1 Introduction

Many of the Jesuit missions that were scattered throughout the Amazon valley during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are considered by historians to be the “cradles” of present-day cities in the northern part of Brazil.¹ In fact, the widespread network of these religious settlements, known as aldeamentos, interlinked the most important strategic points within the vast Amazonian floodplain. This unique environment guaranteed good conditions for agricultural and extractivist activities due to the annual flooding of the Amazon River and the humid tropical conditions. Some of the first descriptions of the region clearly indicate its natural richness and economic potential,² rather than predominantly referring to the legendary city of El Dorado.³ Thus, regardless of their inherent capacity for later urban development, the missions, as they were conceived by the religious, had, above all, a rural character which they maintained up to their official transformation into vilas, that is, semiurban communities under direct civil administration, from 1756 onwards.⁴ It is worth mentioning that, in this process, certain traditional production methods of the indigenous peoples, such as the gathering – or extraction – of plants, roots and oils in the tropical rainforest, were integrated into the colonial economy, which was based on strategic commercialisation. This junction of traditional activities and mercantilist logic is comprised in the term “extractivism.”⁵

This chapter analyses the multiple agricultural and extractive activities in the missions, with special regard to the gathering and planting of cacao along the swampy riverbanks and the nearby rainforest, as well as the cultivation of cassava on the rather poor sandy soil of the Amazon basin, in the context of colonisation during the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. This period can be considered as a time of profound crisis on account of the uninterrupted series of wars, epidemics and conquests that affected large areas of nearly all continents. With its global network of trade routes and trading posts, the Portuguese Empire was not exempt from the impact of these crises.

Thus, a long-lasting economic depression (1670–1700) accompanied the successive decline of Lusitanian influence during the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in Southern Asia, and its subsequent concentration on the Atlantic space. There were several reasons for this development: first, the growing competition between the French, English and Dutch, installed in the Caribbean islands, and their Luso-Brazilian counterparts, when it came to sugar and tobacco production; second, the indebtedness of the Portuguese Crown as a consequence of the constant quarrels with the Castilians (from the ascent of the Bragança dynasty in 1640); finally, the suppression of the long tolerated and profitable smuggling of slaves to the Spanish colonies in South America. In response, Portugal began to centralise and rationalise its administrative structures and to launch new economic initiatives, like other Western European countries at that time.⁶

The policy of the king, Dom Pedro ii, and his finance minister, Luís de Meneses, Count of Ericeira, has to be highlighted in this context. From the 1670s, the Crown sought to promote domestic production in continental Portugal (mostly textile and wine) to equalise the trade balance, marked by an excess of imports and a decline in net exports. The measures had clear mercantilist characteristics and were also aimed at stimulating the consumption of domestic products, both in the motherland and the colonies. In this context, the Crown gave priority to overseas production, and was particularly focused on agricultural and silvicultural output from its two American possessions, Brazil and Maranhão.⁷ However, another commercial depression, following an overproduction of sugar and tobacco, two key commodities during the 1680s, and the suicide of the Count of Ericeira in 1690, compromised the economic recovery of Portugal.⁸

Throughout this period, the Society of Jesus proved to be a loyal supporter of the Bragança dynasty that came to power in 1640. Father António Vieira (1608–1697) had been one of the closest counsellors of Dom João vi, its first king, before crossing the ocean, in 1652, in order to re-establish the Jesuit Maranhão Mission, which officially comprised the entire Amazon region under Portuguese rule.⁹ In 1655, Vieira even obtained the official tutorship of the Society of Jesus over the colony’s indigenous populations. This momentous decision played an important role in the application of the economic plans conceived under Dom Pedro ii between 1676 and 1682. Thus, in 1680, Vieira helped to conceive a law that intended to create a flexible labour market by declaring the indigenous people free, but maintained the fathers’ control over them. However, the growing discontent of the local Portuguese settlers, who felt marginalised by the Crown, led to an uprising, during which the Jesuits were expelled from São Luís, in 1684. Subsequent negotiations in Lisbon resulted in the Regimento das Missões, a statute that granted considerable autonomy to the missions and regulated the annual allocation of indigenous labourers to settlers and authorities. Apart from some substantial modifications, this law was valid until 1755, when the Jesuits lost the temporal, that is, civilian, administration over the aldeamentos. Up until then, the Regimento also constituted the legal framework for the economic ventures of the Society of Jesus in the region.¹⁰

