THE AMERICAS 66:4/April 2010/435-467 COPYRIGHT BY THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN FRANCISCAN HISTORY COLONIAL COLLECTING EXPEDITIONS AND THE PURSUIT OF OPPORTUNITIES IN THE AMAZONIAN SERTAO, C. 1750-1800 E very year during the second half of die eighteenth century, as river levels dropped, an average of 1,500 Indian crewmen departed nearly 50 villages for the remote interior forests and waterways of the Amazonian sertao.1 During die next six to eight months, as they searched for cacao, sarsaparilla, nuts, or turde eggs, the crewmen might experience all manner of hardships—epi demics, tribal attacks, famine, mutinies, or the loss of the village canoe and its cargo, to name just a few. Then, upon arriving home, they might find their fam ilies reduced to utter poverty or sickness, their wives taken in by other men, or their crops abandoned and devoured by pests. Yet despite the arduousness of the state-sponsored collecting expeditions and the hardships imposed upon those left behind, the trips offered a range of opportunities that other kinds of compulsory labor did not. Some of those who were not required to participate, such as the native officials, even did so voluntarily.2 I am grateful to Zephyr Frank, Tamar Herzog, William B. Taylor, Mark Harris, Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, and the two anony mous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Funding was provided by Stanford Uni versity, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, and the Mabclle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund. I also wish to thank David Sweet, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Barbara Sommer for their early encouragement of my interest in colonial Amazonian history. Abbreviations used in the notes arc as follows: Arquivo Publico do Estado do Para, Belcm (APEP); Arquivo Hist6rico Ultramarino, Lisbon (AHU); Arquivo do Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasilciro, Rio de Janeiro (AIHGB); Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (BNRJ); and Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (ANTT). Abbreviations in the document citations refer to Caixa (Cod.), Documento (Doc), C6dicc (Cod.), and F6lio (fl.). All source translations are my own; punctuation has sometimes been inserted to clarify meaning, and tense usage has been rendered more consistent. 1. Adequate English translations of the term sertao include backlands, wilderness, or frontier. On the various mean ings attached to the term and its usage among colonial authors as well as historians, see Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil's Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 4, 292-294. For sources on average crew sizes, see note 15. 2. In her dissertation, Barbara Sommer presented several cases of voluntary participation in the expeditions that initially sparked my interest in the phenomenon ("Negotiated Settlements: Native Amazonians and Portuguese Policy in Para, Brazil, 1758-1798" [Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2000], pp. 135-136, 281), as did David Sweet's passing observation, for an earlier period of Amazonian history, that Indians seemed to have preferred working as crewmen on slaving expeditions to other types of colonial service that did not entail a trip to the sertao ("A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Amazon Valley, 1640-1750" [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974], p. 580). 435 https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press 436 COLONIAL COLLECTING EXPEDITIONS The Directorate legislation on the administration of die Indians (1757-1798) sought to regulate the distribution of native labor such that all able-bodied, non- elite men were employed in either royal service, communal agriculture, service to private parties, or the annual collecting trips.3 Lists of people engaged in each task and accounts of their productivity fill volume after volume in the colonial archive, representing four decades of recordkeeping by village directors in the captaincies of Para and the Rio Negro.4 Yet for all this documentation, we know extremely little about the work experiences and preferences of colonial Indians. Those of the collecting expedition crewmen are the one exception, due to a minor paperwork requirement on the part of village directors that has been almost entirely over looked by historians.5 In addition to the cargo manifests, crew lists, and accounts of trip expenditures, directors were also expected to record testimonies from returning crewmen as to the behavior of their cabo, the canoe boss and expedition leader, during the trip. Although the majority are formulaic proceedings, some three dozen of these devassas (official inquiries) provide unparalleled descriptions of events that occurred in the sertao and depict, often