Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Nora E. Jaffary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754651895
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351934459
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When Europe introduced mechanisms to control New World territories, resources and populations, women-whether African, indigenous, mixed race, or European-responded and participated in multiple ways. By adopting a comprehensive view of female agency, the essays in this collection reveal the varied implications of women's experiences in colonialism in North and South America. Although the Spanish American context receives particular attention here, the volume contrasts the context of both colonial Mexico and Peru to every other major geographic region that became a focus of European imperialism in the early modern period: the Caribbean, Brazil, English America, and New France. The chapters provide a coherent perspective on the comparative history of European colonialism in the Americas through their united treatment of four central themes: the gendered implications of life on colonial frontiers; non-European women's relationships to Christian institutions; the implications of race-mixing; and social networks established by women of various ethnicities in the colonial context. This volume adds a new dimension to current scholarship in Atlantic history through its emphasis on culture, gender and race, and through its explicit effort to link religion to the broader imperial framework of economic extraction and political domination.

Part 1
Frontiers

Chapter 2
Women as Go-Betweens? Patterns in Sixteenth-Century Brazil

Alida C. Metcalf

Go-betweens are everywhere in the Atlantic world during the age of discovery and colonization, but how many of them were women? In a fascinating essay on gobetweens, literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt selects Doña Marina, or Malintzin, Hernán Cortés’s interpreter in the conquest of Mexico, as ‘the supreme instance of the go-between in the New World’ because she was the figure through whom all communication between the Aztec and Spanish worlds passed (Greenblatt, 1991, pp. 143–5). One does not have to look far to find other Indian women, such as Pocahontas or Sacagawea, playing similar roles elsewhere in the Americas (Karttunen, 1994). In Brazil, Catarina Paraguaçu, Isabel Bartira and Maria do Espírito Santo are Indian women known to Brazilians as daughters of chiefs who, because of their associations with Portuguese men, were central figures in the first Portuguese settlements in Brazil. These prominent examples suggest that Indian women were the quintessential gobetweens in the encounters, conquests and colonization of the Americas. But when faced with such interesting and compelling lives, it is always important to ask if these women are unique, or if indeed they are typical of a larger cultural pattern. This chapter seeks to answer this question by systematically searching for the female go-betweens in a formative period of Brazilian history: the first half of the sixteenth century. By using a typology that breaks down go-betweens by ethnicity and gender and by applying it to three discrete stages within this 50-year period, I argue that it is possible to evaluate the presence and significance of female go-betweens in Brazil. Despite the importance often accorded to Indian women as go-betweens between the Indian and European worlds, women, while present, did not dominate this role.

To understand the roles of women as go-betweens, we must first define what go-betweens are. Beginning in the fifteenth century, as the Portuguese and then the Spanish, French and English mounted expeditions of discovery, trade, conquest and colonization, hundreds of go-betweens emerged to create, facilitate and interpret the encounters that took place. At the simplest level, go-betweens are physical – the sea captains, sailors, passengers and slaves who connected through their very physical and biological presence worlds that were previously isolated from each other. At a more complex level, go-betweens are transactional – the translators and cultural brokers who made possible communication, exchange, trade, conquest and settlement. At an even higher level, go-betweens are representational because they characterize and define new worlds and new peoples through chronicles, maps, epics, oral accounts and works of art. (Metcalf, 2005c).

Because go-betweens do not always readily appear in historical sources, they must be searched for, and at times their presence must be inferred. Furthermore, the roles of go-betweens change as conditions change. Three stages can be outlined in the formative first decades of Brazilian history: Encounter and Trade (1500–), Settlement (1530–) and Evangelization (1549–). Applying a simple classificatory scheme to each historical stage makes it possible to codify the roles of European, Indian and mixed-race persons known as mamelucos at each level – physical, transactional and representational. And both male and female go-betweens can be accounted for (Table 2.1).

Table 2.1 A Typology of Go-Betweens in Sixteenth-Century Brazil

	Men European, Indian & Mameluco	Women European, Indian & Mameluca
Physical/Biological	sea captains, sailors, passengers, slaves	passengers, slaves
Transactional	translators, traders, cultural brokers	translators, cultural brokers
Representational	chroniclers, map-makers, writers, orators, artists	writers, orators, artists

Stage One: Encounter and Trade

After the first recorded voyage to Brazil by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500, exploration of the Brazilian coast began, accompanied by a trade in brazilwood and Indian slaves. The vast majority of physical go-betweens in this period of encounter and trade were European men who crossed the Atlantic and linked worlds previously unconnected. On the European side were hundreds of men: sea captains, sailors, degredados (penal exiles), traders and crown officials, but few, if any, women. The absence of even a single known European woman suggests that almost no European women sailed on the early sea voyages to Brazil. Certainly, there must have been some. The ranks of penal exiles included women (degredadas), but whether European women came to Brazil in this very early phase of encounters remains unknown.