In order to analyse these activities, the chapter mainly draws on Jesuit sources, especially the chronicle and the reports of Father João Felipe Bettendorff (1625–1698), the treatises of Father João Daniel (1722–1776) and, to a lesser degree, the notes of Fathers Lourenço Kaulen (1716–1799) and Anselmo Eckart (1721–1809). Father Bettendorff, who was born in Luxembourg, spent nearly four decades (1661–1698) in the Amazon region. Father Daniel, who was from Portugal, lived in the colony for fifteen years (1744–1759), before being expelled in 1757. Fathers Kaulen and Eckart, who were both of German origin, spent a rather brief time in the colony (1751/1753–1757), and were also among the expellees of 1757.¹¹ First, the chapter examines the missions as relevant production sites and as the living places of the indigenous labour force. After that, it investigates first the extractive and then the agricultural activities. As we will see, these overlap and are actually difficult to separate, although the extraction of vegetal products from the rainforest has generally been identified as the most common form of economic production in colonial Amazonia.¹² In the analysis, the chapter does not only consider commercial and technical aspects, but also the impact of indigenous traditions and knowledge.

2 The Mission Network and the Indigenous Labour Force

The main purpose of the missions was the evangelisation of the indigenous populations and their submission to a Catholic sovereign by confining them within an extensive network of interconnected rural settlements. There, they lived as neophytes and catechumens according to a routine of repetitive catechesis and compulsory labour. For example, in all missions, before going to the fields or workshops (for example pottery and carpentry), the Indians were obliged, even before dawn, to attend mass and listen to a catechetical lesson, which was repeated in the evening followed by baroque devotional practices (mainly processions, litanies and chants).¹³ In order to maintain this convent-like way of life, preferably without external interference, the fathers used to set up the missions at some distance from the European settlements (small towns, farms and forts), but always alongside the strategic natural axis constituted by the Amazon River and its numerous tributaries.

According to their specific tasks, there were, roughly speaking, four types of missions: a) the farms, or fazendas, attached to one of the two urban Jesuit colleges in Belém and São Luís (generally situated in the surroundings of these towns); b) the villages exclusively dedicated to royal service (such as the saltworks on the Atlantic coast); c) the so-called aldeamentos de repartição, missions whose male labour force was annually inventoried and assigned to either external (to settlers or authorities) or internal work; d) the aldeamentos de doutrina, small establishments dedicated to religious instruction, especially for groups who had recently come into contact with the missionaries and who were exempt from external labour for at least two years.¹⁴

In the eighteenth century, the farms played an essential role in the subsistence of the urban colleges and in the production of supplies for the missions in the distant backcountry, known as sertão. The larger ones possessed sugar mills, sugar cane, cacao and cassava plantations, as well as facilities and pasture for livestock breeding and small workshops for the production of canoes, furniture, ceramics or cotton cloth.¹⁵ Internal statistics from 1747 mention fourteen important farms: five in the Maranhão captaincy, on the outskirts of São Luis (Anindiba, São Brás, Amandijuí, São Marcos and Maracu), and nine in the Pará captaincy, near Belém (Marajoaçu, Arari, Mortigura, Samaúma, Jaguarari, Ibirajuba, Mamaiacu, Gibirié and Curuçá).¹⁶ These farms, run by the missionaries, are frequently cited in official documents from the eighteenth century as objects of constant contention, as they concentrated most of the labour force that was urgently needed by the settlers (as farm workers) or by the authorities (as rowers, auxiliary soldiers or workers for the construction of public buildings). Within this context, the Jesuits were charged for accumulating wealth and retaining native workers for their own ventures.¹⁷

By contrast, in the seventeenth century, the fazendas of the religious orders, as well as all agricultural and extractivist activities, were still mainly projects involving the cooperation of missionaries and colonial authorities. At the same time, even if it seems contradictory, the Jesuits never forbade compulsory work and even allowed the enslavement of indigenous people under certain conditions. In this regard, they largely agreed with the settlers and the authorities on the exploitation and integration of the native populations into colonial society. The principal disagreement was over the interpretation and implementation of indigenous labour laws. Father Vieira, superior of the Jesuit missions from 1653 to 1661, clarified his order’s position in Lisbon in January 1662, after having been expelled from the Amazon region for categorically rejecting any kind of illegal Indian slavery, in the following terms: “It is not my intention that there may not be any slaves; after all, I tried at this royal court [in 1655], as it is well known and one can see from my proposal, that a council of the greatest scholars should be established for this item and that the cases of legal captivity should be defined by law. But because we [the Jesuits] want the legal ones and are against the illegal ones, they [the settlers] don’t like us in that colony and, therefore, they throw us out of it.”¹⁸

