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Accompanied by about a thousand native troops and almost a hundred Portuguese, Indo-Portuguese, and Afro-Portuguese, Jorge Velho marched out from his estate in 1692. The journey to Palmares, almost five hundred miles long, occurred in what he modestly described as “the worst conditions of toil, hunger, thirst and destitution that have yet been known and perhaps ever will be known.” Two hundred of his troops died; another two hundred deserted. They ran out of food and ammunition and had to wait for ten starving months in the forest for supplies promised by the colonial authorities in Recife. Reduced to “six hundred native soldiers and forty-five whites,” Jorge Velho’s force returned to the assault in December 1693.

Zumbi’s headquarters in Macaco was next to impossible to approach. I got a hint of what it had been like when I visited the park atop Serra da Barriga. Ruts in the muddy, unmarked route tore out the oil pan in the rental car; local teenagers kindly tied it back on with wire scavenged from a telephone pole. From the summit, everything for miles around was visible, cars and tractors picked out by the sun with dizzying clarity. I could imagine maroons watching Jorge Velho’s men below like a line of ants on a tablecloth. Attackers and defenders both were mainly Indians and Africans with a sprinkling of Europeans. The difference was that in Palmares the Europeans were not running the show. Scrambling up the hill to Macaco, the bandeirantes had to twist through a maze of defenses, caltrops slicing at their feet and hands, maroon troops shooting at them from the palisade towers. The attackers formed a ring around the peak in an attempt to starve out the town. It was like a medieval siege in the tropical forest.

After several weeks of stalemate, the besiegers apparently realized that the maroons had more supplies than they did. Jorge Velho instructed his forces to construct a series of stout, movable barricades. Crouching behind them, his men shoved and wedged the walls up the hill a few feet at a time, scanning the coming ground for caltrops, snares, drop-traps, and poisoned stakes, heedless of the arrows and bullets thunking into the other side of the wood. Although the bandeirantes had timed their assault for the dry season, rain fell for days on end, turning every inch of ground into thick mud. Realizing that the movable barricades were blocking their shots, maroon archers and gunmen slipped out of the palisade and climbed high into trees. When the attackers’ walls moved beneath them, they shot the bandeirantes in the back.

Zumbi paced the walkways atop the palisades, rallying his wet, exhausted forces. On the moonless night of February 5, 1694, he discovered that bandeirantes had killed two sentries. (The story comes from maroon testimony afterward.) In the darkness and rain the rest of the guard had not noticed the gap in the defenses—or that the attackers closest to it had taken advantage of that inattention to bring their barricades within a few feet of the walls. Squinting through the downpour at the barely visible attackers, Zumbi apparently realized that it now would be impossible to stop the assault from breaching the palisade. News of the imminent attack radiated through Macaco like terror itself. As Zumbi tried to rally his force for a final defense, some of his men realized that the attackers, too, had a gap in their line. They tore down part of the palisade and fled through it. The bandeirantes, caught by surprise, let most of the maroons pass, firing only a single volley at their heels. Then they poured into Macaco through the fallen wall.

From the summit of Serra da Barriga, the maroons of Palmares could see every movement below. (Photo credit 9.4)

Neither side had expected the final assault to occur when and where it did. In the darkness and confusion and rain, Indians, Africans, and Europeans on both sides smashed clumsily at each other with sticks and blades. Guns were useless in an hour when fighters could barely see and weapons slipped from muddy hands. Covered in a thick impasto