On the Indian side, most of the Indian men and women who crossed the Atlantic did so as slaves destined for Portugal, France, England, Africa and even Asia. Trans-Atlantic Indian slavery began almost immediately after Cabral’s landing in 1500. Fernando Noronha, a Portuguese merchant who received the right to exploit the trade in brazilwood, in 1501 or 1502, obtained a proviso from the king that entitled him to trade for slaves (Amado and Figueiredo, 2001, pp. 267–72). The few references to the slave trade from Brazil clearly indicate that women as well as men were taken from Brazil. One of Noronha’s ships, the Bretoa, transported 36 Indian slaves in 1511, 23 of whom (64 per cent) were women (História, 1921–24, vol. 2, pp. 343–7). In 1515, a Portuguese ship returned loaded not only with brazilwood, but with young men and young women, all slaves (Nova gazeta, 1922).

Indians did cross the Atlantic as free persons, but their experience differed in key respects from that of European men. When an Indian man crossed the Atlantic, as did the Indian Essomericq, he did so in a ship built in Europe with European technology, under the command of European sea captains, and in the service of European kings or powerful European merchants. Although Essomericq was to have returned in ‘twenty moons’ with information for his father, the chief of a Guarani group in what is today Santa Catarina, he never returned to Brazil (D’Avezac, 1869; Perrone-Moisés, 1992). Paraguaçu, the Indian wife of Diogo Álvares ‘Caramuru’, a Portuguese man shipwrecked in Brazil possibly as early as 1510, is known to have crossed the Atlantic, to have visited France, and to have returned. Álvares married Paraguaçu, the daughter of the local chief in what the Portuguese named the Bay of All Saints. In 1528, Álvares and Paraguaçu sailed to Britanny where she was baptized ‘Catherine du Brazil’; soon thereafter, Catarina Paraguaçu returned to Brazil with Álvares (‘Igreja recebe certidão’, 2001; Meznar, forthcoming).

Although Paraguaçu may have been the only Indian woman to cross the Atlantic and to return, many Indian women like her were drawn into intimate contact with European men in Brazil. In 1501 or 1502, Amerigo Vespucci describes landing on several occasions along the coast of Brazil and living with an Indian group for 27 days. While residing in the village, Vespucci describes the contact between natives of Brazil and Europeans, writing that ‘I ate and slept among them’ (Vespucci, 1992, p. 31). Sexual contact between Indian women and European men laid the groundwork for the sharing of disease, and it created the beginning of miscegenation. Indian women who became the willing and unwilling sexual partners of European men became physical go-betweens when they moved back and forth between their Indian villages and the encampments of European men. Their children – the mixed-race mamelucos – would later be an influential group in the first settlements; many would become go-betweens.

Of all who crossed the Atlantic, only very few became the influential transactional go-betweens. Transactional go-betweens typically were translators who directly mediated encounters between Europeans and Indians. Past experience in the African trade in the fifteenth century had taught the Portuguese the importance of translators (Hein, 1993). At the first encounter in Brazil in 1500, there was little communication, according to a pilot on Cabral’s armada, either through language or through signs (Amado and Figueiredo, 2001, p. 134). Cabral immediately began to consider how to create translators for future encounters, but there is no evidence that he considered using women in this role. He had with him 21 degredados whose presence on board was intended for situations, such as the one he found in Brazil, where future communication was desirable (Amado, 1988, p. 242). Pero Vaz de Caminha, a nobleman on the fleet, describes how Cabral discussed with his captains whether it would be a good idea to take away two Indian men by force, and to leave behind in their place two Portuguese men, both degredados (Amado and Figueiredo, 2001, p. 94). According to Caminha, the captains counselled Cabral not to take any Indian men from Brazil, but to leave the degredados. The captains believed that the degredados would learn the language and would be able to give better information when the king sent another ship to Brazil. Cabral and his captains thus deliberately created the first transactional go-betweens when they left behind two men (and several more apparently jumped ship unbeknownst to Cabral). A subsequent expedition to Brazil did find at least some of these men, and learned much from them, as is revealed in a document written in 1503 and a letter in 1505 (Amado and Figueiredo, 2001, p. 301; p. 368).

