Language and Conquest: Tupi-Guarani Expansion in the European Colonization of Brazil and Amazonia

5 * Language and Conquest: Tupi-Guarani Expansion in the European Colonization of Brazil and Amazoniam . k i t t i y a l e e

1. Introduction: Tupi-Guarani Colonists and a New Coastal Language Ecology

Around 1587 in Salvador, “the oldest of Indians” recalled that even prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, the Tupinaé had reached the Bay of All Saints and had driven away its inhabitants, speakers of Gê languages whom they called Tapuia. After many years of living by the sea, the Tupinaé were ousted by another group of newcomers, the Tupi-nambá. Attracted by the “richness and fertility of this land,” the invaders erected villages, planted gardens, enjoyed excellent hunting, and traded with neighbors, eventually populating 100 to 150 independent villages along over four thousand kilometers of coastline (Soares de Sousa [1587] 1989, 215, 216;1 Monteiro 1997, 977). See map 5.1.

The settlement of the Tupinaé and the Tupinambá in the best agricul-tural grounds of lowland eastern South America begins the story of ex-pansion and conquest for the coastal clans of the Tupi-Guarani language family. This story was repeated in the colonial history of Portuguese America (1500–1822) and thus shaped that history. The descendants of the newcomers were said to have greeted the crew sailing under Pedro Álvares Cabral, the Portuguese commander credited with the offi cial dis-covery of Brazil in 1500. Since the days of early communications between indigenous societies and European visitors, and ongoing through much of the colonial era, the languages of coastal Tupi-Guarani-speaking peoples were the fi rst ones used between and among Indians, Europeans, Africans, and their American-born kin. Writers, observers, and Jesuit missionar-ies recognized the widespread use of Tupi-Guarani speech and produced grammars, catechisms, and other didactic texts that codifi ed the ethnic tongues into one single language format. They called it a língua geral Bra-sílica, which literally means “the Brazilian lingua franca.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the colony, the state of Brazil, it served as unoffi cial lingua franca (Rodrigues 1986, 21). The Brasílica gained a new role in Portugal’s lesser known colony: the state of Maranhão and Pará, or Amazonia. About a half century following foundation in 1621, the Brasílica was adopted legally as the language of colonization in 1686.

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By the early eighteenth century, the Brasílica had changed, according to observers, into a vulgar, or vernacular, lingua franca; by midcentury, it became known simply as “the Vulgar.” As for the Brasílica, it lost offi cial status in Amazonia in 1757. Instead, residents of Amazonia spoke the Vulgar as their fi rst language until as late as the nineteenth century (note that the Vulgar is known as Nheengatu or Língua Geral Amazônica in the specialized literature [see Edelweiss 1947; Bessa Freire 1983, 40, 46–49; Couto, chap. 3, this volume; Moore, chap. 4, this volume]).

I argue in this chapter that the Brasílica evolved as a colonial lingua franca largely because its native-speaking communities, the Tupi-Guarani Indians, were undergoing processes of conquest and expansion. Accord-ing to the specialized literature, the varieties spoken by ethnicities of

Map 5.1. Theories about Tupi-Guarani origins and early population movements (c. sixth to sixteenthth centuries). Map drawn by L. W. Sora. Sources: Brochado 1984; Métraux 1927; Heckenberger et al. 1998; Noelli 1998; Fausto 1992, 381–396.

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M. Kittiya Lee [ 145 ]

Tupi-Guarani Indians spread as the lingua franca as a matter of historical serendipity. The geographical prominence along the coast and the major rivers brought native speakers of the language family into contact with the European colonizers. Furthermore, writers perceived that closely re-lated features of the varieties facilitated the use of Tupi-Guarani in inter-ethnic communications (Rodrigues 1986, 18, 29, 32). Hence, because Europeans’ encounters with Indians were often with the Tupi-Guarani, writers referred to the varieties as the língua geral, or the lingua franca of the indigenous inhabitants of Brazil and Amazonia (Soares de Sousa [1587] 1989, 44).

I avoid using the term Língua Geral and the regional variants Língua Geral Paulista (LGP), Língua Geral Amazônica (LGA), and Nheengatu used by Hildo do Couto, Denny Moore, and other linguists (chaps. 3 and 4 in this volume; Edelweiss 1947; Bessa Freire 1983; Rodrigues 1986). My pri-mary reasons for doing so are, fi rst, that this chapter focuses on the early days when the Brasílica was used in interethnic communication before LGP and LGA/Nheengatu were documented. Second, my goal of iden-tifying the Tupi-Guarani’s infl uence on colonial aff airs applies equally to the Brasílica, LGP, and LGA/Nheengatu, since these are all languages based on Tupi-Guarani ethnic varieties. Third, as a historian, I prefer to leave questions of language classifi cation—what linguistic features dis-tinguish the Brasílica from LGP or LGA/Nheengatu?—to trained special-ists. Instead, and in the interest of transparency, I employ in this chapter the most common name given by the colonial writers who authored the language records this study is based on and follow the original, broad meaning of the writers when they used “the Brasílica” to refer to the Brazilian lingua franca they learned to speak or heard spoken between linguistically dissimilar peoples. Doing so not only makes clear that my arguments apply specifi cally to the historical language documented by contemporary observers. It also elides any confusion provoked by use of the generic label língua geral, which colonial writers also used for other unrelated lingua franca. For example, in the eighteenth century, suffi -cient numbers of the slave and free black populace understood the Af-rican language they called Mina to warrant its function as lingua franca in the captaincy of Minas Gerais (Yai 2000; Castro 2002). Elsewhere in colonial Brazil, other African tongues also earned the same denomination as “língua geral” (Couto, chap. 3, this volume).

