Part 16

The colonists, who flocked to Brazil from Portugal at this time, were of a very different type to the Portuguese who were sent to Asia. The latter were chiefly soldiers, sailors, and officials, despatched to India and the settlements in the East in royal fleets as servants of the Crown, who, while acknowledging themselves servants of the king, yet went to the East with the idea of making their own fortunes, and eventually returning home to Portugal, while the Brazilian colonists went out at their own expense with their wives and families, and made their homes in their adopted country. These men were invaluable to a new country; they went out with no intention of ever returning home, and with the power and will to labour with their hands. Throughout the sixteenth century a steady succession of Portuguese emigrants made their way to Brazil, either on account of the favourable report of its climate and resources, which they received from their friends or relations already settled there, or in order to escape the misfortunes impending on their own country, and more especially the heavy hand of the Inquisition. Mention has been made of the vast importation of slaves into Portugal; this employment of negro labour threw a number of agricultural labourers out of work, who did not care to enlist as soldiers for the East, and could not make a livelihood in cities, and from this class many of the first colonists to Brazil came. Some weight, too, must be attached to the adventurous nature of the Portuguese people; and this side of their character, which showed itself in individuals in the East, made men who loved a family life better than fighting find their way to the western continent. The colonization of Brazil was essentially popular; it was not initiated by king, priests, or nobles; and illustrates the extreme self-reliance and daring which made Portugal so great at this period. The one blot upon the careers of these early settlers was their treatment of the natives. Accustomed to the existence of slavery at home, they tried to make the natives work for them, and this attempt brought about a bitter hatred between the aboriginal races and the immigrants, which showed itself in murder and massacre. The steady tide of emigration to Brazil did not at this time contribute to the wealth of the mother country; on the contrary, it must be noted as one of the chief causes of that depopulation of Portugal, which has been spoken of as the germ of the decadence of the Portuguese power.

It has been said that some of the emigrants from Portugal to Brazil were moved by a fear of the Inquisition, and hoped to escape from it by going to the New World. Especially was this the case with numbers of the “novaes Christiãos,” or half-converted Jews. This class comprised many families of wealth and influence, who, when they saw the rapid approach of persecution, removed _en masse_ to Brazil. In the new country they thought themselves free, and were joined by many of their unconverted brethren, who had been expelled by King Emmanuel. As usual, even if not wealthy, these people were able to raise money, and they brought into the new colony, what it most needed, capital. Many of the greatest families in Brazil trace their descent from these laborious and hard-working colonists, who, as in every other place, gave an impulse to trade and industrial development unfelt before. It was owing to their perspicacity that the sugar-cane, the greatest source of Brazilian wealth, was introduced into the colony from Madeira in the year 1548, and they started the direct slave trade with the Guinea Coast, recognizing both the impossibility of reducing the aboriginal races into a state of servitude, and the advantages of negro labour. From all these causes, Brazil was growing a wealthy colony by the middle of the sixteenth century, possessing many well-populated and well-cultivated districts upon the sea coast, surrounding the various ports and harbours, where prosperous towns had sprung up, of which may be noted at this time Pernambuco, Tamacara, Ilheos, Porto Seguro, and St. Vincent.

The prosperity of Brazil attracted the attention of John III., and he at last decided to establish a viceroyalty there, instead of leaving the colonists to govern themselves, and for the first governor-general he selected a nobleman of talent and experience, Dom Thomas de Sousa. At the same time the king revoked his decree forming the three “chief captainships,” and granted his representative full powers to arrange for a new system of administration. In 1549 Dom Thomas de Sousa arrived in Brazil with a fleet of six ships of war, many officials for the new government, a strong force of soldiers, and the first contingent of Jesuits, who were despatched with the especial purpose of converting the natives. Fortunately for Brazil, Thomas de Sousa was a great statesman; he made no attempt to enforce his powers unduly; he carefully avoided interfering with the subordinate captainships, and left the system of local government established in each without modification; he made no attempt to levy taxes or to interfere with the liberties of the people, and even avoided quartering his soldiers in any of the existing towns. He perceived that the weak point of the existing administration was that the captainships were too independent of each other, scattered as they were down the coast like little states, and he therefore determined to found a capital, and to establish a central government, which, without interfering with local liberties, should become a court of appeal, and regulating power over them. The place he selected for his capital was at the head of All Saints Bay, better known as the Bay of Bahia, where he erected the city of San Salvador. This town he made the headquarters of his troops, and the seat of the central government, and the Jesuit fathers also made it their point of departure. The most important question that Thomas de Sousa had to face was the treatment of the aboriginal tribes. The attempts of the Portuguese settlers to reduce them to slavery had been met with stubborn resistance, and a chronic war raged along all the landward boundaries of the captainships. The natives did not often attack the settlements of the Europeans, but they resisted any advance towards the interior, and small parties of Portuguese attempting to settle in the interior were often massacred. Dom Thomas de Sousa determined to check this continuous guerilla warfare by both warlike and peaceful measures. He sent his troops, and led them himself, against tribes which had committed any particular act of atrocity, and punished them severely, and at the same time he gave all the help in his power to the measures of the Jesuits for civilizing them.

