by the crown. Like the ranking captaincy and imperial administrators who devised the justification for war, most lower-level authorities active in the eastern forests shared the belief that the Botocudo and other Native peoples consumed their adversaries. Nevertheless, some interpreted this conclusion in ways that asserted the potential for peaceable exchange leading to the Botocudos’ voluntary incorporation into settler society.

One such official, by no means alone in his methods, administered the small Indian aldeia and nascent settler village of Tocoiós in northeastern Minas Gerais. Originally inhabited by a group of Malali Indians, the settlement was about 50 kilometers by a winding trail from Minas Novas, the nearest sizeable town. From the village the trail extended northeast to the confluence of the Araçuaí and Jequitinhonha Rivers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, still covered by the Atlantic Forest, this area constituted the outer reaches of settlement, the upper reaches of the river valley that Wied would later ascend from the coast. To the east the Jequitinhonha River plunged into the Atlantic Forest, descending through rugged, mountainous terrain, eventually spilling into the ocean north of the town of Porto Seguro.

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