dramatically, the limits of colonial control in that sphere. And in contrast to almost every other type of colonial Amazonian source, the officials recording the devassas quoted or para phrased Indians themselves—or at least, they purported to do so. When read 3. The literature on the Directorate has expanded in recent years to include case studies of its interpretation and application in the different colonial captaincies of Brazil. On the Directorate in Brazil in general, sec Rita Heloisa Almeida, O Diretorio dos Indios: Um projeto de civilizacao no Brasil do seculo XVIII (Brasilia: Editora Universidade de Brasilia, 1997). On Amazonia, see Nadia Farage's pathbreaking book, As Muralhas dos Sertoes: Os povos indigenas no Rio Branco ea colonizacao (Rio de Janeiro: ANPOCS, 1991); Angela Domingucs, Qiiando os indios cram vassalos. Coloniza cao e relacoes de poder no Norte do Brasil na segunda metade do siculo XVIII (Lisbon: Comissao Nacional para as Comcm- oracoes dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2000); Sommer, "Negotiated Settlements"; Patricia Maria Melo Sampaio, "Espelhos Partidos: Etnia, Lcgislacao e Desigualdade na Colonia Sertoes do Grao-Para, c. 1755-1823" (Ph.D. disserta tion, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2001); and Mauro Cezar Coelho, "Do sertao para o mar—Um estudo sobre a experiencia Portuguesa na America, a partir da Colonia: o caso do Diretorio dos indios (1751-1798)" (Ph.D. disserta tion, Universidade de Sao Paulo, 2005). On the Directorate in Bahia, see B. J. Barickman, "'Tame Indians,' 'Wild Hea thens,' and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," The Americas 51:3 (Jan uary 1995), pp. 337-351. For Ceara, see Isabelle Braz Peixoto da Silva, Vilas de Indios no Ceard: Dinamicas Locais sob o Diretorio Pombalino (Campinas: Pontes Editores, 2006). For Rio de Janeiro there is the excellent analysis of Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, Metamorfoses Indigenas: identidade e cultura nas aldeias colonials do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2001). 4. The directors' reports are held at APEP, scattered among more than 400 codices in the Correspondencia de Divcrsos com o Governo series. 5. Secondary sources that describe the collecting expeditions generally rely on either the Directorate legislation itself or the account of the Jesuit chronicler Joao Daniel (see note 10). These include Colin M. MacLachlan, "The Indian Directorate: Forced Acculturation in Portuguese America," The Americas 28:4 (April 1972), pp. 357-387; John Hem ming, Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (London: MacMiilan, 1987), pp. 43-46; Robin Anderson, "Following Curupira: Colonization and Migration in Para, 1758 to 1930 as a Study in Settlement of the Humid Trop ics" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Davis, 1976), pp. 27-45; Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, "A Falacia do Povoamcnto: Ocupacao Portuguesa na Amazonia Setccentista," in Meandros da Historia: Trabalho e poder no Para e Maranhao, Seculos XVIII e XIXycd. Mauro Cezar Coelho, et al. (Belem: UNAMAZ, 2005), pp. 21-33; and Sam paio, "Espelhos Partidos," pp. 146-153. Two recent studies that delve more deeply into local sources on extractive activ ities are Sommer, "Negotiated Settlements," pp. 119-136; and Coelho, "Do sertao para o mar," pp. 230-243, 281. Their systematic use of village-level correspondence has laid to rest any lingering doubts about the feasibility of studying colo nial Amazonian history and its native protagonists. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press HEATHER FLYNN ROLLER 437 alongside the other documents in the directors' reports, the devassas serve as a window onto how die collecting expeditions worked in practice and how they were experienced by their native participants in different places and time periods. They add another dimension to the recent historiography on Indians' efforts to exercise choice and to carve out spaces of autonomy within the constraints of the Portuguese colonial system.6 This essay uses the crewmen's testimonies to address the broad question of what opportunities they encountered on their annual forays into the interior. More specifically, it aims to provide a satisfactory explanation for the cases of apparently voluntary participation in the expeditions—cases that undermine the conventional view that only coercive measures could induce Indians to take part. The essay first situates the comercio do sertao within a context of Crown efforts to harness native collecting expertise and knowledge of the interior for regional economic devel opment. It then explores the ways in which the expeditions afforded room for independent action, fostered the expansion of social networks, and shaped the economic prospects of native Amazonians. INSTITUTIONALIZING THE