Colonia de Sacramento: A Commercial Enclave on the La Plata River

Beginning in the late 16th century, Portuguese merchants began to appear in the La Plata River region, establishing a vibrant community in Buenos Aires during the period of the so-called Iberian Union (1580–1640). Especially active in trafficking enslaved people to Spanish America, the Portuguese dominated this lucrative sector of legal colonial trade, in addition to being deeply involved in smuggling, by which they controlled some of the Peruvian silver that was shipped out through the La Plata estuary.¹ With their expulsion from Buenos Aires in 1640, however, there was a partial decline in the Portuguese presence in the region with the curtailing or momentary disruption of the economic links among the Iberian Empires.² In the context of the Portuguese Empire’s financial difficulties during the government of Pedro II, a new colony was established in a strategic location just across the river from Buenos Aires, in a region that today is part of Uruguay.

Colonia de Sacramento was first established in 1680 under the leadership of Manuel Lobo, governor of Rio de Janeiro, on a small peninsula across from the São Gabriel archipelago chosen “for its position on a promontory and the good quality of its port, which appeared to have a smooth bottom free of hazards.”³ This territorial incursion sparked an immediate reaction from the Spanish settlers in Buenos Aires who, with the help of indigenous Guarani from the Jesuit missions, drove the Portuguese from the Banda Oriental, the lands on the eastern shore of the river.⁴ Under the Provisional Treaty of 1681, however, Colonia de Sacramento returned to Portuguese control, where it would remain until 1705, when the settlement was again attacked by the Spanish in the course of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714).⁵ During this quarter century (1681–1705), the economic exploitation of large cattle stocks on the Banda Oriental began, leading to the development of a profitable trade in hides. According to records kept by the city council of Rio de Janeiro, the Colonia de Sacramento market was exporting between four and five thousand hides per year by the end of the 17th century, a figure that rose significantly in the following years, judging by the reports of governor Sebastião de Veiga Cabral, who at the beginning of the 18th century reported that Colonia brought in more than forty thousand head of cattle annually for the colony’s sustenance and the “manufacture of hides.”⁶

Following the end of the War of Spanish Succession, an international conflict that had set the Iberian monarchs against each other, the second Treaty of Utrecht (1715) limited the size of the new Colonia de Sacramento to the length of a “cannon shot,” meaning that the new settlements were in practice confined to the walled city. In theory, this restriction should have limited Portuguese expansion. In practice, however, this was not the case. After its re-establishment in 1716, Colonia de Sacramento began a phase of economic and social splendor that would last about two decades.⁷ The agricultural economy of Colonia de Sacramento consisted primarily of the region’s wheat cultivation, also evidenced by the existence of millstones and windmills. In 1729, annual wheat production amounted to more than twenty thousand bushels, remaining at this level until the great siege of 1735–1737. In addition to wheat, the production of hides stood out as the real currency of the La Plata River region.⁸ According to available data, the peak of leather hide exports occurred in the early 1730s and late 1750s, when between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand hides were exported annually. These periods coincided with the periods of peace between the Iberian Empires, which facilitated the export of cattle from the Eastern Bank.⁹

A new conflict between Portugal and Spain broke out in 1735, bringing renewed hardship to the La Plata River region. Conflict in the La Plata region was the product of accumulating tensions that pitted Spanish against Portuguese interests in Europe and the Americas; the pretext that triggered the outbreak of hostilities was a small diplomatic incident in Madrid.¹⁰ This incident almost caused an armed conflict between the Iberian crowns in Europe and sparked a war in the La Plata region, the flashpoint in Portuguese-Spanish tensions that had been increasingly strained since 1733.¹¹ Spain’s prolonged twenty-two month siege of the Portuguese settlement would have a significant impact on the population of Sacramento, which declined by almost 25 percent in the following years as some settlers and their slaves left Sacramento for other regions of Portuguese America or to become the first settlers of Rio Grande de São Pedro (see figure 1).¹²

In the 1750s, the new rapprochement between the Iberian monarchies made it possible for the population of Colonia de Sacramento to grow again, but with a substantially different demographic character, consisting of a much larger proportion of Africans.¹³ In 1760, more than half (58 percent) of the inhabitants of Colonia de Sacramento were enslaved persons, although there was no viable occupation for so many enslaved workers, due to the strict Spanish blockade and the loss of the surrounding farmland after 1737. It is true that some of these slaves had occupations in Colonia itself, whether as domestic servants and artisans or as sailors and dock workers. Some may also have been employed in subsistence agriculture, but a significant proportion of the enslaved people were simply “temporary residents,” awaiting the time when they could be resold in the neighboring market of Buenos Aires.¹⁴ This situation began to change in 1763, when Colonia de Sacramento again came under Spanish military occupation in the wake of the Seven Years War (1756–1763) in South America.¹⁵

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Figure 1. America in the 18th century. The heading on the map reads: “Topographical example of the coast that extends from the island of Santa Catarina to the cape of Santa Maria and the La Plata River, to the new Colonia de Sacramento square, with the land adjacent to the same coast.” Map by José Custódio de Sá and Faria. Manuscript 049.01.009 (1763).