Lastly, I understand the critical characteristics of “Língua Geral” as defi ned by linguists—its territorial dispersion and its common linguistic features—are shared by other languages and so are not unique features of the Brasílica. For example, that the native speakers of Romance tongues formed the largest part of the European settler community is refl ected

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in the use of Portuguese, increasingly diff use in towns they dominated (which were few and limited to the coastline) from the seventeenth cen-tury onward. However, observers never qualifi ed Portuguese as a “língua geral,” as they did for the African language Mina. Moreover, Portuguese, Mina, and other languages used in communications between speakers of diverse languages never served in the colony-wide context, as the Bra-sílica did in rural, urban, and indigenous (including non-Tupi-Guarani) European, African, and mixed settlements, at least not during the colonial era. Portuguese and Mina prevailed, respectively, in the towns populated predominantly by the Portuguese and in the enclaves of Africans and their descendants within the settlements, plantations, and ranches run by the Europeans. (These enclaves can perhaps also be identifi ed as “language islands,” to borrow a term used by Couto, chapter 3, this volume.) Thus, a broader focus of the current work questions why the Brasílica, over other important local or regional language varieties, dominated both colonies of Portuguese America during three centuries of European colonization.

Section 2 of the chapter introduces the fi rst written sample of the Brasílica: a 1519 vocabulary of the commodities exchanged between an unspecifi ed ethnicity of Tupi-Guarani-speaking Indians and European mariners. The text, although rarely studied in the scholarship on Brazil, is signifi cant as the earliest known record of any language of the land. For this chapter, its importance lies in its lexical content, which evinces the Tupi-Guarani linguistic affi liation of the Indians that scholars have long assumed but have not proved.2 Thus, this text establishes at an early date a commercial relationship uniting the Tupi-Guarani and the Europeans. Analysis of the vocabulary sheds light on the spoken communications, the conditions under which the lexical data was collected, and the mate-rial culture of the interethnic relations. These issues introduce the com-merce in brazilwood that initially enticed Europeans to the colony. Read alongside coeval sources, they reveal the faintest outlines of what may be called a Tupi-Guarani ethos in outsider relations. This ethos propelled numerous clans of the language family to seek out powerful foreigners as allies, to establish themselves as indispensable to the success of their allies, to foster what became long-standing partnerships, and to maintain their positions as key players in the shifting tides of human history.

Section 2 identifi es this Tupi-Guarani spirit in the interrelations the Tupi-Guarani sustained with European and indigenous outsiders from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Although Brazil and Amazo-nia were colonized offi cially by the Portuguese, the broader term Euro-pean is preferred because of the international dimension of the Spanish, French, Dutch, Irish, and English presence in and competition for the colonies. Representatives from these other European kingdoms fought

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each other and the Portuguese for control, almost always in partnership with Tupi-Guarani speakers. Section 3 then casts comparative light on the distinct behaviors of historical indigenous groups with foreigners. The juxtaposition of contrasting modes of interrelationships that American Indian language groups adopted with others—or the peoples they did not consider to be their own—prominently features an unmistakable Tupi-Guarani ethos of engagements with outsiders and strangers.

Not too long ago, the Tupi-Guarani were themselves foreigners in new lands. The coastal prominence of the language family by the start of the colonial period resulted directly from the eastward relocations of the speech communities.3 As early as the sixth and seventh centuries, Tupi-Guarani peoples had begun to extend beyond original settlements. Map 5.1 summarizes two major schools of thought about the origins of the group and the routes they traveled to settle new territory. Gener-ally, scholars concur that the Tupi-Guarani established themselves in the lands they crossed until they reached the Atlantic (Bruhns 1994, 266; Noelli 1998, 663; Scheel-Ybert et al. 2008, 768). By 1300, Tupi-Guarani speakers had established sites in the River Plate estuary, formed by the Paraná, Paraguay, and Uruguay Rivers (Bruhns 1994, 266). By the six-teenth century, they had dispersed over the most abundant lands of east-ern South America (see map 5.2). Ethnic clans lorded over stretches along four thousand kilometers of the coast, lining the banks of the continent’s two largest fl uvial systems, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the River Plate (Monteiro 1997, 977; Dean 1995, 29, 38). Around this time, the Tupi-Guarani began to receive the Europeans who arrived from trans-Atlantic crossings, ready to swap the wares they transported for local items.

2. The Seaside Barter for Brazilwood

From 1500 until the 1530s, the Europeans traveled to the colony in search of brazilwood (Caesalpinia sappan) (Marchant 1942). Since the Middle Ages, European cloth makers had prized the dyes extracted from this tree, which yielded tones ranging from orange to vermillion to purple (Schneider 1978, 420). These shades were derivatives of the color red, as-sociated with fi re, ferocity, and fortitude, and for such reasons they were viewed as indicators of noble qualities at least by the fourteenth century. Royalty, courtesans, and the nobility favored garments tinged with deep, warm hues, which they wore to distinguish themselves from the drab, dark dress of ordinary folk (Gage 1993, 89; Wiesner-Hanks 2009, 108). When the Portuguese identifi ed the dyewood in timber samples collected during the offi cial Portuguese discovery of Brazil, King Manuel lost no

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time in monopolizing the trade. As early as 1502, the Portuguese king contracted New Christian merchants to explore and claim three hundred leagues of the coast annually, to build and maintain one new trading post (feitoria) every three years, and to deliver brazilwood on each return voy-age (Marchant 1942, 29).

Although the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had given Portugal a claim over the lands that later included Brazil and Amazonia, King Manuel honored contracts with other nations so long as they remitted a share of the profi ts to the royal treasury. But the lure of the greater wealth to be gained from contraband trade was too much to resist. The French were notorious in the illegal traffi c of brazilwood; other important contenders included the Spanish, who moored regularly in Brazilian harbors en route to colonial possessions by the River Plate (Capistrano de Abreu 1997,

Map 5.2. Population movements to/from indigenous settlements (early colonization: Brazil, 1500–1560, Amazonia, 1600–1650s). Map drawn by L. W. Sora.