COMERCIO DO SERTAO "There are so many manatee and turdes, that if one piled together just those that have been taken and eaten until now, they would make mountains larger than those of Potosi." In this (possibly) hyperbolic remark, a Jesuit missionary com pared the Amazon's bounty of natural resources with the famous mineral reserves of the neighboring viceroyalty of Peru.7 Everyone with a stake in the Amazonian economy, from the most humble settler to the Overseas Council in Lisbon, wanted to believe in the possibility of a major Amazonian export boom based on the extraction of wild products like cacao, sarsaparilla, Amazonian clove (cravo), nuts, resins and oils from trees, lard from turtles and manatee, and a large variety of native spices with untranslatable names.8 The official consensus by the mid- eighteenth century was that the main obstacle to such a boom was die region's chronic labor shortage: Indians, with dieir indispensable knowledge of the inte rior and its treasures, had not yet been effectively mobilized for the cause, and so fortunes like those of the Potosi silver barons remained frustratingly out of reach. 6. Some of the most influential or pioneering works in this vein include Farage, As Muralhas lios Sender, the col lection of essays in Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., Historic* dos Indios no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Schwarcz, 1992); Domingues, Qtmndo os indios cram mssalos, Sommer, "Negotiated Settlements"; and Almeida, Metamorfoscs [ndtgenas. 7. Padre Domingos de Araujo, "Chronica da Companha de Jesus da Missao do Maranhao, escripta em 1720," AIHGB, 1.2.32, Livro 1, Capitulo 11, fol. 62. 8. There was at least one short-lived export boom before the Directorate period, in cacao from 1730-1734. See Dauril Aldcn, "The Significance of Cacao Production in the Amazon Region During the Late Colonial Period," Pro ceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120:2 (April 1976), p. 120. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press 438 COLONIAL COLLECTING EXPEDITIONS Collecting canoes, sponsored by missionaries or private parties, had operated extensively but sporadically in the Portuguese Amazon since at least the mid-sev enteenth century, recruiting crewmen from those same settlements that would later become Directorate villages. Exports of uncultivated products (the so-called drogas do sertao) fluctuated during this earlier period in response to labor short ages, disruptions in transatlantic shipping, overexploitation of collecting grounds, and price instability. The decade immediately preceding the implementation of the Directorate was one of the most discouraging for the Amazonian export trade: the quantity of products like cacao or sarsaparilla rose and fell dramatically from year to year, and not a single royal fleet docked at the capital city of Belem in 1746, 1748, 1752, or 1754.9 During the 1740s and early 1750s, as epidemics spread in capillary patterns along the river system, canoe sponsors could no longer enlist adequate numbers of crewmen for the expeditions.10 One goal of the bundle of reforms directed towards the Amazon after mid-cen tury (usually referred to as the Pombaline Reforms, after Portugal's powerful prime minister, the Marques de Pombal) was to remedy these obstacles to eco nomic prosperity.11 With its inception in 1757, following the transfer of temporal authority over the Indians from missionaries to civil officials, the Directorate leg islation attempted to institutionalize the comercio do sertao: to establish a set of standard procedures by which collecting canoes would be dispatched annually from each Indian village, to regulate participation in the expeditions and com pensation of those involved, and to curtail contraband trade and illegal labor prac tices, both of which had run rampant during the missionary era.12 Around the same time (1755), the Crown established a royal monopoly trading company, the Companhia Geral do Grdo Pard e Mamnhao, with the goal of promoting eco nomic development in the Amazon region through regular transatlantic shipping and the supply of African slaves for agricultural enterprises. Shipping did become more frequent, and small numbers of slaves arrived to work on the sugar estates 9. For annual export data from 1730-1755, see "Mappa dos diferentes Gencros, que dos Livros d'Alfandega da Cidade do Para consta se exportarao do seu Porto, desde o anno de 1730, athe o de 1755" AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 80, Doc. 6627. For comparison, export figures during Directorate years (1756-1777) are available in the same document. In his analysis of cacao export data in this series, Alden found that yearly export averages were slighdy lower during the latter period (when the royal trading company, the Companhia Geral do Comercio, operated), but the downward trend in exports of the late 1740s and early 1750s was reversed (Alden, "The Significance of Cacao Production," p. 126). 