1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [194]
Again the insurrection didn’t stop. Why would it? The colonial government had utterly lost control. Within months of Lemba’s death its officials were complaining to the court that rebels were “killing and robbing Spaniards” just nine miles outside of Santo Domingo. Not that this caused them to rethink their commitment to slavery. As the Dominican historian Lynne Guitar has noted, the same letter asked the king for permission to ship five to six thousand more slaves to open more sugar plantations.
In their hunger for labor, European sugar growers were importing people who would have liked nothing better than to destroy them—people like Aqualtune and Ganga Zumba in Palmares. Maroons in Hispaniola ultimately helped drive the sugar industry from the island. Portuguese officials feared that Palmares would do the same in Brazil. The rebel confederacy was a direct military and political challenge to the colonial enterprise. Not only did its troops raid Portuguese settlements, its strategic location atop hills like the Serra da Barriga blocked further European expansion into that part of the interior. If such rebellions spread to other ports of Brazil, Lisbon feared that its colonists would become a kind of marine froth on the coast, while the interior turned into a mosaic of Afro-Indian states.
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Palmares was led by Angolans, but it was not an Angolan society, or even an African society. Many of its people were Tupi-speaking Indians. Some were Europeans with uneasy relations to their own societies; Jews and converted Jews, heretics and ex-heretics, suspected witches and escaped criminals, and a salting of suspicious ethnic minorities. In the main Palmares’s people looked like Africans, but they lived in Indian homes made from woven thatch and steam-bent arches and harvested Indian-style multicrop fields of maize (American), rice (African), and manioc (American). (African rice, Oryza glaberrima, was domesticated in West Africa and is a different species than Asian rice, Oryza sativa.) Palmares’s blacksmiths used African-style forges to make plows, scythes, spears, and swords; colonial reports claimed they could even make guns and bullets. Their religious ceremonies, from what one can gather today, mixed Christianity with Indian and African elements. But their military organization was African, with Aqualtune’s children and grandchildren in strict control of villages so battle-hardened that they should perhaps be thought of as bases.
Between 1643 and 1677 Portugal and the Netherlands (which occupied part of Brazil for some of this time) attacked Palmares more than twenty times, always unsuccessfully. When the armies approached the maroon state’s outlying settlements, their inhabitants would flee to the hilltops, where fertile soils, artesian water, and storehouses of food made it possible to outlast any siege. The attackers would find empty villages stripped of food and valuables. Then they would blunder about the forest, trying to find the people. Soon they would run out of supplies. All the while they would be watched—and ambushed. Arrows flew from the trees to pick off stragglers. Advance scouts fell into hidden pits. Men woke up to find their comrades missing and their food stolen. Infuriating to the soldiers, the region’s planters bought their slaves’ food from Palmares. In exchange for maize and manioc, the planters had provided the maroons with the guns and knives now trained on the soldiers.
A central figure in the story of Palmares was Zumbi, who became its military commander.