Brazilwood increasingly lured European merchants across the Atlantic, and the trade depended on many transactional go-betweens scattered up and down the coast, all of whom appear to have been European men. Either these European men were established in Brazil as factors who managed trading posts, or they were European men who went ‘native’ in Brazil and supplied individual ships. The Portuguese trade in brazilwood was regulated by the crown; merchants who held contracts from the king traded at a few established feitorias, or fortified trading posts, built along the coast. There, a resident factor negotiated directly with the Indians, or he did so through his own interpreters.

Despite the regulation of the brazilwood trade by the crown, Brazil quickly began to follow a pattern that emerged the century before in West Africa where Portuguese men known as lançados settled among Africans and through their marriages to African women became early middlemen in the Guinea trade (Coates, 1993, pp. 158–9; Rodney, 1970, pp. 77–94; Brooks, 1993, pp. 135–40; Couto, 1988, pp. 31–4). Such a pattern is clearly evident in the French brazilwood trade. The French left agents in Brazil, known as truchements (truchmans, interpreters), who lived with Indian groups and facilitated the brazilwood trade when merchant ships arrived (Staden, 1929; Thevet, 1997; Léry, 1994). It was the job of the truchement to convince the coastal chiefs that it was in their interests to cut, haul and load the wood, for as one sixteenth-century chronicler wrote, ‘if the foreigners who voyage over there were not helped by the savages, they could not load even a medium-sized ship in a year’ (Léry, 1992, p. 101). To make possible this trading relationship, the truchements married the daughters of chiefs and other prominent men.

Diogo Álvares developed a similar role in the Bay of All Saints where he facilitated the provisioning of European ships and the trade with Indians (Carneiro, 1980, p. 29). In 1530 a Portuguese mariner who met Álvares wrote in his log that ‘at this bay [of All Saints] we found a Portuguese man who had been here twenty-two years’ and that he [Álvares] ‘gave a long notice of what was in this land’ (Sousa, 1940, vol. 1, p. 155). In the far south of Brazil, similarly, a Portuguese man known only as ‘the bachelor’ provisioned ships, served as an interpreter and sold Indian slaves (Sousa, 1940, vol. 1, p. 502).

No Indian women are known to have brokered any of these early commercial relationships. Yet, it is clear that the success of the European male transactional go-between rested on his marriages to Indian women. These women were de facto gobetweens, too – linking the European men to their own Indian families and villages. As the daughter of a prominent local chief in the Bay of All Saints, for example, Paraguaçu tied Diogo Álvares into a powerful kinship network (Calmon, 1959, pp. 148–50; Tavares, 2001, pp. 67–8). The ‘bachelor’ of southern Brazil had several sons-in-law who assisted him; a fact which suggests that he also had developed an extensive kinship network (Sousa, 1940, vol. 1, p. 502). João Azevedo Fernandes argues that the first European men who found themselves ashore in Brazil had two choices: to be perceived as enemies and taken into indigenous groups temporarily, as captives to be killed in the cannibalism ceremony, or to be perceived as sons-inlaw, to be permanently integrated as the husbands of daughters of powerful chiefs. European men who entered into Tupi society as husbands and sons-in-law thereafter lived under the protection of powerful chiefs and instantly acquired allies in their brothers-in-law. In return, the European son/brother-in-law provided European items as gifts to his kinsmen (Fernandes 2003, pp. 26–7; p. 206; p. 224). Indian women therefore occupied an important niche – that of bridge between the European man and her Indian male kin – but it is difficult to evaluate their independence and agency as go-betweens.

Representational go-betweens explained the meaning of cultural contact and exchange through discourse and symbols, thereby shaping subsequent encounters and perceptions. Representational go-betweens, such as the letter writer Amerigo Vespucci or the chronicler Pero Vaz de Caminha, translated Brazil into a language for powerful European men. As a result, they had a great deal more influence than those who crossed the Atlantic but who did not write about what they saw. The early chroniclers not only described new lands and new peoples, but their information made its way onto maps and into treaties that influenced how an ever larger group of Europeans perceived Brazil. Indian go-betweens also represented Europeans – finding the meaning of their presence, appearance and demands – to an Indian audience. Although we know little about this, shamans and chiefs who traded with Europeans undoubtedly represented the meaning of the actions of the Europeans for their communities through discourse, dreams and the interpretation of myth.