10. Joao Daniel, Tesouro Descoberto no Maximo Rio Amazonas [c. 1758-1776] (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2004), vol. 2, p. 248. On epidemics, see Arthur Vianna, As epidemias no Para (Belem: Universidade Federal do Para, 1975); and Dauril Alden and Joseph C. Miller, "Out of Africa: The Slave Trade and the Transmission of Smallpox to Brazil, 1560-1831," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18:2 (1987),pp. 195-224. 11. A general treatment of the Pombaline reforms is offered by Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlight enment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 12. According to David Sweet, private collecting expeditions during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen turies often collected as many Indian slaves as they did forest products, and slaving activities—carried out under the aus pices of officially licensed collecting expeditions—continued even after government slave-ransoming expeditions were reauthorized in the 1720s ("A Rich Realm," pp. 468-470). https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press HEATHER FLYNN ROLLER 439 and cattle ranches around Belem, but the economy continued to revolve around Indian labor and extractive activities until at least the late 1780s or early 1790s.13 The collecting expeditions occupied the largest portion of the villages' labor force and made a significant contribution to Brazil's total exports, especially in cacao. About one-third of village men participated in the expeditions, as opposed to roughly a fifth in royal service, a sixth in private service, and the rest in an assort ment of jobs that included fishing for Directorate officials and rowing on the mer chant canoes that plied the route between Para and Mato Grosso.14 Treasury reports show that between 1772 and 1788, expeditions from each of the Para vil lages employed an average of 37 crewmen while those from the generally smaller villages of the Rio Negro captaincy employed an average of 30.15 Their produc tivity in the sertao justified what was, at the time, a major ouday of human resources. Cacao was the most economically important export from the Amazon during the eighteenth century, and Directorate villages sent a yearly average of nearly 8,000 arrobas, or 250,000 pounds, of the beans to Lisbon. This comprised about 20 percent of the total cacao exported from the Amazon; the rest was sup plied by private parties who gathered wild pods or, by the 1780s, cultivated them on plantations along the "cacao corridor" between Santarem and 6bidos.16 During the late eighteenth century, Brazil ranked second among New World exporters of cacao, nearly all of it derived from the Amazon.17 Article 46 of the Directorate established that "among all the branches of business that constitute the commerce of this State none is more important, or more 13. Robin Anderson detects a shift in Directorate economic policy around 1788 or 1789, when the attention of village directors and governors turned towards agricultural activities and away from collecting expeditions. She attributes this to changing priorities among policymakers who confronted population declines in the Indian villages as well as short ages in wild products due to overexploitation ("Following Curupira," pp. 121-122). The encouragement of agriculture in the villages was not a new idea—the Directorate legislation itself identified it as a top priority—but very little agricul tural development seems to have taken place in the villages until Governor Joao Pcreira Caldas came into office, in the 1770s, with a mandate to increase production of crops for both local consumption and export. Despite improved agri cultural production during his tenure, extractive activities were a mainstay of the economy well into the following decade. 14. Labor distribution data is summarized in Ibid., p. 125. 15. Data on average crew sizes was gleaned from AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 71, Doc. 6055 (for the year 1772); Cod. 72, Doc. 6102 (for 1773); Cod. 76, Doc. 6389 (for 1775); Cod. 79, Doc. 6533 (for 1776); Cod. 81, Doc. 6648 (for 1777 and 1778); Cod. 88, Doc. 7212 (for 1779-1781); Cod. 98, Doc. 7790 (for 1788). 