Shortly after his arrival in the region in 1653, Vieira drew up a regulation (although his authorship has not clearly been proved) obliging the authorities to make sure that the Indians who had been “rescued” – that is, purchased from other Indians who had kept them as prisoners – should always be given sufficient time and land to plant and harvest what they needed for their livelihood.¹⁹ It is worth mentioning that this proposal was conceived in the early stages of colonisation, when there was a dynamic of extreme mobility of Indians, missionaries and soldiers. Some years later, between 1658 and 1660, when the network of the aldeamentos was already being consolidated and most of the Indians were, accordingly, confined within them, Father Vieira wrote a statute which simply presupposed agricultural activities in and around the missions. By the way, the very few direct economic instructions, that are mentioned in the document, relate exclusively to outside services.²⁰

Unfortunately, we know very little about the specific working conditions of indigenous workers within the aldeamentos, as the missionaries’ reports do not point out every detail of daily life. In this regard, the letter that Father Ascenso Gago wrote on the strategic mission in the Ibiapaba Hills in 1694, is very instructive. This report is about the introduction of agricultural methods, the distribution of tools and, above all, the implementation of a strict work routine within this village.²¹ The letter methodically shows the various steps involved in setting up a mission. Thus, after the act of vassalage and the execution of the first catechetical instructions and sacramental rites (such as baptisms and marriages), the missionary in charge introduced a severe timetable in order to accustom the Indians, who were considered to be undisciplined, to daily discipline. After that, the priest provided the Indian chiefs with tools, which he received from the authorities and nearby living settlers, so that the cultivation of fields could begin, along with the teaching of craft skills. The document also mentions that the Tapuias, as indigenous speakers of non-Tupi languages were called, were purposely overlooked during the distribution of plots of land and tools, as they were considered less reliable due to their nomadic way of life (which actually revolved around regular seasonal migrations), which was interpreted as evidence of inconstancy.²²

In a certain way, more than fierce competitors, settlers and missionaries were close and interdependent partners, at least as far as the regional economy was concerned. Thus, every year they did not only divide the indigenous workers among themselves according to the applicable provisions – even if they very often disagreed on the terms of allocation, treatment and remuneration –, but they also produced and commercialised nearly the same commodities. Nevertheless, it was mainly traditional indigenous know-how that enabled a relatively stable food production (primarily, manioc flour, the main staple food) as well as the seasonal gathering of tropical rainforest products (especially cacao, clove bark, sarsaparilla roots and copaiba oil). For this reason, in the early days of colonisation, formal alliances with the most important indigenous groups were vital for the European colonisers, as they enabled the settlers to establish themselves in the still unfamiliar tropical environment. To use a metaphor of Nádia Farage, certain native peoples were their “bulwark in the hinterland.”²³ From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the insertion of more and more indigenous groups into colonial society, primarily by confining and supervising them in the missions, was the fundament for its further economic development, as has already been emphasised.

Until recently, the scholarship tended nearly exclusively to stress, according to the established logic of mercantilism, the importance of extractivism and the exportation of the drogas do sertão (forest products), and overlooked the contribution of Amazonian Indians to the colonial economy. Contemporary Jesuit documents and Portuguese trade registers, however, show how European and native production methods intermingled and diversified, thus ensuring not only the subsistence of the mission villages, but also the provisioning of local markets and even global commercial networks. Occupying strategic points in the várzea (the fertile floodplain along the riverbanks), in close linkage to the surrounding sertão (the vast backcountry covered with dense tropical forest), these rural settlements turned out to be the territorial – or, more adequately, the fluvial – basis for the complex system of socio-economic dynamics that was emerging in the Amazon region. Mainly for that reason, at the end of the seventeenth century, the tropical colony was gaining importance within the Atlantic-centred Portuguese Empire.