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52–68; Johnson and Silva 1992, 95; Staden [1557] 2008, 30–34, 37–38). Consequently, European traders returned heavy with logs after visiting Rio de Janeiro before 1510, Bahia in 1510 and 1526, Cabo Frio in 1511, and Pernambuco in 1520, 1522, 1526, 1527, and 1531 (Marchant 1942, 29–30). Such recorded voyages represented only a partial picture of what was a truly burgeoning trade accessed by the Europeans (see map 5.2).

This was the context of European engagement with coastal Brazil into which the Italian Antonio Pigafetta stepped in December 1519. By then, the Bay of Guanabara had become known for more than the native groves of dyewood. Abundant ship-quality timber allowed the crewmen to fi x problems that had aff ected the vessels since departure from Europe. Local communities willing to hew, shape, haul, and deliver logs, as well as to barter food, provided provisions for the ships destined for the rich prof-its to be made in the silk and spice trade in the Far East or the mineral wealth of the River Plate. Thus, the Bay became an ideal port of call.

As a volunteer on the Spanish expedition commanded by the Portu-guese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, Pigafetta was one of eighteen lucky survivors aboard the fi rst known vessel to circumnavigate the globe (1519–22). Taking on the task of scribe, the Italian regularly jotted down the sights he saw and the names of things he heard about. The travel nar-rative he published around 1525 brought to life for European audiences the peoples, customs, material wealth, fl ora, fauna, and languages he encountered across the world.4 Among this information is the fi rst known Tupi-Guarani vocabulary, in a document entitled, “Some Words of the Peoples of Verzin,” or Brazil.5 Although Pigafetta did not reveal the iden-tity of his informants, the glossary suggests they were the Indians living around the Bay who spoke Tupi-Guarani varieties. Travel accounts in the 1530s and 1550s identify them by the ethnonyms Tupi, Tupinambá, and Tupinikin (Schmidel [t. 1535] 1997, 20; Thévet [1575] 1953, 225; Léry [1578] 1990, 56; Staden [1557] 2008, 105).6

Table 5.1 is based on the modern transcription of the Tupi-Guarani vocabulary included in the Beinecke-Yale manuscript (Pigafetta [t. 1519] 1994, 17–18). Scholars consider the French-language document to be the most accurate version of the original.7 The left column lists the English terms (translated from French in Pigafetta [t. 1519] 1994, 45), and the right column lists the words that the Italian writer presumably heard in the barter between the Indians and the Europeans. The narrow commer-cial focus of the eight terms befi ts the interactions Pigafetta must have witnessed in an era when the European presence remained tied largely to the brazilwood trade. The document provides a unique perspective regarding the earliest of interethnic trade relations. However, it remains underutilized in the scholarship on Brazil, perhaps because the work de-

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votes only a few pages to describing Portuguese America, or perhaps because specialists question the reliability of the information it contains, a matter I discuss below.

Instead, the specialized literature draws from later works that focus exclusively on Portuguese America. Pigafetta’s vocabulary, compared to the accounts by French royal cosmographer André Thévet (1556), Ger-man artilleryman Hans Staden (1547–48, 1549–55), and French Calvin-ist pastor Jean de Léry (1556–58), is the shortest in length. In all four documents, the amount of linguistic information provided correlates with the time each author passed in the colony. Thévet’s ten-week visit sur-passed Pigafetta’s by two months: hence it contains several pages of eth-nographic data about the Indians, including a transcription of Christian doctrine in the Tupinambá language. Léry, who resided in the same fl edg-ing settlement as Thévet, interacted with the Tupinambá through French interpreters for “about a year or so” (Léry [1578] 1990, 56). Accordingly, he was able to publish an eighteen-page “Colloquy”8 made up of words and dialogues about salutations, colors, animals, plants, and cultural and material items (178–195). The “Colloquy” forms one chapter in History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, which itself is peppered with Tupi-Guarani terms and anecdotes about conversations with its speakers, scenes wit-nessed among them, and comments on their habits. Staden’s True His-tory and Description of a Country Populated by a Wild, Naked and Savage Man-munching People, situated in the New World, America was composed following two voyages. After a short fi rst trip, Staden remained for nine years the second time; during that period he lived as a prisoner-of-war among affi liated Tupinambá clans around Bertioga and São Vicente. The extensive linguistic content of Staden’s work refl ects the fl uency that he attained during a time when the only languages he heard were the ethnic

Table 5.1. The fi rst known Tupi-Guarani vocabulary

[corn,] millet maizfl our huyfi sh hook pindaknife [i]taissecomb chiguapscissor piramebell iteumaracagood, better [ga]tum, maragatum

Source: “Some words of the Peoples of Verzin,” in Pigafetta [t. 1519] 1994, 45.

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tongues of each clan and, in far fewer instances, French, which he did not speak, and Portuguese, which he had acquired (Staden [1557] 2008).

Whereas the work by Staden refl ects linguistic acquisition through immersion and long-term residence, Pigafetta’s “Some words” captures the low profi ciency of most European visitors. Travel literature indicates that the merchants and crewmen tended to sleep, eat, and tend to aff airs on the vessels when calling at the Brazilian harbors (Caminha [1500] 2002; Schmidel [t. 1535] 1997). Hence, the Europeans interacted with the Indians over the course of days or on and off throughout the weeks necessary to collect wood and replenish supplies. Such limited exposure is unlikely to have resulted in the Europeans’ adoption of the language, excepting individual talents. The experiences of the “master’s mate,” who was a repeat visitor to the colony, is typical of most Europeans. When called upon by the crew to mediate in the barter with Tupinambá Indi-ans, he could “stammer out a few words in [the Tupinambá] language” (Léry [1578] 1990, 26). Gestures and facial expressions must have been helpful, and, along with them, lists like “Some words” introduced key terms and phrases to uninitiated travelers anticipating direct and profi t-able conversations with the Indians.