16. Cacao production data for the Directorate villages is available in the "Mapa(s) gerai(s) do rendimento" series in AHU, Para Avulsos, Cods. 51, 61, 64, 66, and 69. To determine the portion of cacao supplied by Directorate villages, I compared production data from a seven-year sample (1761-1772) of these mapaswith total cacao export data available in AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 80, Doc. 6627 for those same years; some but not all of this data is available in Alden, "The Significance of Cacao Production, " pp. 124-125. On the emerging "cacao corridor," see his p. 126, note 173. The Indian villages may have collected even more cacao when they were run by missionaries, if one royal investigator's fig ures are correct; sec the "Copia da informacao e parecer do Desembargador Francisco Duarte dos Santos, que sua Mages- tade mandou ao Maranhao em 1734, para se informar do governor temporal do fndios e queixas contra os missionaries [1735]," in Corograpbia Historian, Cronogrdphica, Gznealogica, Nobilidria, e Politica do Imperio do Brasil, A. J. de Mello Moraes, ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Brasileira, 1860), pp. 139-140. 17. Alden, "The Significance of Cacao Production, " p. 132. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press 440 COLONIAL COLLECTING EXPEDITIONS useful, than that of the Sertao"; and it put the primary responsibility for the suc cess of the expeditions on the shoulders of the village directors.18 Subsequent arti cles stipulated how many should participate in the expeditions and for whose profit. The various Indian officials in the village could send two to six Indians each (depending on the official's rank) to work for them in the sertao, as long as they paid their salaries; the officials could also accompany the expeditions if they so wished.19 An additional ten to 12 Indians should go to work for themselves, to be paid a percentage of the profits upon the conclusion of the trip.20 Although Indian women were supposed to stay in the village to work in agriculture or local industries, the occasional crew list showed them participating in separate, all- female collecting expeditions in pursuit of nuts or tree resins in nearby forests.21 Each expedition also had to be accompanied by a cabo—a person of "known fidelity, integrity, honesty, and truth" who would supervise the crewmen and coordinate the whole enterprise—to be nominated by the village council and headmen and approved by the Indian crewmen. Although not stipulated in the text of the legislation, cabos were white or, much more rarely, mameluco (mixed white and Indian) men, possibly Portuguese-born in the case of the former but more commonly Brazilian-born.22 Notably silent on the actual conduct of the crewmen and their boss in the sertao, the Directorate simply prescribed careful supervision at the village port upon the canoe's return (i.e., the directors had to perform an examination of the cargo and solicit testimonies from each of the crewmen as to the behavior of their cabo) and also at the port in Belem, where the products were eventually to be deposited with the Royal Treasury. The final instructions on the expeditions concerned profits and payments: the state was to be paid back for the supplies it had furnished the expedition, tithes were to be levied on certain products, and finally the profits were to be split between the cabo (20 percent), the director (about 16 percent), and finally the native officials who had sent Indians on their behalf and the crew men who had gone to work for themselves (whatever was left, with pilots and 18. Diretorio, que se deve obscrvar nas povoacoes de indios, Article 46, reproduced in Jose Oscar Beozzo, Leis e Re0- imentos das Missoes: Politica Indigenista no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Edicoes Loyola, 1983). 19. Ibid., Article 50. 20. Ibid., Article 52. 21. References to female participants can be found in the following APEP codices: Cod. 177, Doc. 38; Cod. 190, Doc. 23, Doc. 40, and Doc. 53; Cod. 201, Doc. 94; Cod. 202, Doc. 65; Cod. 202, Doc. 74; Cod. 491, unnumbered doc, fls. 49-51; Cod. 491, unnumbered doc, fls. 45-48; Cod. 497, unnumbered doc, fls. 35-38; Cod. 517, Doc 31. Sending women on collecting expeditions was specifically forbidden by the Intcndcntc Luis Gomes de Faria c Souza during the early Directorate period (see his letter to Francisco Xavier de Mendonca Furtado, September 15,1762, AHU, Para Avutsos, Cod. 53, Doc. 4839), but the practice nevertheless continued. 22. Dirctorio, Article 53, in Beozzo, Leis e Regimentos; and Daniel, Tesouro Descoberto, vol. 2, p. 91. Despite the stipulation that cabos be nominated by municipal councils and village headmen, cabos were often appointed by the gov ernor, supposedly because there were no "suitable" candidates in the villages {Intendcnte Geral do Comercio Mathias Jose Ribeiro to Governor Martinho de Souza Albuquerque, Belem, November 27, 1783, AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 90, Doc. 7366). https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press HEATHER FLYNN ROLLER 441 bowmen typically receiving larger shares than regular crewmen).23 Although not specified in the Directorate legislation, additional deductions apparently became customary: a portion for the treasurer, alms for tiie Church, and a deduction in support of the Public Works in Belem. The governor who oversaw the abolition of the Directorate system calculated tiiat, after all of tiie deductions were taken, only 30 percent of the profits was left to divide among the crewmen of Para, and perhaps just 15 percent for those of the Rio Negro captaincy. 