Naked Tropics

New World in the Atlantic WorldJack P. Greene and Amy Turner Bushnell, Series Editors

Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal CourtIn Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821By Kirsten Schultz

Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776By Trevor Burnard

Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial VirginiaBy Linda L. Sturtz

Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other RoguesBy Kenneth Maxwell

Naked TropicsEssays on Empire and Other Rogues

Kenneth Maxwell

ROUTLEDGE

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2003 byRoutledge29 West 35th StreetNew York, NY 10001www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain byRoutledge11 New Fetter LaneLondon EC4P 4EEwww.routledge.co.uk

Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in anyform or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maxwell, Kenneth, 1941–Naked tropics : essays on empire and other rogues / by Kenneth Maxwell.

p. cm. — (New World in the Atlantic world)Includes index.ISBN 0-415-94576-3 (hb) — ISBN 0-415-94577-1 (pbk.)

1. Brazil—History. 2. Portuguese—Foreign countries. 3. Portugal—Relations—Foreign countries. I. Title. II. Series.

F2521.M495 2003981—dc21

2003043129

For Stanley J. Stein and Barbara Hadley Stein

The empires of our time were short lived, but they have altered

the world forever; their passing away is their least significant feature.

V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

Contents

Map ix

Foreword by Fouad Ajami—Blame It on Rio xiThe Historical Vocation of Kenneth Maxwell

Acknowledgments xix

Illustrations xxi

Chapter 1 First Encounters 1

Chapter 2 ¡Adiós Columbus! 13

Chapter 3 Chocolate 37

Chapter 4 Pirate Democracy 47

Chapter 5 Hegemonies Old and New 61

Chapter 6 The Spark 91The Amazon and the Suppression of the Jesuits

Chapter 7 The Idea of the Luso-Brazilian Empire 109

Chapter 8 Why Was Brazil Different? 145The Contexts of Independence

Chapter 9 The Odd Couple 171Jefferson and the Abbé

vii

viii • Contents

Chapter 10 A Story of Slavery, Sex, and Mammon 187

Chapter 11 The Tragedy of the Amazon 199

Chapter 12 Chico Mendes 219

Chapter 13 The Two Brazils 243

Chapter 14 Macao 257Shadow Land

Chapter 15 Heroes and Traitors 291

Chapter 16 Orfeu 305

Sources of Publications 311

Abbreviations 313

Index 315

ix

Trav

els

and So

jou

rns

Foreword–Blame It on Rio

The Historical Vocation of Kenneth Maxwell

In one of his arresting and subtle works, Finding the Center (1984), V. S.Naipaul writes of the promptings of his craft and offers a narrative of hisliterary beginnings—a narrative intended to “admit the reader to the pro-cess of writing.” By now we know the themes and the methods of thatwriter: the journey from his small birthplace in Trinidad to the metropoli-tan center, the panic of arrival, the wanderlust that took him to distantlands in a world beginning to shake off its colonial heritage. There wasglamour in the travel, and knowledge, the gathering together of the strandsof a man’s life and background. In these pages by the gifted historian Ken-neth Maxwell, we are “admitted” into the process of writing as well. A his-torian of great talent, working at the peak of his powers, takes us into thepromptings of his own vocation. Piece by exquisite piece in this book, wesee the historian’s method and the concerns that have been the driving pas-sions of his life for four decades now: the peopling of the Americas, theshaking up of continents, the spirit that took a “precocious” Portugal intoits imperial venture, the play between Portugal’s extensive imperial reachinto Africa and Asia and the Americas, and the limits of its own demogra-phy and abilities, the rise of Brazil and its tumultuous history.

