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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jordana Dym, Kris Lane, Tamar Herzog, Sylvia Sellers-García, Mark Harris, Dan Bouk, and the members of the history department writing group at Colgate University for their assistance with earlier drafts of this article. Two reviewers, one of whom revealed herself to be Barbara Sommer, provided helpful comments and suggestions.
Archives
Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará (APEP), Belém, Brazil
Arquivo Nacional (ANRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Biblioteca Nacional (BNRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Arquivo do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (AIHGB), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (AHI), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), Lisbon, Portugal
Caixa (Cx.); Códice (Cod.); and Documento (Doc.)
Notes
1. Two exceptions are Safier (2009, 171–73 and 181) and Domingues (2000, 238–45), who describe the contributions of a number of individual guides and informants in the Amazon Basin. A few studies of colonial mapping and reconnaissance in other parts of the colonial Americas have also profiled individuals and particular communities that participated in European exploration or mapmaking enterprises; see Mundy Citation1996; Offen Citation2007; and Mapp Citation2011. I am grateful to Kris Lane for bringing my attention to the latter.
2. La Condamine Citation2000 [1745], 92–93; Humboldt Citation1852–1853, 2:377; Schomburgk, as described by Burnett 2000, 234, 236, 239; and Biard 1862, especially 479; on the last, see . Note that, per Crown policy, no non-Portuguese travelers were permitted in the Portuguese Amazon from c. 1750–1810.
3. For an example of this new approach, focusing on European exploration of the North American West, see Mapp 2011; on Peru, see Scott Citation2009. Further afield, on British India, see Edney Citation1997, especially 81–83, and Arnold Citation2006, 176–84.
4. There were, of course, exceptions in the category of foreign travelers, some of whom fell into Shiebinger's category of ‘long-term resident naturalists’ (2004, 53). Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira (Citation1972, Citation1994), a Portuguese naturalist appointed by the Crown to study regional flora, fauna, and ethnography, spent nearly a decade (1783–1792) visiting different parts of the Amazonian interior and working closely with a range of local informants. In the nineteenth-century, another naturalist, Henry Walter Bates (Citation1989 [1863]), spent eleven years in the region. Despite their outsider status, it seems likely that both of these naturalists developed, over time, more complex and even intimate relationships with their informants, though they still tended to refer to these people generically. For reflections on Bates's intimacy with local people and places, see Raffles 2002, 137–46.
5. The Amazonian captaincies of Pará and the Rio Negro were ruled directly from Lisbon for much of the colonial period, along with the captaincy of Maranhão to the east, with which they were administratively linked. The vast northern captaincies only joined the main Estado do Brasil in 1774 (Mansuy-Diniz Silva Citation1987, 253–54).
6. The Portuguese term prático (or the Spanish práctico) refers to one who is recognized as experienced or expert in something; more specifically, it denotes a pilot or navigator. It should be noted that some of those I have described as práticos in this article were not, in fact, identified as such in the sources; instead, they appeared as pilotos or jacumaúbas (canoe pilots), sertanistas (backwoodsmen), guias (guides), capitães do mato (bush captains), or simply as people who provided detailed geographical information about the interior. In other parts of Brazil, they might have been called bandeirantes (frontiersmen).
7. As McGrath notes elsewhere (1989, 47), these navigability estimates would be even higher for the shallow-draft vessels of traditional Amazonia.
8. For two contrasting interpretations of cartographic ‘silences’ on early modern maps, see Harley Citation2001 and Valverde and Lafuente Citation2009. On Europeans’ ‘geographic ignorance’ about Western North America, see the recent study by Mapp 2011.
9. I thank Tamar Herzog for reminding me that the legal debates provoked by riverine change were not unique to the Amazon (personal communication, 2011). I do hold that these issues were intensified by the size and volume of the river system.
10. These routes had been used by native groups long before the arrival of Europeans (Arvelo-Jiménez and Biord, Citation1994); during the colonial period, they were also used by maroons and other types of fugitives (Pérez Citation2000).
11. On the geopolitical importance of Amazonian rivers during this period and the intensification of efforts to turn those strategic routes to state purposes, see Davidson Citation1970. On the role of sertanistas and missionaries in Portuguese colonization of the Basin up to the mid eighteenth century, see Sweet Citation1974, Hemming 1990, especially 301–7, and Sommer 2006. Whitehead (Citation1996) provides a useful overview of indigenous societies caught between empires in northeastern South America between 1500 and 1900.