Notably absent in the glossary is the item that so motivated the Por-tuguese, French, and Spanish to cross the ocean. Perhaps the Indians had become all too familiar with the European craze for brazilwood, so that there was no need to name it. This was the case in 1531, when an unspecifi ed group of Indians invited Pero Lopes de Sousa to trade with an impressive show of athletic prowess. Swimming with the swift pace of the ship on which the Portuguese rode, the Indians asked about his wish to trade for brazilwood—although the author does not specify exactly how they did so (Marchant 1942, 33). In Pigafetta’s case, the Indians who met with the crew may have simply arrived bearing logs to hand over in return for European merchandise.

Pigafetta may not have heard the Tupi-Guarani term for the wood if the haggling for its exchange occurred before he arrived. That the ship Bretôa waited for deliveries of brazilwood from April 17 until May 12, 1511, exemplifi es the lengthy period required for the logs to be prepared. Indian and African workers spent almost one month identifying and trav-eling to the grove of brazilwood trees, felling them with the metal tools provided by the Portuguese, shaving the bark, dividing the trunks into sections, and rounding the logs (Marchant 1942, 37). The logs then had to be carried to the factory or trading post (feitoria) near the coast, pre-sumably by the same laborers (34–41). If Magellan purchased as many logs as the Bretôa did, then the wait time would have exceeded the two weeks that Pigafetta remained in the colony.

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The fi nal explanation for the absence of “brazil” on Pigafetta’s list is the high probability that Magellan followed the commercial protocol established by the Portuguese. By law, a Crown-appointed agent known as the “factor” (feitor) was charged with negotiating all aff airs between the Indians and the Europeans. His tasks included identifying profi table goods, persuading local headmen to trade, negotiating prices with Indian merchants, and arranging for the delivery of the timber to the factory, where the factor stored the goods until the arrival of Portuguese traders. Therefore, local knowledge was crucial to the factor’s ability to realize the obligations. Although linguistic aptitude was not a requirement, the biographies of the few known factors indicate fl uency in the local speech. In some cases, the men were selected from the tiny population of Euro-peans already living on the land as survivors of shipwrecks, as deserters from earlier ships calling at port or as exiled convicts (Johnson and Silva 1992, 93; [Lopes de Sousa] [1530–32] 1968, 51; Marchant 1942, 35, 38–39; Couto 1995, 194–195; Cortesão et al. 1960–62, 43). Although the factor had been transferred prior to Magellan’s arrival, the commander called upon João Lopes de Carvalho, a Portuguese sailor who learned the local language variety during years of residence in the Bay of Guanabara (Parr 1953, 282).

The glosses for foodstuff s and merchandise in “Some words” suggest the continuing fame of the Bay of Guanabara as a trading post among European mariners. That the vocabulary features comestibles and small trade items infers that the factor bartered for the major commodity of brazilwood while the sailors negotiated directly with the Indians for per-sonal consumption. For example, sixteenth-century travel writers regu-larly mentioned manioc fl our, a staple of coastal indigenous societies, as an important provision for ships, which often ran low on food rations af-ter the two to three months typically required to cross the Atlantic Ocean (Caminha [1500] 2002, 56; Staden [1557] 2008, 27, 30, 38; Léry [1578] 1990, 26, 69–72). The second starch listed in the vocabulary presents the single linguistic anomaly in a document otherwise restricted to Tupi- Guarani lexica. Pigafetta notes for ‘corn’ (Zea mays) the word maiz, a term of Arawak origin. Coastal speakers possessed their own word for the plant, so loan words are improbable (Léry [1578] 1990, 71–72). Moreover, no Arawak clans were known to have occupied the eastern shores (Urban 1992, 95), nor is the Arawak word documented at any other time in the sixteenth century by coastal Indians. The most plausible explanation would be an oversight on the author’s part. Scholars have suggested that portions of the narrative drew from the writings of Christopher Colum-bus, the fi rst European to document American corn, and of Amerigo Ves-pucci, who introduced to European readers many Indian-language terms.

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As the authors of well-circulated travel accounts about the New World in the late fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, both men popularized words used by the Arawak-speaking Taino of the Caribbean islands (Pi-gafetta [t. 1519] 1995, xxiii; Warman 2003, 12, 37).9 Although portions of the ethnohistorical information in Pigafetta’s First Voyage around the World may be unreliable for this reason, my own comparison of “Some words” with records of Tupinambá, Tupinikin, and Brasílica vocabularies from 1540 until 1795 confi rms what is otherwise the faithful recording of Tupi-Guarani lexica in “Some words.”

The Italian writer specifi es by name the merchandise that the Eu-ropeans brought with them in anticipation of barter with the Indians. “Fish hook,” “knife,” “comb,” “scissor,” and “bell” were prized by the autochthonous societies that did not possess metal implements prior to trade with the Europeans. Their standard reference in sixteenth-century accounts identifi es the items as the staples of Indian-European seaside commerce (Staden [1557] 2008, 76). However, their notable absence from a 1500 report of the fi rst known encounter between coastal Indi-ans and Portuguese mariners reveals that by 1519 an evolution had oc-curred in the class of goods supplied by the Europeans. The metal tools in Pigafetta’s glossary were more expensive for the Europeans to acquire than the scraps of clothing and “worthless old” headgear (plucked from the very heads of the Portuguese sailors) that they gave to the Indians in 1500 (Caminha [1500] 2002, 46, 48, 53). It appears that the Europe-ans’ hunger for brazilwood—not to mention the actual starvation they endured as food rations diminished toward the end of the long Atlantic crossing—drove them to accommodate the demands of their indigenous commercial partners. Something can be said about Tupi-Guarani ingenu-ity in packaging their services into the sale of the item so hotly contested by the Europeans. By demanding the tools and by providing the labor necessary to fell, chop, and transport the logs, the Indians themselves became indispensable to all steps of the commercial transaction. Perhaps, too, the Europeans attempted to conserve whatever leverage they could by refi ning their persuasion skills. For instance, Pigafetta picked up the phrase “very good,” which he might have heard in sales pitches to Magel-lan’s crew, much in the fashion of the enthusiastic Indian vendor reported in the 1550s (Léry [1578] 1990, 27).