Courtesy of Biblioteca National, Rio de Janeiro.

The results of the intense smuggling activity practiced in Colonia de Sacramento can be measured by the constant shipments of silver that left Brazil for Lisbon. Beginning in the mid-18th century, large quantities of silver left the ports of Rio de Janeiro almost every year. Almost all of the silver exported was derived from illegal trade with Spanish America, facilitated by Colonia de Sacramento’s proximity to Buenos Aires. In 1761, the French consul in Lisbon reported that the annual fleet brought two million silver pesos. A few years later, in 1766, despite the growing vigilance of Spanish authorities, Portuguese smuggling on the La Plata River reached the value of eight hundred thousand pesos.¹⁶

Rio Grande de São Pedro: A Cattle-Raising Economy

If Colonia de Sacramento can be viewed as a commercial enclave with a small, clearly defined territory, Rio Grande de São Pedro was a vast territory in a frontier area where the Iberian Empires were competing for control over a region not yet consolidated.¹⁷ Initially, the Portuguese established two settlements. Rio Grande was founded as an Atlantic port and military fort in 1737 and promoted to the status of town and seat of the captaincy’s government in 1751.¹⁸ Further north, the area of Campos de Viamão was the site of a small village and parish founded in 1747 on the site where the first settlers coming from Laguna had established their cattle ranches in the early 1730s.¹⁹

Before this, the earliest phase of the cattle industry in the South consisted of rounding up wild cattle in the so-called Vacaria del Mar, that is, hunting animals loose in the fields.²⁰ The effective occupation of the so-called Rio Grande Continent occurred at the beginning of the 18th century as the colonization of Brazil moved inland. With the discovery of gold in the region of Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul entered the colonial economy as a supplier of beef cattle, horses, and mules to feed and transport people and goods in the mining region. The wealth produced by mining meant there was a high demand in Minas for goods produced in Rio Grande do Sul. The importance of cattle from the South meant that tropeiros [cattle herders] from São Paulo and Laguna would drive herds north to the town of Sorocaba, where they would be resold at a livestock market to residents of the mining regions.²¹

This predatory phase lasted until approximately 1730, when the dwindling of wild herds led to the establishment of estancias [cattle-raising ranches]. At that time, the concession of sesmarias [land grants] to leading cattle herders and military officials gave rise to the establishment of cattle raising.²² Many of the earliest ranchers of Rio Grande de São Pedro were from Laguna; shortly thereafter, they started to come from Colonia de Sacramento, and later, even Azoreans became ranchers and cattle farmers. Among the first ranchers, we also find natives of other captaincies of Portuguese America, especially military officers from Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Bahia, and São Paulo.²³ In this regard, it is worth emphasizing that the social formation of colonial Rio Grande do Sul reflected the political dynamics of an ancien régime also based on territorial conquest. The idea of territorial conquest based on the appropriation of land for cattle raising, the exercise of local power through municipal councils, the formation of factions that concentrated great political and economic power, and even the recruitment of indigenous allies to ensure safe movement through the territory were all elements found in the activity of pioneering ranchers in the region.²⁴

Land appropriation is one of the classic themes in the historiography of southern Brazil. Traditional histories by authors such as João Borges Fortes, Guilhermino Cesar, and Dante de Laytano have always emphasized the estância [cattle ranch] as the basic unit of Rio Grande do Sul society, focusing on the importance of this social and economic institution.²⁵ The result was a perspective that saw society in a dichotomous manner, split between estancieiros [landowners] and a peasantry that consisted mostly of free men, thereby disguising the presence of African slavery in the countryside. However, works by authors such as Sebalt Rüdiger and, more recently, Helen Osório reveal that side by side with large landowners and holders of sesmarias [land grants] lived small landowners or homesteaders who made their living through ranching, but also sometimes through commercial agriculture. This rural society was made up not only of the cattle-ranching elite but also of a host of small producers, many of whom used enslaved laborers.

The number of estancias grew remarkably: while there were only forty-three large ranches in the whole the Rio Grande mainland in 1741, this number grew significantly over the following decades, and no less than 214 distinct cattle brands were registered by the authorities in 1767, with two-thirds of them concentrated in the parish of Viamão.²⁶ The expansion of estancias is directly tied to the growth of trade in livestock, especially mules, whose breeding and importation from Spanish territories was prohibited by the Portuguese crown in 1761. Pressured by objections from ranchers, the government relented in 1764, permitting the breeding of mules but still prohibiting the importation of Spanish mules. After that, trade in mules between the Spanish and Portuguese domains in America was considered smuggling, punishable by arrest and confiscation of the animals.²⁷ As in Colonia de Sacramento, illicit commerce was a characteristic feature of Rio Grande’s economy.