The direction of Professor Maxwell’s journey reverses Naipaul’s,though. With the historian, it is the pushing outward of a child of the em-pire, a young man at Cambridge venturing into the tropics. Born in 1941,Maxwell belonged to a generation that was hanging on with its fingernailsto the old imperial order. On a “misty, cold, damp, and dreary East Anglianevening,” in an old picture palace that had reinvented itself as an “art the-

xi

xii • Foreword

ater,” Maxwell had seen Marcel Camus’s film Black Orpheus. It “could nothave been a greater revelation,” he writes. The ancient story set against thetropical background, the color and the vibrancy of that background,hooked him. “I determined immediately that Brazil, and above all, Rio deJaneiro, was somewhere I had to go.” He went there via Lisbon, and in thatgreat Luso-Brazilian world he was to find his material, and his range, andthey are on full display here. This “material” could have supplied great fic-tion or travel writing: Maxwell himself, as these beautiful pieces demon-strate, with their love of color, with their ability to conjure up a forlorncolonial outpost on the South China Sea (Macao), or the teeming streets ofBrazil’s cities, or the life and murder of a rubber tapper, a union activist, inthe hinterland of Brazil by a violent clan of ranchers, could have pulled itoff and produced that sort of literary work. But he is a historian of ideas,and of social and economic life, and his insatiable, boundless curiosity in-fuses this work with an energy and a life all its own.

Edward Gibbon, as we learn from the late historian John Clive’s lovingtribute to the reading and writing of history, Not by Fact Alone (1989), oncecalled the historian’s first person “the most disgusting of pronouns.” Gib-bon was giving voice to an ambivalence, for the historian’s “I” was there inhis work, in his footnotes, in the text itself, the writer’s personality and atti-tudes toward the subjects at hand. Macaulay, too, used his first person toconvey to his readers a sense of immediacy, of places seen and oral historieshe had collected. So did Tocqueville who had his own way of taking thereader into his confidence, of letting the reader know what that liberal aris-tocratic historian thought of revolutionary violence and pretensions, Clivetells us. The narrator’s “I” gives this work by Maxwell its unique place inwhat this prolific historian has produced. We saw precious little (directly,that is) of Maxwell when he produced his seminal biography of Portugal’sleading eighteenth-century statesman, Marquês de Pombal, and his at-tempt at a revolution from above, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment(1995). Nor would we have surmised much about the historian had weread his definitive accounts of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, or of thepolitical traffic between Portugal and Brazil in the second half of the eigh-teenth century. This work is different: we are truly taken into the narrator’sconfidence, admitted into the craft of writing. The personal pronoun isnever intrusive though. There is a kind of trust between historian andreader, an illicit pact of sorts.

We know and trust this historian: we are eager to travel with him toMacao or the Amazon forests; we are eager for him to tell us about otherhistorians and chroniclers. We pick up his trail—and his likes and dislikes,for that matter. When he writes that Carlos Fuentes is “never one to use

Foreword • xiii

two words if more will do,” and that that Mexican writer in one of hisworks throws at the reader “every stereotype of hispanidad propaganda(Bulls, Virgins, Tangos, Gauchos, Don Quixote),” he gives voice to his read-ers’ verdict (most of them, I hazard to guess) on that exhibitionist writer.“My Portuguese was the swallowed nasal Portuguese of Lisbon, and I wasutterly unprepared for the musicality, rhythm, and softness of Brazilianspeech,” he writes on the occasion of meeting his first Brazilian in his aca-demic supervisor’s office at Princeton. Until then his Brazil had been “en-tirely phantasmogorical,” he adds, the stuff of books and films. Thehistorian’s trail, and the anxiety of the first probings of an alien world: theycome together for us in that episode. And we don’t have to search for thehistorian’s pride in the world he had come to adopt in the Americas. It isthere in Maxwell’s sense of exasperation with the “provincialism” of Eu-rope. The Old World may have “discovered” and disrupted the New World,but the latter remade the Old Continent, he reminds us. The educatedEuropeans may have been fixated on classical literature and Renaissancecosmology. But they did so, he adds, while “drinking their American-produced coffee, smoking American-produced tobacco, binding their textsbetween American leather hides, and enjoying the leisure that the divi-dends from overseas investments made possible.”