The history of the Jesuits in Brazil is far more glorious if less interesting than that of the Jesuits in India. In America they had not to contend with the trained and subtle intellects of the Hindus, who were able and ready to meet them in the most abstruse philosophical arguments, but with simple-minded savages willing to be taught. The success of the famous Society was unbounded; the teachings of Christianity did far more to quiet the aboriginal inhabitants than the swords of De Sousa’s soldiers, and in a comparatively short space of time, either Jesuits, or native emissaries trained and taught by them, had penetrated many miles into the interior of the continent. The rapid conversion and civilization of the native tribes produced many fortunate results: the great domain of Portugal in South America was saved much of the terrible warfare with savages, which marks the history of the English settlers in North America; but, on the other hand, peace between the two races brought about intermarriage, and produced a class of _mestizos_, or half-breeds, which now includes about a quarter of the population. This conversion to the Christian religion was not hastened or in any way assisted by the terrible power of the Inquisition. That institution, which did so much to weaken the influence of Christianity in India, by its _auto-da-fés_ and its persecution of the Nestorian Christians was never allowed to take root in Brazil, and the atrocities of Goa were not imitated at San Salvador or Rio de Janeiro. Many reasons have been given for the non-establishment of the Inquisition, but the chief credit is undoubtedly due to Dom Thomas de Sousa, who was well aware of the services rendered to Brazil by the “novaes Christiãos” and other persons, whose orthodoxy could be impeached, and who urged at the Court of Lisbon, that it would be impossible to establish such a hated institution as the Inquisition against the will of the people of the captainships without the assistance of a powerful army, and as the king wanted all his soldiers for India, he gave up the idea of setting up an offshoot of the Holy Office in America.

The establishment of the Jesuits in Brazil, the foundation of a central authority to superintend but not harass the captainships, and the pursuance of a steady and uniform policy towards the natives, are the points which mark the government of Dom Thomas de Sousa. That of his successor, Duarte da Costa, was less important than his predecessor’s. He followed De Sousa’s example, and the prosperity of Brazil became so obvious that emigration from unhappy and declining Portugal continued to such an extent that the Europeans in the colony doubled in number during his administration. One point of his administration deserves notice, namely, that he superseded the old earthen fortifications round the principal towns by walls, and erected forts to guard the most important harbours, mounted with artillery. These precautions show that there was fear of foreign aggression; other European nations heard of the wealth and fertility of Brazil, and coveted its possession, and a systematic attempt to oust or conquer the Portuguese was made in the next century by the Dutch. During the sixteenth century, however, only one nation, the French, attempted to make a settlement in Brazil, and their effort deserves a brief notice.

France, it is well known, was torn by religious wars during the sixteenth century, and it was one of the Huguenot leaders, Nicolas Durant, Sieur de Villegagnon and Vice-Admiral of Brittany, who first conceived the idea of expatriating himself and founding a colony with his co-religionists in the fertile country of Brazil. The Admiral de Coligny warmly supported this scheme, and obtained leave from Henry II. to put it into execution. Three large vessels were accordingly chartered, and a number of intending colonists set sail from Havre for Brazil in May, 1555, under the command of Villegagnon. They reached South America in November, and, without even attempting to obtain the consent of either of the King of Portugal or of the authorities of the captainship in which they landed, deliberately settled in an eligible spot, and for protection alike against the natives and the Portuguese, they built Fort Coligny. Villegagnon immediately reported his success to the admiral, who sent on his letter to Calvin at Geneva. Calvin expressed his satisfaction at the notion of a Protestant colony in that quarter of the New World, and with his approbation a Genevese named Dupont, and two ministers, Richer and Chartier, collected together three hundred more French Huguenots and joined the original settlers in 1557 at Fort Coligny. Violent religious quarrels soon broke out between Villegagnon and Richer, and the newly-arrived colonists first removed to the banks of the Rio de Janeiro, and then returned to France, where they vehemently reviled Villegagnon. He returned to France to meet their accusations, and the Portuguese, under their governor, Emmanuel de Sá, took advantage of his withdrawal to demolish Fort Coligny and expel the French settlers. Thus ended the first attempt of the French to settle in Brazil.

