THE BEGINNING OF COLONIAL BRAZIL 125
slave hunters continued to fi nd a market for their
wares throughout the colonial period. The most
celebrated slave hunters were the bandeirantes
(from the word bandeira, meaning “banner” or
“military company”) from the upland settlement of
São Paulo. Unable to compete in sugar production
with the more favorably situated plantation areas
of the northeast, these men, who were themselves
mestiço in most cases, made slave raiding in the in-
terior their principal occupation. The eternal hope
of fi nding gold or silver in the mysterious interior
gave added incentive to their expeditions. As na-
tives near the coast dwindled in numbers or fl ed
before the invaders, the bandeirantes pushed even
deeper south and west, expanding the frontiers of
Brazil in the process.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil did not accept the
loss of land and liberty without a struggle, but their
resistance was handicapped by the fatal tendency
of tribes to war against each other, a situation
the Portuguese utilized for their own advantage.
Forced to retreat into the interior by the superior
arms and organization of the Portuguese, the na-
tives often returned to make destructive forays on
isolated Portuguese communities. As late as the
fi rst part of the nineteenth century, stretches of the
Brazilian shore were made uninhabitable by this
unremitting warfare.
But the unequal struggle at last ended here, as
in the Spanish colonies, in the total defeat of the
natives. Overwork, loss of the will to live, and the
ravages of European diseases caused very heavy
loss of life among the enslaved indigenous people.
Punitive expeditions against those who resisted
enslavement or gave some other pretext for sanc-
tions also caused depopulation. The Jesuit father
Antônio Vieira, whose denunciations of Portu-
guese cruelty recall the accusations of Las Casas
about the Spanish, claimed that Portuguese mis-
treatment of natives had caused the loss of more
than 2 million lives in Amazonia in forty years. A
distinguished English historian, Charles R. Boxer,
considers this claim exaggerated but concedes that
the Portuguese “often exterminated whole tribes in
a singularly barbarous way.”
Almost the only voices raised in protest against
the enslavement and mistreatment of native peo-
ples were those of the Jesuit missionaries. The fi rst
fathers, led by Manoel da Nóbrega, came in 1549
with the captain general Tomé de Sousa. Four
years later, another celebrated missionary, José de
Anchieta, arrived in Brazil. Far to the south, on the
plains of Piratininga, Nóbrega and Anchieta estab-
lished a colegio or school for Portuguese, mixed-
blood, and native children that became a model
institution of its kind. Around this settlement grad-
ually arose the town of São Paulo, an important
point of departure into the interior for “adventur-
ers in search of gold and missionaries in search of
souls.”
The Jesuits followed a program for the settle-
ment of their native converts in aldeias(villages),
where they lived under the care of the priests, com-
pletely segregated from the harmful infl uence of
Portuguese colonists. This program provoked many
clashes with the slave hunters and the planters,
who had very different ends in view. In an angry
protest to the Mesa da Consciência, a royal council
entrusted with responsibility for the religious af-
fairs of the colony, the planters sought to turn the
tables on the Jesuits by claiming that residents in
the Jesuit villages were “true slaves, who labored
as such not only in the colegios but on the so-called
Indian lands, which in the end became the estates
and sugar mills of the Jesuit fathers.”
The clash of interests between the planters and
slave hunters and the Jesuit missionaries reached
a climax about the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury, an era of great activity on the part of the ban-
deirantes of São Paulo. In various parts of Brazil,
the landowners rose in revolt, expelled the Jesuits,
and defi ed royal edicts proclaiming the freedom of
native peoples. In 1653, Antônio Vieira, a priest
of extraordinary oratorical and literary powers,
arrived in Brazil with full authority from the king
to settle these questions as he saw fi t. During Lent,
Vieira preached a famous sermon to the people
of Maranhão in which he denounced indigenous
slavery in terms comparable to those used by Fa-
ther Montesinos on Santo Domingo in 1511. The
force of Vieira’s tremendous blast was weakened
by his suggestion that slavery should be continued
under certain conditions and by the well-known
fact that the Jesuit order itself had both indigenous