In two books and an accompanying website, Silvia Lara offers a comprehensive history of Palmares, the longest-lasting runaway-slave community in colonial Brazil. Through an extensive review of what has been written about Palmares, an exhaustive search in archives for documents, a careful reading of known and overlooked sources, and attention to linguistics and mapmaking, Lara recasts the spatial and temporal history of Palmares and places it in a trans-Atlantic perspective. Along the way, Lara addresses fundamental questions in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World, such as the politics of peace and war, what constituted an independent state, how freedom could be gained and lost, how political culture survived the Middle Passage, and the place of Palmares in Brazilian history. Palmares & Cucaú: o aprendizado da dominação (2021) is Lara’s masterful book. Guerra contra Palmares (2021), co-edited with Phablo Roberto Marchis Fachin, reconstructs the history of one of the most famous documents about Palmares, while Documenta Palmares: um instrumento de pesquisa, is a comprehensive, interactive bibliographic website that presents the known documents and works about Palmares. It also includes an innovative map.
In Palmares & Cucaú, Lara sets out what is known, unknown, and unknowable about Palmares from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Mocambos—independent villages created by runaway slaves—formed in the sertões of Pernambuco and Alagoas since the late sixteenth century. Palmares was not a single place, but several regions in which mocambos formed alliances and developed a political leadership based on family lineages. Through meticulous work with primary sources, Lara reveals that negotiations for peace were part of the long history of Palmares. As is well known, colonial authorities authorized entradas (armed expeditions) against the mocambos of Palmares, but what historians have not emphasized is the recurring pattern of negotiation. Colonial authorities treated leaders of Palmares as independent and powerful sovereigns and sent emissaries with offers of peace. Despite similarities to peace overtures (and treaties) between the Saramaka of Suriname and Dutch colonial authorities, Brazilian historians have not considered that a similar process unfolded at Palmares. Lara argues for the importance of peace proposals and calls for attention to how leaders of Palmares responded to such offers. Memories of the political landscape of West Central Africa, especially Angola, where a large proportion of the enslaved came from, were key. There, a history of independent leaders dealing with powerful African kings and with Portuguese authorities, was part of the political culture carried by the enslaved. It likely influenced their responses to peace negotiations.
Lara’s larger question is how colonial authorities experimented with strategies for control over the sertões of Pernambuco and Alagoas. They were influenced by colonial policies towards Indigenous peoples in Brazil as well as by the Portuguese experience in West Central Africa. The interests of governors, town councils, and colonists are explicitly laid out in correspondence with the crown. Details were discussed, for example, on how soldiers would be paid, how colonial slaveholders would be compensated, and how the royal fifth would be collected. Offers of peace were also debated. On both sides of the Atlantic, peace proposals that included the granting of freedom to Palmaristas who promised to cooperate, as well as to all children born in the mocambos of Palmares, were deliberated. Reconstructing the strategies and interests of the Palmaristas is more difficult, but Lara emphasizes that overtures for peace were taken seriously. Not only did they fit into patterns of West Central African politics, but as new generations of children were born in the mocambos, the communities desired recognition and status.
At the heart of the book is an exchange of letters between Gana Zumba, a Palmares leader, and the governor of Pernambuco in 1678. The exchange illustrates Lara’s meticulous approach to the sources, which are far more extensive than historians have imagined. Before even addressing the content of the letters, the reader learns their provenance, how they were bound into a volume, the clarity of the scribe’s hand, and their lack of notice by previous historians. Only then can the letters be read, and their content, language, and tone contextualized and understood. Using a close, careful reading of these long-overlooked letters and contextualizing them among hundreds of other documents and interpretive works by historians, Lara recovers the story of Cucaú—an independent village granted to Palmaristas—by the governor of Pernambuco and the Portuguese crown as part of the peace negotiations in 1678.