Among the different commodities, it was, without any doubt, cassava and cacao that made the colony work. In fact, cassava, with its many varieties, was the most important staple food all over the northern and central parts of South America, and also spread to Africa and Asia relatively fast, thanks to the intense Portuguese trading dynamics. At the same time, cacao was appreciated as one of the most profitable tropical commodities in Europe’s aristocratic and bourgeois circles. As the two plants both have their origin in the Amazon basin, the indigenous peoples of the region had, over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years accumulated a vast knowledge related to these two tropical products. Especially the cassava with its many by-products, such as starch, tapioca, beiju (flat cakes), cauim (a fermented beverage) and, above all, flour (made by toasting and granulating the pulpy mass squeezed out of the smashed roots), was an essential component of the regional diet, both for the natives and for the colonisers. Fathers Anselm Eckart and João Daniel describe the production procedures of manioc flour, reputed as being the “bread of the region,” and other correlated products in great detail, as well as the various indigenous methods of cultivating and gathering cacao.²⁴ Thus, in the truest sense of the word, all the knowledge about what to do with the cassava roots and where to find the cacao trees in the rainforest was concentrated in the aldeamentos run by the missionaries.

3 The Extractivist Activities and the Importance of the Sertões

Even more than the network of military forts, the missions proved to be efficiently functioning outposts of the Portuguese empire in the vast hinterland. The padroado, i.e., the patronage of the Crown over ecclesiastical and missionary activities, is at the origin of this strategic task of the aldeamentos, at least until the mid-eighteenth century.²⁵ Thus, the numerous catechetical settlements along the Amazon River and its main tributaries constituted a kind of corridor that can be characterised, according to the words of Daniel Nordman, as a “granular frontier.”²⁶ In fact, the effective presence of the colonisers in this space was reduced to a number of strategic spots interlinked with one another by very risky waterways that passed through nearly impenetrable forests and vast floodplains. This tropical “frontier” gained importance within the Portuguese colonial empire when the loss of trading posts to the Dutch on the island of Ceylon and in the Malay Archipelago, in the 1640s, and to the English in India, in the 1660s, resulted in a considerable decrease in the supply of spices, especially clove (from the Moluccas) and cinnamon (from Ceylon). At the royal court in Lisbon, therefore, the plan was drawn up to focus on the Amazon basin, from where the Dutch had just been expelled and where the captain Pedro Teixeira had unilaterally set the first boundary marker between the zones respectively claimed by the Castilian and the Portuguese Crown during his expedition to Quito in 1639, rather than on the South Asian coasts. The discovery of some highly valued spices in the Amazon rainforest, such as cacao, clove bark, sarsaparilla, vanilla, Copaiba oil, and a native cotton variety brought the region into focus; all the more because the introduction of Asian spices in the Amazon region, such as Indian clove, cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper, was not very successful.²⁷ Thus, Father João Felipe Bettendorff reports that he planted the seedling of a cinnamon tree from India, which the king himself had given to him, in the patio of the college in São Luís in 1689, but there are no records of a significant production of this spice.²⁸ In fact, the early interest in native plants from the rainforest prevailed, as is shown by official documents that stimulate their collection and eventual cultivation with the clear intention of exporting them to European markets.²⁹ The sources also stress the necessity of discovering new areas, reputed to be rich in all sorts of drogas do sertão, throughout the vast tropical plain.³⁰

One of the most common services executed by indigenous labourers for colonial authorities, private merchants and religious orders was the gathering of cacao. In fact, among the forest products, cacao played a key role, as it was rather abundant in the vast sertões. The Indians knew where to find the widely scattered cacao groves and how and when to collect their fruits. Fathers João Felipe Bettendorff (in the seventeenth century) and João Daniel (in the mid-eighteenth century) mention the considerable amount of cacao orchards along the riverbanks of the Amazon and its huge tributaries, especially in the western part of the basin around the Madeira River.³⁴ Official records from 1743–1745 show that the Jesuits played an important role in the commercial exchanges between Belém and Lisbon. They were responsible for four-fifths of the exports dispatched by the religious orders in these years. Cacao made up 78.7 per cent of the products, followed by clove bark (16.1 per cent), sugar (2.7 per cent), sarsaparilla (2.1 per cent) and coffee (0.4 per cent).³⁵ The two non-forest products, sugar and coffee, were produced, along with tobacco and cotton, on the Jesuit farms, where cacao was also increasingly being cultivated. By contrast, the systematic collection of the drogas do sertão predominated in the inland missions. Planting and gathering thus became complementary activities in the economy of the missions at the end of the seventeenth century.³⁶

In another report, written one year later, Bettendorff clarifies that his initiative to plant the cacao trees and, especially, to involve the settlers was due to a request of “the Governor to satisfy the wish of the Most Serene Prince [future king Dom Pedro ii].”³⁸ Many other letters in his official correspondence as superior refer to cacao as one of the most valuable products for the sustenance of the mission and the colony.³⁹ His successor, Italian-born Father Pedro Luís Consalvi, also stressed the role of Bettendorff in the cacao enterprise in a letter to the general superior in which he wrote that “in a very innovating way, Father Rector planted cacao, from which is made the beverage known as chocolate.”⁴⁰

