Taino

Bastida/BalboaVespucciColumbo

Puerto Rico

Dominican Republic

Concilio Taíno Guatu-Ma-cu A Borikén

April, 22 1500, Portuguese arrived off of coast of Brazil

post-1650

1581-1640

Hans Staden

Jean de Léry (1536-1613)History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil,

Also Called America (1578).

Botocudos (Macro-Gê)

Guarani (1949)

Tupinamba of Olivença, southern coastal Bahia

Pataxo (Macro-Gê), Bahia

2/1541

8/1542

6/15422/1542

Orellana Expedition (1541-42), chronicled by Gaspar Carvajal

• Aparia, overlord of a vast territory (80 leagues; 450 km), in the Peruvian Amazon;

• Machiparo, overlord of a territory that “extended for more than 80 leagues,” in the upper Solimões;

• “there was not from village to village a crossbow shot, and the one that was farthest was not half a league away, and there was one settlement that stretched for five leagues without there intervening any space from house to house.”

• “There were many roads here that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways.”

• Downriver, saw “some very large cities that glistened white”

• They discovered “a great quantity of food, such as turtles in pens and pools of water, and a great deal of meat and fish and biscuit, and all this in such great abundance that there was enough to feed an expeditionary force of one thousand men for a year.”

• “very great quantities of porcelain ware of various makes … the best that has ever been seen in the world”

Iquitos, Peru (375,000)

”We went among some islands which we thought uninhabited, but, after we got to be in among them, so numerous were the settlements which came into sight … that we grieved; and, when they saw us, there came out to meet us on the river over two hundred pirogues [canoes], that each one carries twenty or thirty Indians and some forty …; they were quite colorfully decorated with various emblems, and they had with them many trumpets and drums …. and on land a marvelous thing to see were the squadron formations that were in the villages, all playing on instruments and dancing about, manifesting great joy upon seeing that we were passing beyond their villages”

Gaspar Carvajal, 25 June 1542 (Medina 1988:218)

This short passage, but one of many from early chronicles, attests to the vigorous and populous societies that thronged the banks of the river, but it suggests how foreign this complexity was to the European eyes. “Great was their [early European colonial authorities] disapproval on seeing that those strapping men glowing with health preferred to deck themselves out like women with paint and feathers instead of perspiring away in their gardens (Clastres 1987:193).”

Santarém, Brazil (200,000)

Home of the primary town of the Tapajós polity in 1500-1600s

Estimated at 20 km² with a core area of 100 ha (350 acres) in 1500 (largest prehistoric settlement in Amazon)

Lope de Aguirre arrived in the New World (Peru) in 1536-37 and became renowned for violence, cruelty, and sedition.

Together with his daughter he joined the 1560 Ursua expedition down the Maranon and Amazon with 300 Spanish men and hundreds of natives.

Pedro de Ursúa (1526 – 1561)

was a Spanish Basque. As

governor of Panama (1550s),

Ursúa subdued a (ex-slave) revolt,

Tricked revolt leader Bayano, who came

unprepared to negotiate a truce. Ursua captured him and sent him back to King Phillip II of Spain.

Ursua-Aguirre Expedition (1560-1561)

Walter Raleigh and the Discoverie – El Dorado (1595)

Texeira (with 47 canoes, 70 soldiers, and 1200 native and African slaves); departed in Oct. 28, 1637, established

Portuguese settlement on Napo in 1639

Antonio Vieira, Jesuit1653-1661

During two centuries of colonial rule, indigenous people living on the main Amazon and its navigable tributaries had been destroyed, due in large part to European disease – smallpox, measles, influenza, and later malaria.

Survivors mercilessly brought down the river (“descended”) in slaving expeditions; or ‘descended’ from their forest homes to fill denuded mission villages.

The Marquis of Pombal, strongman of Portugal in the mid-eighteenth century, expelled first the Jesuits then the other monastic orders. Replaced missionaries with lay Directors, who were appalling oppressors. They forced men and women to work ceaselessly for them, and often abused girls in harems that shocked visiting ecclesiastics.

Pombal’s Directorate was abolished in 1798; but exploitation of the poor did not abate.

Hemming (2006); see also Hemming (1987), Amazonian Frontier

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquês de Pombal (1699-1782)

Pombal Directorate, in 1755, the Directorate of the

(abolished in 1798)

• Charles Marie de La Condamine (January 28, 1701 – February 4, 1774)

• La Condamine went to South America to measure the equator (1735). Travelled from Quito down the Amazon, ultimately reaching Cayenne (French Guiana). Discovered rubber from indigenous peoples in the region, but generally described the Amazon River as desolate with small and dispersed indigenous populations, in stark contrast to the descriptions of the previous centuries. Considered first scientific exploration of the Amazon. The journal of his ten-year long voyage to South America was published in Paris in 1751.

• Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l'équateur (Paris 1751, Supplement 1752)

• Relation abrégée d'un voyage fait dans l'intérieur del'Amérique méridionale (Paris 1759)

1822, Brazil’s independence from Portugal, up until that point the colony of Grao Para dealt directly with the Portuguese crown, and only after independence claimed allegiance to Brazil

1850s-1910s: Brazilian Rubber Boom

Henry Walter Bates, 1825-1892

Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823-1913

Richard Spruce, 1817-1893