Colonial Mangroves and Brazil Landless Poor

Stilt-Root Subsistence:
Colonial Mangroves and Brazil’s

Landless Poor
Shawn W. Miller
In 1677, the Jesuit prelate in Rio de Janeiro, Father Silveira Dias, summarily
excommunicated every distinguished member of the city’s municipal council.
Although priests frequently quarreled with local officials over such issues as con-
trol of indigenous labor, marching order in annual processions, or the extent of
clerical exemption from municipal taxation, only in the most extreme scuffles did
clerics make heretics of the local elite. In this case, the Jesuits exercised excom-
munication, their ultimate weapon, in defense of a fetid mangrove swamp.1
This was not an isolated instance. In the next decade, the Benedictines
and individual landholders, with respective threats of excommunication and
arrest against trespassers, pursued exclusive claims to the mangrove forests that
bordered their lands on Rio’s extensive Guanabara Bay.2 As a result, the bay’s
wretched free poor — abruptly barred from a resource that had supplied much
of their food and had been traditionally open to all — appealed to the munici-
pal council for redress. Despite strong ties to landed interests, the council chal-
lenged all corporate and private claims to areas seaward of the high tide. With
crown support, the council reaffirmed the mangroves’ public status, holding
that, as in Portugal, tidelands were state property and open to the use of all. In
a colony where forest and field were generally hoarded by fidalgo, priest, and
1. “Ordem régia,” 4 Dec. 1678, in Pedro Moreira da Costa Lima, Collecção de leis,
provisões, decisões [etc.] sobre terrenos de marinhas (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional,
1865), 6, Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (hereafter IHGB), Archive, Rio de
Janeiro; “Índice das cartas régias,” Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro (hereafter ANRJ),
vol. 2, fol. 54. For the more-common conflicts between councils and clergy, see C. R.
Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia, and
Luanda, 1510 –1800 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 88 – 91.
2. Vivaldo Coaracy, O Rio de Janeiro no século dezessete, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José
Olímpio, 1965), 83 – 84.
Hispanic American Historical Review 83:2

Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press
224 HAHR / May / Miller
king, Brazil’s tidal forests — due in part to their brackish location — escaped
elite monopolization.
This study investigates the relationship between two peripheral popula-
tions: the mangroves at the fringes of the colonial landscape, and the peoples at
the margins of the plantation economy.3 Brazil’s rural poor, landless due to lati-
fundia and wageless due to slavery, prioritized subsistence in their economic
life and engaged various strategies to evade the prospect of hunger. These strate-
gies, of course, included subsistence planting on plots granted at the landholder’s
consent, but sources suggest that where possible the rural poor preferred hunt-
ing, fishing, and gathering from nature’s abundance. While many explained these
activities as unproductive and the result of the free poor’s lazy disposition, the
drive to eat seems to best explain the poor’s unique set of “indolent” strategies.
Subsistence security — having enough to eat —was at the center of their eco-
nomic life, and it outweighed all other ambitions.
The ruling elite acknowledged the poor’s basic right to eat and defended a
primitive moral economy by reserving some mangroves for the exclusive use of
the poor. Hence, by the coincidence of the poor’s hunger, the state’s paternal-
ism, and the mangrove’s own unrivaled fecundity, mangroves outside immediate
urban areas survived the onslaught of colonization. Today mangroves still grace
as much as one-third of Brazil’s coastline. Conservation can only take a portion
of the credit for mangrove survivals, but what is exceptional is that, at least in
some areas, strict conservation policies were shaped not by the commercial
interests of the elite but by the subsistence requirements of the poor.
The mangrove forest was commonly deprecated as the epitome of wilder-
ness, the antithesis of civilization, and the primary breeder of tropical disease.4
But recurring conflicts evidence the mangroves’ role in meeting the subsis-
tence needs of the poor and the commercial interests of the elite.5 Due to the
3. While the sciences have advanced mangrove studies in the last 25 years, historical
approaches are rare. Philip D. Curtin, “African Enterprise in the Mangrove Trade: The
Case of Lamu,” African Economic History 10 (1981): 23 – 33, describes the East African rafter
trade with the Persian Gulf and the evolution of conservation policy in the twentieth
century; and Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian
Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 24, 196 – 97, concisely addresses
the human impact on Brazil’s mangroves.
4. Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: n.p., 1817), 2:60, was not
alone in his opinion that “the mangroves entirely destroy the beauty which it is natural to
suppose that the rivers of the country of which I am treating would possess. Until they are
destroyed, a dull sameness presents itself.” He removed the mangroves along his property
and pronounced the change pleasing.
5. As examples of the struggles over mangrove use, see Governor Vasco Fernandes
César de Meneses to the councils of Cairu, Camamu, and Boipeba, Bahia, 25 Aug. 1721,
Colonial Mangroves and Brazil’s Landless Poor 225
mangroves’ many extractives (including firewood, timber, lime, clay, tannin, fish,
shellfish, and feathers) and its easy access by water, these swamps of rank muck
and impassable tangles were among the colony’s most exploited resources. Bal-
tasar da Silva Lisboa, formerly the colony’s highest forest official, opined that,
had the king granted the Jesuits exclusive control over Rio de Janeiro’s man-
groves in 1677, he might as well have given them the city and captaincy as well,
“for all of their inhabitants would have been sold to the avarice of great corpo-
rations, which would have become the rulers and only lords of the fortunes and
persons of their fellow citizens.”6 Silva Lisboa may be accused of anticlerical
exaggeration, but he points to the mangroves’ notable place in the colonial
economy.
Mangroves, adapted to the brackish waters and anaerobic muds of tropical
tidelands, framed much of Brazil’s colonial coastline, particularly the estuarine
waters on which her chief urban centers were located. In fact, all of Brazil’s
major colonial ports held extensive reserves.7 Brazil’s mangrove formations,
unlike most tropical forests, are simple in composition, consisting largely of
three arboreal varieties: red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), black mangrove,
commonly known as siriúba (Avicennia schaueriana and nitida), and white man-
grove (Laguncularia racemosa).8 Most distinctive for its stiltlike respiratory roots,
Documentos históricos (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, 1929 – 55),
44:125 – 28; Governor Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses to Câmara de Camamu, Bahia, 9
Oct. 1721, Documentos históricos 44:151; Senado da Câmara de Jaguaripe to king, Jaguaripe,
20 Oct. 1769, Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Seção de Manuscritos (hereafter
BNRJ-SM), I-31,29,39, no. 1; Representação de Inácio José dos Santos e dos moradores da
freguesia de Irajá to king, Irajá, 1817, BNRJ-SM, II-35,10,16; Representação de Silvestre
de Sousa, Ilha de Brocóio, [June?] 1818, BNRJ-SM, codice 250, 12; Representação dos
pescadores de Magé, Paquetá, Piedade e circumvizinhas, Macacu, 1822, BNRJ-SM,
II-34,18,15, nos. 1– 4; Petição dos moradores da Lagoa de Pereteninga, Rio de Janeiro, 20
Jan. 1844, BNRJ-SM, II-34,19,6, no. 2.
6. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, Annaes do Rio de Janeiro, 4 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Seignot-
Plancher, 1835), 4:274 –78.
7. Even late in the colonial period, Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich
Philipp von Martius, in Viagem pelo Brasil, 1817 –1820, 3 vols. (Belo Horizonte: Editora
Itatiaia, 1981), 2:138, described the Bay of All Saints and its islands as “covered, in general,
along the shoreline, with thick forests of mangrove”; and John Mawe, in Travels in the
Interior of Brazil, 2nd ed. (London: Longman et al., 1821), 134, noted of Rio de Janeiro
that “in the precincts of the city, there is an extensive flat, covered with mangroves,”
referring to the region known as the Mangue, which would be later drained and filled in
the mid–nineteenth century to create the neighborhood of Cidade Nova.
8. “Mangrove” refers to all trees of the tidal forest and is an ecological term rather
than botanical, as mangroves derive from more than one family. The major division is
geographic: western mangroves surround the south Atlantic, and eastern mangroves range
the red mangrove dominates the immediate shoreline and serves as pioneer in
the mangrove forest’s expansion, colonizing shallows and creating dry land as it
advances. Its viviparous fruit extends the mangrove’s propagative power by
floating for as long as a year searching for shallow mud in which to sink its ener-
getic roots. Just inland the siriúba predominates, identified by the hundreds of
snorkel-like pneumataphores (respiratory roots) that jut from the mud and
by the salt crystals sparkling on its leaves. The white mangrove, with less pro-
nounced pneumataphores, inhabits the highest land. All together, along with a
rather small variety of lesser plants and grasses, these form the mangal.
Here colonists found a ready abundance that was unmatched by other
colonial habitats in providing subsistence. Simão de Vasconcellos, a seventeenth-
century Jesuit historian, noted that while the mangrove had no fruit of any value,
it compensated admirably for this fault “with various utilities of yet greater
advantage to the inhabitants.”9 Tidal forests are an extreme example of an eco-
tone — a habitat formed by the meeting of two others — and, like most eco-
tones, they embrace uncommon numbers of living creatures. The mangrove’s
own leaf is master link in a complex food chain that supports immense stocks
of fish and shellfish. Annually, mangroves nourish the creatures about their
roots with more than six thousand kilograms of fallen leaves per hectare.
Algae, protozoa, and various larvae feed upon this detritus, and crabs and vari-
ous fishes consume the now proteinized leaves. Some fishes pass their entire
lives among the mangroves; others, both salt and freshwater species, employ
the mangroves as spawning grounds and nurseries. All classes, including slaves,
exploited the mangals’ fish and shellfish as important sources of protein. Vas-
concellos pointed out the curiosity of shellfish being both the “sumptuous
repast of the rich and a staple of the poor.”10
In harvesting the mangal, early colonists only imitated the practices of the
from the Cape of Good Hope to East Asia. Color distinctions refer to the bark, and the
dominant “black” species in Brazil changes with latitude.
9. Simão de Vasconcellos, Chrónica da Companhia de Jesu do estado do Brasil, 2nd ed.
(Lisbon: A. J. Fernandes, 1865), 22.
10. Vasconcellos, Chrónica da Companhia de Jesu, 22, “regalo dos ricos, e fartura de
gente ordinária.” The fruits of two of the mangroves were edible, but consumption was
insignificant; while the leaf was not edible, Willem Piso noted that the salt collected from
the surface of three siriúba leaves was sufficient to season a soup. Guilherme Piso, História
natural e médica da Índia ocidental, trans. Mário Lobo Lêal (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto
Nacional do Livro, 1957), 430. Considering the price of monopoly salt in the colony, this
practice may have been common.
The red mangrove’s roots were also the source of the shipworm (Teredo navalis), the
wooden ship’s most insidious enemy. Hulls served not only as hosts, but as vectors of
coastal natives. In fact, the largest archaeological objects bequeathed by Brazil’s