The steadily growing demand of cacao in Europe even motivated the colonial authorities to transfer the capital of the colony from São Luís to Belém, because the harbour in the Amazon delta gave better access to the cacao producing forests and plantations.⁴¹ Nevertheless, the production and exportation of cacao was not as successful as described in the first letters from the 1670s. The oscillations of the colonial market also affected this rather new economic activity. In 1691, Father Aloísio Conrado Pfeil mentions a local commercial crisis on account of the lack of cacao and clove bark for exportation after bad harvests.⁴² But just thirteen years later, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the settlers complained about the over-commitment of the Jesuits to the commercial production of cacao, reminding them of their spiritual obligations. With regard to this growing discontent, Dauril Alden explains that the “Jesuits, along with the other Orders active in the Amazon, produced some cacao on their own plantations, but they depended primarily upon their Amerindian charges in the interior missions to collect it. Such reliance brought the fathers into direct conflict with vested settler interests.”⁴³

These tensions point to the increasing profit prospects of cacao and explain the interest of orders, settlers and authorities to increase its quantity by adapting the once wild tree to plantation modes. Referring explicitly to the experience of the Spaniards in the neighbouring colonies, even the prince regent, Dom Pedro, insisted in 1675 that cacao should be cultivated in the Amazon region “as it is done in the Indies of Castile.”⁴⁴ Nonetheless, as already mentioned, the continuity of seasonal gathering in the sertão missions linked indigenous practices and knowledge with the far-reaching intercontinental trading system that developed around cacao. The rural character of the missions was thus retained and even strengthened due to the non-circulation of metal coins and restricted access to iron tools.⁴⁵ For example, already in the 1650s cotton cloth served as substitute for money to remunerate the services of the indigenous labourers, who worked outside the missions, and was used in small commercial exchanges.⁴⁶ Decades later, in the eighteenth century, cacao beans substituted the cloth rolls as “natural currency.”⁴⁷ This parallel system of traditional trade without the use of coined money and with hardly any investment in new tools or methods, contributed to producing a rural colonial environment with pronounced indigenous features.

From the end of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits had followed the growing extractivist activities of the settlers and colonial authorities, who were dispatching more and more canoe flotillas to the hinterland, with suspicion. The fathers did not shy away from reporting them to high-ranking church officials. Thus, in 1701, an anonymous document from the Maranhão Mission denounced the alleged greed of the settlers for “spices” and the abuse of indigenous people as compulsory workers to the papal authorities in Rome: “The main business in these Portuguese towns [Belém and São Luís] was to make, by all means, profit with the aromatic clove bark and with cacao, i.e., the famous and aromatic beans from which chocolate is made. A huge quantity of these substances is extracted from the forests by Indian labourers and then sent to Portugal.”⁴⁸

Between the lines, the complaint alludes to the harsh competition that existed between settlers and missionaries in producing and commercialising these two important Amazonian products. However, although the Jesuits’ contribution to the exportation of commodities was less than many researchers, such as Alden Dauril,⁴⁹ have presumed, they were perceived as serious competitors, especially during the first half of the eighteenth century, when cacao commerce became of growing importance. In fact, “[c]rude exports data exist only from 1730 onwards and reveal how cacao became the most important product of Amazonian economy. The fluctuation of its position within the totality of the region’s exports for the period 1730–1755, however, is significant, ranging from 97 per cent in 1736 to 44 per cent in 1753. Only in two years, cacao represented a little less than half of the entire exports of the Amazon region. In fifteen years, it represented more than 80 per cent of all the products shipped from the Amazon region to Portugal.”⁵⁰

Around 1732, Governor Alexandre de Sousa Freire (1728–1732), a tenacious foe of the Jesuits, set up a list of the estates (farms and other properties) that belonged to the Society of Jesus with details of their production activities. Sousa Freire certainly exaggerated the fathers’ economic output when trying, unlike his Jesuit-friendly predecessor, João da Maia da Gama, to prove to the Crown that the Jesuits tried to bypass the Royal Treasury by systematically avoiding or refusing the payment of tithes. According to Sousa Freire, the fathers produced only around 500 arrobas of cacao on their estates (fazendas) each year. Additional to that, up to 5,400 arrobas of wild cacao came from the missionary villages upstream on the banks of the Amazon River and its southern tributaries Tocantins, Xingu, Tapajós and, mainly, Madeira.⁵¹

