Everything about The Bandeirantes totally explained
The
Bandeirantes were Brazilian colonial
scouts who took part in the Bandeiras, exploration expeditions. Through these, the Bandeirantes expanded
Portuguese America from the small limits of the
Tordesilhas Line to roughly the same territory as current
Brazil. This expansion discovered mineral wealth that made the fortune of
Portugal during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Bandeiras
The
Bandeiras were the expeditions by
Paulistas and allied Indians to find precious metals and stones, enslave indigenous people and capture runaway slaves.
Leaving from the then poor and tiny village of
São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, which was so unimportant to the
Portuguese Empire that it even used the
Língua Geral instead of the
Portuguese language, the
Bandeiras followed the course of the rivers -- in Southeast
Brazil rivers flow from the edge of the
Serra do Mar range in the coast inland -- and profited from the
Union of the Crowns of
Portugal and
Spain to effectively invade the Spanish America territories which were then unimportant to Spain, their rich mines and Indian cities being in the western Andes mountains.
São Paulo was the home base for the most famous bandeirantes. Indians, mostly free men, and
Mestiços predominated in the society of São Paulo in the 16th and early 17th century and outnumbered Europeans. The influential families generally bore some Indian blood and provided most of the leaders of the bandeiras, with a few notable exceptions such as António Raposo Tavares (1598 - 1658), who was European born.
As a result of the
Bandeiras, the
Capitaincy of São Vicente became the basis for the
vice-kingdom of Brazil and encompassed current states of
Santa Catarina,
Paraná,
São Paulo,
Minas Gerais,
Goiás,
Tocantins and both Northern and Southern
Mato Grosso.
Slave raids
There were over 2.5 million
Indigenous peoples in Brazil in 1500. By the middle of the 18th century, the number had dropped to between 1 million and 1.5 million. Many tribes living close to the Atlantic coast intermixed with Portuguese or died of
diseases. Others had fled into the interior, and their flight created an ever-greater need for
slaves, one that wasn't entirely satisfied by importing them from Africa.
From
São Paulo, the infamous Bandeirantes, adventurers mostly of mixed Portuguese and native ancestry, penetrated steadily westward in their search for Indian slaves. Along the
Amazon river and its major tributaries, repeated slaving raids and punitive attacks left their mark. One French traveler in the 1740s described
hundreds of miles of river banks with no sign of human life and once-thriving villages that were devastated and empty. In some areas of the
Amazon Basin, and particularly among the
Guarani of southern
Brazil and
Paraguay, the
Jesuits had organized their
Jesuit Reductions along military lines to fight the slavers.
Some of the most famous bandeirantes were Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, Fernão Dias Pais, António Rodrigues Arzão, António Pires de Campos and Bartolomeu Bueno de Sequeira. In 1628, Antônio Raposo Tavares lead a bandeira, composed of 2.000 allied Indians, 900 Mamluks (Mestizos) and 69 white Paulistanos, to find precious metals and stones or to capture Indians for slavery or both. This expedition alone was responsible for the destruction of most of the Jesuit missions of Spanish Guairá and the enslavement of over 60,000 indigenous people.
From 1648 to 1652, Tavares also lead one of the longest known expeditions from
São Paulo to the mouth of the Amazon river, investigating many of its tributaries, including the
Rio Negro, and covering a distance of more than 10,000 km. The expedition arrived in
Andean Quito, part of the
Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, and stayed there for a short time in 1651. Of the 1200 men who left São Paulo, only 60 reached their final destination in
Belém.
Further Information
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