But a new product emerged at the end of the 18th century that would become the regional economy’s leading activity. This was the production of jerked beef, that is, dried and salted beef whose durability made it possible to export the otherwise-perishable product. Classic historiography has always held that the first commercial jerked beef factory geared for exportation was established in 1780 by José Pinto Martins, a native of Portugal who had arrived from Ceará to accept a government land grant.²⁸ More recent research, however, holds that Pinto Martins only arrived in the vicinity of Pelotas in the 1790s, fleeing a great drought in what is now Northeastern Brazil.²⁹

Three main factors converged in the last quarter of the 18th century to boost the development of the jerked beef industry. First, the peace following the signing of the Treaty of Santo Ildefonso (1777) allowed cattle ranches to expand into new areas and gave access to the maritime port of Rio Grande, previously occupied by the Spanish.³⁰ Second, the droughts that struck Ceará, Piauí, and Bahia in the 1770s and 1790s disrupted the production of dried meat in those regions, opening a market niche that came to be occupied by production from Rio Grande do Sul. Finally, the population increase in Brazil’s Center and Northeast regions at the end of the 18th century created a growing demand for foodstuffs in those areas.

Jerked meat factories were established in various locations in Rio Grande do Sul, including Jacuí, the Patos and Mirim lagoons, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande, and Jaguarão. Due to its strategic location, however, Pelotas became the center of Rio Grande do Sul’s jerked beef production. The reasons for Pelota’s success in jerked beef production include easy access to the cattle herds and to river and maritime transportation through the Rio Grande port. It is still difficult to specify the number of salted meat producers at a given time. A report by Simões Lopes Neto in 1912 found that “there were more than forty salted meat plants used by approximately two hundred businesses,” and that “at one time, more than thirty were operating simultaneously,” as early as the mid-19th century.³¹ Recent research that used postmortem inventories to study the elite of salted meat producers in Pelotas between 1790 and 1835 found sixty-two individuals engaged in salted meat production during that period.³²

Rio Grande increased its production of salted meat in a short period, becoming one of the fastest-growing areas in the Portuguese Empire between 1780 and 1820. The main consumer markets for Rio Grande do Sul’s salted meat were Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco. Between 1790 and 1815, ranching products accounted for 70 percent of total exports from the captaincy, consisting principally of salted meat, hides, and livestock on the hoof (horses, mules, and cattle). The remaining 30 percent of exports consisted primarily of products such as wheat and cheese.³³

The early days of commercial agriculture in Rio Grande de São Pedro were characterized by the introduction of wheat farming. The main consumer markets for Rio Grande do Sul’s wheat were Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco. But wheat cultivation declined after the beginning of the 19th century due to a number of factors: the arrival of a pest called ferrugem[stem rust fungus], external competition from North American wheat, royal impoundment of grain to feed the troops, and recruitment of farmers into military service.³⁴ Having begun in the mid-18th century, Rio Grande do Sul’s wheat production accelerated in the early 19th century, with grain exports reaching a peak of 342,000 bushels in 1813 and beginning to decline soon thereafter.³⁵ Circumstances were favorable at this time due to the opening and development of trade during King John’s time in Brazil (1808–1821). This boom of Southern wheat should be understood in the context of what was called the agricultural renaissance in Brazil during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The retaking of the Rio Grande port in 1776 and the end of the war with Spain for control of the region boosted economic activity. This marked the definitive inclusion of Rio Grande in the Portuguese Empire and an increase in the production of hides, salted meat, and wheat. Between 1790 and 1797, an average of 125 vessels per year moved through the port, an almost ten-fold increase over the 1760s.³⁶ By 1808, there were 134 merchants established in the captaincy and between 230 and 240 vessels moving through the port each year.³⁷ The livestock trade went into a relative decline during this period, recovering only in the early 19th century when there was a surge in exports of mules due to the demand created by the sugar industry in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Santa Catarina and the Colonial Internal Market

Lying to the north of Rio Grande de São Pedro, the territory of Santa Catarina encompassed both the island by that name and the coastal strip where the Portuguese settled in the second half of the 17th century. The result of expansion from São Paulo, these towns were established in the wake of an earlier expansion powered by slave raids in which residents of the captaincy of São Paulo captured and enslaved thousands of indigenous Guarani.³⁸ Three towns were created by settlers from São Paulo: in chronological order, they were São Francisco do Sul (1660), Laguna (1714), and Desterro (modern-day Florianópolis, 1726).

