A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 45

another analyst of the trade, estimates that yet another 100,000 may have moved more
invisibly through internal overland routes, coffled together, walking more than a thou-
sand kilometers. 15 At least 10,000 and possibly 20,000 slaves a year were exiled from
homes and families in the Northeast from 1870 through the mid-1880s, the bulk from
Bahia, with over 25 percent of the trade. 16
On smaller plantations, relations between masters and slaves were intimate and medi-
ated by an array of affinal and customary understandings of rights and obligations. The
combination of changing financial and climatic conditions produced a rupture in both
the economic possibilities of the interior and the implicit social pacts and moral eco-
nomies between owner and slave. In a Pilate-like market process, boys and men were
shunted off to slave dealers. Males constituted almost 70 percent of the trade, and 86
percent of this population was between eleven and forty years old. 17 Backland inhabit-
ants suddenly found themselves swept up in a resurgence of slavery just when its end
was in sight. Once again, the commerce broke up families and communities and fueled
bitter resentment and rebellion among slaves and local indentured freemen. The shift to
more extensive cattle production at the end of the nineteenth century may have reflected
an increasingly intractable labor force, a scarcity of available vaqueiros , as much as the
robust price for animals. The Niño droughts were a boon to water rich but labor-scarce
plantations of coffee in the south and rubber forests to the north, and the commerce in
humans that underpinned these thriving economies, but hideous for those captured in
slavery's last snares. 18
Brazil'sinternalslavemarketshelpexplainwhywomenoutnumberedmentwotoone
in Canudos in da Cunha's day: it was the inverse of the regional slave markets for men.
Canudos' importance as a safe haven for women who may have been abandoned, separ-
ated from their families by the slave commerce, widowed, or disgraced or for whatever
reason, in need of protection, was widely noted. It was indeed a City of Women.
Journalists writing about the fourth expedition to Canudos were surprised by the om-
nipresenceofwomen.DaCunhawouldwrite,“Women,women,women—alltheprison-
ers of war seemed to be women.” They were everywhere; they did everything and were
a strange subtext for the masculine theater of war. The Baron of Jeremoabo, the Sertão's
mostpowerfullandownerandpoliticoandanindefatigableletterwriter,wrotethatinthe
last year of the existence of Canudos “it had 5,000 battle-ready men, not counting the
women who also fight like fanatics.” 19
Peasants and Prophecy
In circumstances so devastating, so lethal, so simultaneously capricious and inevitable,
one can understand the desire for miracles and messiahs, and relief from nature through
the supernatural, one of the hallmarks of Northeastern rural culture. 20 Apocalypse was