Sugar and the Slave Coast

Bahia, 1564. A Jesuit named José de Anchieta is writing a letter about the people of this coast.

A sugar estate in the Pernambuco countryside, painted by Frans Post around 1660. The owner's big house and the mill buildings stand on the right, enslaved people walk the path in the foreground, and a palm leans in at the edge of the frame. Post came to Brazil in 1637 as the official painter of the Dutch colony and left in 1644, so this view was painted in the Netherlands, from memory, years after he last saw the place. It shows the working unit the sugar colony was built from: the house, the mill, and the enslaved people who ran them, together in one calm frame. Frans Post / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

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Contents — 9 sections

OPENING SCENE
THE COAST IS CUT INTO STRIPS AND GIVEN AWAY
A GOVERNOR, A CITY AND SIX JESUITS
SUGAR BECOMES THE COLONY
ONE WORKFORCE DIES, ANOTHER IS BOUGHT
ONE KING, TWO EMPIRES, AND THE WALK INLAND
THE DUTCH TAKE THE MACHINE
THE MACHINE IS TAKEN BACK, AND COPIED
THE NORTH, THE RIVER PLATE, AND THE END OF PALMARES

OPENING SCENE

Bahia, 1564. A Jesuit named José de Anchieta is writing a letter about the people of this coast.

Twenty years ago, the villages around the bay were full. Now, he writes, that population "is wasted in this Bahia, and it seems an incredible thing, for one never believed that so many people would ever be used up, let alone in such a short time".

Used up. He is describing human beings in the language of stock.

Smallpox had swept the coast in 1562, and measles the year after. Each disease killed about 30,000 people living under Portuguese control. Those are the estimates the Jesuits and royal officials made, and they are estimates rather than counts.

The sugar mills behind the coast lost most of their workers inside five years. The mills did not stop. Their output rose the whole time, because the men who owned them had begun buying enslaved people from Africa.

Today's Core Question: The mills lost most of their workforce inside five years and did not slow down. What does that tell you about what the colony was for?

LOCKED AFTER THE PREVIEW

What's in the rest of Day 2

THE COAST IS CUT INTO STRIPS AND GIVEN AWAY
A GOVERNOR, A CITY AND SIX JESUITS
SUGAR BECOMES THE COLONY
ONE WORKFORCE DIES, ANOTHER IS BOUGHT
ONE KING, TWO EMPIRES, AND THE WALK INLAND
THE DUTCH TAKE THE MACHINE
THE MACHINE IS TAKEN BACK, AND COPIED
THE NORTH, THE RIVER PLATE, AND THE END OF PALMARES

The governor who reported the fall of Macaco told Lisbon that the defenders' general lay among the dead. He was wrong. The general's name was Zumbi, and his last twenty-one months open Day 3. So does something found in the streams of the far interior, by the same kind of expedition the crown had hired to finish Palmares: gold, and with it a century that moved Brazil's capital, its people and its slave trade a thousand kilometres.

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Back Continue to Day 3

OPENING SCENE

José de Anchieta in a portrait Benedito Calixto painted in 1902 for the Museu Paulista in São Paulo, three centuries after the Jesuit's death. No likeness from life survives, so the picture is a reconstruction of a man known entirely from paper. Anchieta landed in Brazil in 1553, aged nineteen, and never went back to Europe; Rome moved slowly on him, beatifying him in 1980 and declaring him a saint only in April 2014.Benedito Calixto / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Bahia, 1564. A Jesuit named José de Anchieta is writing a letter about the people of this coast.

Used up. He is describing human beings in the language of stock.

The title page of Anchieta's Arte de gramática da língua mais usada na costa do Brasil, printed at Coimbra in 1595 and photographed from the 1933 facsimile of the Biblioteca Nacional's copy. The Tupi it describes did not die with the coastal villages: its descendant Nheengatu is still spoken in the upper Rio Negro basin, and in 2002 the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira made it a co-official language beside Portuguese.Biblioteca Central UFRGS / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0

Today's Core Question: The mills lost most of their workforce inside five years and did not slow down. What does that tell you about what the colony was for?

What's in the rest of Day 2

THE COAST IS CUT INTO STRIPS AND GIVEN AWAY

A GOVERNOR, A CITY AND SIX JESUITS

SUGAR BECOMES THE COLONY

ONE WORKFORCE DIES, ANOTHER IS BOUGHT

ONE KING, TWO EMPIRES, AND THE WALK INLAND

THE DUTCH TAKE THE MACHINE

THE MACHINE IS TAKEN BACK, AND COPIED

THE NORTH, THE RIVER PLATE, AND THE END OF PALMARES