At this level of representational go-betweens, no women, either Indian or European, are known to have represented the other side in texts or images that historians can study today. The lack of women in this role is only partly expressed by the absence of women in the more basic roles of physical, biological and transactional go-betweens. European women were less likely than men to possess the ability to read, to write or to draw maps. On the Indian side, it is possible that some women might have been shamans and might have represented the meaning of the presence of Europeans through oral prophecy. Indian women were known, for example, to play an important role in the cannibalism ceremony. In this role, they may have represented European men as outsiders and enemies (Fernandes, 2003). It is not difficult to imagine that Catarina Paraguaçu, who had sailed to France, would have been a go-between who represented Europe to those living in the Bay of All Saints. Assessments of these roles await more careful study of the surviving sources that depict Tupi and Guarani societies in the sixteenth century.

Stage Two: Colonization

In the second stage of development in sixteenth-century Brazil, which corresponds to the time when the first colonies began to form, women become more visible as go-betweens. On the European side, women began to cross the Atlantic in small numbers, becoming the first European women to play the role of biological and physical go-betweens in Brazil. The number of European women in the coastal settlements, however, remained very small. Not only were Indian women still more likely to be the sexual partners and wives of European men, but the numbers of mamelucas had grown substantially. The sheer number of Indian and mameluca women living in the Portuguese colonies made it possible for them to serve as transactional go-betweens between the early colonies and the surrounding Indian world. At the level of representational go-between, no women, Indian or European, are known by name.

The majority of the women living in the first Portuguese settlements all along the coast were Indians or mamelucas. Pero Correia, who had lived in Brazil since 1534, wrote that in the southern settlement of São Vicente European men had 20 or more Indian women, some slaves, some not, all of whom were his ‘women’. According to Correia, it had become a custom for Portuguese men to marry a mameluca, and to then delegate to her authority over his slave women, many of whom were his concubines (Leite, 1956–68, vol. 1, p. 438).

European women played a weak role in the formation of the first colonial settlements, largely because of their small numbers. The crown endeavoured to send Portuguese women to Brazil. Some of these women came as poor but respectable orphans, others as the poor and unrespectable degredadas (Coates, 2001, p. 143; p. 85; Leite, 1956–68, vol. 1, p. 166). Both, it was hoped, would become marriage partners of Portuguese men. Beyond their role as physical go-betweens, these European women were intended to serve a second role: to connect the nascent colonies back to Portugal. Beatriz de Albuquerque, the Portuguese wife of Duarte Coelho, the holder of the large grant of Pernambuco, is such an example. In a colony where it was a ‘custom’ for Portuguese men to live with several women, Beatriz de Albuquerque carried to Brazil a reminder that the Catholic teachings on marriage recognized only one wife. In the same way, other European women who came to Brazil also reasserted the cultural ties to Portugal. According to genealogists, Beatriz’s own brother, Jerónimo (who was unmarried but living with an Indian woman) was ordered by the queen of Portugal to marry a Portuguese woman. Jerónimo complied and married the oldest daughter of a Portuguese royal official (Fonseca, 1935, vol. 2, p. 350).

Because the early colonies depended so heavily on surrounding Indian tribes for their very survival, transactional go-betweens who mediated between the Portuguese settlement and the neighbouring Indian villages became crucially important. While it is possible that Indian and mameluca women brokered this relationship, the more common pattern which can be observed in the sources suggests that men dominated this role. Historian John Monteiro observes that ‘the most successful early Portuguese settlements were precisely those where significant alliances had been struck between European adventurers and native headmen’. For Monteiro, these alliances were ‘cemented by marriage strategies, as headmen “adopted” outsiders as sons-in-law’. (Monteiro, 2000, pp. 991–2). These adopted outsiders followed in the footsteps of the European men who brokered the brazilwood trade, for as the first Portuguese settlements began in the 1530s, European men who became sons-in-law to powerful Indian men became the crucial transactional go-betweens for colonists. As can be seen in the experience of three first colonies – Bahia, São Vicente and Pernambuco – Indian women were part of the success of the male European transactional go-between, but little is known of their roles.

When the hereditary grant to colonize the region at the northern most part of the Bay of All Saints was given to Francisco Pereira Coutinh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor Notes
• Introduction: Contextualizing Race, Gender and Religion in the New World
• Part 1: Frontiers
• Part 2: Female Religious
• Part 3: Race Mixing
• Part 4: Networks
• Afterword Women in the Atlantic World
• Bibliography
• Index