12. A classic treatment of the risks of travel along Brazil's interior rivers is Holanda (Citation1945, 124–84).
13. I am grateful to Mark Harris for urging me, some years back, to think along these lines (personal communication, 2006). For his ruminations on modern-day ribeirinho communities and the seasonality of life on the Amazon, see Harris Citation2000. On Amazonians’ sophisticated manipulation of the fluvial landscape, see Raffles 2002, and Raffles and WinklerPrins Citation2003.
14. On the multiple causes of geographical frustration among Spanish explorers in western North America, including their inability to communicate effectively with Indian informants, see Mapp 2011, 29–98.
15. Canoe crew lists from the Directorate period (1757–1798) can be found scattered throughout the annual reports of village directors from Pará and the Rio Negro, in the Correspondência de Diversos com o Governo series at APEP. Pilots were listed as either pilotos or jacumaúbas, from the língua geral word for the piece of wood (jacumã) typically used in place of an oar. Pilot ages were usually recorded when they testified in the formal inquiries, or devassas, that occurred upon the conclusion of the annual forest collecting expeditions. There are no comparable sources for the pre-1757 period of missionary administration, but Padre João Daniel's descriptions of the expeditions indicate many continuities in the way expeditions were organized and conducted (2004 [1758–1776], 2: 79–94).
16. See, for example, José Rodrigues Rego to governor, Arraiolos, 22 July 1764, APEP, Cod. 142, Doc. 20; and Manoel Nunes do Amaral to governor, Bragança, 24 August 1772, APEP, Cod. 240, Doc. 32.
17. These testimonies are rich sources for colonial Amazonian history but pose a number of interpretive challenges, as discussed in Roller (2010a, 448–451).
18. Pilots’ explanations can be found in the devassas from Santa Ana do Maracapucu in 1765 (APEP, Cod. 157, Doc. 10); from Souzel in 1774 (APEP, Cod. 268, Doc. 66); and from Alter do Chão in 1775 (APEP, Cod. 284, Doc. 17).
19. See, for example, the devassas from Silves in 1774 (APEP, Cod. 268, Doc. 4); from Oeiras in 1772 (APEP, Cod. 240, Doc. 19); and from Fragoso in 1764 (APEP, Cod. 141, Doc. 54).
20. Cases include Joseph Luis da Cunha to governor, Fragoso, 20 August 1764, APEP, Cod. 141, Doc. 44; Joseph Bernardo da Costa e Asso to governor, Serzedelo, 29 July 1773, APEP, Cod. 260, Doc. 16; Manoel Gonçalves da Silva to governor, Veiros, 26 September 1775, APEP, Cod. 283, Doc. 115; Francisco Roberto Pimentel to governor, Portel, 13 October 1779, APEP, Cod. 346, Doc. 21; and João Euquério Mascarenhas Villa Lobos to governor, Alenquer, 26 October 1793, APEP, Cod. 470, Doc. 70.
21. For a case in which villagers did not approve of the recruitment of an outside guide, whom they saw as incompetent, see the Devassa of Custódio de Souza Azevedo, Melgaço, 5 September 1775, APEP, Cod. 284, Doc. 33.
22. ‘Formalidade, q’ se costuma observar no Negocio feito nos Sertoes …’ from the Intendente Geral do Comércio, Mathias José Ribeiro, to Governor Martinho de Sousa Albuquerque, Belém, 27 November 1783, AHU, Pará Avulsos, Cx. 90, Doc. 7366.
23. See, for example, the case of a remarkable índio aldeado named Angelo de Morais, from the village of Almeirim, who served for more than twenty years as an officially licensed guide for expeditions to negotiate resettlements (descimentos) with independent native groups in the interior, beginning in the early 1760s (APEP, Cod. 131, Doc. 56) and continuing into the late 1780s (APEP, Cod. 442, Doc. 55). He also explored the course of a previously unknown waterway for some eight months, a feat that earned him a recommendation for an official post in his village (APEP, Cod. 346, Doc. 17). For a case study of an Indian woman involved in descimento efforts in the captaincy of Goiás, see Karasch Citation1981.