precolumbian peoples were the mangroves’ shell middens (sambaquis), some of
which are 350 meters long and 25 meters high. For maybe a century after the
first European settlements, subsistence remained the primary utility of the
mangrove swamp, and I will first describe what the inhabitants consumed and
how it was collected. Thereafter, I will depict the beginnings of the mangrove’s
commodification and, finally, how the state responded to the impact of this
development on the subsistence needs of the poor.
Many colorful, raucous birds nested in the mangroves’ branches, but early
observers took little note. What demanded attention was the multitude of crabs
that gave the mangal its animation. More than a hundred crabs might inhabit
one square meter of mud, and “boiling” was the common adjective used to
describe their collective movement. Many crabs, particularly the largest speci-
mens, found protection among the red mangrove’s roots. The little aratu (Ara-
tus pisoni ) — the agile, prehensile monkey of the crab family — spent part of its
life in the mangroves’ branches feeding on the young leaves and tender buds.
The swimming siri (Callinectus spp) were abundant and tasty, and the guanhumi
(Cardisoma guanhumi), whose mouths were reported large enough to accom-
modate a man’s leg, wandered far from their dens during thunderstorms and
caused such a racket together that they spooked locals into charging armed
from their houses, believing they were under native attack. The swift guan-
humi were difficult to catch, so when one sidled into the house it was consid-
ered a windfall due to their excellent meat and sizable portions. In the 1640s,
the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso noted that Dutch soldiers loved to hunt
them in the late afternoon and that the meat was good enough alone to satisfy
entire cohorts. Potiaçu (Macrobrachium amazonicum), the freshwater lobster, and
various species of shrimp were also harvested from the mangroves’ waters.11
The mangrove, or fiddler, crab (Ucides cordatus), nearly always referred to
transmission to many of the world’s ports. Infected mangroves were easily toppled by
winds. Infected ships had to be replanked or risked sinking. Only in the late eighteenth
century was an effective defense discovered in copper sheathing. Louis-François de
Tollenare, Notas dominicais tomadas durante uma viagem em Portugal e no Brasil em 1816,
1817, e 1818 (Salvador: Livraria Progresso Editora, 1956), 343 – 44, is apparently the only
source to describe the shipworm in Brazil’s mangroves.
11. Fernão Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia
Editora Nacional, 1978), 58; H. Luederwaldt, “Os manguesaes de Santos,” Revista do Museu
Paulista 11 (1919): 372; Sebastião da Rocha Pita, História da América Portuguesa (São Paulo:
Universidade de São Paulo, 1976), 35, 46; Piso, História natural e médica, 186 – 87; Spix and
Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 1:79.
Figure 1. The uçá as depicted in Zacharias Wagner’s “Thier Buch,” c. 1640. Reproduced from Dutch
Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1997), vol. 2, plate 25.
by its indigenous name uçá, was the most widely collected and highly praised
for flavor. It was also remarkable for its defenses—a single oversized pincer that
drew blood from unprotected flesh. But succulence trumped truculence, and
Fernão Cardim in 1583 described the uçá in Bahia as “the sustenance of all this
land, particularly of the Guinea slaves and Indians.” In the same decade,
Gabriel Soares de Sousa observed that the uçá fed on leaf litter, shellfish, car-
rion, and each other, shocking newcomers by their unspeakable numbers.
Gatherers (mariscadores) determined a crab’s size by the diameter of its den and
adeptly barehanded even the largest, reportedly harvesting only the males.
Soares de Sousa explained that “there is no inhabitant on the farms of Bahia
who does not hire an Indian daily to gather these crabs; and from each sugar
mill go four or five of these Indian gatherers.” A single gatherer collected three
to four hundred live crabs each day, all safely caged in large woven baskets.
Many slaves apparently gathered crabs and shellfish on their own time as well.
The Jesuit planter Antonil condemned planters who failed to feed their slaves
adequately or to grant them a weekday to plant food crops, as this forced slaves
to take what little time they had at the end of the day to go in search of a crab
for supper, which, along with shellfish, was the slaves’ favored food.12 Hence,
12. Georg Marggraf, História natural do Brasil (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado,
1942), specimen no. 464; Cardim, Tratados da terra, 58; Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado
slave provisioning was not entirely dependent on local agriculture and charqui
imports.
A great variety of shellfish also came from the mangroves, and colonial
writers provided extensive lists. Luís dos Santos Vilhena stated that the variety
“caused admiration at the multiplicity of living things created in these seas.”13
Oysters, which had long been a favorite of the natives, were in great favor
among colonists as well: boiled, fried, or raw. The leri-assu, which bedded in
the mud, were so large they had to be cut into quarters to be eaten, and their
shells, lined with mother of pearl, served as dinner plates and basins in São
Vicente.14 The smaller leri-mirim, which were a staple of many tables, bedded
right on the mangrove roots from which they were collected at low tide. Soares
de Sousa noted that leri-mirim were so thick on the roots that one could not
see the wood beneath, and that they “never deplete, because when removed,
others are soon born in their places.”15
While the harvest was enjoyed by all, the work was reportedly distasteful.
In 1817, Louis-Francois de Tollenare gathered oysters in the mangroves that
backed the island of Itaparica, Bahia, and advised his readers against it as recre-
ation. In addition to causing sunburn, the walk through knee-deep mud was
exhausting, and no fewer than 30 unidentified insects burrowed into his feet.
Mosquitoes also found an ideal habitat in the mangal, and locals repelled them
with smok y torches of bundled straw, although in some seasons the biting
clouds became so thick that whole villages temporarily relocated.16 In 1789, a
descritivo do Brasil em 1587, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1971), 289;
André João Antonil, Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas, ed. Andrée Mansuy
(Paris: Institut des Hautes Études de L’Amerique Latine, 1968), 128, 244. Antonil states
that shellfish were the slave’s remédio, which today would be translated as “medicine” but
can also suggest “that which one lives upon.”
13. Among the more common, which were all classed under the term marisco, were
sernambis, ameijoas, tarcobas, mexilhões or sururus, berbigões or sarnambitingas, búzios,
longuerões, perseves, caramujos, pernambins, caramuhos, unhas de velha, and periguaris. See Pita,
História, 34; and Luís dos Santos Vilhena, A Bahia no século XVIII (Salvador: Editora Itapuã,
1969), 695.
14. When in Rio de Janeiro in the mid–sixteenth century, the Calvinist missionary
Jean de Léry renamed himself leri-assu, “big oyster,” to the delight of the Indians, who
declared they had never met a Frenchman by that name. Considering his frequent
descriptions of native cannibalism, we can assume a certain bravado in taking the name of a
popular food. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. J. Whately
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 162.
15. Sousa, Tratado descritivo, 291; Pita, História, 68.
16. Tollenare, Notas dominicais, 342 – 43; Baltasar da Silva Lisboa to Rodrigo de Sousa
band of runaway slaves in Bahia penned a rare treaty offering terms under
which they would resubmit themselves to their master, Manoel da Silva Fer-
reira. Many provisions dealt with their subsistence needs. In addition to time
off for food production, the fugitives demanded the master provide them with
a good canoe and fishing nets and declared that if he provided them a good
launch, they were willing to put fish on his table as well. But under no circum-
stances was he to order them to gather shellfish or build weirs in the man-
groves. If the master “desires to eat shellfish,” they wrote, “order your Mina
blacks” to gather them. Apparently, only the lowliest African-born slaves were
expected to perform this disagreeable task.17
The mangroves were also among the colonists’ primary fishing grounds,
and coastal fishing even today correlates with surviving mangroves. The vari-
ety of fare, from sea cow to sardines, was fantastic. Early in the twentieth
century, the fishermen of Santos could name more than one hundred species
of fish in the mangroves and commonly netted 24 species in a single cast.18
Cardim wrote that fishing was so productive in the late sixteenth century that
surplus catch was used to fatten pigs, and he reported with epicurean satiety
that all the homes he visited in Bahia were “so full of fish and shellfish, that in
their abundance the people live like counts, and they waste much.” The xareu
(jack, Caranx hippos) was among the more important fish for human consump-
tion, although consumed largely by the poor. Massive nets requiring 50 to 60
men, who worked for a share of the catch, hauled 1,500 – 2,000 fish at a time. A
meter in length, the fatty xareu was also salted in barrels as sailor rations.19
Coutinho, Cairu, 20 Mar. 1799, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 36:109; and
Cardim, Tratados da terra, 60. Luederwaldt, “Os manguesaes de Santos,” 390, describes
mosquitos, borrachudos, and maruim, the last of which were too small to see, but the most
vexing.
17. The treaty was published in Stuart B. Schwartz, “Resistance and Accommodation
in Eighteenth-Century Brazil: The Slaves’ View of Slavery,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 57 (1977): 80 – 81.
18. Luederwaldt, “Os manguesaes de Santos,” 311. Mangroves are important for
offshore fishing not only because they serve as nurseries but because shrimp and mullet are
collected here for bait.
19. Cardim, Tratados da terra, 63, 178, 193; Pita, História, 34. The arrangements under
which northeastern fisherman attracted occasional labor for the hauling of nets in the
1960s are described in Shepard Forman, The Raft Fisherman: Tradition and Change in the
Brazilian Peasant Economy (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), 48 – 50; and António
Alves Câmara, Pescas e peixes da Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Leuzinger, 1911), 124,
described gangs of 80 –100 hauling nets ashore. Oxen had been recently introduced to haul
nets due, in part, to theft. Haulers sometimes buried fish in the sand, slipped them into
Many fish, such as the tainha (mullet, Mugil brasiliensis) and corvina (Micropogo-
nias furnieri), inhabited the mangroves and in season were also taken in large
numbers. However, the tainha, which ran in dense schools, were difficult to net
due to their propensity to jump, so fishermen simply beat the water with their
paddles and let the fish leap into their canoes. The improbability of this tech-
nique is outweighed by the numbers who reported it; around 1800 one witness,
John Black, reported that several canoes were filled by this means in 20 min-
utes.20
By the beginning of the seventeenth century the desire to commodify
the mangroves intensified. Fish and shellfish were never much exported, but
the mangal was an important source not only of subsistence foods but also of
commodities essential to building the colony and advancing its exports. The
extractions in some cases benefited the rural poor who might find therein an
independent living. But the commodification of the mangroves also conflicted
directly with their subsistence needs by destroying the creatures that bred
there.
Mangrove was the principal fuel in coastal regions, due to its accessibility
to water transport and its high quality. Red mangrove is extremely dense (1.20
specific gravity), making it a superior fuel whether in the form of raw firewood
or charcoal.21 Sugar millers in particular, but also whale oil processors, lime
producers, brick and tile makers, and distillers, all placed demands of near
industrial levels on the mangrove for fuel. Firewood accounted for 15 to 20
percent of the costs of sugar mill production, and already by the 1670s mills
in the northern reaches of Bahia’s bay were harvesting mangrove fuel 70 km
to the south on Itaparica Island and in the town of Jaguaripe. In the mid–
eighteenth century, ships making passage to Europe generally stocked 1,000
billets of mangrove fuel for the crew’s needs. And even Portugal made fuel
demands on the mangrove, importing an average of 120,000 billets from Bahia
each year in the late 1750s.22 This, of course, was in addition to the daily needs
pockets, or hid them under hats. Blood running down a worker’s face betrayed the fact that
a hatted fish had set its teeth into his scalp.
20. John Black, An Authentic Narrative of the Mutiny on Board the Ship Lady Shore with
Particulars of a Journey through Part of Brazil (Ipswich: n.p. [1798]), 58; James George
Semple Lisle, The Life of Major J. G. Semple Lisle (London: W. Stewart, 1799), 254;
Luederwaldt, “Os mangeuzais de Santos,” 358, also described this in 1919, but with the
addition of a net draped along the length of the canoe to capture fish that would otherwise
have passed over.
21. Mangrove Forest Management Guidelines (Rome: FAO, 1994), 49.
22. Sousa, Tratado descritivo, 189; Shawn W. Miller, “Fuelwood in Colonial Brazil:
The Economic and Social Consequences of Fuel Depletion for the Bahian Recôncavo,
of the general population. Even in the 1890s, the mangroves provided 20 per-
cent of all the domestic fuel consumed by Rio’s citizens.23
Like crabbing, fuel cutting was undesirable and strenuous work. Accord-
ing to Armando Magalhães Correa, mangrove fuel cutters early in the twenti-
eth century worked naked from the waist down, donning only a canvas sack for
a shirt and a leather belt to hold their machetes. They worked constantly in
muck and water as they bucked the trees into manageable lengths and loaded
them into canoes. As the immediate coastal trees were felled, men cut and dug
canals into the interior of the mangal to afford water access to the white and
siriúba mangroves. It was harsh labor, but it long remained a cheaper option
than cutting and hauling timber from distant mountain slopes.24
Most of Brazil’s coastal cities, which were often built over and among man-
groves, were also largely built of them. First, while not an esteemed construc-
tion timber, mangrove was among the few timbers available to the poor classes,
as most quality timbers had been monopolized by the crown and were found on
private land. Prior to the nineteenth century, housing for Rio’s urban poor
was constructed of mangrove wattle, and the rafters of these and other edifices,
including mills and plantation homes, came largely from the red and siriúba
mangroves. And again mangrove found its way across the Atlantic, particularly
to Oporto and the Azores, as posts for wine grape trellises (varas de parreira).25
1549 –1820,” Forest and Conservation History 38 (October 1994): 189 – 90; Juan Lopes de
Sierra, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil: The Funeral Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de
Castro do Rio de Mendonça by Juan Lopes Sierra, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz, trans. Ruth Jones
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979), 43. For Bahia’s fuelwood exports from 1757
to 1759, see the “Mapas de exportação,” Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (hereafter
AHU), Bahia, nos. 2814 –15 (18 May 1757), 2887 (14 Sept. 1757), and 3654 – 55 (20 Sept.
1758); and the fleet export statistics published in Boletim Internacional de Bibliografia Luso-
Brasileira, vol. 9 (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkia, 1968), 627, 645, 647.
23. Armando Magalhães Correa, O sertão carioca (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Histórico e
Geográfico Brasileiro, 1933), 74. This refers to all fuel cut into small proportions and
bundled into feixes. Mangrove was not the exclusive fuel even in the early colonial period,
but it was preferred initially for its high quality, easy access by water transport, and
common status. It appears that only as local mangrove sources were depleted did residents
begin pushing into the upland forests, but here they often ran into the defensible private
rights of landholders.
24. Correa, Sertão carioca, 75 –76. There is no evidence that canals were dug in the
colonial period, and it may have been that mangroves were abundant enough that this was
unnecessary.
25. Coaracy, Rio no século dezessete, 83 – 84, 197; Frei Vicente do Salvador, História do
Brasil, 1500 –1627, 7th ed. (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1982), 64; see also Baltasar da
Second, even for those who could afford masonry walls, the mangroves —
which captured clay sediment —were the source of clay for ceramic produc-
tion. Brick kilns were usually established in the vicinity of mangroves, in part
because the mangrove’s slow-burning fuel was required for effective firing, and
also because its bark was used to color the ceramics. Antonil had discouraged
sugar millers from attaching a pottery to their operations, as the kiln’s incredi-
ble demand for mangrove fuel destroyed the slaves’ source of shellfish. Antonil
identified the apicus— deposited hillocks that lay in a band between the mangal
and dry land — as the major source of clay during the colonial period.26 Vice
Admiral Pedro António Nunes, who owned a stoneware enterprise (casa de
louça), strategically located his kilns just inside the bounds of the São Lourenço
mangal near Niterói, providing equal access to the apicu deposits inland and
the mangrove’s fuel toward the bay. Sugar mills, which required clay to “clay,”
or whiten, sugar, and the potteries — some of which were connected to the
mills for the production of sugar forms—sent slaves to load it on double canoes
lashed together with planks. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century,
Rio’s city council attempted to discourage the building of mangrove shacks
with palm roofs, which they considered both urban eyesores and fire hazards,
by fixing the price of bricks and roof tiles at a level that larger numbers could
afford. But this would simply substitute one mangrove commodity for another.27
And third, it was in the mangroves that masons found the lime that mortared
the rising masonry city. Until the nineteenth century, Brazil’s lime came almost
exclusively from the shell middens. So large that some thought them the remains
Silva Lisboa, Riqueza do Brasil em madeiras de construção e carpinteria (Rio de Janeiro: n.p.,
1823). Curtin, “African Enterprise in the Mangrove Trade,” 24, observes that the
dimensions of many Persian Gulf homes were determined by the length of mangrove
rafters taken from the Kenyan coast. For a recent study of the broader Brazilian timber
sector, see my Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s Colonial Timber (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 2000).
26. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 150, 242; Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:192.
27. See Pedro António Nunes to crown, Rio de Janeiro, [1826], BNRJ-SM,
II-34,23,3, and the accompanying map that shows the vice admiral’s house, kilns, and the
extent of the São Lourenço mangal. See also Coaracy, Rio de Janeiro, 83 – 84.
In addition to clay, sugar millers also required ashes rich in alkali to purify sugar while
it was still in liquid form. Along with a couple of other trees, mangrove served this purpose
well due to the high concentrations of soda (20%) and potassium (35%) in its ash, which
was saved and slaked with water to create lye. See Lisboa, Annaes do Rio de Janeiro, 253 – 54;
and D. A. Gonsalves, “Os compostos de sódio na economia nacional,” Boletim do Ministério
de Agricultura, Indústria e Comércio, Rio de Janeiro 24, nos. 7 – 9 (1935): 5, 8 – 9.
of primitive pyramids, the colonists found these monumental refuse heaps