The oldest settlement on the coast of Santa Catarina was established in 1641, when Manuel Lourenço de Andrade, with his wife, children, son-in-law, and a large retinue of settlers, slaves, cattle, farming implements, and mining equipment, founded the village of São Francisco, subsequently promoted to the status of town in 1660. The economy of the new settlement was based on the preparation of dried fish, shipbuilding, and manioc cultivation, large quantities of which were exported.³⁹ A few years later, José Pires Monteiro, the son of Francisco Dias Velho, founded a settlement on the island of Santa Catarina in 1673. Founded as an agricultural company, the settlement consisted of just over one hundred people. Several years later, Dias Velho himself would arrive on the island, where he would be slaughtered by Dutch pirates in 1687.⁴⁰ After his death, the settlement was neglected for some time as Dias Velho’s sons moved to Laguna, but it regained strength at the beginning of the 18th century and became a town in 1726. Finally, in 1684, Domingos Brito Peixoto and his sons, Francisco de Brito Peixoto and Sebastião de Brito Guerra, led the settlement of Laguna, which was named a town in 1714, but only came to effectively exercise that role in 1720.⁴¹ One of the first local historians observed that “dried fish and manioc flour were the most important sectors of industry and trade in the 18th century. Laguna supplied Santos, Rio de Janeiro, and even Colonia de Sacramento with these goods.”⁴²

We therefore have a common pattern characterized by the migration of family branches from São Paulo to the South, giving rise to small settlements with a fairly timid colonization until the early 18th century. This scarce population and fragile presence of the Portuguese state facilitated illegal activity, especially on Santa Catarina Island, where the accessible port attracted foreign vessels that engaged in prohibited trade with local residents. The presence of the French was particularly worrisome to the colonial authorities, as trade with the foreigners went beyond merely furnishing travel provisions to the establishment of trading posts that could deal in hides and slaves.⁴³

However, geopolitical changes led to the recovery of the southern American regions, and the Portuguese crown therefore decided to create the captaincy of Santa Catarina Island and its adjoining mainland in 1738.⁴⁴ Faced with the prospect of more clearly defining the borders between the Iberian Empires, the Portuguese monarchy considered it prudent to establish more effective control of Santa Catarina’s territory, which until then had been controlled by the local elites who held sway in the municipal governments of the coastal towns. A new wave of occupation began in the mid-18th century, when the Crown mandated a colonization project for the coast of Santa Catarina, thereby integrating it into the Portuguese Atlantic circuit. Under the command of Brigadier José da Silva Pais, Santa Catarina Island was fortified to protect its bay and received settlers from the Azores to occupy its territory.⁴⁵ In addition to this coastal occupation, the mountain town of Lajes was established in 1771 at the behest of the governor of São Paulo (see figure 2).⁴⁶

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Figure 2. Plan and internal view of the settlement of Colonia. Atlas by Miguel Antônio de Ciera. Cartography CAM.02,001 (1758).

Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Manioc cultivation and whaling were the economic mainstays of the captaincy of Santa Catarina. The dissemination of flour production in small mills shows the strength of the colonial internal market, which absorbed most of the captaincy’s exports. Flour production was part of the broader context of the Santa Catarina captaincy’s agricultural production, and manioc cultivation offered a number of advantages, as it was easily grown, adapted to most soils, and could be planted throughout the year.⁴⁷

The first whaling stations were established on the coast of Santa Catarina in the mid-18th century, when this area was definitively occupied by the Portuguese. In 1746, a whaling station was established at Piedade, on the mainland across from Santa Catarina Island. Its pioneering location would make it the largest and most important whaling station on the Santa Catarina coast. Others were established later: Lagoinha (1772), Itapocorói (1778), Garopaba (1793–1795), and Imbituba (1796). These whaling stations were operated by slave labor: the Lagoinha station, for example, had forty-six slaves in 1816. For some time, they were the basis for an important colonial economic activity, supplying the internal market with lard, spermaceti, and candle wax, and the external market with lighting oil.⁴⁸

Indigenous Societies: Conquest and Assimilation

From the late 16th to the early 17th century, inter-ethnic contacts occurred through the enslavement of indigenous Guarani along the coast of Santa Catarina. Settlers from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo sent slave-hunting expeditions that relied on the collaboration of local indigenous leaders for their success. The main intermediaries of this incipient trade in indigenous slaves were in the Patos region, where the so-called “Port of Patos” (the modern-day city of Laguna) was an entrepot for the trade in enslaved Guarani. In this port, the captives were chained and boarded on ships destined for the captaincies of São Vicente and Rio de Janeiro. This was the case of Chief Tubarão, who became the leading supplier of Guarani captives in the Patos region. In exchange for European goods, this chief delivered the Portuguese captives from the Araxá tribe, who had in turn been taken prisoner by the Carijó in intertribal wars.⁴⁹ Much of the Guarani population of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande de São Pedro was enslaved over the 17th century, as the prohibition on indigenous enslavement was circumvented by the peculiar institution of “private management.” This disguised form of slavery was maintained during the 18th century and also practiced by the first settlers in the region of Campos de Viamão, especially among those who had some connection with the village of Laguna, a colonial center deeply marked by an indigenous presence and inter-ethnic mixture.⁵⁰