24 Furthermore, crewmen were always supposed to be paid by the Treasury in goods, rather than cash, due to tiieir "rusticity and ignorance" of financial responsibility. 25 Several subsequent dispatches from officials in Belem addressed collecting opera tions in the sertao, an aspect of the expeditions that the Directorate had ignored. In 1783, for example, a document produced by the Intendente Geral do Comer- cio (General Secretary of Commerce) laid out explicit procedures for the collec tion of each product. At least one example is worth quoting at length, for what it reveals about official understandings of what happened (or perhaps more accu rately, what was supposed to happen) in the sertao: When going after cacao, the canoe should leave the village by the 15th of December; heading up the Amazon River, it goes to the Madeira, Peru, or Solimoes Rivers. As is customary, [the crew] finds a spot on a riverbank, where they make a factory (feito- ria), building a thatched hut with a large frame at its base, upon which to dry die cacao. Having arrived at this destination, which should be around the 20di of Janu ary, they prepare the mats (tupes), which imitate the mats woven in the Algarve, upon which to dry the cacao and also move it inside when it rains. [The crew] also makes enough small canoes for them to split up [into different teams] in search of cacao, and leaving the cabo behind in the factory with two Indians, they go upriver. They collect cacao fruit along the margins of the rivers, and sometimes they go about a half league into the interior of the forest, picking the fruits there ... for a period of six, eight, or more days. Returning to the factory, they turn die cacao over to the cabo; the Indi ans who did not go the first time now join the others and return to collecting die fruits, until they have gathered an adequate amount and can no longer find any more. They dry the cacao well, such that when it is squeezed in one's hand, the skin [of the pod] should split open, indicating that it is perfect; it is then loaded on the village canoe in a protected compartment. . . . When the harvest of cacao is over, which is 23. Diretorio, Article 56, in Beozzo, Leis c Regimentos. The cabo's percentage was not actually specified in the leg islation but was later set at 20% (MacLachlan, "The Indian Directorate," p. 366). A detailed listing of the payments-in- kind made to each crew member, along with their monetary value, can be found in Director Luis de Amorim to gover nor, Boim, October 23, 1760, APEP, Cod. 107, Doc. 83. This shows the three pilots earning goods valued at 14S205 rajeach; the two bowmen earning 12$ 171; and the rest of the 26 crewmen earning between 8$955 and 9S263. The difference in payments among the regular crewmen would correspond to whether the one had gone to work for himself (and had therefore received a cut of the profits) or had worked on behalf of the native officials for a fixed salary. 24. Governor Francisco de Souza Coutinho to Queen Maria I, Belem, March 22,1791, AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 100, Doc. 7963. 25. Diretorio, Article 58, in Beozzo, Leis c Rc0tmentos. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press 442 COLONIAL COLLECTING EXPEDITIONS normally in March, the canoe should go after a different product, suc has Amazonian clove (cravo), which is collected in the following manner. . . 2,6 Each product had its set of collecting guidelines, but these did not actually rep resent an innovation on colonial Amazonian collecting practices, which had evolved over the past century—or much longer, if one considers their basis in tra ditional indigenous livelihoods. The Jesuit Joao Daniel's description of a typical cacao expedition during the missionary era (pre-1757) is remarkably similar, down to the minor details about the construction of the factory and the division of crewmen into different collecting bands.27 The Intendente was most likely summarizing procedures that had long become customary, and his purpose was probably to educate a newly arrived governor about the colony's extractive activ ities, rather than to regulate or reform anything per se. The guidelines, however, left no room for surprises; they placed what had always been an autonomous, and therefore irregular, operation into a standard mold. As the rest of this essay will show, the collecting expeditions rarely conformed. They had always afforded a host of opportunities for unsupervised activities and the pursuit of disparate interests. While some higher officials in the colony