entirely invaded by mangroves. This proved beneficial, as one could simul-
taneously harvest both the shells and the fuel needed to reduce them to quick-
lime. After collection, which usually involved transporting shells and firewood
to a central location, workers formed caieiras, piles of alternating layers of
shells and mangrove firewood, which they burned for 10 to 12 hours. Com-
pared to reducing limestone blocks, the process was simple and required less
fuel.28
The quality of shell lime was not on par with that of the limestone that
was occasionally imported from Lisbon as ballast. The local mortars had a
tendency to turn black in the humid tropics, and for watertight construction,
such as water storage tanks, stone lime was preferred, but nearly all common
masonry relied upon the middens; for this, Cardim insisted, shell lime was as
good as Spanish limestone. Demand was great. Some sixteenth-century sugar
mills consumed more than three thousand moios (2.3 million liters) of oyster
lime in their construction. But at that time there was no lack in supply either;
Cardim relates that “a single mountain [of shells] built . . . the College of
Bahia, the governor’s palaces, and many other buildings, and it is still not
exhausted.”29
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, lime producers in Rio located
caieiras throughout the bay; Silvestre de Sousa, who provided lime to the gov-
ernment for building the royal palace and maintaining fortifications, centered
his production on Brocoió Island, next to Paquetá, equidistant from the many
mangroves of the northern shoreline. Pedro Soares Caldeira noted that the
booming growth of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói in the mid–nineteenth century
placed heavy demands on the mangroves for fuel and shells. Auguste de Saint-
28. Benedicto Calixto, “Algumas notas e informações sobre a situação dos sambaquis
de Itanhaen e de Santos,” Revista do Museu Paulista 6 (1904): 502; Sousa, Tratado descritivo,
343; Salvador, História do Brasil, 75. Dean, With Broadax, 24, 197, describes the wastefulness
of the open firing of shells and notes how many questions remain regarding the origins of
the middens.
29. Carta régia, 1701, in “Índice alfabético das leys, alvarás, etc. que há no archivo da
Provedoria da Fazenda Real,” [1796] ANRJ, codice 126; José Joaquim da Cunha de
Azeredo Coutinho, Ensaio econômico sobre o commércio de Portugal e suas colônias, 2nd ed.
(Lisbon: Academia Real de Sciencias, 1816), 135; Sousa, Tratado descritivo, 291; Cardim,
Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, 59.
Saint-Hilaire, in Viagens pelo distrito dos diamantes e litoral do Brasil, trans. L. de
Azeredo Pena (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1941), 342, observed that true
limestone, which was of higher quality, was quarried north of Cabo Frio and there reduced
in kilns burning tingoassuiba wood, but also stated that Rio relied almost entirely on shells.
Hilaire considered shell collecting, which he observed at Ilha de Governador,