Following the signing of the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, the Portuguese crown resolved to make a greater effort to populate its southern colonial territories, which until then had been fairly sparsely settled. A significant contingent of Guarani was therefore transferred from the Sete Povos das Missões area to Viamão. Following the Guarani War (1754–1756), in which a combination of Spanish and Portuguese troops battled indigenous forces who resisted being expelled from their territory and ended in the partial destruction and occupation of the region of the missions, Governor Gomes Freire brought a significant number of indigenous people (approximately three thousand people or seven hundred families) to the occupied territory, many of whom were settled in Campos de Viamão to form the Aldeia dos Anjos, where they were to receive clothing and rations from the colonial government. A small number of this contingent, approximately four hundred Indians, ended up forming the village of São Nicolau, near the Rio Pardo fortress.⁵¹ The establishment of indigenous villages in the Rio Grande mainland fit with the political project of the Marquis of Pombal, chief minister of Portuguese King Joseph I. Among other aspects, Pombal’s assimilationist project included the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portuguese America and the resulting secular administration of the indigenous village according to the Directory of Indians of 1758. In the specific case of Rio Grande de São Pedro, the Indians were most welcome, as they not only swelled the population but also formed a large “reserve” of labor for the colonizers, who used them in a great variety of farming and ranching activities (see figure 3).⁵²

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Figure 3. Santa Catarina Island. Map by José Custódio de Sá e Faria. Cartography ARC.025,11,016 (1777).

Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Besides the Guarani, another indigenous group that played an important role in the colonial period were the Minuano, an ethnic group with close ties to the Portuguese who traveled through the mainland of Rio Grande de São Pedro to Colonia de Sacramento during the 18th century. They also had a fairly close relationship with the residents of the village of Rio Grande. They were called “infidel” Indians and considered “barbarians” because some of them refused Catholic baptism. They were, however, considered “friends” of the Portuguese. Friendly contacts between the Portuguese and the Minuano continued in the following years and intensified at the beginning of the 18th century, when residents of Laguna, seeking to defend Colonia de Sacramento and their interest in the region’s cattle, granted honors to a number of Minuano chiefs, naming them commanders and defenders of Portuguese interests. This was an attempt to co-opt the Minuano chiefs, attracting them to the Portuguese side and creating an alliance that would allow for the safe passage of the cattle herds. It is worth noting that the Minuano were the largest suppliers of cattle to the pioneering ranchers and herders of the “Continent of Rio Grande,” who established themselves in the Campos de Viamão beginning in the 1730s.⁵³ The native peoples known as Minuano and the Charrua took advantage of the imperial efforts to establish borders to serve their own purposes. As royal authorities sought to define a border on lands they did not effectively control, they sought the aid of native agents. In response, natives took up arms, crossed the border to develop informal economic activities or elude imperial armies, or sought to incorporate new settlers into indigenous sociopolitical networks. These actions undermined imperial designs but made the border an important form of territorial organization.⁵⁴

While the Guarani and Minuano were in contact with the Portuguese since the beginning of the 17th century, the first contacts between the Portuguese and Indians belonging to the Jê group, known as Xokleng, occurred a century later. These indigenous groups were always the most resistant to contacts with the colonizers. However, the opening of the herding trail linking Rio Grande de São Pedro to São Paulo in 1728, the founding of the town of Lages in 1771, and the establishment of new ranches in the countryside of what is now the state of Paraná made it impossible for the Xokleng to continue making their gathering expeditions into the pine forests scattered throughout that countryside. The indigenous presence in the countryside around Lages and Guarapuava led the government of Don João VI to issue a royal letter (November 5, 1808) declaring a war of extermination against those indigenous people, claiming that it was “ever more evident that there is no way to civilize savage peoples.”⁵⁵

Enslaved Africans

Colonia de Sacramento had a large population of enslaved people in the second half of the 18th century, comparable to other regions directly involved in the African slave trade such as Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. Growth was gradual, as the town had approximately 1,800 inhabitants in 1722, of whom only 16 percent were enslaved. A few years later, in 1730, the numbers indicate a significant growth in the proportion of enslaved people, which reached approximately 35 percent of the total population. Over the following decades, from the 1730s to the 1760s, this growth remained vigorous, approximately 2.8 percent annually. Growth on this scale indicates a fairly rapid demographic dynamic, largely due to the importation of enslaved Africans.⁵⁶ These data confirm the impact of the African slave trade on the social configuration of Colonia de Sacramento, highlighting the significant presence of enslaved Africans among the people of the Portuguese enclave on the La Plata River. More importantly, some 24,000 enslaved Africans may have entered the La Plata region through the small port between 1740 and 1760, an indicator of the extent of smuggling of Africans to Spanish America through Buenos Aires.⁵⁷