24. Before 1775, the possibility of a Dutch annexation attempt had been taken more seriously, for the Spanish in the Orinoco River Basin were assumed to be unable to cross the mountain range that separated them from the Rio Branco. News of the Spanish establishments on a tributary called the Rio Uraricoera, obtained from a French deserter, shocked Portuguese authorities as well as local práticos: the royal magistrate Francisco Xavier Ribeiro de Sampaio reported that the incredulous residents of the captaincy seat, ‘who had some knowledge of that same river, immediately began to ask where, and how, they [the Spaniards] had come’ (Nabuco 1903, 1:96). The region turned into a strategic priority for the Portuguese for the rest of the eighteenth century (Hemming 1990; Farage 1991, Chapter 4).
25. Two additional índios aldeados testified that the Branco had always been recognized as Portuguese territory: Alberto Parente (45 or 46 years old) and Matheus Lobo (35 years old), both residents of Carvoeiro, the colonial village at the mouth of the Rio Branco, where they had been resettled as children (‘Auto de justificação,’ Barcelos, 19 April 1775, in Nabuco 1903, 1:110–11). Although it is not clear why these two men were selected as witnesses among the many Indians in Carvoeiro who hailed originally from that river basin, we do know that Parente led descimento expeditions to populate the Portuguese villages along the Rio Branco during the latter half of the 1770s (Ferreira 1994 [1786], 87).
26. Before the 1750s, some of these non-Indian explorers were missionaries. See, for example, Sweet's discussion of a Mercedarian missionary named Theodósio da Veiga, ‘a special kind of transfrontiersman who went to the sertão primarily or at least partially for profit and adventure,’ and who often collaborated with Indians and non-Indian laymen in mounting expeditions (1974, 319); and the documentation produced during the contest for the Rio Branco, in which Portuguese officials invoked the explorations of a Carmelite missionary named Jerónimo Coelho, who had travelled far up on the Rio Tatacú, a tributary of the Branco, to trade with the Dutch back in the 1720s (Nabuco 1903: 1:104, 106, 149; also Sweet 1974, 656–58).
27. On non-Indian laymen and the various kinds of expeditions they led in the sertão, see Sommer 2005, 407–8, 419, and Chambouleyron Citation2008, 44.
28. Morais's trajectory can be traced through various sources: Antonio José Landi's ‘Extracto do Diário de Viagem ao rio Marié em Setembro de 1755,’ in the Bibilioteca Digital Fórum Landi; the 1775 ‘Auto de justificação’ in Nabuco (1903, 1:104–6); and Morais's own c. 1780 geographical ‘Memória,’ in AHI, Lata 288, Maço 5, Pasta 5. A biographical sketch can be found in Sweet 1974, 766. For additional examples of slavers-turned-informants after midcentury, see the geographical reports gleaned from Francisco Ferreira and Eugénio Ribeiro—key informants on the Rios Branco and Japurá, respectively—in Viagens no Brasil (Citation1906 [1755], 320–22).
29. Arcangela herself disappeared. She may well have been forced to return to Pará, without even arousing the suspicions of the French-installed priest or her fellow villagers. At the end of her questioning, perhaps ingenuously, Arcangela had indicated that none of those villagers knew where she and her companions had gone to fish, and that they would have been assumed dead—‘caught in the tidal bore, or drowned at sea’—if they did not return (‘Relação do que […] respondeu a India Arcangela Rufina,’ appended to Manuel da Gama Lobo de Almada's report to the Overseas Secretary, Macapá, 6 August 1783, AHU, Pará Avulsos, Cx. 90, Doc. 7323).
30. For a description of standard practices along these lines, see Manoel da Gama Lobo de Almada, ‘Descripção relativo ao Rio Branco e seu território,’ 1787 (Nabuco 1903: 1:253–71, especially 254).
31. Reports of independent natives refusing to cooperate with colonial reconnaissance efforts are perhaps scarce for this very reason. One exception comes from the Portuguese official Henrique João Wilkens, who in 1800 denounced the coordinated secrecy among independent native groups and fugitives in the interfluvial zone bordered by the Rios Negro, Solimões, and Japurá (ANRJ, Cod. 807, Vol. 13, 230–34).
32. A useful overview of Europeans’ efforts to verify information supplied by native North Americans can be found in Lewis (Citation1997, 105–14); these efforts included repeated questioning to evaluate consistency.
33. A transcription of Simões de Carvalho's report and other supporting documents appear in Nabuco (1903, 1:227–31), but without the crew list appended to the original.