as among the labors most detrimental to slave health, and Thomas Ewbank
provided a vivid description of slaves, chest-deep in the surf of Gloria Bay,
landing tea chests of quicklime, their heads whitened by the caustic powder
that had been carelessly ladled from boats with a hoe. Each trip out, the porters
submerged themselves to remove the burning lime from their heads and shoul-
ders.30
The rusty brown waters of the mangal hinted at one last contribution the
red mangrove made to the colonial export economy — in the form of high con-
centrations of tannin in its bark. Portugal supplied tannin to Europe from her
native Mediterranean sumac, but unlike the case of Portugal’s salt industry (a
royal monopoly that the crown thrust upon Brazilians despite the colony’s own
extensive salinas), colonial tanners substituted mangrove bark with no apparent
opposition, and Vasconcellos claimed that the leaves themselves tanned leather
more quickly than sumac.31 This contributed to a thriving export of tanned
leathers. In the seventeenth century, tanners engaged their own slaves to bark
the red mangrove, but by the late eighteenth century barking became a self-
sustaining activity. In 1800, Bahia received two hundred boatloads of man-
grove bark from its southern towns, and Rio de Janeiro, while relying to some
extent on its bay’s own resources, had it shipped in from Santos and from as far
north as the mangrove-choked Caravelas River. Passing through Caravelas in
1817, Prince Maximilian of Wied reported that a large vessel denominated the
casqueiro (bark boat) plied the waters between Rio and Caravelas with such fre-
quency as to have taken on the official role of mail packet.32 In the early 1750s,
30. Representação de Silvestre de Sousa, Macacu, 29 Oct. 1817, BNRJ-SM, codice

250, 12, nos. 4, 5; Pedro Soares Caldeira, O corte do mangue: Breves considerações sobre o antigo
e atual estado da Bahia do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: J. Villeneuve, 1884), 8, IHGB,
Biblioteca; Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem pelas províncias de Rio de Janeiro e Minas Geraes,
trans. C. Ribeiro de Lessa, 2 vols. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1938), 1:24;
Thomas Ewing, Life in Brazil; or a Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm
( New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), 112 –13. Lime eats human tissue and in the interest
of public health was used to speed the decomposition of the dead.
31. Portugal exported 63,426 arrobas (936 metric tons) of sumac bark in 1777, worth
18,270 mil-réis. [Bernardo Jesus Maria], Arte, e diccionário do commércio, e economia
Portugueza (Lisbon: Domingos Gonçalves, 1784), 195, John Carter Brown Library,
Providence, R.I.; Vasconcellos, Chrónica da Companhia de Jesu, 22. Tannin was also taken
from the leaves of the white mangrove, but the bark of the red predominated as
concentrations ranged from 15 to 35 percent. Marcelo Pinto Marcelli, Ecologia liquênica no
manguezais do sul-sudeste Brasileiro (Berlin: J. Cramer, 1992), 6.
32. Manoel da Cunha Meneses to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Lisbon, 12 Aug. 1780,
Brazil’s combined leather exports averaged more than 150,000 shoe-sole blanks,
referred to as vermelho (red) due to the mangrove’s dyeing properties; 110,000
hides, some tanned, others salted; and 500 pelts of the native deer, leaving
uncounted the tens of thousands of hides that were produced to package
tobacco. By the end of the eighteenth century, leather goods figured as Brazil’s
third, and occasionally second, most valuable export.33
The 1677 dispute involving the Jesuits is the first documented conflict
over the legal status of the mangroves, although there must have been prece-
dents. Thereafter, despite the crown’s declaration of the mangals’ public status,
the issue resurfaces often. The nature of the mangal, an alien formation squeezed
between the familiar and legally defined spaces of sea and land, presented
unusual obstacles to legal and geographical definition. It was easy enough to
declare that common property ended at the reach of the high tide, but did that
mean the average high tide or the extreme spring tides? The difference amounted
to hundreds of square kilometers in an average estuary. And as the tide entered
the mangal along contorted natural channels, were the long, narrow strips of
supratidal land between them part of the mangal or the mainland? Addition-
ally, the mangal was constantly on the move, increasing the difficulty. At the
water’s margin, the mangrove was most fluid. In estuaries with high deposition
rates, red mangrove has been observed to advance as much as one hundred
meters annually. On the land side, through alluvial deposition and leaf litter,
the white mangrove will gradually rise above the highest tides — becoming, by
definition, no longer public property. The nebulosity of the mangals’ legal
bounds, the landholders’ desire for exclusive access, and finally the short legal
memory, corruptibility, and overlapping jurisdictions of crown and local offi-
cials made the final settlement of the issue improbable.34 Powerful actors occa-
ABNRJ 32: 473; Manoel Ayres de Cazal, Corografia brazílica, ou Relação histórico-geográfica do
Reino do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Na Impressão Régia, 1817), 2:16; Prince Maximilian of
Wied-Neuwied, Travels in Brazil in the Years 1815, 1816, 1817 (London: Sir Richard Philips
and Co., 1820), 207.
33. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 484; José Jobson de Andrade Arruda, O Brasil no
comércio colonial (1796 –1808) (São Paulo: n.p., 1972); and Boletim Internacional, 619 – 47.
In the late nineteenth century, much of the tanning industry of the northeast had
moved inland and began to use angico as a tannin source. This is not due to any real decline
in mangroves, which were still noted as extremely abundant despite human depredations,
but rather due to a move of the industry to the interior where cattle were produced and
now slaughtered. See S. Froes Abreu, Informações sobre a indústria do couro na Bahia (Rio de
Janeiro: Ministério de Agricultura, 1926), 18 – 20.
34. The importance and legal nebulosity of tidelands, the so-called terrenos de
marinhas, is evidenced by the fact that between 1680 and 1865 there are nearly three
sionally succeeded in obstructing access, confiscating boats, nets, bark, and fire-
wood, and imprisoning infractors. But the excluded parties consistently peti-
tioned the state, which, bound by law, judged repeatedly in their favor.35
However, even when all parties accepted the mangal as common, this only
altered the conflict. Initially, the mangal was an unregulated public good, an
extreme form of common property where each party vied with others in a race
to harvest nature’s bounty, the prize falling to those who arrived first and extracted
most. But the battle remained over which utility should be given priority, for
many of the mangrove’s extractive activities were incompatible. Even among
those who cut the mangroves for fuel, there were disputes over whether sugar
producers, brick makers, or the general public ought to be favored. Various
interests approached the crown with extraordinary claims seeking the right to
either take their needs from the mangroves first or to ban all extractions con-
flicting with their own. As demand for mangrove resources increased, so did
demands for regulation.
Fortunately for the colonists, mangroves exhibit a prolifigacy and resilience
to human impact that is incomparable to most other forests. Typical tropical
forests form over millennia through a process of species succession; when mature
climax formations are felled, they cannot regenerate in a single generation, but
only over similar time scales, if ever. The mangroves, on the other hand, are
pioneer species. Succession does not occur vertically, over generations, as in a
typical forest, but horizontally across the landscape, seaward. Even when felled,
new life springs from the standing roots. Mangroves that had been cut for tim-
ber might be selectively reharvested every couple of decades, and Silva Lisboa
reported that mangrove could be coppiced ( periodically trimmed) for fuel
every 12 years.36
However, what was true of the tree’s resilience was not so for its habitat,
and the felling and barking of the red mangrove in particular brought the
immediate emigration of local fish and crabs and the sudden die-off of shellfish
that overheat with the loss of shade. Even when only barked, the red man-
groves no longer produce the leaves so critical to the food chain. Residents who
relied upon the mangal for food complained of these events. Henry Koster, an
English planter in Pernambuco who ventured that mangrove grew back at
hundred laws, decrees, and provisions dealing with the issue, some of them directly with
mangroves. See Lima, Collecção de leis . . . sobre terrenos de marinhas (Rio de Janeiro:
Typographia Nacional, 1865).
35. See note 5.
36. Lisboa, Annaes do Rio de Janeiro, 4:277.
such prodigious rates that demand for firewood could never exceed supply, also
noted by contrast that fish forsook the waters in regions where the mangroves
had been cut, and that “in a fish-pen . . . near my place, no fish was caught after
the fuel-cutters had established themselves at the bridge hard by; of this I
heard much, as there was some squabbling on the subject.”37 The removal of
the mangroves, whether for fuel, timber, or bark, proved as detrimental to sub-
sistence exploitation as exclusion.
In southern Bahia, complaints about mangrove deforestation and the ensu-
ing disappearance of local fish found sympathy in local town councils. The dis-
trict of Ilhéus had a population of 6,000 in the 1720s that had grown to 17,431
by 1780 and 75,569 by 1818. Camamu, with roughly 6,000 inhabitants in 1818,
was its largest settlement.38 Although some manioc was planted using slave and
household labor, and the crown intermittently financed royal timbering here,
the population largely relied upon subsistence plots, forests, and waters to pro-
vide their daily bread; fish and shellfish were more than alimentary supple-
ments. In 1780, Manoel da Cunha Meneses observed that southern Bahia was
the only place in all of the Americas that had neither cattle nor butcher shops.39
In 1701, the crown had made it illegal to ranch within ten leagues of the sea in
order to prevent cattle depredations on farms and plantations. Only draft oxen
were permitted, and there were few of these in southern Bahia. Most regions
imported beef on the hoof, but southern Bahia was too isolated. Despite
numerous attempts to build roads into the interior where cattle proliferated,
and despite imports of oxen by sea from Salvador to work in timbering, the
people of Ilhéus ate no beef. Fish and shellfish provided their protein.40 Bal-
tasar da Silva Lisboa, who both administered royal timbering in Ilhéus and
served as judge (ouvidor), concurred. When local manioc planters complained
that the king’s expanding timber reserves would prevent the expansion of man-
ioc planting and result in the starvation of the local population, Silva Lisboa
countered that the residents did not rely on manioc, but nearly exclusively on
the mangroves, for subsistence. Despairingly, he also attributed the district’s
37. Koster, Travels in Brazil, 2:62.