African slavery also played an important role in the economy and society of Rio Grande do Sul. In addition to the activities related to agriculture and cattle raising (ranching and salted beef production), slaves from Africa and the New World were also engaged in urban activities such as domestic service and hired-out jobs, for which they were obliged to surrender most of their earnings to their masters. In the region of the earliest colonization on the Rio Grande Continent, the Campos de Viamão, approximately 42 percent of the population consisted of enslaved Africans in 1751.⁵⁸ The enslaved population of Porto Alegre reached 40 percent in 1802, according to parish rosters.⁵⁹ These are extreme cases, but in general, the captaincy had a fairly large contingent of enslaved people, ranging from 28.5 percent to 36.7 percent of the total population in the period from 1780 to 1810.⁶⁰

Although there was some natural reproduction in the slave population, available data indicates that most of the enslaved people entered Rio Grande do Sul through the slave trade. Slightly more than 17,000 enslaved Africans were brought between 1800 and 1820, most of them through the port of Rio de Janeiro.⁶¹ Large slave traffickers were comparatively rare in this context; small shipments of enslaved people were more common, making for small-scale but intense trading activity of a speculative nature.⁶² Although more precise data is not available until the early 19th century, this importation of enslaved Africans had been occurring since the 1780s and 1790s, powered by growth in cattle raising and salted meat production. This is reflected in the fact that the population of enslaved people grew at a faster annual rate than did the free population. The population of enslaved people grew at annual rate of approximately 5 percent, showing that a large number were already being imported at the end of the 18th century, a sign of the region’s economic strength.⁶³

In the captaincy of Santa Catarina, where the use of free labor was more widespread, the enslaved population ranged from 20 to 25 percent of the total population between 1787 and 1836. Despite its relatively limited size, slaveholding played a structural role in this society.⁶⁴ The slave trade was stimulated by the boom in food exports, which was largely sustained by the purchase of newly arrived Africans to work on small and medium-sized agricultural properties. Many of the Africans living on Santa Catarina Island and the adjacent mainland coast had been brought across the Atlantic in ships belonging to slave traffickers based in Rio de Janeiro and then re-distributed to Santa Catarina with other trade goods, which were mostly exchanged for manioc flour. Based on official orders, we know that between 1811 and 1830, at least 1,700 slaves were sent to Santa Catarina, a number that may be underestimated, as it does not take into account the extent of smuggling and the overland trade in enslaved people.⁶⁵

A fundamental element in the colonial society of Portuguese America, African slaveholding would also play a leading role in Portugal’s southernmost territories. While in Colonia de Sacramento the enslaved population made up an exceptionally large proportion of the population, the absolute numbers were small due to the limited size of the local market. On the other hand, trade in African slaves took place on a large scale, especially as a result of the smuggling of slaves into Spanish America. In Rio Grande do Sul, the proportion of enslaved people of African origin was smaller, but this captaincy also saw significant illegal trade in enslaved people to their Spanish neighbors.⁶⁶ Only in Santa Catarina were the numbers somewhat lower, in light of the economic activities that required fewer enslaved workers.

The Policy of Targeted Colonization

The southern frontier of Portuguese domains in America was still very sparsely settled in the mid-18th century, leading the Portuguese crown to implement a policy of targeted colonization using settlers from the Azores archipelago. The main causes of Azorean emigration to Brazil included the presence of surplus population on some of the islands. In addition to the overpopulation, frequently recurring grain harvest failures, accompanied by famine and sickness, were aggravated by the land inheritance system based on the morgado, by which the eldest male inherited the family’s undivided property, leaving few prospects for younger heirs. Faced with these circumstances, the Crown encouraged voluntary enlistment of immigrants to Brazil. The number of emigrants who enlisted in 1747 represented little more than 5 percent of the Azorean islanders, but even this small number constituted an important boost to the population of the southern captaincies.⁶⁷

Between 1748 and 1756, approximately six thousand people arrived at Desterro (modern-day Florianópolis), of which almost 40 percent (2,000–2,500 people) were transferred to the southern border and landed in the town of Rio Grande.⁶⁸ These Azorean families founded settlements at various locations on the island of Santa Catarina and along the adjacent mainland coast. The aim was to develop the region based on the free labor of settlers in farming and manufacturing villages dedicated to the cultivation of wheat, cotton, and linen (flax).⁶⁹ In the captaincy of Santa Catarina, the immigrants were settled in the towns of Desterro and Laguna and in various other locations such as Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Lagoa, São José, Santo Antônio, Nossa Senhora do Rosário da Enseada do Brito, São Miguel, Nossa Senhora das Necessidades, and Vila Nova. Some of these locations were already inhabited, while others were founded by the arriving Azoreans.⁷⁰

