Cruzeiro do Sul, A History of Brazil's Half-Millennium

INTRODUCTION

This is a history of another America.

Frei Vicente do Salvador, the mild-tempered Brazilian-born Franciscan schooled by the Jesuits who wrote the first genuine history of Brazil in the 1620s, a book still unmatched in many ways, recorded as his first sentence the newly-synthesized knowledge that his little-known subject embraced a portion of “America, one of the four parts of the world.”  When he wrote, the grandly-proportioned, very lightly-populated Portuguese colony in the tropical New World - in fact, the first land anywhere to which the name “America” was applied - already possessed an impressive and tumultuous history to be recorded, filled with vivid personalities, drama, and near-cosmic events.

Conversely, a modern French Brazilianist, Pierre Monbeig, noted in the introductory sentence of his geographic overview that “what is most surprising about Brazil is its existence, the fact that a Brazilian nation exists that constitutes a civilization of its own.”

Frei Vicente’s observation identified Brazil in terms of the role the country was to play during the formative first half-millennium following its European discovery: that of an experimental, new sort of tropical civilization in the New World, continental in projection practically from the start. Monbeig’s declaration rings true in more than one sense: First, it is remarkable that roughly the eastern (nearest) half of South America - a single country larger in area (and currently in population) than all of the distinct and various Spanish-speaking realms on that continent combined - should have been claimed, retained, conquered, and indelibly stamped by the small, curious, quite medieval kingdom of Portugal. Second, the existence in tropical America of such a rich and vibrant land, bursting with momentous events and phenomena, ten percent larger than, and perhaps as well-endowed in resources and even location as today’s conterminous United States, comes as a minor shock, because we outsiders generally know so little about it. (Indeed, Brazil remains rather mysterious even to Brazilians.)

The country - apart from little snippets of real estate we manage to connect with, such as the urban beaches of Rio and, perhaps, a few downtown blocks at the center of super-city São Paulo for certain businessmen - remains precisely as elusive as the Portuguese language (unentangled with Spanish) is rare in the world as a second language. Over all, we probably know more about China than Brazil. We certainly think a lot more about China. If one wants to read a reasonably full narrative history of Russia (homeland to a smaller populace, currently with a rather smaller economy, that recently presumed to roar) in English, one might find twenty to choose from. But, as I am writing, one can search for an equivalent referenced narrative history embracing still-forming Brazil’s 500 years as a New World colony, independent crowned monarchy, and republic

My motivation for composing this history, after more than twenty years of reading, collecting materials on site, traveling, and sometime residence, is to attempt to fill this surprising void and help to remedy the English-reading public’s lack of familiarity with a country and history every inch as big, colorful, and full of stupendous events, wonders, and superlative personalities as our own, in a reasonably balanced, comprehensive way.

To the point: perhaps as much as sixty percent of the essential information cited and presented in this two-volume history has never been available before, except in Portuguese and, in many cases, in antique Portuguese or in rare or difficult-of-access sources. As a result, broad overviews of Brazil’s history exist, but the story taken from life has been starved and stinted into generalization. It turns out, upon inspection, that, in numerous uncanny and unsuspected ways, Brazil’s experience as a New World offshoot of Europe parallels - and, because it is prior, anticipates, and sometimes demonstrably inspires - the career of British North America and the subsequent United States.

The extent of congruency in critical themes is indeed uncanny, though the two eventual continental-scale offshoot societies’ responses often differ markedly. In the meantime, the numerous and inevitable contrasts between Brazilian and more-familiar Anglo-, and even Spanish-American history, are startling and, invariably, instructive.

In essence, the colonial history of Brazil began in 1500, the year of its discovery, and lasted for over three centuries. Unlike its English-speaking closest counterpart, Brazil claimed and, for the most part, conquered virtually its entire, continent-size modern territory, step by grueling step, before gaining independence. Accordingly, the country has its own, almost unknown, full record of bloody, centuries-long, technologically-mismatched struggles with an array of fierce (and frequently, cannibalistic) tribes of Indians. Settlers and authorities also had to deal with English (and, at one point, American) pirates bent on plunder and rapine, determined French interlopers who tried repeatedly for centuries to take over the country, and Dutch interlopers who actually did - part of it - for several decades, before being forced out in a protracted war by Portuguese colonials, or, more precisely, their mixed-race offspring, with nominal help from Europe.

There were centuries of intrigues and struggles - mostly successful in the end - against the Spanish and their independent successor states, along 8,000 mile