The brevity of “Some words” further suggests that limited conversa-tions between the sailors and the Indians occurred as they swapped prod-ucts for personal consumption. It served as a reference guide for fi rst-time sailors to know what foods to request. Staden witnessed one such con-versation: “When the ships come to bargain in this manner, one or two savages row out in a canoe and hand over their goods as fast as they can.

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Then they demand what they want in return, which the Portuguese then give them” (Staden [1557] 2008, 76). André Thévet also recalled transac-tions in “this manner [of speech]: ‘give me that, and I will give thee this,’ without any further talk” ([1575] 1953, 225). The modest lexica, con-sisting of limited grammar and a few terms adequate for effi cient iden-tifi cation of the trade commodities, exhibit the features linguists have identifi ed as common to many trade languages (Crystal 1997, 336, 439). This low level of profi ciency, best represented by itinerant European mer-chants or sailors, contrasts with the fl uency observed in men like Hans Staden, João Lopes de Carvalho, the anonymous factors referenced in historical documents (Johnson and Silva 1992), and the many unnamed mestizo interpreters born of Tupi-Guarani mothers and European fathers (Moore, chap. 4, this volume; Metcalf 2005).

Unique to the Brazilian case is the exclusive reliance on indigenous lexica. “Fish hook,” “comb,” “scissor,” and “knife” are named in the local tongue, suggesting that borrowings from European languages were not widespread even for objects that Europeans introduced. Even in the sec-ond half of the century, when the European presence had grown frequent, interethnic transactions occurred in the Tupi-Guarani coastal varieties (Cardim [1583] 1980; Knivet [t. 1591] 2008; Anchieta [1595] 1933). The absence of recognizable European loanwords stands in contrast with what has been described in the European trade colonies in Africa and in the Pacifi c in the nineteenth century. Though separated by three hundred years, colonies in sixteenth-century Portuguese America and in nineteenth-century Africa and the Pacifi c Ocean shared commonalities. Both were situated along trade routes and near forts. Encounters between the natives and the Europeans were largely commercial, similarly occa-sional, and depended on the length of time that each ship moored nearby. But unlike early Portuguese America, interethnic spoken communication in the African and Pacifi c colonies took place in the nonstandard vernacu-lars of European merchants, which the native traders acquired expressly for commercial purposes (Mufwene 2001, 8).

3. A Tupi-Guarani Ethos of Partnership: A Historical Survey

The European reliance on the Tupi-Guarani varieties continued as a long-standing practice throughout the sixteenth century. Their initial use evolved as a practical consequence of the Europeans’ desire for brazil-wood, which limited aff airs involving the Indians to the stretch of the shore where it grew natively. Recall that these were the lands recently oc-cupied by settler Tupinae and Tupinambá, whose descendants ventured out to meet the fi rst Europeans along the coast. Inland and farther north,

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interpreters who accompanied European writers into the Amazon en-tered landscapes dominated by the same language group (Medina [1542] 1988). Diogo Nunes likened the customs and languages of the riverine inhabitants he encountered around 1538 to that of the Tupi-Guarani by the coast, where he was born and raised (Nunes [c. 1552] 1993, 33; [c. 1552] 2000, 4). The Tupi-Guarani situation along the Atlantic shore, the Amazon River, and the River Plate, all navigable waterways acces-sible to seagoing European vessels, determined that the experiences of the Europeans almost always involved Tupi-Guarani speakers, a matter refl ected in all sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century travel litera-ture. Although it must have seemed to the Europeans that everywhere they explored, they encountered Tupi-Guarani speakers, in fact, by the 1530s, explorers had learned about non-Tupi-Guarani Indians. During the 1530–32 expedition to erect the fi rst Portuguese settlement of São Vicente, Pero Lopes de Sousa noted that the speech of the Gê language family (see map 5.2) sounded like “the chatter of the Moors [of North Af-rica or living in Iberia],” and the Portuguese claimed they “did not under-stand [it], nor was it like that of Brazil [the Brasílica]” ([Lopes de Sousa] [1530–32] 1968, 78, 97). These fi rst encounters were fl eeting, as were all subsequent meetings between the Gê and the Europeans for one cen-tury following recorded contact (Pompa 2003, 202–206; Puntoni 2002, 52–53; Langfur 2006, 24, 56). The contrast between the Tupi-Guarani and the Gê modes of interaction with outsiders, a matter discussed below, emphasizes the Tupi-Guarani ethos, which was evident in their consistent willingness to make and sustain contact with the Europeans and to render themselves crucial to the success of European endeavors.

The historiography on colonial Brazil has interpreted this Tupi- Guarani spirit as one of amicability. Narrations of the early colonial phase describe the “friendly” Tupi-Guarani Indians who helped the Portuguese gain a foothold in the colony despite the threats posed by competing European kingdoms (Capistrano de Abreu 1997; Johnson and Silva 1992; Marchant 1942).10 Once the Portuguese founded permanent settlements (the fi rst, in 1531–32 in São Vicente, by permission of the Tupinikin of Piratininga) and erected a provincial capital at Salvador in 1549 (a task enabled by the Tupinambá of the Bay of All Saints), the introduction of sugarcane prompted authorities and colonists to turn to African slavery (Schwartz 1986). In addition to the epidemics that decimated Indian populations, war, enslavement, environmental degradation, and territorial encroach-ment, other upheavals brought on by European occupation induced the remaining indigenous societies to fl ee. By the end of the sixteenth cen-tury in the urban centers of Brazil, autonomous Tupi-Guarani Indians had been exterminated, had escaped inland, or had been absorbed into

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the fold of descendants claiming mixed indigenous, European, and Afri-can heritages. From the seventeenth century onward, the former lords of the coast were relegated to remote hinterlands (see map 5.3); in his-tory books, too, they were glimpsed only in the foliage and on the rivers of Amazonia, or scattered throughout the vast interior. In this manner the traditional historiography about the late colonial period presents the involvement of the Tupi-Guarani Indians in colonial aff airs as having di-minished greatly from the infl uential roles they had once played.