At the heart of this book, its binding if you will, is of course Portugal’simperial journey: it is the historian’s beat and his pride. It was the Por-tuguese, he reminds us, who linked the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, whomapped the coastline of Asia, and explored the African coastline fromCape Verde in the West to the mouth of the Red Sea in the East. In one ofthose mysterious spurts that enable a particular people to do stunning,surprising feats, the Portuguese recast and revisioned the world. Their ad-vantage, we learn, was less navigational than conceptual: their cartographyenabled them to arrive at a “new graphic conception of global space.” ThePortuguese broke the monopoly of the trans-Saharan trade route betweenWest Africa and the southern shores of the Mediterranean. In less than twodecades after Vasco da Gama’s voyage of discovery of 1497–1498, Portugalhad claimed a vast dominion: Brazil in 1500, Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511,Hormuz in 1515, and so on. Portugal aimed for the passageways of trade,the “choke points” of international trade: Hormuz at the mouth of the Per-sian Gulf, Mombassa and Mozambique, Malacca, the Azores, Macao at themouth of the Pearl River in China, Cape Verde. The Portuguese must haveintuited their own weakness. Portugal, Maxwell reminds us, was after all, a“small country with a large empire.” No wonder the Portuguese hugged thecoasts—and stayed aloof from the interior of the worlds they probed andventured into.

xiv • Foreword

Weakness—and backwardness—stalked the imperial push. The neme-sis was not far behind. In the span of a few decades after that remarkablespurt, Portugal itself slipped under Castilian hegemony in 1580. A de-ranged monarch had taken the country and its nobility on a quixotic cru-sade into North Africa; the venture had issued in tragedy and thedecimation of the country’s nobility. Philip II had offered a traumatizedPortugal rescue. But an absentee, semi-alien monarch would not do. Por-tugal was to recover its independence in 1640, but the imperial thrust wasbroken. There would be no Portuguese empire in the Orient. The very na-tional epic of Portugal’s voyages of discovery, The Lusiads, by the great poetLuís Vaz de Camões, published in 1572, was a lament for what might havebeen. There was patriotism aplenty in Camões, and there was nationalpride, to be sure. The poet, who had spent seventeen of his adult years as asailor and soldier in Goa, Cochin, and Macao, praised Portugal’s urge to“discover the sun’s very cradle in the East.” But Camões himself was a childof disappointment. The trajectory of his country—the early success, thenthe steady retreat from progress, and Castilian rule—brackets his life. Hewas born the year Vasco da Gama died, in 1524; he died in 1580, right as hiscountry was slipping under the Castilian noose. Portugal succumbed todespondency, and the sorrow is there in The Lusiads, and a knowledge ofthe heartache that came with the imperial temptation. In Canto IV, a wiseold man comes to the shore to bid farewell to the voyagers and to weep forhis country, and for the sorrow that imperial appetite heaped upon her:

Oh craving of command! Oh vain Desire!Oh vainest vanity man miscalleth Fame!Oh fraudulent gust, so easy fanned to fireBy breath of vulgar, aping Honour’s name!What just and dreadful judgement deals

thine ire,To seely souls who overlove thy claim!What deaths, what direful risks, what

agoniesWherewith thou guerdonest them, thy

fitting prize!

What new disaster dost thou here design?What horror of our realm and race invent?What unheard dangers or what deaths

condign,Veiled by some name that soundeth

excellent?

Foreword • xv

What bribe of gorgeous reign, and goldenmine,

Whose ready offer is so rarely meant?What fame hast promised them? What

pride of story?What palms? What triumphs? What

victorious glory?

That sorrow and despondency of Portugal—and the urge for reformand repair—are caught in Maxwell’s pages. But that despondency thatuntil recent years hovered over Portugal, a steady shadow and companion,did not travel to Brazil. The tropics worked their will here. Indeed, it isdoubtful, I would think, that a child of an empire in decline (Britain) ofMaxwell’s temperament would have been hooked on another somber land.There may have been troubles in Brazil, but the history was one of tumultand possibilities. In that Luso-Brazilian encounter, the issue, the child ofthe encounter, bounced with greater freedom, had less burden to carrythan the motherland. In its passage from colony to imperial center (themonarchy had quit Portugal for Brazil in the wake of Napoleon Bona-parte’s armies’ invasion of Portugal in 1807) to independent nationhood in1822, Brazil charted its own course; Portugal had for all practical purposesbecome a dependency of Brazil.