took advantage of this situation for per sonal gain, others railed against its abuses. This produced a long paper trail of denunciations and counterdenunciations of people who had stakes in the collect ing economy. "I found," one high court judge wrote in 1761, "that nearly all of the cabos pursue their own business [in the sertao], to the detriment of the mis erable Indians. ... To the Articles 41, 42, 53, and 54 of the Directorate they give no observance whatsoever; and when, upon the departure of these same cabos for the sertao, I told them how they should conduct themselves, they thought so poorly of this, that they wanted to argue with me."28 Not surprisingly, the leg islative articles he cited were those that contained prohibitions on the trafficking of cane liquor in Indian villages (Nos. 41 and 42) and that laid out basic expec tations for the cabo's honesty and fairness (Nos. 53 and 54). Another dispatch from the judge detailed the particular misdemeanors he had investigated, num bering nine cases in all and leaving the impression of a widespread network of ille gal exchange among Directorate officials in Para. Six cabos and three village direc- 26. "Formalidade, q' se costuma obscrvar no Negocio feito nos Sertoes" Intendente Geral do Comercio Mathias Jose Ribeiro to Governor Martinho de Souza Albuquerque, Belem, November 27, 1783, AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 90, Doc. 7366. For more on the seasonal navigation of Amazonian river routes, see Roberta Marx Delson, "Inland Naviga tion in Colonial Brazil: Using Canoes on the Amazon," International Journal of Maritime HistoryVII, no. 1 (1995), pp. 1-28; and David Michael Davidson, "Rivers and Empire: The Madeira Route and the Incorporation of the Brazilian Far West, 1737-1808" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1970). 27. Daniel, Tesouro Descoberto, vol. 2, pp. 79-94, especially p. 84. 28. Desembargador Luis Gomes de Faria e Souza to the Secretdrio de Estado da Marinba e Ultramar, Francisco Xavicr de Mendonca Furtado, Belem, November 17, 1761, AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 51, Doc. 4689. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press HEATHER FLYNN ROLLER 443 tors were accused of selling the products of the expedition for their own profit, stealing from the collective supplies, and diverting tlie labor of Indian crewmen, to name just a few of their transgressions.29 Twenty years later, the comercio do sertao was still a tangle of unregulated activ ities. A crusading ex-governor described, like the judge before him, the "collu sion" of directors witli cabos and various treasury officials, who perpetrated "a thousand tricks and extortions against the simple credulity of the miserable Indi ans." Jose de Napoles Telo e Menezes was particularly incensed by the payment practices of the Treasurer of the Indians, who offered, in exchange for the pre cious drogas do sertao, "goods of no value or utility, [selling them to the crew men] at arbitrary and exorbitant prices."30 In other instances, Indians were apparendy given nothing whatsoever for their labor, as happened to the crewmen of the village of Azevedo, who, according to a document submitted by Telo e Menezes, had not received their payment-in-kind even four years after the expe dition.31 Although the ex-governor blamed the Treasurer for such abuses, he extended his critique more broadly to the directors and cabos. On the latter, he did not mince words: These cunning men, who are at the same time among the most lazy and negligent, ordinarily provide no service except to conduct the village canoe to the location of the factory in the sertao; where, upon retreating to a hut that is constructed for their accommodation and that of the supplies, nothing bothers them; [they go on] eating and drinking aplenty, at the cost of the miserable ones [the Indians]; meanwhile, these make their way through the forests, bringing back the products of the harvest until the weather or water [levels] necessitate their return.32 In its singular focus on the cabo as an abusive and exploitive figure, this descrip tion and others like it tell only part of the story. 33 Although they clearly indicate that the comercio do sertao as practiced was a far cry from the Directorate model, they convey very litde about the role played by the Indians themselves. Did the crewmen, like the delinquent cabos and directors mentioned above, participate in an underground network of exchange that helped compensate for the paltry pay ments that they received from the Treasury? Did they take advantage of their 29. Ibid, to the Secretario de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar, Francisco Xavier de Mendonca Furtado, Bel£m, 3 August 1761, AHU, Pari Avulsos, Cod. 50, Doc. 4593. 