According to Father João Daniel, the annual expeditions to gather cacao in the central and western parts of the Amazon basin, that is, in rather remote areas abundant with cacao orchards, meant a deep cut in the daily routine of the missions, the “main nerve of the State,” and brought much suffering to the Indians, who were classified as being “the feet and hands of the white settlers.” The missionary complained that the only people to get rich through this activity were the commanders of the canoas (transport boats). For this reason, he implicitly suggested the planting of cacao in a system of crop rotation on the fields around the inland missions. As an example, he related the successful experience of a certain missionary (probably he himself) in Cumaru on the Tapajós River, in the mid-1750s, where the planting of macaxeira (a kind of cassava), cacao seedlings (which produced “10,000 trees”) and banana alternated annually on the partially flooded and sandy terrains that surrounded the mission. However, this form of cultivation did not prevail, nor did it expand, since the Jesuits were expelled a few years later in 1759.⁵²

4 The Agricultural Activities and the Persistence of Indigenous Traditions

Contemporary sources, such as the report of the judge Maurício de Heriarte from 1664, describe the central valley of the Amazon basin with its mighty tributaries Tapajós, Trombetas and Rio Negro as an extreme fertile plain, ideal for growing wild rice, sarsaparilla, cacao, manioc and maize, or for breeding livestock.⁵³ He also points to the systematic cultivation of native vegetal dye substances, such as annatto, as well as profitable plants from other tropical or semi-tropical regions, such as indigo, sugar cane and tobacco. For this purpose, the royal official proposed the implementation of huge plantations or farms on the riverbanks and islands throughout the vast floodplain: “There are many and good sites to build big settlements.”⁵⁴ When Heriarte wrote these words, the Jesuits had already established a series of small rural settlements in the várzea regions of the Amazon valley. In fact, during the 1650s alone, according to Dauril Alden, more than fifty missions had been founded by order of Father Antônio Vieira.⁵⁵ Over the years, many of these settlements specialised in a specific activity, be it agricultural (cultivating cotton or cacao, preparing manioc flour or drying fish) or artisanal (building canoes or producing ceramics).⁵⁶ However, in all of them, cassava, rice, beans and maize were planted for their own consumption.⁵⁷

The mission network thus became important for agricultural production, especially in the decades after the first uprising of the settlers and the expulsion of Vieira and, at least temporarily, that of most of the Jesuit fathers, in 1661. Father Bettendorff, who had managed to escape the persecution and became the local superior in Belém (1662–1663) and São Luís (1663–1668), described his efforts to reconstruct the economic and infrastructural base of the two urban communities during the 1660s in detail.⁵⁸ For that reason, he invested in the farms that were situated near the two towns, planting diverse fruit trees (among them, orange trees from China), (re)building small sugar mills, promoting livestock breeding and even acquiring enslaved Africans as a permanent labour force. These activities, which had the character of a diversified economy of subsistence, show that local necessities had priority. As has already been emphasised, the farms provided the Jesuit communities in Belém and São Luís with food, furniture, ceramics and other items for daily use. Furthermore, they delivered all sort of products needed to guarantee the functioning of the remote inland missions, to satisfy the indigenous groups at the moment of first contact or to meet the needs of the crew members of the many transport convoys that went up and down the Amazon River.

The report also mentions smaller properties on the outskirts of São Luís. One of them occupied an entire island of one-and-a-half square miles on which “lives a fisherman with his wife and children, an African, with an African wife, a daughter and other descendants, and also three servants, and he takes care of a herd of cattle, which includes 67 animals, some goats, about 30 pigs and chicken. The women are our laundresses and weavers.”⁶² The document continues by succinctly presenting various rural scenes on farms and missions throughout the delta and the Amazon valley, revealing a clear concern with the precarious and constantly oscillating supplies of manioc flour and fish for the mission, and also for the colony in general.⁶³

In the official annual statistics, or Catalogus, that Bettendorff sent to the general superior in Rome in 1671, he reports the existence of several small properties which had been donated by benefactors from Belém and São Luís. Like on their big farms, the Jesuits produced a large variety of food on these strips of land to sustain the residents of the urban colleges (mainly young students and novices, but also a growing number of elderly and sick missionaries), and, to a lesser degree, they produced products to be exported. Bettendorff particularly emphasises the production of salt (actually a royal monopoly) and livestock breeding in Maranhão and that of sugar, cotton and cacao, as well as manioc flour, in Pará. He also registers that the Jesuits’ Indian workers in Maranhão were mainly legal slaves, while those in Pará were officially free, but obliged to live on the farms, just like the Indians in the inland missions.⁶⁴

