american-holocaust

92 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTtosf in the Andes "~nd ~ll the way as you go, you shall have great townesof Indians. . . . You shall have five hundred of these Indians by the wayas you travell readie with Nets [hammocks] to carry you." So thick witha vast variety of cultures and peoples were Brazil's coastal and riverineareas that the first Portuguese governor of the region, T orne de Sousa,declared that it was impossible for there ever to be a lack of natives, "evenif we were to cut them up in slaughterhouses." 116 It was one of those rarestatements that was both prescient and wrong: the effect of European conquestin Brazil was indeed as damaging as if the people had been cut upin slaughterhouses; but the number of natives was not inexhaustible.The Portuguese governorship of Brazil was established with Sousa'sarrival in the Bay of Bahia in March of 1549. Within just twenty yearswhen,in 1570, King Sebastiao emptily declared that natives should not beenslaved unless they were captured in "just wars"-the native peoples ofBrazil already were well along the road to extinction. From the first daysof the colony, in 1549 and on into the 1550s, as Pero de Magalhaes Gandavowrote at the time, "the governors and captains of the land destroyed[the natives] little by little and killed many, and others fled into the interior."In 1552, and again in 1554, and again in 1556, and again in 1559through 1561, epidemic diseases brought by the Europeans swept the coastsand countryside, preying heavily on the weakened bodies of enslaved Indianswhose ancestors had never encountered such pestilences. In 1552,wrote Francisco Pires, of those natives who came down with the fever"almost none of these has survived." In 1554 an epidemic of "bloodyfluxes," reported Simao de Vasconcellos, "struck with such violence thatas soon as it appeared it laid them low, unconscious, and within three orfour days it carried them to the grave." In 1556 another epidemic destroyed"an infinite number of savages," recalled Andre Thevet. And fortwo years, from 1559 to 1561, horrifying hemorrhagic fevers, dysentery,and influenza or whooping cough, raked the populace that remained. Thenatives everywhere "were terrified and almost stunned by what was happeningto them," wrote Antonio Blasques: "They no longer performedtheir songs and dances. Everything was grief. . . . there was nothing tobe heard but weeping and groaning by the dying." 117In the midst of all this the enslavement and forced labor continued.King Joao III had earlier divided the 2500 miles of the Indians' Braziliancoastline into fourteen so-called "captaincies," or private grants of land,each one extending inland from a coastal strip that might be anywherefrom 100 to 400 miles long. 118 In the captaincy with the best existingrecords, the Bahia captaincy, at least 40,000 Indians toiled in forced plantationlabor as the decade of the 1560s began. Other captaincies had similarnumbers of Indian slaves.Meanwhile, in Europe, bubonic plague and smallpox both were ragingonce again. With case mortality rates as high as 60 percent and more for