38. Pita, História, 62; Cunha Meneses to Melo e Castro, Lisbon, 12 Aug. 1780,
ABNRJ 32: 473; Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:163, 192.
39. Cunha Meneses to Melo e Castro, Lisbon, 12 Aug. 1780, ABNRJ 32: 473.
40. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, Nova Valença, 28 Oct.
1799, AHU, Bahia, no. 20,436; Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:183 – 84; Alvará, 27
Feb. 1701, in ABNRJ 31: 90 – 91. For other road building attempts to interior Ilhéus, see
B. J. Barickman, “ ‘Tame Indians,’ ‘Wild Heathens,’ and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the
Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The Americas 51 ( January 1995):
353 – 56.
general economic torpor not to the natural indolence of the population, but to
the productivity of the mangrove. Despite his consistent efforts to encourage
the citizens to industry and agriculture, he lamented that “the people live for
the most part in dire misery, content with the sustenance of fish and oysters
which abound on these coasts and rivers.”41
Jaguaripe, on Ilhéus’s northern border, despite greater access to the herds
driven from the interior, was in a similar situation. Luis dos Santos Vilhena
described the town as economically quite diversified, being the primary pro-
ducer of brick, tile, and sugar forms for the entire region, and an important
supplier of fuel, construction timber, rum, and piassava palm fibers. But he
observed also that despite the town’s productivity, “what is most common to
see here is poverty,” and that the inhabitants found in fish and shellfish their
“ordinary sustenance.”42
By the term subsistence poor, I refer to those free individuals who produced
little or nothing for local markets, and instead overwhelmingly nourished
themselves by gardening, fishing, and hunting.43 As they owned no land, their
subsistence activities took place on the landlord’s lands, on the frontier, or on
the common waters. Although they represented the majority of the free rural
population, they are among the least-studied groups in the colony — certainly
less than slaves, and probably less than even the much-neglected Indian.44
However, it may be well to summarize what we think we know about the free
rural population — particularly those who, like the peoples of southern Bahia,
subsisted at the margins of the market economy — and speculate on where they
lived, how they subsisted, and what motivated or determined their choices.
Only then can we comprehend the critical role of the mangrove in subsistence,
and why local town councils were responsive to demands even from the colony’s
41. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, Cairu, 2 Sept. 1799,
AHU, Bahia, no. 20,343.
42. Vilhena, A Bahia no século XVIII, 486.
43. Many Portuguese-speaking scholars, and some English speakers, employ the term
“subsistência” and its cognate “subsistence” to refer to the production of any food crop, even
if for markets. I use it in its restricted English sense — that is, to the nonsurplus production
of foodstuffs for household consumption. Jacob Gorender, in O escravismo colonial (São
Paulo: Editora Ática, 1978), 297, uses the terms “auto-subsistência” and “auto-
abastecimento” to achieve this sense in Portuguese.
44. Works with relevant observations on this class are Gorender, O escravismo colonial,
291– 301; Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), 65 – 69; and B. J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint:
Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780 –1860 (Stanford: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1998), 118 –19, 130 – 35.
most marginalized, a social class in some aspects worse off than the slaves, as
Stuart Schwartz has noted.45
While contemporaries referred to the free rural poor by many terms —
agregado and morador (both meaning tenant at will), vadio and vagabundo (loafer
and vagrant), caboclo and caipira (acculturated Indian and bumpkin), matutu and
sitiante (forest dweller and plot farmer)— historians have no precise nomen-
clature. “Peasant” has occasionally been used, for it suggests a number of char-
acteristics (landlessness, dependence, personal service, protection, and even
commons of sorts) that are accurate to the conditions of many of Brazil’s free
poor.46 However, a distinction must be made, for in Brazil the rights and priv-
ileges of the “peasant” must be understood as noncontractual and hence often
temporary and always insecure. The lord did not rely upon this peasant class
for labor, but upon the slave. Families and individuals could be expelled at the
lord’s whim. And for familial, economic, or personal reasons, the “peasant”
might freely decide to look for another protector or simply move beyond the
reach of authority altogether by squatting on wastelands or settling beyond the
plantation frontier, which throughout the colonial period was open for such
movement.47 The free poor were often placed at the fringes of the landowner’s
property to help protect cane, timber resources, and possibly mangroves from
the depredations of neighbors; this, along with a number of small, noneco-
nomic services such as political loyalty, was offered in exchange for tenant
rights.48
Tollenare, who traveled extensively in rural Pernambuco and Bahia in the
1810s, divided the free rural peoples into three classes: senhores de engenho,
lavradores, and moradores. The last was the most diverse, and Tollenare claimed
that the majority consisted of the miscegenated descendants of acculturated
Indians and freed Africans. And their numbers appear significant, although
estimates are rather imprecise. Tollenare, judging “by eye,” claimed that mora-
dores made up 95 percent of the total free rural population and that they lived
“isolated, far from all religious or civil authority . . . and consider all strangers
almost as enemies.” As late as 1881 Louis Couty estimated that of Brazil’s 12
45. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia,
1550 –1835 ( New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 252 – 53.
46. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 66. There were no traditional commons in
Brazil, but the landless who resided with permission on the land of others were generally
permitted to hunt on portions of the property as well.
47. Concerning the availability of land, even in the Bahian Recôncavo, see Barickman,
A Bahian Counterpoint, 97 – 99.
48. Gorender, O escravismo colonial, 293.
million total population, the agregados, caboclos and caipiras made up fully
half: “[S]ix million inhabitants, at minimum, who are born, vegetate, and die
without having served the nation,” and claimed as well that of 1.5 million free
blacks, no more than a thousand of them made any productive contribution to
the economy, most living as recluses in the forests and wastelands.49
Vilhena claimed that the number of “idlers” that inhabited Bahia’s farms,
mills, and fields as tenants was inexpressible. For less than two days’ wages —
and sometimes for no rent at all — they mounted a crude, thatched shack on
the planter’s land, furnished with the rudest of household goods. For Vilhena,
their hammocks and clay tobacco pipes were symbols of the household’s indo-
lence; the weapons that adorned the home —“two or more knives, well sharp-
ened, a lance . . . and a club”—were more than symbolic of its refusal to be
completely subjected to the landholder. Both Vilhena and Tollenare claimed
that assassinations by the free poor of their betters were common, as was the
vengeful killing of the landowner’s cattle, and that the lord was cautious about
whom he expelled. Regarding their subsistence, Vilhena mentions the planting
of banana trees at the shack’s threshold and the ownership of a piece of net for
fishing. Tollenare observed that women made lace, and each household planted
a little cassava, any surplus of which might be sold to buy clothing, the only
commodity he claimed they consumed. The moral reform of this languid
segment of the population was deemed necessary, and Vilhena and Tollenare
agreed that while land reform must come first, that alone would be insufficient,
as the rural peoples were “so lazy and had so few needs.”50
49. Tollenare, Notas dominicais, 95, 97, also noted that despite the moradores’ wariness
of outsiders, the men were quite interested in his double-barrel shotgun, and the women
were fascinated by both his eyeglasses and the tailoring and quality of his white clothes,
which he claimed were inferior to their own work; Louis Couty, A escravidão no Brasil (Rio
de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1988), 102.
50. Vilhena, Bahia no século XVIII, 926 – 28; Tollenare, Notas dominicais, 95 – 96. While
Tollenare threw up his hands over the fact that Brazil did not have schools and a
committed clergy to foster moral reform, Vilhena suggested a strict census to determine
the occupation, or disoccupation, of every inhabitant, and the use of police to force them
into productive activities. For those who refused he recommended exile to Angola or
Fernando de Noronha before their indolent examples rubbed off on their children.
Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 1:84, 2:178, also wrote that some of the poor of
Ilhéus planted bananas and cassava, but only very little. And they described the poor in the
region of Jacarepaguá near Rio de Janeiro as destitute, sickly “people of color” living in
poor fishing shacks, the abundance of fish making it such that even the planting of bare
essentials — some corn, melons, sweet potatoes, and cane —was rarely accomplished.
The tenant class was exempt from the dízimo, a tax of 10 percent on farm produce,
Most observers stated emphatically that the rural poor did not work for
wages, except when in dire straits or when coerced by the state into public
works.51 It appears that some rural poor did engage directly in extractives, col-
lecting and selling mangrove commodities on their own accounts, but one gets
the sense that this was unusual and irregular. There was a noted lack of interest
in accumulation or upward mobility. The peasant lives by what James Scott has
called a subsistence ethic, a premodern set of needs and motivations that place
subsistence security above all else. What observers classified as indolence was
in reality the best means to survival. With hunger at their heels, the central
concern was not to climb the slope of social betterment —which was already
strewn with the obstacles of race, family, and class — but to maintain one’s dis-
tance from the edge of starvation. This ethic expressed itself differently in dif-
ferent situations. The urban poor sought higher wages and lower food prices,
the latter of which the municipal councils gave them. The rural landless might
seek lower rents, a more secure tenancy, and greater independence, but their
primary need was access to a small plot of second-rate soil — and, as we have
seen, to maintain access to nature’s easier offerings.52
The rural poor probably refused wage labor because it did not furnish a
subsistence as effectively as did gardening, hunting, gathering, or even beg-
ging, another subsistence activity that was widely reported. One hindrance was
the difficulty of converting wages into food in a place of few markets. In the
town of Ilhéus, Spix and Martius, despite having cash, could find no food for
sale. They went without for two days while a local official sent for food from a
distant farm — further evidence that the town’s 2,400 locals produced little or
nothing for local markets.53 The royal timbering operations there, which coerced
locals into wage labor, could themselves not depend on cash and the market to
provide food for the loggers, but instead designated a couple of men for the
but some landlords collected it for their own needs. How much this contributed to slave
provisioning is impossible to determine, but it may have served as a disincentive to farming
and an inducement to harvesting the common mangrove’s “tax-free” goods.
51. Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, 133 – 35. Prison and armed guards were
frequently used to coerce wage laborers, including non-Indians, into royal timbering
operations; see Luís Caetano Simões de Lima to governor, Jequiriçá, 21 Dec. 1779,
Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, Seção Histórica (hereafter APB), 201– 20, no. 4; and
Miller, Fruitless Trees, 114 –16.
52. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), 4 –7, 179.
53. Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:176.
Figure 2. The mullet, in this case the small parati, still popular on Brazilian tables, from Albert Eck-
hout’s Theatri rerum naturalium Brasiliae: Icones aquatilium, in Brasil Holandês (Rio de Janeiro: Edito-
ria Index, 1995), plate 46.
task of fishing and hunting to feed the labor gangs.54 And although Antonil
promoted the giving of alms to meritorious poor, he recommended that the
able, begging poor be offered a hoe. That way they would either become wage
laborers, or move on and no longer cause trouble.55 Most moved on. A hand-
to-mouth existence was a more direct and reliable means of feeding oneself
than a hand-to-hoe, wages-to-mouth existence.
Stuart Schwartz has pointed out that Brazil’s free poor class was an early
modern fabrication, a social caste that descended from “no precolonial her-
itage, traced its lineage to no fallen civilization, and bore no collective folk
memory of a glorious past.”56 They had no sense of group identity and no tra-
dition of organized resistance in defense of the moral economy, at least on the
level of European peasants. These distinctions alone go far in understanding
how Brazil’s “peasantry” differed from that of Europe.
But while Brazil’s subsistence poor shared no precolonial history, they
were not without cultural inheritance. Their originating cultures were not peas-
ant, but Indian, African, and, significantly, slave. From their indigenous par-
ents they inherited an indomitable desire for personal independence, a charm-
ing disinterest in material accumulation, and a male resistance to agricultural
54. Jerónimo de Melo e Castro to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Paraíba, 20 Mar. 1792,
IHGB, Archive, 1,1,13, fol. 41; António Manuel da Prata to [governor?], n.p., 12 Jan. 1792,
IHGB, Archive, 1,1,13, fols. 42 – 44; Silva Lisboa to Sousa Coutinho, Cairu, 20 Mar. 1799,
ABNRJ 36: 109.
55. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 140; Wied-Neuwied, Travels in Brazil, 159, also
commented on the begging poor near Caravelas in southern Bahia, who accosted him with
petitions. Wied attributed their indigence to indolence: “[T ]oo poor to purchase slaves,
and too indolent to work themselves, they prefer starving.”
56. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 66.
labor of any kind, be it for wages or subsistence. They also inherited a tradition
of mutual assistance, for it had been the nature of the Indians, who distributed
among others the fish and game they caught, to share today what could not be
saved for tomorrow. The poor of the town of Ilhéus, who as we noted neglected
even the slightest agricultural production for local markets, were tellingly referred
to as being tapuiada — essentially “gone native.”57
From slave progenitors they likewise inherited a cagey attachment to free-
dom, as well as a strong desire to avoid the appearance of obsequious relation-
ships or the performance of servile labors. Among Indians, only women per-
formed farm labor; among Africans, only slaves. And probably most important,
subsistence strategies as a means of survival stemmed from both precolumbian
America and precolonial Africa, where food was largely produced for the house-
hold and not for markets. Hence, the shape of their economic existence, even
without slavery’s impositions, might have been predicted.58
Additionally, most of the rural poor probably did not have the technology,
labor, or land sufficient to produce enough food for their own needs, let alone
for the local planters’ slaves or for distant markets. James T. Lemon has esti-
mated that a household of five in late-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania required
about 70 acres to be self-sufficient.59 We may question the relevance of such an
estimate for Brazil, but despite the fertile capacity of the tropics, an extended
growing season, and the high calorie-per-hectare performance of cassava, Brazil’s
rural poor, forced to subsist on small plots of inferior soils, probably had little
choice but to take to the local forests and mangroves to supplement their mea-
ger agriculture. Subsisting on wilderness may have been imposed by the plan-
tation regime regardless of the role of cultural inheritance on subsistence
choices.
This leads us to two theories about the relationship between the institu-
tion of slavery and the free poor that apparently have not converged. The first
argues that slavery created the landless and wageless rural classes. Slaves, who
57. Allen W. Johnson, in Sharecroppers of the Sertão: Economics and Dependence on a