Bettendorff’s descriptions do not only have an economic dimension, but also a sociocultural one, for they provide details, as we can see, about the complex system of cross-cultural interactions between Jesuit missionaries, indigenous groups and even persons of African origin. Furthermore, the reports refer to the rather difficult period between 1663 and 1680, when the Jesuits had temporarily lost the control, granted to them by law in 1655, over the indigenous labour force and their annual repartition and distribution. Only in 1686, they recovered the so-called “double administration” (concerning spiritual and temporal/secular matters) over the missions.⁶⁵

Another report from 1671 on the general visitation carried out by Bettendorff as superior of the missions also reveals, between the lines, the behaviour of the Indians in relation to the mission system. Instead of accepting the role of subordinate labourers, some native groups tactically negotiated their entry into the aldeamentos motivated by their own interests. Three examples can be pointed out. First, remote missions, whose fathers were frequently absent due to pastoral obligations or sickness, admitted the presence of not yet converted or baptised Indians, not respecting the official principle of segregation between Christians and “pagans.” This occurred in the faraway Tupinambaranas mission near the mouth of the Madeira River. Bettendorff disapprovingly remarks that “those who call themselves Christians live mixed up with the heathens, more than in other villages.”⁶⁶ Second, certain groups set clear conditions before settling down in a mission. Bettendorff mentions the Nhunhuns from the Xingu River who, although they had only recently come into contact with the missionaries, insisted on forwarding a delegation in order to inspect the aldeamento and demanded the allocation of fertile plots of land close to the river prior to moving to the mission. The father also reports his encounter in Cametá with a group of Aruaquis from the Tocantins valley who declared their interest to settle down in the aldeamento because they had to recover from the attacks of slave hunters and a hostile neighbouring group.⁶⁷ Third, shamanist rites persisted in the missions in spite of the daily catechetical instructions and ludic devotions. Bettendorff refers to a secret (and syncretic) ceremony held by shamans that he interrupted in Tapuitapera, one of the oldest missions, near São Luís. While the shamans were arrested, he himself was, according to his report, nearly lynched by his own Indian rowers who, very attached to their shamans, were eager to take revenge.⁶⁸ Although these observations are not directly related to agriculture they reveal, nevertheless, the social and cultural background in which the economic activities took place. To a certain extent, they show a typical feature of rural communities, in which the persistence of traditions was still strong, even if these were passing through constant resignification due to frequent interferences – mainly (moral) interdictions and (technical) innovations – from outside.⁶⁹

Two decades later, in the beginning of the 1690s, describing the “rich and beautiful gardens” surrounding the older aldeamentos, Bettendorff emphasised that more and more native groups were becoming reluctant to move to the missions. As an example, he mentions the reaction of the Guanases, who argued that they were already living on extremely fertile lands and did not see any reason for them to settle down in a missionary village. Other groups, also full of distrust, preferred to send a vanguard ahead to the nearest mission to “plant their [own] maizes and maniocs,” as a precautionary measure.⁷⁰ The growing suspicion of the Indians was not only due to the fact that they were more and more aware of the functioning of the mission system with its various constraints, but also due to the effects of the new law, the Regimento das Missiões, which, in 1686, established new labour conditions, especially those concerning the outside services. In fact, the law redefined the rules for the annual distribution of male workers and the respective periods of permitted absence from the mission. These could vary, according to the commodity to collect or cultivate, from four to six months, instead of two to four.⁷¹

Another factor which made life in the missions extremely precarious were the epidemics. Three outbreaks of contagious diseases, in 1661/1662, 1695/1696 and 1748/1749, depopulated entire aldeamentos. Beside the high mortality, the number of Indians who fled from the missions in these periods was considerable.⁷² But despite these nearly regular catastrophic interruptions, the economy tended to develop advantageously. Thus, in 1697, at the very end of the seventeenth century, Bettendorff wrote that a ship bound for Portugal could only be loaded with one-third of all the “sugars, tobaccos and, particularly, clove bark and cacao” which had been piled up in the ports of São Luís and Belém.⁷³ This brief mention reveals, on the one hand, how much agriculture (sugar, tobacco and cultivated cacao) and extractivism (clove bark and wild cacao) intermingled around the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century and, on the other hand, how much the Amazon region was far from being a miserable and precarious periphery.⁷⁴

In the 1720s, when the self-proclaimed procurator of the settlers, Paulo da Silva Nunes, accused the Jesuits of being responsible for the “ruin” of the regional economy, the pro-Jesuit governor João da Maia da Gama (1722–1728) defended the order, stressing that the fathers had “made come down”⁷⁵ from the hinterland more than four thousand Indians and, through this labour force, had contributed to increase the profit for the Crown. Implicitly, the governor affirmed that this had enabled him to annually dispatch ships with “twenty, twenty-five and even thirty thousand arrobas of cacao, and eight thousand arrobas of sugar” to Lisbon, ironically remarking that “this is, according to Paulo da Silva Nunes, the ruin of the colony.”⁷⁶

Despite the great importance attributed to export commodities, it should not be forgotten that cassava was one of the main agricultural products. In fact, the term roças (fields), is omnipresent in colonial documents. In most cases, it is employed as synonym for small or medium-sized plots of land prepared according to the common slash-and-burn method for manioc planting. From a traditional nourishment of the Indians, cassava flour turned into the main staple food of the whole colony, mainly due to its good storage conditions. This turned it into an ideal food supply for the many expeditions and voyages.⁷⁷ A missionary source from the 1750s, written a few years before the fathers’ expulsion, conveys a rather clear picture of the importance of cassava in the daily life of the Indians. In 1753–1754, Father Anselmo Eckart described how the many derivative products of manioc were prepared. Besides the elaborate process of flour production (washing, grinding, squeezing and toasting), he highlights the making of “wine” or cauim, an alcoholic beverage made by chewing and cooking the manioc mush, to guarantee its fast fermentation. According to Eckart, this work was mainly done by “older women, who already stood with one foot in the boat of Charon [mythological helper of Hades],” as the evaporation of the brew released the cyanide contained in the toxic cassava species.⁷⁸

The report reveals the still widespread consumption of this traditional and, in many cases, also ceremonial beverage, even in the interior of the missions at the end of the Jesuit period. Up to the last years of their presence, the fathers used to complain about the constant “dancing and boozing sessions” that were clandestinely held in the villages, especially since they were aware that these assemblies had a clear ritual character.⁷⁹ According to Father Jacinto de Carvalho, other “heathen” rites prevailed more or less openly in the missions, such as the veneration of mummified bodies as “god of the maize, god of the cassava, god of the rain and god of the sun” among the Tapajós.⁸⁰ This example shows that, in addition to economic aspects, the symbolic dimension has to be taken into account in order to more profoundly understand the agricultural and extractivist activities in colonial societies in the Americas, especially in places where the Indians constituted the majority of the labouring and resident population, like in the Amazon region.

5 Conclusions

In summary, we can draw four important conclusions. First, the widespread rural mission settlements under Jesuit (and, to a lesser extent, under Franciscan, Carmelite and Mercedarian) administration played a far greater role in the colonial occupation and exploitation of the Amazon region than the system of fortifications along the Amazon River or around the two main urban agglomerations, Belém and São Luís, on the Atlantic seashore. Indeed, the very first reports on the Amazon valley already pointed out in detail the economic potential of the region’s backcountry. Second, the large network of interconnected Jesuit missions, which was founded in the 1620s and expanded in the 1650s, consisted of rural production centres and contributed, despite all precarities, to establishing the long-lasting success of this vast “granular” frontier, whose natural axis was the Amazon River. Third, the agricultural and extractivist activities were, at least throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, a kind of joint venture involving missionaries, settlers and colonial authorities. Despite the constant tensions between these agents, each depended entirely on the indigenous labour force – which, for a long time, was the only labour force that was available. As for the Indians, even those submitted to obligatory confinement and compulsory labour held to their main traditions and were able to articulate and negotiate their interests. Fourth, indigenous knowledge and practices adapted to the necessities of mercantilist trading, forming a new production system which had a specific regional character in accordance with the processing methods of the commodities, mainly cacao and cassava.

The agency of the indigenous populations within the mission is implicitly noticeable in most reports of Jesuit authors, although the fathers normally tended to emphasise “inconstancy” and “rusticity” when writing about the Indians. In this context, the contribution of Father João Felipe Bettendorff must be stressed, for, in the second half of the seventeenth century, this missionary from Luxembourg was a central figure in the consolidation process of the Jesuit mission network. His voluminous chronicle and many of his over fifty official letters reveal his evident interest in economic issues and thus testify to his historical role in the development of the Amazon region.