A central theme of Brazil’s history, and a theme that Maxwell handleswith amazing skill, concerns the tension between liberty and order inBrazilian history. In a land where the whites constituted a distinct minor-ity, the revolution that held the attention of the oligarchs and the elite ofthe land was not the American Revolution in 1776 but the Haitian slave re-volt. In Haiti’s fire, in the success of its rebels, the Brazilian elite saw thespecter of its own undoing. There was fear of revolutionary “contagion”and a recognition that a society that would give unfettered run to the ideaof “equality” in a land “ordered by racial as much as by social hierarchy”would be torn asunder. Progress in this outwardly flamboyant land wastethered to order.

Nor was the American republic, for that matter, so keen on seeing its lib-erty replicated in the South American landscape. In a characteristic bit ofhomage to liberty’s reach, Thomas Jefferson, in 1820, had written to a Por-tuguese-born friend, Abbé Corrêa da Serra, in praise of a new world in theAmericas free of the curse of Europe’s wars, of a day over the horizon whenthe fleets of Brazil and the United States would ride together “as brethrenof the same family and pursuing the same object.” Jefferson was in retire-ment in Monticello then. As Maxwell reminds us, the decisive Americanvoice on the independent nations of South America belonged to John

xvi • Foreword

Quincy Adams both as secretary of state between 1817 and 1825 and aspresident in the four crucial years that followed. Adams was bereft of trop-ical romance. “He saw South Americans as irredeemably corrupted by theRoman Catholic religion, Iberian tradition, and the tropical climate.”Brazil had to find its own mix of liberty and racial assimilation. Maxwellallows Brazil its final flourish and vindication, a signature of its own onthis great quest: the seminal, great figure of its independence, Jose Bonifá-cio, was a metallurgist. He aimed for a Brazilian race that would “amalga-mate” all the diverse “metals” of Brazil, blend them into a commonnational identity.

* * *

Now a word about the “introducer’s” personal pronoun. My knowledgeof the Americas is rather scant, of the Iberian world a bit better. My au-thority for writing these brief pages of appreciation I owe to KennethMaxwell’s flattering and surprising invitation. I couldn’t have declined thehonor, though undeserved. Circles are closed and connections are made inthese pages. It was at Princeton where Maxwell met his first Brazilian, as wewere told. It was there, on the same campus, a decade later, where I metProfessor Maxwell. We are roughly the same age; he had grabbed the colo-nial drama of the time, Portugal’s struggle with its last African coloniesand Portugal’s struggle at home with its rebellious young officers who hadhad their fill with imperial burden. It was with excitement that I can stillcall up that I read his magnificent depiction of the Portuguese Revolutionof 1974, and my admiration of his craft has never ceased.

My second claim is given me by the work itself. Maxwell writes of bro-ken worlds and “hollow empires.” A child and a chronicler of matters andlands Islamic and Arab, I know something of that malady and of the trajec-tory of civilizations that rise on impulse, draw on mysterious energy, andthen succumb to despondency. I may be unfamiliar with the settings ofProfessor Maxwell’s work, but the themes are innately, painfully, familiar.The very first time I came upon fado music and songs, I understood not aword, but I intuitively, readily, caught the themes and the mood—love andloss and lament. I had no difficulty “entering” the haunting songs of thegreat Amália Rodrigues: we have her peer in the legendary Egyptianwoman singer Umm Kulthum, who must be reckoned the twentieth cen-tury’s greatest Arabic singer, and whose themes and tone were evocationsof loss and sorrow. The “fado” in the Portuguese fragments by Maxwell isfamiliar to me in the same way. Of all of Maxwell’s work, this work ismeant for the general reader (hence my casting) who wants to know about

Foreword • xvii

the history of chocolate, or the voyages of discovery that have remade ourworld, or the true historical sociology of pirates and piracy.