30. Written during his tenure as governor and included as an attachment to a letter to the queen. Governor Jos6 de Napoles Telo e Menezes to the Secretdrio de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar, Martinho de Mclo e Castro, Bel£m, November 28, 1780. Attached Doc. 1 in AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 94, Doc. 7502. 31. Attached Doc. 1 in AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 94, Doc. 7502. 32. Attached Doc. 4 in AHU, Para Avulsos, Cod. 94, Doc. 7502. 33. For another contemporary account with a similar tone, sec Antonio Jose Pestana e Silva, " Meios de Dirigir o Governo Temporal dos fndios [ 1770s?]," in Corographia Historica, Cronqgraphica, Gencalqgica, Nobiliaria, e Politico do Imperio do Brasil, ed. A. J. de Mello Moraes (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Brasileira, 1860), pp. 140-142. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press 444 COLONIAL COLLECTING EXPEDITIONS autonomy in extractive activities to work, as one director alleged, "at their discre tion, and whenever they [felt] like it"?34 Many historians have assumed that whoever could avoid the state-mandated col lecting expeditions, did avoid them.35 There is, however, ample evidence to sug gest that some men participated voluntarily. As Barbara Sommer has already noted, some were native officials who were not obligated to go to the sertao, like the Sctrgcnto Theodosio Ferreira, nephew of the headman of Sousel, who had recendy been granted a patente, or official certificate, for the post of Alferes (Stan- dard-Bearer, or second lieutenant). When notified of the promotion, however, he told the director "that he did not want to be an Alferes, a post that his uncle had sought for him; he wanted to remain a Sargento and wanted to go on the col lecting canoe to the sertao this year to work for himself, [rather than] be seated in front of everyone with his father standing up" (in other words, he did not want to be promoted above his father's rank). Here was a situation in which someone preferred to go on what was undoubtedly an arduous expedition, rather than be promoted to a higher ranking office in the colonial bureaucracy and be obligated to serve in the village.36 Other examples of volunteers include the headman who offered to serve as pilot for his village's expedition, allegedly because he wanted to visit and trade with an independent Indian nation; the brother of an expedition pilot who hopped on the canoe as a stowaway, hoping to evade a royal service assignment; the Indian from Veiros, who, on his way back from royal service upriver, stopped to visit relatives in Porto de Moz and ended up accompanying that village's expedition; or the Indian from Monte Alegre, possibly a runaway, who joined the expedition of the village of Portel.37 Of course, we cannot be sure that these men were volunteers in the true sense of the word—serving entirely out of free will—but if they were 34. Director Venuslao Jose de Souza Moraes to governor, Boim, [n/d] 1777, APEP, Cod. 317, Doc. 12. 35. See, for example, Arthur Cezar Ferreira Reis, A politica de Portugal no valle amazonico (Belem: Secretaria do Estado da Cultura, 1993), pp. 54-55; Caio Prado Junior, The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil (Berkeley: Univer sity of California Press, 1967), pp. 246-248; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, p. 45; MacLachlan, "The Indian Directorate," pp. 374-375; Robin Anderson, Colonization as Exploitation in the Amazon Rain Forest, 1758-1911 (Gainesville: Univer sity of Florida Press, 1999), pp. 34-35; Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, "Os Vassalos d'El Rey nos Confins da Amaz6nia: A Colonizacao da Amazonia Ocidental, 1750-1798," Anaisda Biblioteca Nacional 112 (1992), p. 72. 36. Director Manoel Ignacio da Silva to governor, Sousel, August 17,1764, APEP, Cod. 141, Doc. 36. My atten tion was first drawn to this case by Sommer, "Negotiated Settlements," pp. 135-36 and 215, where the document is also quoted. As she points out, The6dosio Ferreira did end up holding the post of Alferes but was listed as absent from his village in 1776 (p. 215). 37. Director Bclchior Henrique Weinholtz to governor, Pinhel, April 18, 1770, APEP, Cod. 215, Doc. 53; Direc tor Francisco Rubcrto Pimentel to governor, Portel, September 16, 1778, APEP, Cod. 330, Doc. 53; Director Faustino Antonio de Souza to governor, Veiros, September 18,1772, APEP, Cod. 244, Doc. 15; and Director Francisco Rubcrto Pimentel to governor, Portel, October 13, 1779, APEP, Cod. 346, Doc. 21. For additional cases of voluntary participa tion (including that of Indian officials), see the following APEP documents: Cod. 129, Doc. 93; Cod. 142, Doc. 371; Cod. 175, Doc. 3; Cod. 236, Doc. 18; Cod. 389, Doc. 31; Cod. 423, Doc. 13; Cod. 561, Doc. 4. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.0.0253 Published online by Cambridge University Press