Brazil before Mendonça Furtado's appointment Early Colonial Structures upright=2.5|Map by Luís Teixeira (c. 1574) with the division of Portuguese America into captaincies. The Tordesillas line is offset ten degrees to the west of the official line. Collection of the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon. There were sharp differences between Spain's and Portugal's approaches to colonizing new territories in their empires as illustrated, for example, Spain's approach in those territories discovered by Christopher Columbus and Portugal's use of Brazil following the early encounters by João Ramalho Maldonado, Pedro Álvares Cabral, and Pêro Vaz de Caminha, the royal clerk on Cabral's flagship who wrote to King Manuel I describing the new territory.On the letter, Caminha stated the location as "deste Porto Seguro da vossa ilha da Vera Cruz" (English: this Safe Harbor of your island of the True Cross), Vera Cruz being the name Cabral had given the land in honour of the feast day of the Finding of the Holy Cross (3 May in the Old Roman Calendar - now abolished. (See "Cross". The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. revised. Edited by David Hugh Farmer. Oxford University Press, pp. 106-107. (in English). .), the day on which they departed from Brazil. In the early colonial period, European immigrants were the minority within the total population, while the Indian population, although never formally measured, constituted the majority having been estimated as 2.43 million in the 16th centuryScarato, p. 38.In his key analysis of the Indian population in 1500, Hemming acknowledges the degree of guesswork which had led many grossly differing estimates. His own estimate was that the Indian population at that time was 2,431,000. (See Hemming, pp. 487-501. reduced by infectious diseases to 10\% of that figure by the mid-18th centurySee Indigenous peoples below for further examination of the diseases and how they were introduced. As a result, the Indians were quickly outnumbered by the African slaves, of whom there were 560,000 at the end of the 17th century, Scarato, p. 38 after which the demands for slave labour increased rapidly and between 1700 and 1800 1.7 million slaves, mostly men, were imported. That measure did not go far enough to satisfy the settlers' needs. Nor were the Jesuits' prepared to accept it because they could see that the settlers were ignoring the new law anyway by deliberately setting up what they saw as "just wars" under the guise of which they were able to capture Indians and force them into slavery. Guasco, p. 72. Some Bandeirantes even raided the aldeias to capture Indians for their own use. Further appeals to the crown by both the Jesuits and the settlers led the king in 1574 to issue a further decree in which he reinforced the resgate principle but required that the names of all Indians taken into slavery should be entered into an official registry. The underlying factor was that, as their volume of work increased, the Jesuits raised funds to support it by using land for the production of goods. In turn this increased their need for labour. In the process they became "Brazil's largest landowner and greatest slave-master."Alden, "Late colonial Brazil, 1750–1808." Colonial Brazil. Edited by Leslie Bethell. Cambridge University Press, 1987. p. 296. . According to Alden, the outcome was:"Every sugar-producing captaincy possessed one or more Jesuit plantation; Bahia alone had five. From the Amazonian island of Marajo to the backlands of Piauí the Jesuits possessed extensive cattle and horse ranches. In the Amazon their annual canoe flotillas brought to Belém envied quantities of cacao, cloves, cinnamon, and sarsaparilla, harvested along the great river's major tributaries. Besides flotillas of small craft that linked producing centres with operational headquarters, the Society maintained its own frigate to facilitate communications within its far-flung network. The Jesuits were renowned as courageous pathfinders and evangelists, as pre-eminent scholars, sterling orators, as confessors of the high and mighty, and as tenacious defenders of their rights and privileges, which included licences from the crown to possess vast holdings of both urban and rural property and complete exemption of their goods from all customs duties in Portugal and in Brazil." Alden, "Late colonial Brazil", p. 296. In addition, as they saw their land being taken over and their freedom limited, hostility towards the settlers arose among the Indians. In two attacks in the 1530s, the settlements of Bahia and São Tomé were destroyed and several others were severely damaged. This was only the beginning of more than twenty years of attacks on settlements, and against the settlers' ready access to firearms the Indians won because of their agility and numbers.Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. University of California Press, 2005. pp. 383-384. . However, the Jesuits' comment on "great injustices" against the Indians took on greater meaning in 1559 as the Portuguese, under the leadership of Brazil's third governor general Mem de Sá, began "… grim, unrelenting, aggressive campaigns that included elements of surprise, night attacks and terror in one blood-drenched encounter after another. Having discovered that the palm-thatched buildings of the Indians burnt readily, the Portuguese systematically torched any village they occupied or passed. The Portuguese recruited and employed Indian allies to devastating effect and incited internecine warfare between politically fragmented Indian groups. This genocidal warfare resulted in the near extinction of many ethnic groups. All this was achieved with relatively few Portuguese troops acting with characteristic daring and brutality."Richards, p. 385-386. As this same commentator said, "These battles were a portent of the next three centuries."Richards, p. 385. In response, Indians either fled away from the occupied areas and further into the forests or moved to the aldeias. But it is a matter of ongoing debate in modern historical interpretation regarding the extent to which negative views towards the Jesuits in Portugal were based on truth or myth. One historian says:"In Portugal, the great architect of the anti-Jesuit myth was the Marquis of Pombal. It corresponded to a centralization process of the absolutist state, keeping the control of education, which belonged to the Society of Jesus...This myth had such a lasting negative impact in the Portuguese society that even today they are seen by many as responsible for obscurantism and as enemies of science." Evidence from the 19th century illustrates how Pombal's attitudes towards the Jesuits had entered the public mind and continued to emerge in other contexts. For example, a quote from 1881 says:"[T]hey accuse the Jesuits of committing all kinds of crimes, from larceny to murder, of plotting in the darkness against freedom, of turning credulous spirits into fanatics, terrorizing them with the ridiculous paintings of Hell and of the dreadful punishments of eternity; of teaching the beliefs, thus preparing the youthful spirits for their future work of destruction; of abusing the trust that in the naive their hypocritical humbleness inspires, to, one day, raise the strength, light up the fire and douse in blood the martyrs of this land of liberals."Botelho, A. A defesa dos jesuítas por um liberal (The defense of the Jesuits by a liberal). Livraria Portuense de Clavel, 1881. p. 5.) The irony is that Pombal was a graduate of the Jesuit-run University of Coimbra (Portuguese: Universidade de Coimbra), one of the largest and wealthiest of all Portuguese education institutions, and the author's just quoted have suggested that the Jesuits were actually playing a leading role throughout Portugal in the advancement of scientific knowledge and research, the development, innovation and dissemination of pedagogic practice, and the expansion of teaching facilities including free schools for the poor.Brás et al, pp. 4-5. Expulsion of the Jesuits As dealt with above, Carvalho e Melo's dissatisfaction with the Jesuits, as much related to their influence within the Portuguese court as their controlling influence in Brazil, is stated clearly in the Instruções Régias, At the early stage of Mendonça Furtado's governorship, the idea of expelling the Jesuits was not yet on the agenda. However, they were not off the hook because in the instructions he had been directed to investigate the Jesuits' wealth and landholding "with great caution, circumspection, and prudence". Instruções Régias, Inst. 14. In similar fashion, Pará's royal magistrate Feliciano Ramos Nobre Mourão told Carvalho e Melo that his brother was "gloriously leaving his name memorable for all ages, for his heroic deeds and enlightened virtues" offering as evidence the way he had promoted the liberty of the Indians, protected the inhabitants, encouraged commerce, increased incomes from livestock and the production of various kinds, all thanks to his "exemplary procedure, honesty, ardent zeal." Santos, p. 76. As Azevedo illustrated, there were various opinions about Mendonça Furtado. "Of the modern writers, Francisco Luíz Gomes,The book referred to is Gomes, Francisco Luis. Le marquis de Pombal, esquisse de sa vie publique (The Marquis of Pombal, sketch of his public life). Imprimerie Franco-Portugaise, 1869. (in French) Accessed 18 January 2019. perhaps the most appreciative of the events of the time, claims Francisco Xavier to have been a man of little understanding; an unfair view … ." Azavedo , p. 14. In the end, it emerges clearly that Azevedo was prepared to argue in Mendonça Furtado's favour because, as he wrote: "Appointed captain-general of the Gram-Pará soon after his brother had entered the ministry, Mendonça had been in charge of the government for more than seven years leaving in the archives of the captaincy enough evidence to illustrate that we may be misinformed by those who have haggled against him with limited intellectual endowment. Azevedo, p. 17.
Brazil before Mendonça Furtado's appointment Early Colonial Structures upright=2.5|Map by Luís Teixeira (c. 1574) with the division of Portuguese America into captaincies. The Tordesillas line is offset ten degrees to the west of the official line. Collection of the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon. There were sharp differences between Spain's and Portugal's approaches to colonizing new territories in their empires as illustrated, for example, Spain's approach in those territories discovered by Christopher Columbus and Portugal's use of Brazil following the early encounters by João Ramalho Maldonado, Pedro Álvares Cabral, and Pêro Vaz de Caminha, the royal clerk on Cabral's flagship who wrote to King Manuel I describing the new territory.On the letter, Caminha stated the location as "deste Porto Seguro da vossa ilha da Vera Cruz" (English: this Safe Harbor of your island of the True Cross), Vera Cruz being the name Cabral had given the land in honour of the feast day of the Finding of the Holy Cross (3 May in the Old Roman Calendar - now abolished. (See "Cross". The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. revised. Edited by David Hugh Farmer. Oxford University Press, pp. 106–107. (in English). .), the day on which they departed from Brazil. In the early colonial period, European immigrants were the minority within the total population, while the Indian population, although never formally measured, constituted the majority having been estimated as 2.43 million in the 16th centuryScarato, p. 38.In his key analysis of the Indian population in 1500, Hemming acknowledges the degree of guesswork which had led many grossly differing estimates. His own estimate was that the Indian population at that time was 2,431,000. (See Hemming, pp. 487–501. reduced by infectious diseases to 10\% of that figure by the mid-18th centurySee Indigenous peoples below for further examination of the diseases and how they were introduced. As a result, the Indians were quickly outnumbered by the African slaves, of whom there were 560,000 at the end of the 17th century, after which the demands for slave labour increased rapidly and between 1700 and 1800 1.7 million slaves, mostly men, were imported. That measure did not go far enough to satisfy the settlers' needs. Nor were the Jesuits' prepared to accept it because they could see that the settlers were ignoring the new law anyway by deliberately setting up what they saw as "just wars" under the guise of which they were able to capture Indians and force them into slavery. Some Bandeirantes even raided the aldeias to capture Indians for their own use. Further appeals to the crown by both the Jesuits and the settlers led the king in 1574 to issue a further decree in which he reinforced the resgate principle but required that the names of all Indians taken into slavery should be entered into an official registry. The underlying factor was that, as their volume of work increased, the Jesuits raised funds to support it by using land for the production of goods. In turn this increased their need for labour. In the process they became "Brazil's largest landowner and greatest slave-master."Alden, "Late colonial Brazil, 1750–1808." Colonial Brazil. Edited by Leslie Bethell. Cambridge University Press, 1987. p. 296. . According to Alden, the outcome was:"Every sugar-producing captaincy possessed one or more Jesuit plantation; Bahia alone had five. From the Amazonian island of Marajo to the backlands of Piauí the Jesuits possessed extensive cattle and horse ranches. In the Amazon their annual canoe flotillas brought to Belém envied quantities of cacao, cloves, cinnamon, and sarsaparilla, harvested along the great river's major tributaries. Besides flotillas of small craft that linked producing centres with operational headquarters, the Society maintained its own frigate to facilitate communications within its far-flung network. The Jesuits were renowned as courageous pathfinders and evangelists, as pre-eminent scholars, sterling orators, as confessors of the high and mighty, and as tenacious defenders of their rights and privileges, which included licences from the crown to possess vast holdings of both urban and rural property and complete exemption of their goods from all customs duties in Portugal and in Brazil." In addition, as they saw their land being taken over and their freedom limited, hostility towards the settlers arose among the Indians. In two attacks in the 1530s, the settlements of Bahia and São Tomé were destroyed and several others were severely damaged. This was only the beginning of more than twenty years of attacks on settlements, and against the settlers' ready access to firearms the Indians won because of their agility and numbers.Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. University of California Press, 2005. pp. 383–384. . However, the Jesuits' comment on "great injustices" against the Indians took on greater meaning in 1559 as the Portuguese, under the leadership of Brazil's third governor general Mem de Sá, began "… grim, unrelenting, aggressive campaigns that included elements of surprise, night attacks and terror in one blood-drenched encounter after another. Having discovered that the palm-thatched buildings of the Indians burnt readily, the Portuguese systematically torched any village they occupied or passed. The Portuguese recruited and employed Indian allies to devastating effect and incited internecine warfare between politically fragmented Indian groups. This genocidal warfare resulted in the near extinction of many ethnic groups. All this was achieved with relatively few Portuguese troops acting with characteristic daring and brutality."Richards, pp. 385–386. As this same commentator said, "These battles were a portent of the next three centuries."Richards, p. 385. In response, Indians either fled away from the occupied areas and further into the forests or moved to the aldeias. But it is a matter of ongoing debate in modern historical interpretation regarding the extent to which negative views towards the Jesuits in Portugal were based on truth or myth. One historian says:"In Portugal, the great architect of the anti-Jesuit myth was the Marquis of Pombal. It corresponded to a centralization process of the absolutist state, keeping the control of education, which belonged to the Society of Jesus...This myth had such a lasting negative impact in the Portuguese society that even today they are seen by many as responsible for obscurantism and as enemies of science." Evidence from the 19th century illustrates how Pombal's attitudes towards the Jesuits had entered the public mind and continued to emerge in other contexts. For example, a quote from 1881 says:"[T]hey accuse the Jesuits of committing all kinds of crimes, from larceny to murder, of plotting in the darkness against freedom, of turning credulous spirits into fanatics, terrorizing them with the ridiculous paintings of Hell and of the dreadful punishments of eternity; of teaching the beliefs, thus preparing the youthful spirits for their future work of destruction; of abusing the trust that in the naive their hypocritical humbleness inspires, to, one day, raise the strength, light up the fire and douse in blood the martyrs of this land of liberals."Botelho, A. A defesa dos jesuítas por um liberal (The defense of the Jesuits by a liberal). Livraria Portuense de Clavel, 1881. p. 5.) The irony is that Pombal was a graduate of the Jesuit-run University of Coimbra (Portuguese: Universidade de Coimbra), one of the largest and wealthiest of all Portuguese education institutions, and the author's just quoted have suggested that the Jesuits were actually playing a leading role throughout Portugal in the advancement of scientific knowledge and research, the development, innovation and dissemination of pedagogic practice, and the expansion of teaching facilities including free schools for the poor.Brás et al, pp. 4–5. Expulsion of the Jesuits As dealt with above, Carvalho e Melo's dissatisfaction with the Jesuits, as much related to their influence within the Portuguese court as their controlling influence in Brazil, is stated clearly in the Instruções Régias, At the early stage of Mendonça Furtado's governorship, the idea of expelling the Jesuits was not yet on the agenda. However, they were not off the hook because in the instructions he had been directed to investigate the Jesuits' wealth and landholding "with great caution, circumspection, and prudence". In similar fashion, Pará's royal magistrate Feliciano Ramos Nobre Mourão told Carvalho e Melo that his brother was "gloriously leaving his name memorable for all ages, for his heroic deeds and enlightened virtues" offering as evidence the way he had promoted the liberty of the Indians, protected the inhabitants, encouraged commerce, increased incomes from livestock and the production of various kinds, all thanks to his "exemplary procedure, honesty, ardent zeal." As Azevedo illustrated, there were various opinions about Mendonça Furtado. "Of the modern writers, Francisco Luíz Gomes,The book referred to is Gomes, Francisco Luis. Le marquis de Pombal, esquisse de sa vie publique (The Marquis of Pombal, sketch of his public life). Imprimerie Franco-Portugaise, 1869. (in French) Accessed 18 January 2019. perhaps the most appreciative of the events of the time, claims Francisco Xavier to have been a man of little understanding; an unfair view … ." Azevedo , p. 14. In the end, it emerges clearly that Azevedo was prepared to argue in Mendonça Furtado's favour because, as he wrote: "Appointed captain-general of the Gram-Pará soon after his brother had entered the ministry, Mendonça had been in charge of the government for more than seven years leaving in the archives of the captaincy enough evidence to illustrate that we may be misinformed by those who have haggled against him with limited intellectual endowment. 
R
106-107.
106–107.
R
487-501.
487–501.
D
Scarato, p. 38
D
Guasco, p. 72.
D
Alden, "Late colonial Brazil", p. 296.
R
383-384. .
383–384. .
R
p. 385-386.
pp. 385–386.
R
4-5.
4–5.
D
Instruções Régias, Inst. 14.
D
Santos, p. 76.
R
Azavedo
Azevedo
D
Azevedo, p. 17.