The Portuguese possession of Brazil was to be far more dangerously disputed by the Dutch in the following century, and the only reason why they did not lose their American, as they did their Asiatic dominion is to be found in the method by which the colony had been settled. What was best in old Portugal, not necessarily what was bravest, but what was best and most industrious had gone to Brazil; the colonists there had been most wisely and prudently governed; they had been allowed to develop free from all restrictions by the wise policy of prudent governors; and the result of this free development was that the Brazilians remained Portuguese at heart. They repulsed the attempts of the Dutch, and even, when able to stand alone, they preferred to cling to the mother country. Therefore it was that when in the eighteenth century the Portuguese possessions in Asia were only a drain on the exchequer of the kingdom, Brazil became the main source of the wealth of the Portuguese Crown. Little did Cabral, or King Emmanuel, think that Brazil would be a far more valuable possession to Portugal than Cochin, or Goa, or Malacca, and that it was so was due to the manner in which it was settled; for colonies, whose prosperity rests on stout hearts and industrious hands, are of a lasting value to their mother country, while possessions, won and held by force of arms, are only of fictitious advantage and of transient value to the conquering race.

XI.

THE LAST KINGS OF THE HOUSE OF AVIZ--DOM SEBASTIAN AND THE CARDINAL HENRY.

The germs of the rapid decline of Portugal have been already noticed in discussing the reigns of Emmanuel and John III.; the country, exhausted by its efforts to conquer Asia and colonize Brazil, and deprived of liberty of thought by the deadly influence of the Inquisition, was fast losing its old vitality; and what Portuguese were left in Portugal were either enervated by luxury in the upper classes and slaves to the Court, or in the lower beggars upon the charity of the King and the Church. The Portuguese of the upper classes, who preserved the old Portuguese spirit of daring were in Asia; the sturdiest peasantry of the lower classes had found their way to Madeira or Brazil. Cultivated mainly by slaves, subject to an absolutist and bigoted court, and chiefly inhabited by slaves, priests, and beggars, it was no wonder that keen observers, like the Dutchman Cleynaerts, perceived that beneath its appearance of seeming prosperity, the Portuguese kingdom was rotten to the core. Lisbon was indeed the centre of the trade of the East; it was from the Tagus that the ships from the rest of Europe came to fetch the muslins of Bengal, the brocades of Gujarāt, the “calicos” of Calicut, the spices of the “Spice Islands,” the pepper of the Malabar coast, and the teas and silks of China. Lisbon was the commercial capital of the world; the King of Portugal was the richest sovereign in Europe. But in spite of wealth and luxury and universal consideration Portugal was a decaying power, and a single shock was sufficient to strike the country from its place, as the leading nation of Europe, the nation of heroes, and leave it defenceless against foreign foes.

This shock was supplied by the African expedition of Dom Sebastian and its disastrous result, and Portugal was then an easy prey to the ambition of Philip II. of Spain. The reign of Dom Sebastian has therefore a pathetic interest to posterity: the romantic character of the young king; his gallantry, and his death on the field of battle; and the sudden end of the house of Aviz, which had seemed so powerful, have contributed to make this reign one of the best known to students of general history in the whole annals of Portugal. To contemporaries this sudden collapse of the kingdom, which a few years before had seemed so great, appeared nothing short of marvellous, and political philosophers were never weary of dwelling on this extinction and finding reasons for it. Rabid Protestants argued that it was all due to the Inquisition; humanitarians agreed that it was a punishment for the high-handed conduct of the Portuguese “conquistadores” in the East; shortsighted historians attributed it entirely to the defeat of Dom Sebastian in Africa. But more careful inquiry has shown that the seeds of decline had long been planted, and that the fall of Portugal from her high estate was due to the exhaustion of her vital energies and to the rapid depopulation of her territory in Europe. No country can continue to exist and be a power, which sends forth all its best energies to foreign lands and foreign continents, and becomes exhausted at home; it might as well be expected that a man should be vigorous when his heart is hopelessly diseased.