Map 5.3. Expeditions of contact, exploration, and enslavement (c. 1550s to 1750s). Map drawn by L. W. Sora. Sources: Monteiro 1994; Sweet 1974.

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Archaeologists and anthropologists have built on this historical narra-tive of the disappearance of the Indians from the core regions of the col-ony. They have characterized as “migration” or “expansion” the popula-tion movements of the language group before and after the arrival of the Europeans (Noelli 2008, 660–663). The westward migrations of the Tupi-Guarani away from the coast are viewed as the Indians’ abandonment of original settlements, which had fallen under European control starting in the mid-sixteenth century (660). By contrast, the geographic prolifera-tion referred to as “expansion” is said to have occurred in pre-Columbian times when Tupi-Guarani movements resulted in demographic growth, the breakup of villages, and forestry management, which brought speak-ers to the Atlantic coast while they still retained infl uence over original sites (Brochado 1984; Noelli 2008, 660).

The work of ethnohistorians, colonialists, and scholars of the indig-enous peoples of Brazil have provided fresh perspectives on the degree to which the Tupi-Guarani, despite or perhaps because of their mobil-ity, created, sustained, and determined the outcome of colonial aff airs (Carneiro da Cunha 1992; Metcalf 2005). Monteiro (1997) argues that the seventeenth-century expansion of the colony’s frontier and the indig-enous slave market, the economic engine of the captaincy of São Paulo, relied extensively on individuals who successfully played off the politi-cal rivalries that divided Tupi-Guarani clans, unaffi liated native peoples, Luso-Brazilians, the Portuguese, and the Spanish (see map 5.3). Scholars of the Jesuits have emphasized the importance of Tupi-Guarani Indians in creating and renewing affi liations between the clans of the language family and the Catholic missionaries that endured for two and a half centuries throughout the far-fl ung provinces of Portuguese America. In particular, the elevation of the Tupi-Guarani languages from the mother tongues of coastal Indians to the unoffi cial lingua franca of the colony and the subsequent proliferation of grammars and catechisms in the Bra-sílica underscore the ongoing involvement throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of native speakers of Tupi-Guarani with religious agents of European colonization (Araújo 1618; Araújo and Leam 1686; Figueira 1621, 1687; Bettendorff 1678; Leite 1938–50; Moore, chap. 4, this volume; Couto, chap. 3, this volume). Native speakers led campaigns known as “fl ying missions” (missões volantes), which crisscrossed the col-ony and introduced Christianity and the Brasílica to indigenous peoples who had hitherto lived far from the Portuguese settlements and Jesuit missions. Thus, they edged the latter into the fold of colonial authorities (Leite 1938–50, vol. 2; Barros 2001; Pompa 2003; Bessa Freire 2004). These works emphasize the consistency with which Tupi-Guarani peoples sustained engagements with the Portuguese and, later, with settlers and

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[ 158 ] c h a p t e r f i v e

colonial authorities. As they did so, member clans of the language family remained central and in many cases enabled the continued Portuguese expansionist projects in the Americas, even in the late colonial era.

But it would be diffi cult to argue that the Tupi-Guarani invested solely in the Portuguese. In fact, if the Portuguese believed that the Tupi- Guarani were everywhere to be found, other indigenous peoples must have concluded that wherever the Tupi-Guarani arrived, the Europeans and Luso-Brazilians soon followed (see maps 5.2 and 5.3). The collabora-tion between numerous Tupinambá tribes and the French allowed the lat-ter a generous helping of the profi ts from the illegal traffi c of brazilwood around the Bay of Guanabara in the 1540s and 1550s and near Belém and São Luís in the 1600s (Daher 2007; Abbeville 1945). Recall also André Thévet and Jean de Léry, the French clergy who accompanied the 1550s attempt to erect the settlement of “France Antarctique.” The French pres-ence in the Bay of Guanabara would not have been possible except for the permission granted by the local Tupinambá. Throughout the 1640s, Po-tiguar Indians and the Dutch carved out colonies in the northeastern cap-taincies of Paraíba and Pernambuco, much to the alarm of the Tupinambá and their Portuguese allies (Capistrano de Abreu 1997, 69–90). Near the River Plate from the late sixteenth until the mid-eighteenth century, the Carijó (or the Guarani, as they were known in the literature on colonial Paraguay) interacted with settlers, enslavers, and church and colonial au-thorities on both sides of the frontier that divided Portuguese and Span-ish America (Monteiro 1994; Ganson 2003). And clans in parts of Amazo-nia welcomed Dutch, French, and Irish traders and colonists throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Evreux [1614] 1929; Sweet 1974; Lorimer 1989; Farage 1991; Dominguez 2000). While it may ap-pear that the Tupi-Guarani sought to associate with the Europeans to compete against indigenous neighbors and foes, or against Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian territorial encroachment, it is important to remember that for the most part, the battles played out between member tribes of Tupi-Guarani languages. As colonial writers and modern historians and anthropologists have shown, the bellicose relations that marked aff airs between clans were and continue to this day to be distinct features of the Tupi-Guarani, recorded by observers from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries (Staden [1557] 2008; Soares de Sousa [1587] 1989; Bettendorff [1694–98] 1990; Fernandes 1970; Clastres 1995; Viveiros de Castro 1992).

Perhaps the Tupi-Guarani commitment to sustained and meaningful relationships with the Europeans refl ects their desire to preserve them-selves as the lords of the land, which they believed themselves to be. (For a similar phenomenon elsewhere, see Ball, chap. 10, this volume.)