Brazilian Plantation (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971), 17 –18, notes the demise of the
Indian in Ceará and points out subsistence agricultural strategies as the primary indigenous
legacy.
58. John Hemming, “Indians and the Frontier,” in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 156; Dean, With Broadax, 89, describes the
moti-ro or mutirão, an indigenous form of cooperative labor for mutual subsistence.
59. James T. Lemon, “Household Consumption in Eighteenth-Century America and
Its Relationship to Production and Trade: The Situation among Farmers of Southeastern
Pennsylvania,” Agricultural History 41 ( January 1967): 59 –70.
occupied the bulk of rural jobs and made extensive landholding profitable,
made unemployment and landlessness the plight of the nonslaveholding free
inhabitants. Here, slavery is the agent conditioning the lives of an impotent,
even passive, people.60 The second argues conversely that the rural poor, who
sought land and refused wages, made slavery and its spread inevitable. Formu-
lated in the 1830s independently by both Edward Wakefield and Miguel Cal-
mon, this theory maintains that slavery resulted from the colonial reality of too
few people on too much land. According to Calmon, “in unsettled countries,
where subsistence is easy, and man can live without great exertion,” servile
labor is the unavoidable result. With all of Brazil before them, the small free
population, including the Indian, refused to work for others. So planters, the
strongest and best connected of the free rural classes, turned first to enslaving
the Indians, and then to Africans.61
While on the surface contradictory, the two theories, if periodized, do not
necessarily meet head on; both contain a certain explanatory usefulness. Open
frontiers and limited populations alone are insufficient to make forced labor
inevitable, but the initial and persistent refusal of the free classes, including the
Indians, to work for others under any circumstances did force those in need of
labor to consider other options, such as slavery. So the rural peoples, actively
resisting subservience and moving on to open land, did to that extent help cre-
ate the slave option. But it is also true that the establishment and expansion of
slavery incrementally denied the majority of the rural peoples the opportunity
to own land, or even to reconsider their initial decisions about engaging in
remunerative wage labor. Not only did slaves come to fill the majority of occu-
pations, but those jobs had now become by definition “slave work” and there-
fore all the more to be avoided by free people. Additionally, the slave-owning
60. This has been argued from at least the Praieira Revolution of 1848 and has since
been repeated by many. See Amaro Quintas, O sentido social da Revoluçao Praieira [por]
Amaro Quintas (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçao Brasileira, 1967), 16, 96 – 99, 112; F. J. Oliveira
Vianna, Populações meridionais do Brasil (São Paulo: Monteiro Lobato e Cia. Editora, 1922),
60 – 61, 69; and Caio Prado Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1987), 328 – 29, 332.
61. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and
Political State of Both Nations, 2 vols. (London: 1833); Miguel Calmon, Ensaio sobre o fabrico
do assucar (Bahia: n.p., 1834), 5. Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, 132 – 33, examines the two
previous writers and bolsters them with his evidence for the widespread availability of land
in Bahia even at the end of the colonial period. Vilhena, Tollenare, and Couty would
support neither argument, for they attributed the status of the agregados to indolence
alone.
classes no longer needed the free poor, so they felt no compunction to provide
them a basic subsistence, a tool used by landholders in other peasant societies
to tie labor to the land.62 A proclivity for autonomy saved many of the rural
free from servile labor relationships, but with the unintended consequence of
having to settle for either a tenuous independence at the receding frontier, or
an equally tenuous dependence on the lands of those who, with slavery as a
tool, had usurped them.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the town councils of southern
Bahia began acting to secure legislation that not only protected the mangals’
public status but also acknowledged subsistence as the mangrove’s priority use.
The first known of such laws was enacted during the governorship of João de
Lencastro (1694 –1702), who prohibited the stripping of mangrove bark for
tannin within three leagues of the towns of Camamu, Cairu, and Boipeba (all
within the district of Ilhéus), due to the damage this caused fishing.63 In 1715,
Jaguaripe also sought protection for local fisheries, and the governor, the mar-
ques de Angeja, similarly prohibited the felling of any mangrove timber in the
township with a penalty of 30 days in jail, a fine of ten thousand réis to be
granted to Jaguaripe’s office of public works, and an additional four thousand
réis to the informant, should there be one. These were blanket prohibitions,
covering all three varieties of mangrove, and the governor by this legislation
had apparently created a self-enforcing mechanism. Potential informants had
monetary incentives in addition to their already vital interests to preserve local
fisheries.64 The system, as it stood, seemed to work too well. With similar
blanket prohibitions established in the other villas of the district, by 1721 tan-
ners were in distress. Their petition to the governor told of untreated hides
piled to the rafters, soon to be lost to decomposition if bark could not be
acquired. Governor Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses, concerned about the
reach of the legislation, sent letters to the villa of Camamu inquiring as to the
exact nature of the laws passed by Lencastro and the limits of the regions pro-
tected. Until the matter could be fully resolved, he exempted the tanners from
62. Scott, Moral Economy, 6.