The primary goal of Azorean immigration to Rio Grande de São Pedro was strategic, because the Portuguese crown sought to establish settlements that would anchor the Portuguese domain against potential Spanish encroachments. The 1747 Edict authorized the arrival of the Azoreans, establishing the conditions for migration and the Portuguese state concessions: male immigrants must be no older than forty and female immigrants thirty, and they would receive a subsidy, farming implements, livestock, and flour during the first year. The settlers would be exempt from military service and were promised a land grant of one quarter of a square league (1,089 hectares). In practice, however, when the settlers received their concessions in the 1770s, the plots were much smaller than promised: between 130 and 272 hectares.⁷¹

The original intention was for the Azoreans to settle the region formerly occupied by the Spanish Jesuit missions from which the missionaries and Guarani were displaced following the Treaty of Madrid. While awaiting transfer to the missionary region, the Azoreans were partially transported to Viamão, Porto Alegre, Santo Amaro, and Rio Pardo. However, due to indigenous resistance to leaving the territory, the Azoreans ended up remaining in the region already occupied by the Portuguese, scattered through the fields of Viamão, along the banks of the lower Jacuí River and the environs of the town of Rio Grande. The settlements were literally abandoned, awaiting the promised concessions.⁷² Unlike the case of Santa Catarina, where the Azorean settlements were established officially in the 1750s, in the case of Rio Grande de São Pedro, the uncertainty caused by war resulted in haphazard settlements, giving rise to a number of small villages that would later become parishes. This was the case with Porto Alegre, Santo Amaro, Taquari, Conceição de Arroio, and Mostardas, for example.

Analysis of the consequences of this targeted colonization initiative shows mixed results. One consequence was the formation of an “Azorean identity” historically rooted in the colonization of southern Brazil and based on the prospect of access to land.⁷³ Although the original project for settling the missionary region did not work out, the impact on the region’s population was significant. The town of Rio Grande, for example, which had a population of 1,400 in the middle of the previous decade, saw its population of white adults grow by at least 1,273. In other words, the population practically doubled due to the arrival of the Azoreans.⁷⁴ The parish of Viamão also felt a noticeable impact, as 30 percent of the brides who were married in the parish between 1747 and 1759 were natives of the Azores. The impact of Azorean immigration was felt less in Porto Alegre, where fewer than 5 percent of the brides married between 1772 and 1800 were natives of the islands; as a major river port and capital, Porto Alegre attracted other types of migrants.⁷⁵ On the other hand, the strategic goal was achieved, as the Azorean settlers spread out from the town of Rio Grande along land and river routes following a line drawn by the Portuguese crown for settlements, anchoring Portuguese-Brazilian occupation of territories that were in dispute with the Spanish.⁷⁶

In addition to this Azorean colonization of the mid-18th century, southern Portuguese America was also the setting for another sort of targeted colonization: forced resettlement of exiles. Between 1782 and 1810 alone, more than two hundred people were sent from Portugal to “southern exile,” the vast majority on the island of Santa Catarina, where the principle urban center was known, not by coincidence, as the town of Desterro (i.e., banishment). Exile was not only trans-Atlantic in nature, however, as was typical of forced colonization in the modern age; it also had an internal dimension. Between 1689 and 1804, perhaps two hundred other people (at least) were sentenced to what was known as internal exile, transported from other regions of Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, to the southern border: in this case, exile destinations included not only the island of Santa Catarina but also Colonia de Sacramento and Rio Grande de São Pedro.⁷⁷

As a way of dealing with convicts who were banned from the Kingdom of Portugal or from the more important centers of its overseas territories, the Portuguese monarchy chose to use penal exile, a method of punishment widely used by modern European states. Beginning in the 16th century, Portuguese America was already a destination for those condemned to exile. Beginning in the late 17th century, two interests converged in the use of this peculiar method of criminal punishment. On the one hand, there was a need to remove the “undesirable elements” that disturbed the peace of the communities where they lived; at the same time, there was an urgent need to populate the most distant and disputed frontiers of the empire, under the principle of uti possidetis, which considered the presence of all sorts of people useful in very sparsely populated areas. Considering a temporal and geographical arc that ranges from exile to Colonia de Sacramento beginning in the late 17th century through penal exile to Rio Grande de São Pedro in the mid-18th century to the peak of the practice in the 19th century concentrating on the island of Santa Catarina, one can see how exile to the South played a decisive role in the broader policy of appropriating and occupying lands that were disputed by the Spanish crown in southern Brazil and the La Plata region. Exile had an obviously strategic character in affirming Portuguese claims to this key region of the Portuguese Empire (see figure 4).

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Figure 4. Rio Grande de São Pedro at the time of the Guarani War. The heading of the map reads: “Map that depicts the country known as Colony of the Missions and the path taken by the two armed forces of His Faithful and Catholic Majesty.” Map by Miguel Angelo de Blasco. Cartography ARC.013,05,005 (1756).

Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Discussion of the Literature

Traditional 20th-century historiography of Colonia de Sacramento had a nationalist bent, focusing primarily on military history and the diplomatic and armed disputes that characterized part of the history of the fortified Portuguese foothold on the La Plata River. A new wave of more recent research beginning in the 2000s has resulted in innovative approaches anchored in social and economic history. Fernando Jumar’s work addresses the Atlantic slave trade during the 18th century, viewing Colonia de Sacramento in the context of the La Plata River port system that included Buenos Aires and Montevideo.⁷⁸ The interdependence of these ports was a characteristic feature of this region, marked by deep-seated economic and social exchanges among the Iberian subjects. Fabrício Prado studied the networks established among residents along both banks of the La Plata River, showing the importance of the links between Colonia de Sacramento and Buenos Aires.⁷⁹ Veritable trans-imperial networks were formed, allowing the Portuguese to remain in the area (especially in Montevideo) even after the La Plata region had been definitively surrendered to Spain in 1777. Another key reference is the work of Paulo Possamai, who has used the perspective of daily life to reconstitute 17th-century society in Colonia de Sacramento, examining such varied aspects as the indigenous population, military recruitment and barracks life, the presence of the clergy, and the practice of smuggling.⁸⁰

Traditional historians of Rio Grande do Sul developed a Luso-centric version that explained the formation of the southern territory only in terms of Portuguese colonization efforts, ignoring the indigenous presence and the Spanish influence. The predominant slant of this historiography was towards military history and traditional political history, focusing on the great deeds of famous men. Examples include the studies published by João Borges Fortes in the first half of the 20th century. Books such as Troncos seculares, Os casais açorianos, and Rio Grande de São Pedro: povoamento e conquista set the tone for traditional historiography, anchored in nationalist and elitist precepts.⁸¹ Until at least the 1970s, the predominant explanatory framework was provided by the Historical and Geographical Institute of Rio Grande do Sul, which consisted mostly of this traditional historiography. With regard to the colonial period, Moysés Vellinho was still defining the main lines of the southern region’s historical formation. In works such as Capitania d’El Rei and Fronteira, Vellinho considered the history of Rio Grande do Sul to be primarily shaped by the Portuguese crown’s administrative policy (hence the studies of important men such as André Ribeiro Coutinho, Gomes Freire, and José Marcelino de Figueiredo), while viewing the Jesuit missions (and the history of the La Plata region itself) to be outside the scope of Rio Grande do Sul’s history.⁸² Little attention was paid to the configuration of colonial society, strongly characterized by slaveholding and the indigenous population. Among the notable exceptions are two works by authors from outside Rio Grande do Sul: It is worth highlighting the ground-breaking work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Capitalismo e escravidão no Brasil meridional, which revealed the role of black people in the formation of slaveholding society in Rio Grande do Sul.⁸³ Another notable study is Corcino Medeiros dos Santos’s Economia e sociedade do Rio Grande do Sul: século XVIII, although it is still grounded in the assumptions of traditional historiography.⁸⁴ With the emergence of university graduate programs in the 1980s, however, new subjects and topics such as the history of agriculture and slavery were developed. These themes appear in the works of Helen Osório. Instead of a rural landscape made up only of large estates employing a labor force of primarily free men, her studies portrayed a society consisting of a large number of peasant families, many of whom also made use of enslaved labor.⁸⁵ The study of family history also began to receive attention. Authors such as Martha Hameister and Fábio Kühn focused on family strategies used by the pioneering settlers of Rio Grande and Viamão, showing the important role played by kinship networks in the formation of an ancien régime society on the southern frontier.⁸⁶ It is also worth highlighting the development of studies of indigenous history, with notable works by Eduardo Neumann and Elisa Garcia. The former has dedicated himself to the study of the missionary Guarani, studying the importance of their appropriation of a literate culture, a key aspect in the context of the Guarani War.⁸⁷ Garcia, in turn, has been studying the indigenous policies implemented in the southernmost area of Portuguese America, showing how indigenous populations also exercised agency locally.⁸⁸

The historiography of Santa Catarina is also marked by the initial predominance of authors associated with the Santa Catarina Institute of History and Geography such as Osvaldo Rodrigues Cabral and Walter Piazza, whose early works addressed classic themes like the Azorean immigration and the territorial occupation of Santa Catarina.⁸⁹ Recently, however, new works have appeared that explore less well-known topics. Luciana Rossato makes use of travelers’ accounts to reconstitute the how the natural landscape of Santa Catarina has been represented.⁹⁰ Augusto da Silva’s research on the administrative history of Santa Catarina includes a detailed study of the captaincy’s governors and their importance in the context of the Portuguese Empire.⁹¹ Another overlooked topic, the history of slavery, has gained attention, especially with the work of Beatrice Mamigonian, who has proposed a diverse history that includes the important role played by enslaved Africans in the configuration of Santa Catarina society.⁹²