Our towering historians are few and far between. In the age of the 24/7cable channels and the gabfest and the instant analysts, those historians aresure to become rarer still. Attribution, rigor, fidelity to sources, once the as-sumed tools and ways of the craft, are flung on the sidelines. Behold inthese pages this distinguished historian, the (younger) peer of BernardLewis on Islam and C. Vann Woodward on Southern history and ArthurSchlesinger on the American experience and David Landes on economichistory. In these pages we are in the hands of a guide who truly owns hisfield, and roams its expanses with easy authority and a genuine wonder atthe ways of our world.

Fouad Ajami

Acknowledgments

First my thanks to Tomás Amorim who is a valued colleague at the Councilon Foreign Relations and as my research associate from 1999 to 2002 hasbeen instrumental to seeing this selection of essays prepared for publica-tion. I am grateful to him for his care and attention to detail and for his pa-tience with my endless reworkings of the texts. The Council has providedme with a stimulating environment for work, and I appreciate the greatlatitude they have allowed me over the years to pursue my interests in his-tory as well as public policy. I owe much to its president, Leslie H. Gelb, forhis encouragement and support, and not least appointing me in 1995 asfirst holder of the Nelson and David Rockefeller Chair. Peter Tarnoff andNicholas X. Rizopoulos invited me to join the Council in 1989, and for thisI am much in their debt. I have had the great privilege of working with fineeditors such as Bob Silvers of the New York Review of Books, James Chaceand Linda Wrigley of the World Policy Journal, Helder Macedo and ToniHuberman of Portuguese Studies, and Steven Lagerfeld of the Wilson Quar-terly, as well as Dauril Alden, Marcos Sá Corrêa, Flávio Pinheiro, PedroDoria, Adriano Schwartz, and Marcos Flamínio Peres. All held me to thehighest standards. It is a special pleasure to appear in the Routledge SeriesNew World in the Atlantic World, edited by Jack Greene and Amy Bushnell.Both have been pioneers in the field of cross-cultural Atlantic studies, longan orphan, but now at long last receiving due attention by their colleagues,and they have always understood the interconnectedness of the Americasand the value of comparative approaches to histories which remain toooften parochial and compartmentalized. I am especially grateful to Jacksince he has long kept me linked to the historical profession despite my

xix

xx • Acknowledgments

wanderings (or, as Albert Hirschman calls it, “trespassing”) between vari-ous disciplinary fields. For this I am ever grateful. John Coatsworth, direc-tor of the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard, and James Dunkerley,director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University ofLondon, read the whole manuscript, and I was encouraged to go forth withtheir support. And not least, my thanks to Fouad Ajami for his splendid ifundeserved foreword.

Kenneth MaxwellNew York City, March 2003

Illustrations

All illustrations are from The Boy Travellers in South America: Adventures ofTwo Youths in a Journey through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay,Argentine Republic, and Chili, with Descriptions of Patagonia and Tierra delFuego, and Voyages upon the Amazon and La Plata Rivers, by Thomas W.Knox (New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1886).

Foreword—Entrance to the harbor of RioChapter 1—Surveying under difficultiesChapter 2—Marching through the forestChapter 3—CacaoChapter 4—Buccaneers embarking on an expeditionChapter 5—Bay of Panama, from the southeastern rampartChapter 6—Ruins of church of San DomingoChapter 7—View of Rio from Boa VistaChapter 8—Statue of Pedro IChapter 9—Pair of toucans and their nestChapter 10—In the fieldsChapter 11—A Brazilian forest, with characteristic mammaliaChapter 12—In the rainy seasonChapter 13—Sedan chairChapter 14—Scene on a coolie shipChapter 15—Looking across the bridgeChapter 16—Rio de Janeiro: The aqueduct

xxi