63. Conde de Vimieiro to Sargento-mor Pantaleão Rodrígues de Oliveira of
Camamu, Bahia, 30 Nov. 1718, Documentos históricos, 44:100; Vasco Fernandes César de
Meneses to vilas of Camamu, Cairu, and Boipeba, Bahia, 25 Aug. 1721, Documentos
históricos, 44:125 – 28. While the role of the leaves and trees in the fishery’s ecology was
generally understood, many blamed the astringent bark, some of which fell in the water
during stripping, for the sudden disappearance of the fish.
64. Ordem do Marques de Angeja, 14 Nov. 1715, Bahia, Documentos históricos, 54:69.
the prohibition on a one-time basis, which ostensibly saved their hides. There-
after, he promised, a new law would be promulgated.65
In 1724 Meneses, who had to again remind landholders that the man-
groves were public property, presented a royal provision ruling that fisheries,
upon which the local inhabitants of southern Bahia relied, took precedence
over other property claims and resource demands on the mangroves. However,
the blanket restrictions were to be replaced by the regulation of nonsubsis-
tence extractive activities; the power to regulate remained with the town coun-
cils. Hence local government, by a system of licensing and fees, could deter-
mine the rate and location of bark and fuel extraction in their jurisdictions.66
By 1735, Jaguaripe’s council had worked out regulatory particulars. They pro-
tected the red mangrove outright, prohibiting felling or barking of any kind.
Felling for fuel was limited to the white mangrove, whose location inland had
little impact on fisheries. Those who cut the white mangrove had to seek per-
mission under a progressive system of licensing. The poor could purchase
renewable annual licenses for two thousand réis; the rich, “os mais possantes,”
paid four thousand réis under the same terms. How the wealth brackets were
determined is unstated, but the distinction may have been between those who
worked on their own account and those who employed slaves. As brick and tile
making employed many of Jaguaripe’s residents, the council further limited
fuel harvesting to the use of these potteries and prohibited the sale of local fuel
to the sugar mills of the Recôncavo, as “they serve, by such excessive consump-
tion, to devour and extinguish the said mangroves.” Individuals who owned more
than one pottery were required to buy a separate license for each. The former
penalties and incentives for felling or stripping the red mangrove remained in
effect, and, because some had argued that the council had not been as diligent
in the past as they should have, the council’s attorney was given specific charge
of enforcing the regulations, which were published and posted throughout the
municipality.67
The barkers, who could only use the red mangrove (as the other species
contained little or no tannin), had been left with little recourse in southern
Bahia and had to make do with the mangrove forests that fell outside the
65. Vasco Fernandes César de Menezes to Câmara of Camumu, Bahia, 9 Oct. 1721,
Documentos históricos, 44:151.
66. Cópia da provisão régia, D. João to Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses, n.p., 9
July 1724, BNRJ-SM, I-31,29,39, no. 3.
67. Cópia do provimento que corregiu aquele de 1724, n.p., [1735?], BNRJ-SM,
I-31,29,39, no. 5. See also Cópia do provimento que corregiu aquele de 1735, n.p., n.d.,
BNRJ-SM, I-31,29,39, no. 4.
municipalities’ reach. However, even in these remote areas they remained at

odds with the fuel cutters, who also sought the easier pickings of the red man-
grove. The activities of both parties, with a little cooperation, could have been
coordinated, or better still, combined into a single endeavor. But this was
apparently never the case. Fuel cutters felled mangroves with the bark, which
was then uselessly burned, forcing barkers further afield. And the barkers often
felled the mangroves in order to strip the upper trunks that then decayed
under the constant wetting of the tides. Even when barkers left the trees on
their roots, fuel cutters, if they did not come directly behind barkers, probably
found the dead, tough trees difficult to work and moved on to fresh, green
ones that yielded more easily to the ax.68
By 1760, the barkers of Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco had appealed to
the crown to be given priority over their fuel-cutting rivals. They claimed fuel
cutters were taking so much mangrove that the price of the bark had become
excessive and that in a short time nothing would remain of the red mangroves,
threatening the very existence of the tanning industry. Although claims of com-
plete mangrove deforestation were greatly exaggerated, the crown saw the
waste involved in the lack of coordination between the two activities. It was
hence declared illegal to cut red mangroves that had not been stripped of their
bark, and severe fines of 50,000 réis and three months jail were imposed. With
the rising importance of leather exports in the eighteenth century, the crown
granted the barkers the privilege of stripping the red mangrove “without dis-
tinction of place or district,” from Santos to Ceará, with the notable exception
of the state of Bahia, where the laws passed previously in favor of fisheries
remained in effect. Maranhão and Pará are not mentioned, probably because
their incredible reserves were only beginning to be tapped.69
68. The documentary record does not indicate the actual method for barking
mangroves, but because Spix and Martius (Viagem pelo Brasil, 1:90) observed that it did not
take long for the mangrove trees to regenerate their bark, it is likely that only the outer
layer of bark was stripped, leaving the inner bark to repair itself. The inner layer was more
difficult to remove but had the highest concentrations of tannin. In modern barking
operations, both layers are taken, although sometimes law requires that only the bark on
one side of the tree be stripped, which allows the tree to recover. In both cases, however,
during the period that the tree requires to repair itself, leaf production nearly ceases, which
might explain why some colonists claimed barking did kill the tree; see Miguel de Lobo de
Carvalho, Ouvidor in Ilhéus to [governor?], Camamu, 19 Jan. 1771, APB, 182, no. 8.
69. “Alvará com força de ley, por que Vossa Magestade he servido prohibir, que nas
capitanías do Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Santos, Paraíba, Rio Grande, e Seará, se não
cortem as árvores de mangues, que não estiverem já descascadas, debaixo das penas nelle
conteúdas” ([Lisbon?]: [9 July] 1760), New York Public Library.
Southern Bahia’s town councils appear to have largely succeeded in pre-

serving the local mangroves against depredations that threatened fisheries.
Their record was not perfect, and there are many instances of locals accusing
the councils of failure to enforce the regulations, and even of corruption. But
Jaguaripe’s council maintained it had attempted to obey the law to the letter
and had adamantly refused the bribes of cutters and barkers alike. Some land-
holders had offered them enormous annual sums to be exempted from these
restrictions, but their brazen petitions were denied. And when individuals like
Sebastião Pereira de Araújo went over the council’s head to the king, seeking
exclusive right to fell mangroves fringing his properties, the council effec-
tively defended the public status of the mangal by dispatching bundled copies
of past legislation for crown perusal. Despite the fact that they could not
catch and punish every infractor, they argued they had always acted in the
interest of the “common good, which ought to be preferred to private inter-
est.” Opening of the mangal to limited barking, at the price of four thousand
réis per boatload, was the only substantive change they had made, and this they
also justified in the interest of the poor residents who increasingly wanted to
engage in barking.70
The mangroves are an exceptional case of colonial forest preservation.
While the crown made many attempts to conserve upland forests, largely by
monopolization, only in the mangroves, and in a more limited way in the pro-
tection of urban watersheds, were forests actually preserved for ends other
than elite interests. But colonial mangrove legislation is also exceptional because
it was enacted on behalf of Brazil’s marginal classes, a group for the most part
ignored by the colonial government.
The municipal councils may have had a number of motivations for com-
ing to the assistance of the subsistence populations, but sources are silent on
many of the possibilities. Protecting food sources might have been a means of
reducing popular uprisings, but in rural areas no such food riots or organized
resistance are reported, at least before the nineteenth century. Furthermore,
the councils never name the threat of unrest as justification for protecting
mangrove subsistence activities, a powerful argument they could have used to
ensure royal support were it a serious concern of local officials. As noted, these
rural peoples had little opportunity for coherent rebellion, and their ability to
70. Senado da câmara de Jaguaripe to king, Jaguaripe, 20 Oct. 1769, BNRJ-SM,