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The rivalries internal to the language family often did not characterize Tupi-Guarani relations with non-Tupi-Guarani Indians. The history of the Tupinambá of coastal Pernambuco echoes the language family’s ten-dency toward alliance with outsiders. According to longtime Amazonian resident and Jesuit missionary Father Felipe Bettendorff , the residents of eighty-four Tupinambá villages left Pernambuco between the 1520s and the 1530s (see map 5.2). Seeking refuge from the slaving, violence, eco-logical destruction, and other mayhem caused by Portuguese coloniza-tion, they pressed westward into Amazonia, eventually settling the banks of the Madeira River (see Tupi-Guarani migration on map 5.2). The whip of an angry Spanish man set them in fl ight again, this time to an island located twenty-eight leagues from the mouth of the Madeira (Bettendorff [1694–98] 1990, 56–57).11 There, the Tupinambá inserted themselves into local political and commercial circuits, forged commercial alliances with the “seven Provinces” of peoples to their north, and collected tribute from the “Mataieces” (57; Maranhão 1947, 196).12 Through intermar-riages, they linked their own lineage with those of their neighbors (Fer-nandes 1963, 55). Neighboring native societies must have understood the benefi ts to be gained by allying themselves with the expansionistic, warrior peoples. Around 1613, Caeté headman Arraia Grande expressed regret, saying that his people would have fared better had the Tupinambá been their allies (Evreux [1614] 1929, 172). Where confrontations oc-curred, the Tupinambá gained the respect and fear of their neighbors, who watched as they “consum[ed] entire nations [of resistors]” in war-fare (Bettendorff [1694–98] 1990, 57).

The integration of Tupi-Guarani newcomers into regional Amazonian networks calls for revision of the expansion/migration concepts scholars have used to categorize the territorial relocations of the language group through time. Although the Tupinambá of coastal Pernambuco left their homes, they created relationships with neighbors that heightened their social, political, and economic status in the new human landscape. This spirit of partnership forged with outsiders and foreigners—in contrast to the warring nature that characterized the interactions between clans—forms part of the elusive Tupi-Guarani ethos that anthropologists have sought to identify (Fernandes 1963; Clastres 1995; Viveiros de Castro 1992). That the Portuguese followed closely along the trails blazed by the Tupi-Guarani throughout the lowlands of eastern South America (Sam-paio 1987) raises the issue that Tupi-Guarani expansion remained in full swing throughout the colonial era and in fact determined where, when, and to some degree how the Europeans sought to fulfi ll their imperial ambitions.

The tendency of the Tupi-Guarani to make themselves essential part-

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[ 160 ] c h a p t e r f i v e

ners is especially salient when viewed in contrast with the actions of the Gê-speaking Indians featured in Hal Langfur’s study of the Eastern Sertão.13 From the 1750s until the 1830s, colonization of the region brought “local elites, slaves, impoverished settlers from other parts of the colony, and seminomadic indigenous peoples into a contest for land, labor, and resources, radiating outward from the mining district’s major towns” (Langfur 2006, 9). Especially in the second half of the 1600s, such contests broke out as armed confl ict, war, raiding, and kidnapping. Though “unequal and often coerced . . . [these contests remained] inten-sive exchange nevertheless” and formed “an essential means of [inter-ethnic] communication and exchange” (214, 261). Langfur’s study sug-gests another means by which Indians who met with outsiders chose to relate and to incorporate the latter, by interrelationships of avoidance, violence, and competition.

The ancestors of the Gê Indians of the Eastern Sertão are believed to have been the non-Tupi-Guarani Indians who fought Tupinaé and Tu-pinambá invaders on the coast prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500. Gê territorial occupation interrupted Tupi-Guarani coastal domi-nance, and as dwellers by the sea, the former Indians had made contact with European visitors by the 1530s (recall the Portuguese observer who compared their speech to that of North African Moors). Because the Gê also lived by the groves of brazilwood, they were well placed to compete against the Tupi-Guarani in establishing trade agreements with the Eu-ropeans, had they so desired (see maps 5.2 and 5.3). Yet they did not, because they conceptualized exchange with the other in terms of avoid-ance and violence, as testifi ed by sixteenth-century writers (Léry [1578] 1990, 29). Hence, one may even argue that the Tupi-Guarani became the favored indigenous trading partners for the Europeans simply because other Indians shunned the opportunity.

4. Conclusion: Language and Conquest

In this chapter I have attempted to argue for a Tupi-Guarani epoch of conquest and expansion, one driven by a spirit particular to the language family in its manner of engaging with and confronting outsiders. Al-though in general, human relations invariably span a range of acts from accommodation and collaboration to avoidance and confrontation, what distinguishes the Tupi-Guarani is the tendency to defi ne themselves as essential to the successes of their partners and to renew and sustain these alliances through the long term. In the case of the coastal Tupi-Guarani, their arrival to the shores of eastern South America shortly before the

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landing of the Europeans on the same lands resulted in associations that bound the groups for over two centuries.

In arguing for an indigenous age of conquest and for the evolution of the Brasílica as an expression of that Tupi-Guarani expansion, this chapter may seem at odds with the ideas articulated in other chapters. In fact, I have sought to understand how Tupi-Guarani conquerors and migrants recognized and incorporated the European outsiders, who were also in the midst of political and territorial expansion. In all instances, the central positions played by the Tupi-Guarani in the early sixteenth century evolved into long-standing relationships wherein the Europeans depended on Tupi-Guarani speakers to achieve their imperial ambitions. In the diff erent and far-fl ung lands of Portuguese America in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, confi gurations of alliance divided spe-cifi c ethnicities of Tupi-Guarani speakers among themselves but united them with what each clan considered to be the most prominent of the Europeans. The episodes of collaboration, whether military, commercial, religious, or political, reveal that the distinct ethnicities of the Tupi- Guarani language group colluded with the imperial and colonial designs of the European rulers, colonial authorities, and settlers and, later, of Luso-Brazilians.