Portugal was thus already rapidly decaying, when an infant of three years old became its monarch. Three times before in its history minors had succeeded to the throne, but in each case wise regents had governed the country, and the minorities had been marked by advance not retrogression. The first King of Portugal, Affonso Henriques, was but three years old, when he succeeded to his country; but the wisdom of his mother, Donna Theresa, during his minority paved the way for his subsequent success. Sancho II. was but a boy when he became king; but the great Bishop of Lisbon, by his self-abnegation, made his minority a triumph. Affonso V. had also been a child sovereign; but his uncle, the great Duke of Coimbra, ruled so wisely, that the king’s coming of age proved to be a disaster, not an advantage, to the country. But there were no such regents for the minority of Dom Sebastian: his grandmother was Spanish to the core, and loved Spain more than Portugal; his heir-presumptive was his great-uncle Dom Henry, Cardinal and Grand Inquisitor of the kingdom.

The youthful king had none to help him. His father Dom João, the only son of John III., had died fifteen days before the birth of his only child, and his mother, Donna Joanna, the daughter of the Emperor Charles V., had immediately retired to Spain, leaving the child to the care of his grandparents. On the death of John III. in 1557, his queen, Donna Catherine, the sister of Charles V., assumed the regency in the name of her grandson. From the very first, the Portuguese people, from the highest to the lowest, disapproved of her rule; she was so aggressively Spanish in speech, bearing, and appearance, and had so persistently refused to identify herself with her adopted country, in spite of her long residence there, that every one believed her to be plotting to secure the eventual succession of her favourite nephew, Philip II. of Spain, to the crown of Portugal. Her bigotry and encouragement of the Inquisition did not tend to make her popular, and national prejudice declared itself strongly against her. Yet she was not a bad ruler; she maintained the old servants of John III., and the machinery of administration though in many places clogged by corruption, went on smoothly, and she even managed to despatch a sufficiently powerful army to relieve Mazagon, when it was besieged by the Moors. Yet throughout her five years’ tenure of power the queen-regent found herself hampered by the intrigues of the Cardinal Henry, who, as heir to the throne, thought he ought to be in her place, and at last she decided to give up the struggle, and in 1562 she retired to Spain.

The Cardinal Henry then satisfied his ambition and became regent of the kingdom, of which he was to be for a short time the unfortunate monarch, and during his rule the government of the country fell entirely into the hands of two brothers, who had made themselves very conspicuous in the intrigues which had led to the retirement of Queen Catherine. Of these brothers, the elder, Luis Gonçalves da Camara, was an able Jesuit, who had been appointed confessor and tutor to the young king, while the younger, Martim, was prime minister, and carried on the work of administration during the regency of the Cardinal Henry. The two brothers were both men of considerable ability, and, though they made no attempt to initiate reforms or to check the decay of Portugal, they managed to conceal her rottenness as much as possible from the eyes of Europe. In 1568 Dom Sebastian was declared of age by the Camaras, though only in his fifteenth year, and from that time they excluded their former master, the Cardinal, from even a semblance of power. This behaviour did not ensure their continuance in office, for as soon as the young king began to take an active interest in affairs, he dismissed the brothers, and placed the chief power in the hands of an upright nobleman, Dom Pedro de Alçaçova Carneiro.

The character of Dom Sebastian was one of the most important factors in bringing about the final overthrow of Portugal, and therefore deserves some examination, the more especially as the nature of the Portuguese monarchy was now entirely absolutist, owing to the wealth brought into the private treasury of the king by the Asiatic trade, and his consequent independence of the Cortes. The young king was rather German than Portuguese in appearance, with his blue eyes and fair hair and his face disfigured by the Hapsburg lip, and in his nature there was much of the Teuton dreaminess and love of the marvellous, which impelled him to take part in rash undertakings.[19] He was fond of solitude, and of building up castles in the air, in which he always appeared as a Christian hero exterminating the Mohammedans. For with his German dreaminess he united a truly Spanish fanaticism. His tutor, Luis Gonçalves da Camara, made him a bigot, and his governor, Dom Aleixo or Alexis de Menezes, taught him to look upon warlike enterprise as the chief aim of a monarch’s career, and the double teaching had inspired him with crusading ardour. He was not likely to be satisfied like his grandfather, John III., with showing his zeal for Christianity by rigorous orthodoxy and systematic persecution at home, but longed rather to unite war with religion, and to spread Christianity, like St. Louis of France, by his sword. To fanaticism and warlike ambition he added an obstinacy and imperiousness of character, which made him a tyrant. While training himself from boyhood for war, he determined to train his people also by issuing a sumptuary edict that none of his subjects might have more than two dishes, and those of the simplest character, for their meals, forgetting that no decree could alter the daily life of his people. Lastly, with these characteristics he united a spirit of profoundest melancholy, which is evident in his portraits and in all his actions, a melancholy which seemed to presage his early and tragic death, and is indicated by the motto he selected for himself:

“Un bel morir tutta la vita honora.”