The governor of Pernambuco recognized Gana Zumba as the leader of Palmares, holding sufficient power and authority to speak for a large number of Palmaristas. The governor promised peace and freedom to Gana Zumba if those under his power would leave their independent mocambos and settle closer to colonial society in the village of Cucaú. From the governor’s point of view, these negotiations were part of his strategy, for they made Gana Zumba’s people vassals of the king, subject to a missionary priest, and thus under Portuguese domination. From Gana Zumba’s point of view, peace was likely the best option available after the losses suffered in recent attacks. Moreover, the offer recalled memories of how independent kings in Africa accepted similar conditions and could expect them to be upheld. The sending of ambassadors, the giving of gifts, the exchange of written documents, and ritual ceremonies all seemed to confirm the reliability of the offer, for they resembled practices used by the Portuguese in West Central Africa. Yet, the story of Gana Zumba in Cucaú was tragically brief. Four hundred Palmaristas accompanied him to settle there, but the village was attacked by soldiers a few years later and two hundred were re-enslaved. Gana Zumba died, perhaps poisoned by rival Palmaristas. Zumbi, who never accepted the offer to move to Cucaú, remained in the sertão, becoming the new leader of Palmares.
Although the governor had granted freedom to Gana Zumba, as well as to all of the children born in the mocambos, and even though this grant was confirmed by a royal decree, when soldiers attacked Cucaú, they re-enslaved those to whom freedom had been granted. This question was discussed at length in Portugal, for it raised many questions about the failure to abide by negotiated agreements. Over time, as the question of the status of children born in Palmares continued to come up, the discussion changed. A great fear voiced by many, including the Jesuit Antonio Vieira, was that if such freedoms were granted it would strike at the heart of slavery. How could the colony survive if slaves could gain their freedom by running away from sugar plantations and forming mocambos? Seeking successful modes of domination was the explicit and ongoing challenge for colonial authorities and the crown. Offers for peace were part of that strategy, but not if they undermined slavery.
The defeat of Zumbi nearly twenty years later and the role of the contingent of soldiers from São Paulo is covered in Chapter Five. Lara discusses at length the ins and outs of the armed expeditions against the mocambos, as well as the suits brought by Domingos Jorge Velho and others over how they would be compensated. Still, there were negotiations. Overtures for peace, as well as war, continued to be part of colonial strategies to control Palmares. The death of Zumbi did not defeat Palmares. There was no concrete “end.” The situation had changed. Whereas the Palmares of earlier times had consisted of independent mocambos in alliances and with a political and military hierarchy, now the settlements in Palmares were referred to as quilombos. This word is less suggestive of independent communities than of war camps. Seeking a solution to the problem of runaway slaves, colonial authorities created a new profession: that of the capitão do mato (bush captain). The job of this individual was to capture runaway slaves before they could reach the safety of the deep forest and create quilombos or mocambos.
Four carefully researched maps make clear how the region encompassed by Palmares changed over time. Not only do these maps locate many mocambos, but they illustrate how the spatial extent of Palmares changed. For example, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Palmares referred to three regions in the sertões of the modern states of Alagoas and Pernambuco. In 1678, it was a more unified region that extended farther north. In the 1680s, Palmares expanded to the West.
In Guerra contra Palmares: o manuscrito de 1678, Lara and philologist Phablo Fachin painstakingly study one of the central documents about Palmares, the “Relação das guerras feitas aos Palmares de Pernambuco no tempo do Governador Dom Pedro de Almeida de 1675 a 1678.” Published in the nineteenth century, this document has been heavily used by historians, but the original remained unknown until Lara found it in 2009. Comparing the handwriting, Lara was later able to identify the author. Lara and Fachin evaluate the various versions of the “Relação.” Not only do they trace the history of the various copies in archives, but they are able to see how the document was changed as it was copied over time. An annotated transcription of the “Relação” is offered to readers, as well as fourteen additional original documents.
The website Documenta Palmares offers interested readers access to an extensive bibliography of manuscript sources and published works about Palmares. Approximately 1,800 primary sources are identified, and many have been scanned and can be read online. The site has a bibliography of more than 600 published works about Palmares, whether in the form of books, articles, edited collections, or images. An interactive map builder allows any viewer to visualize Palmares at various moments in time by clicking on the available layers. These include locations of mocambos, Indigenous aldeias (villages), colonial towns, sesmarias (land grants), and armed expeditions.
All in all, this is a monumental contribution to the history of Brazil and to our understanding of slavery and resistance in the Atlantic World. Lara is to be commended not only for her outstanding scholarship, but also for her innovative presentation of the known research on Palmares, which is now easily accessible to students. Historians of the Atlantic World would benefit enormously from the translation of Palmares & Cucaú into English.
In this issue
Jump to section
Related Articles
Cited By...
- No citing articles found.