I-31,29,39, no. 1; Miguel Lobo de Carvalho to [governor?], Camamu, 19 Jan. 1771, APB,
182, no. 8; Cunha Meneses to Melo e Castro, Lisbon, 12 Aug. 1780, ABNRJ 32: 473;
Representação da câmara de Jaguaripe, Jaguaripe, 21 Aug. 1784, BNRJ-SM, I-31,30,55.
suffer hardships without lashing out was summed up nicely by José da Silva
Lisboa: “[T]he people of Bahia are of a pacific and docile nature: general mis-
fortune elicits lamentations, but not blasphemy.”71
In maintaining the common status of the mangroves, the councilmen
(who were usually local planters) may have been attempting to prevent the
more powerful among them — such as the Jesuits, who held extensive tracts of
coastal sugar lands — from monopolizing the source of fuel for their mills or
food for their slaves. But if the councils had the power to defeat the strongest
among them, why grant the weakest exclusive access? Although town revenue
did result from the increasing regulation of the mangroves through licensing
fees and fines, and the councils stood to gain yet more by the corruption of
those regulations, this seems an unsatisfactory explanation.
More likely is that the protection of the mangroves represented an attempt
by local councils to guard their interests from outsiders. When it was noted
that barkers, limers, fuel cutters, and fisherman were often nonresidents, new
regulations might be seen as a means to secure local resources for local needs.
When Jaguaripe (where no sugar was grown) prohibited the cutting of man-
groves to fuel sugar mills, their real intent may have been to keep nonresident
sugar millers from competing with locals who required the fuel for ceramic
production.
But in addition to protecting their own local interests, there seems to be a
sincere desire on the part of officials to protect the weak from the excessive
acquisitiveness of the strong. Just as nature’s laws forced the mangroves to the
margins of the colonial landscape, the colonial institutions of latifundia and
slavery had pushed much of the population to the very economic fringe of
society. It was a reality that few elites questioned. Despite the demands of a
few, like Vilhena, to legislate the free poor into productive wage labor through
censuses, vagrancy laws, or monetary head taxes, no real attempts were made,
since slavery already satisfied the demand for captive labor. And none couched
the argument for maintaining free access to the mangroves in the terms of
egalitarian or republican morality. The right of the poor to the mangroves had
nothing to do with equality of status or access. But to a certain extent, those
who governed took some responsibility upon themselves for the society they
had created, and one right that the poorest classes were to maintain was to sub-
sist. Just as Rio de Janeiro’s council legislated the price of bricks and tiles so the
71. José da Silva Lisboa, “Carta muito interessante . . . para o Dr. Domingos
Vandelli” [1781], ABNRJ 32 (1910): 506. “O povo da Bahia he de hum carácter pacífico e
dócil: as desgraças públicas o fazem gemer, mas não blasphemar.”
poor could afford to shelter themselves decently, most municipal councils in

Brazil worked on behalf of the local poor to maintain sufficient supplies and
affordable prices of staples such as beef and cassava flour, placing, as they so
often repeated, public good before private greed. They even required large
landholders to plant specified numbers of cassava mounds each year — not to
supply slaves, as is sometimes assumed, but for the requirements of the urban
poor.72 Bureaucratic officialdom could accept inequality with equanimity, but
they could not countenance starvation; preservation of the mangroves for Brazil’s
poor was the defense of a moral economy, however primitive.
Had Brazil’s oysters produced pearls of marketable value, as they did in
New Spain, it is likely the crown would have had a different perspective, and
conservation would have taken a different course, but with no direct economic
interest in the mangroves, they remained a protected option for the poor.73 It
is possible that municipal councils outside of Bahia similarly preserved local
mangals for fishery conservation, but unfortunately there is no extant evidence.
However, southern Bahia’s apparent success is remarkable in and of itself. In
1800 fish and shellfish were so abundant in the region that, as Silva Lisboa
reported, many preferred the hand-to-mouth existence the bounty permitted
over engaging in planting, let alone in remunerative labor. And on passing
through the region in 1818, much of it on foot, Spix and Martius observed that
despite a visibly significant population as judged by numerous farms and houses,
the coast was almost entirely cloaked in mangrove over the more than two
hundred kilometers from Ilhéus to the island of Itaparica just offshore from
the town of Jaguaripe.74
Attempts at forest conservation in Brazil’s upland Atlantic Forest failed in
the colonial period, in part because royal and colonial interests differed. Only
the crown wished to conserve Brazil’s fine hardwoods, including brazilwood,
so the king monopolized them on both public and private land in the interest
of royal shipbuilding and exclusive trade profits. Landholders perforce engaged
primarily in agriculture, and although the laws protecting specific timbers and
72. For municipal acts regarding food supplies in the city of Salvador, see Cartas do
Senado: Documentos históricos do Arquivo Municipal do Salvador Bahia (Salvador, Brazil:
Publicação da Secretária de Educação e Cultura, Prefeitura do Município, 1951– 62),
3:32 – 33; 4:50 – 51; 5:16, 68, 108 – 9; and Documentos históricos da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de
Janeiro, “Senado da Câmara—Bahia, 1696 –1726” (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e
Cultura, 1950), 87:58, 68, 154, 157.
73. On Spain’s justification for oyster conservation in New Spain see Lane Simonian,
Defending the Land of the Jaguar (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1995), 35.
74. Spix and Martius, Viagem pelo Brasil, 2:193.
forests were well known, farmers destroyed—rather than harvested—the king’s

trees with impunity and disastrous results.
The Atlantic Forest has almost entirely disappeared, and what little remains
is largely secondary growth. Brazil’s mangroves, however, represent the world’s
largest reserves.75 That success must be credited in large part to the forest itself
and not to conservation policy. Despite unrelenting extractions by those who
subsisted and by those who commodified, the mangal fought back with incom-
parable fertility. In regions that were not heavily urbanized, nature’s supply
more than met humanity’s demands, a seemingly inexhaustible resource based
not on the principles of sustainability, but on a fantastic yield. But local con-
servation policies also lent a hand. The mangrove’s fecundity alone, when con-
stantly disturbed, could not maintain the diversity and multitude of species
that relied upon them. This required full preservation. Preservation of the
mangal for the purpose of fish conservation appears to have experienced at
least a moderate and local success.
In the nineteenth century, the rapid expansion of many of Brazil’s coastal
cities began an urban onslaught against the mangroves that has continued to
this day. Population growth intensified demands on the mangrove for subsis-
tence and commodities, and urban expansion permanently displaced mangrove
habitat. As Rio de Janeiro spread both west and north, lands had to be drained
before they could be platted with roads and lots. Dikes cut off the mangroves’
access to the salty tides, and a single broad canal drained the life out of the
infamous Mangue, a massive mangal that had marked the western edge of Rio
and separated the city from the royal palace. Nearly all applauded the reclama-
tion, replacing swamps with handsome townhouses and palm-lined avenues.
But there was one lone voice crying for the loss of wilderness. Pedro
Soares Caldeira incorrectly attributed the rise of yellow fever in the city with
the rapid decline of the mangroves, but he correctly pointed out some of the
real costs incurred by the mangroves’ destruction. His major concern was the
declining stocks of fish and shellfish that had once been so abundant. Sardines
were becoming rare, and he claimed the oyster was almost entirely gone. He
lamented this loss of life both for its human costs and for its own sake, describ-
ing the deforested tidelands as massive, inhuman cemeteries where the lives of
millions of creatures rotted under a burning sun. What had once vibrated with
life had become a “laboratory of death.” He blamed mangrove deforestation
for the unprecedented nightly heat waves the city experienced. Westerlies
75. Edna Mascarenhas Sant’Anna and Maria Helena Whately, “Distribuição dos
manguezais do Brasil,” Revista Brasileira de Geografia 43 ( Jan.–Mar. 1981): 47 – 63.
passing over the now unshaded black mud, which he claimed could burn a
man’s feet, carried the intense heat and cadaverous stench to the homes of the
inhabitants. And he chided government officials who had for the last few years
spent considerable sums to reforest the Tijuca Mountains above the city but
had entirely neglected the tidal forests around it, which he considered of greater
value to the citizens.76
By the mid–twentieth century, the rural poor began pouring into Brazil’s
cities, often faster than they could be housed. The migrants were forced to
build shanties on land to which nobody important made claim. Many went up
to the picturesque hillside favelas; others have been forced down into what
remained of the mangroves, onto the tidal no-man’s-land. If the realities of
colonial rural life forced the poor to depend on the mangroves, the realities of
modern Brazilian urbanism have forced the poor to displace them. The man-
grove’s stilt roots have been supplanted by the stilt foundations of palafitas,
sprawling slums constructed over tidelands. Now, more than willing to work in
the larger economy, the lack of opportunities still requires many to direct their
attention to subsistence. The poor continue to fish and crab in what remains of
the urban mangroves, but the harvest is slim and sickly compared to that of
their colonial progenitors.
76. Caldeira, O corte do mangue, 6, 9, 12, 21, 22, 24.

Colonial Mangroves and Brazil Landless Poor

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Colonial Mangroves and Brazil Landless Poor

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Stilt-Root Subsistence:

Colonial Mangroves and Brazil’s

Hispanic American Historical Review 83:2

coastal natives. In fact, the largest archaeological objects bequeathed by Brazil’s

of primitive pyramids, the colonists found these monumental refuse heaps

Hilaire considered shell collecting, which he observed at Ilha de Governador,

30. Representação de Silvestre de Sousa, Macacu, 29 Oct. 1817, BNRJ-SM, codice

37. Koster, Travels in Brazil, 2:62.

57. Allen W. Johnson, in Sharecroppers of the Sertão: Economics and Dependence on a

62. Scott, Moral Economy, 6.

municipalities’ reach. However, even in these remote areas they remained at

Southern Bahia’s town councils appear to have largely succeeded in pre-

70. Senado da câmara de Jaguaripe to king, Jaguaripe, 20 Oct. 1769, BNRJ-SM,

poor could afford to shelter themselves decently, most municipal councils in

forests were well known, farmers destroyed—rather than harvested—the king’s

76. Caldeira, O corte do mangue, 6, 9, 12, 21, 22, 24.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen