Sergio's Journey Part 1

THE SECRET REMAINS HIDDEN UP THE TAPAJOS RIVER

TRAVELLING NOTES ON THE FRUITLESS EXPEDITION LED BY ANTONIO RAPOSO TAVARES AROUND BRAZIL (1648-1651)

By Sergio Mejía

Lord Rootes Fund

University of Warwick

November, 2001

To Carine, because this Brazilian expedition was not after Raposo Tavares but towards her

Et in memoriam Sylviae amori

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest thanks go to my friend David Ayrton who

sacrificed both war and peace to help me scan and print

the illustrations and who, with the warmest friendship,

accompanied and helped me on the final push to finish

this work on time.

TO THE READER

The present text is barely a finished work in any

sense. It is not proper historical writing and it

is lamentably short of being literature. As a travel

account, it is unfinished, and it does not solve any

of the issues that it rises. However, it brought

much needed light to its author on a fundamental

question of purely personal import. It is solely for

this reason, does he dare to beg the reader to read

all the way to the end.

PREFACE

Saying that this is not a finished work does not imply that the objectives laid out in the initial project presented to the Lord Rootes Fund committee, were not accomplished. I believe that they were. Antonio Raposo Tavares?s route was retraced in all of its main parts; the historical problem posed by the expedition was comprehended through a sufficient use of the literature that has dealt with it, and ultimately it was presented in a meaningful and satisfactory way; we familiarised ourselves with the contemporary Brazil that we saw to the point of falling in love with the country; our Portuguese language advanced in the course of six weeks to the point of reasonable communication and was set on a solid foundation for improvement; we made friendships with Brazilians that will endure the distance; we incorporated in our lives the other half of Latin America; the final products offered to the committee were achieved to the point that they fulfil our responsibility, yet remain with us as acquired interests for further work.

In my case in particular, an unstated objective was achieved which I consider of even greater importance. I did not put it to the committee back in January, out of respect for the clear guidelines that regulate the application to the Lord Rootes Fund prize. I did not mention it to my partners in the project either. Perhaps it was not even clear to myself, even if it trailed with me permanently. In the end, while searching for answers to the predicament of Raposo?s expedition and doing my best to incorporate into my life as much of Brazil as possible, I came to the solution of a personal dilemma that had proved ellusive for two years. This solution was a happy one, as the reader will be able to notice in the last section of the present, despite it being veiled. To me, this is the greatest benefit of the whole enterprise, and one that I will keep for ever.

CONTENTS

Abstract                                                           8

The South East                                     8

In the Land of the Guaranies                             22

The Swamps of the Matto Grosso                     32

In the Foothills of the Andes                              38

Down the Fresh-Water Sea                              45

Epilogue

ABSTRACT

In 1648 ? at the time of the English revolution, the 30-years war in continental Europe and eight years after the Braganzas had recovered the Portuguese crown from the Spanish Hapsburgs ? Antonio Raposo Tavares left the settlement of São Paulo in Brazil and headed west. He departed with other two hundred Portuguese men and near one thousand Tupi Indians, and he did it for the sake of the Portuguese crown as much as he did it for himself. Three years later, after a long way downriver, he knocked at the gates of the fortress of Garupá, near the mouths of the Amazon. Three years later, in 1654, the Jesuit savant and advisor to the king of Portugal, Antonio Vieira ? at that time in charge of the frontier diocese of Maranhão ? wrote his long lost 56th letter, where he described Raposo?s odyssey.  He obtained the information from the testimony of some of the members of the expedition who had stayed in the region, as he and Raposo never met. Because the expedition had no chronicler priest, Vieira?s letter is the main source to reconstruct Raposo?s itinerary. As all evidence suggests, that letter was not lost but edited out from Vieira?s complete writings, and it was only brought to light by the Paulista historiography of the mid-twentieth century. Raposo?s expedition was not only rubbed out from history, it was ? in spite of being the greatest in scope of the recorded Portuguese entradas in Brazil ? an almost complete failure.

THE SOUTH-EAST

Our transatlantic plane touched the asphalt of  Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo early in the morning, when the sun sheds its first lights on the huge and whitish São Paulo skyline. A skyline made up of the succession of at least three large clusters of skyscrapers interspersed by vast stretches of much lower buildings that strike the eye as a white savannah. The ensemble could be seen from the air to be cut by broad thoroughfares not yet busy at the time of the first lights of the day. A black snaking and narrow strip winds its way through the city; we confirmed later that it was the Tieté River.

Raposo, together with his second in command Antonio de Pereira, ordered his men to march out of the village in the early morning, and left behind the wooden church and the one-storey houses that made up for seventeenth-century São Paulo. They reached the northern bank of the Tieté and skirted along it on horse and foot. On horse were those Portuguese members of the expedition who would afford an animal and a saddle, on foot the poorer ones and all the Tupis. They had no boats, but that did not diminish the importance of the river?s waters. They led a sure and known way to the mighty Paraná, second of the Iberian American rivers as the Spanish and Portuguese geographers already knew.  Both the Tieté and the Paraná led the way to the Spanish Jesuit missions of Paraguay, favourite places of looting for Pulistas like Raposo who in the 1630s had earned a reputation as ?the infamous? for taking toll of the christianised Guarani Indians and razing the Jesuit enclosures. If the infamous Raposo had been an Indian hunter ? a purveyor of the slave markets of Rio and Salvador ? he was in 1648 embarking on a completely different kind of expedition.

Unlike Raposo, and only after half an hour on the plane stretching our legs and watching the sun slowly rise over the Paulista Planalto, we headed east. We had decided that our own trip was to start in Rio, and only thanks to the logic of intercontinental flights serving Brazil did we have the opportunity to take an early glance over Raposo?s hugely magnified city. The dimly lit whiteness of the city at dawn had given way to a resplendent shine and the thoroughfares to their snaking, smoking load of vehicles. After long minutes in the air, the white megalopolis gave way to the dark green Planalto, which in turn turned into the whimsical and broken line of mountains that fringe the coast of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Thus, jumping from island to island and bay to bay, we reached the air gateway to the Wondrous City, the Galeão international airport.

It must be said that at this side, at the headwaters of Guanabara Bay, the Wondrous City does not look wondrous to the flying eye. The Tijuca mountain range, which so breathtakingly overlooks the city in postcards and posters with its Redeeming Christ on top, faces the other side and shows only its back to the oncoming planes. At its heels, there sprawls the not-so-glamorous and definitely unmarketable Rio Norte, a world apart. Here, a large portion of the cariocas live and very few outsiders venture. We excuse ourselves on the grounds of safety considerations, but beyond that it is clear that our minds are not well trained to apprehend live on this side of town. We tend to see only the poverty and the danger where there are also unique expressions of life, community and art. Rio Norte stands to the left of the Redeeming Christ?s throne (a sinistra do Deus Pai, as it is put in Portuguese) - there is no doubt about it -, but it is inhabited by the most obvious descendants of the men and women brought by force to build Brazil, and they have never put all their bets in the Redeeming Christ. We did not visit Rio Norte ? we only drove through it from the ramparts of an expedite motorway - but we glimpsed at it in many other parts of Brazil. For us, it continues to be a land of future exploration but also one of the main heartfelt reasons why we loved Brazil so much. In time, I will come to that.

Why Raposo headed west from Sâo Paulo is a matter that taken without the historical perspective causes a certain uneasiness in the traveller of today. Putting miles between oneself and Rio de Janeiro is something that must be explained, in the same way that so many visitors to the city end up taking the same taxi back to Galeâo and take off back to their lives without really wanting to ? at least not for a while longer! -, their hearts ridden with nostalgia - with saudade, as the Brazilian word best describes it. Rio is a place where one wants to stay or to which one wants to go back if one knows it. Raposo knew it, as he knew most of the Brazilian coast, but it was already taken by the courtiers of Mem de Sá and Raposo and his Paulistas had only the lesser share of the inland-oriented Sâo Paulo. He plunged into the Sertâo, he went to the place where nobody stays.

Raposo went west as we went east. He had a quest for glory ahead of him, riddled with dangers und uncertainties. We had the libraries and professors of Rio?s universities; also the monuments, beaches and all the delicacies of life to indulge in. Raposo was on a quest of momentous magnitude, of historical import, of which however he could not know the outcome, neither much about the means or paths to reach it. We were on a quest for Raposo and his expedition, but also ? like him ? for a Brazil that would give us many things we did not expect. Both expeditions set out on the quest for something, but he as much as we ventured into the unknown.