Underlying the concerns discussed here is the larger issue that ques-tions why the Brasílica endured as the most important lingua franca for the two colonial provinces of Portuguese America. Recall that in Brazil, the lingua franca fell second to Portuguese by the late colonial era; in Amazonia it persisted as the fi rst language of most families and as the primary lingua franca for all who lived in colonial villages and towns. While it might be true that the Brasílica spread as far and for as long as it did under the patronage of Iberian colonial and church authorities, the long Tupi-Guarani history of engagement with foreigners suggests an ad-ditional reason. Its expansion from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century serves as one more refl ection of the Tupi-Guarani success in con-tinually defi ning and redefi ning themselves as essential actors whose par-ticipation would ensure success in local human endeavors.

Notes

Part of the writing and research for this chapter was made possible by the Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship in the History Department at the University of Chicago, the Ameri-can Historical Association, the Center for Historical Research at Ohio State University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities at the John Carter Brown Library. The sources consulted for map 5.1 include Brochado (1984), Métraux (1927), Heckenberger et al (1998), Noelli (1998), and Fausto in Carneiro da Cunha (1992, 381–396) and for

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[ 162 ] c h a p t e r f i v e

map 5.3 are Monteiro (1994), and Sweet (1974). I am grateful to the participants of the conference, especially to Salikoko S. Mufwene and Bruce Mannheim, as well as the anony-mous reviewers, for their probing comments and generosity of time. Their input has made this chapter a much better work; any errors or omissions herein are fully my responsibility.

1. For all historical sources written during the colonial era from 1500 to 1822, I have placed in brackets the original year of writing, if it is known, or the year of fi rst publication. If no date is available for the year of writing, or if the text remained as a manuscript until publication in the nineteenth through twenty-fi rst centuries, then the year of travel to the colony is given in brackets. The letter t serves to distinguish the date of travel from the year of writing or publication. Following each bracketed date is the year of the modern publication consulted. In order to not confuse read-ers with the diversity of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spellings of indigenous groups’ names, I have made use of modern Luso-Brazilian orthographic conventions for the names of Indian clans, Portuguese settlements, and geographic features; in bibliographic citations and in quoted material, the original spelling is maintained.

2. The 1519 year of the vocabulary predates the usual start date for the histori-ography, which begins earnest discussion of the colonial period in the 1550s (and in some cases, in the 1530s or the 1580s). If Indians in the early sixteenth century are addressed, they are considered the ancestors of the Indians living in the same region and identifi ed by mid-sixteenth-century writers (see discussion in the chapter about André Thévet, Jean de Léry, and Hans Staden).

3. I follow the specialized literature (for example, Brochado [1984]; Rodrigues [1986]; Bessa Freire [2004]) and regard the Tupi-Guarani language family as a single entity and linguistic class that brings together smaller speech communities that refl ect ethnic and regional varieties. For this reason, I refer to the Tupi-Guarani language family in the singular (i.e., the Tupi-Guarani language family expands) but use the plural when mentioning the peoples, speakers, clans, and so forth, of the linguistic affi liation (i.e., the Tupi-Guarani Indians settle).

4. Pigafetta’s record was titled Le voyage et navigation faict par les Espaignolz es isles de Mollucques, des Isles quilz ont trouve audict voyage, de roys dicelles, de leur government et maniere de vivre, avec plusiers autres choses and carried the following approximate translation in English: The Voyage and Navigation of the Spaniards among the Moluccas, the Islands that they found during said voyage, together with many other things (Pigafetta [t. 1519] 1995, xlvii). Subsequent partial and complete editions of the work were published under diff erent titles.

5. The edition printed in Venice in 1536 (Pigafetta 1536) carries the title “Alcune parole che vsano le genti ne la terra del Bresil” (“Some words that the people of the land of Brazil use”). In addition to the Tupi-Guarani vocabulary, Pigafetta’s First Voy-age around the World (Voyage and Navigation) also includes word lists in the following languages: Tehuelche of Argentina and Patagonia; Visayan of the south Pacifi c and the Philippine Islands; and Malay of the Malay Straits (Pigafetta [t. 1519] 1995, 10, 12, 55).

6. These Tupinambá were probably neither the same peoples as the migrants men-tioned in this chapter’s introduction, who settled in the Bay of All Saints before the arrival of the Portuguese, nor the Tupinambá discussed later in this chapter who fl ed from Pernambuco to Amazonia. Scholars remain uncertain about the affi liations of the numerous clans that colonial writers named equally as “Tupinambá,” and scholars have sought to distinguish between them according to geographic location; the ones

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referenced by this note are the Tupinambá of the Bay of Guanabara. In the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, writers began to use the term generically to refer to all Indians (see Moore, chap. 5, this volume).

7. Though written in French and not in Pigafetta’s native Italian, the Beinecke-Yale manuscript is thought by specialists to be an authentic work, the one composed closest to the dates (March 1523 to April 1524) when the original manuscript was written (Pigafetta [t. 1519] 1994, 17–18, 27). If these estimations are correct, then Pigafetta would have drafted the Beinecke-Yale document nearly one to two years after returning to Europe.

8. The full title of the chapter is “Colloquy upon the entry or arrival in the land of Brazil among the people of the country called Tupinamba and Tupinikin: In the sav-age language and in French” (Léry [1578] 1990, chap. 20).

9. Additional words throughout Pigafetta’s narrative support the hypothesis: the words king, canoe, and hammock are of Arawak origin. That the Arawak terms do not appear in subsequent Tupi-Guarani vocabularies suggests that Pigafetta borrowed from the works of Columbus and Vespucci, either intentionally or accidentally.

10. This perspective is not limited to historians. See, for example, Rodrigues (1986) and Couto (chap. 3, this volume).

11. This is probably the island known as “Ilha dos Tupinambarana.”12. The tribute-paying peoples called “Mataieces” by Bettendorff may be the

ancestors of the modern-day Pano-speaking Matís Indians or the Matsés Indians, all settled near to the Javari River.

13. The lands known during the colonial era as the Eastern Sertão today make up the state of Minas Gerais and the borders it shares with the states of Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, and Bahia.

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Language and Conquest: Tupi-Guarani Expansion in the European Colonization of Brazil and Amazonia

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