Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 102

Pombaltendedtowardanactivist statethatwouldsubsidizethepurchaseofslavesvia
the charter company of Grão Pará and Maranhão, so that agroindustries and infrastruc-
ture would be supplied with the needed workers. The Directorates that he created would
banish the religious orders and replace ecclesiastic missions with a secular system. In-
dians who had toiled on clerical lands were to become administrated wage laborers for
rent to settlers too poor to purchase slaves. “Directors” of mission villages—now labor
depots—wouldreceiveagenerous17percentofthevalueofthegoodsproducedbytheir
wards, while assuring the crown its mandatory 10 percent. These two means—ramped-
up slavery and Indian rental—would, in Pombal's view, loosen the regional labor con-
straint. Natives from the Directorates were also assigned onerous jobs in civil construc-
tion, woodcutting expeditions, rowing, and state provisioning. This policy had its loc-
al commentary when the native rowers, transporting the regional magistrate, Francisco
Mendonça Furtado (half-brother to Pombal), near Belém, jumped overboard, swimming
to shore and abandoning him to estuary waters (he barely survived). 54 The arduous
nature of these tasks and the general abusive treatment of the natives, plus the fear of
disease, often led to Indians to desert Directorate villages and flee to the interior, some-
times into the multiethnic native quilombos or mocambos . 55
Pombal's zeal to secularize the mission system not only reflected his vehement anti-
clerical sentiments but also fed a strategy to decisively transform the widespread eccle-
siastic settlements (technically under Vatican sovereignty) into communities that were
formally Portuguese, and thus evidence of de facto (and Luso) occupation. Pombal and
MendonçaFurtado'scorrespondenceonquestionsofsettlementrevealsjusthowanti-Je-
suit anxieties dovetailed with Pombal's imperial territorial necessities to show de facto
occupation. 56 FollowingthePortuguesemodelinthesematters,Pombalalsourgedinter-
marriage in the colonies, the “portuguesation” of place-names, and the end of the lingua
franca in favor of Portuguese as a means of creating a Luso colonial identity. (The lin-
gua franca was, if anything, a pan-national/ethnic creole language, used throughout all
of Amazonia by the religious orders and not limited to Portuguese domains.) Pombal's
polices were supposed to reinforce Portuguese presence in the face of the requirements
of uti possedetis . 57 French policy in Guiana, on the other hand, favored racial segreg-
ation, eagerly awaited the white settlers who were at always at the heart of its colonial
policy, was less insistent on language, was still very Catholic, and was oriented in its
race relations by the far less assimilationist Code Noir. Pombal's approach had enorm-
ous impacts on the native population of Brazil, largely because indigenes in Directorate
villages were basically worked to death and exposed to diseases, which contributed to
the processes of cultural dissolution of native traditions and languages. This approach
alsocreated aclass ofproletarians andapeasantry,someofwhomwouldeventually end
up in Belém and help fuel the Cabanagem revolt. 58