Early colonial adventures
Pirate, colonist, slave
The admirable adventures and strange fortunes of Master Anthony Knivet
Dec 17th 2011 | from the print edition
ONE cold morning in 1591 an English sailor found himself shivering on Ilhabella, now an island of yacht clubs and well-appointed weekend houses that is to Brazil what Martha’s Vineyard is to America. He had been left for dead—again—the fourth or fifth time Fate had deserted him in his short career as a pirate. He survived for eight days by catching crabs in his stockings and cooking them over a fire, and then for a further two weeks by picking at the carcass of a beached whale.
He was naked, alone but for the savages who lurked inland and a man-eating dragon he had spotted in the shallows, and far from Virginia, where England would subsequently found a colony: here was a man in the wrong hemisphere at the wrong time. Yet painful as they were to him, Anthony Knivet’s misfortunes offer a fascinating, if mostly overlooked, insight into an early stage of colonialism. Unusually, Knivet was both an exponent and a victim of it. He experienced both the thrill and enchantment of contact with remote tribes and the brutality of enslavement. And he recorded all that (with the odd embellishment) in his memoir.
Brazil at the end of the 16th century was an inhospitable place. Its original inhabitants, who had first encountered the Portuguese in 1500 when a group of sailors landed and claimed the territory for their king, were coming to the conclusion that their new neighbours made unreliable allies in intertribal wars. Even more offputtingly, the European newcomers spread smallpox, which proved fatal to people who had not had their immune systems tested by centuries of living with children and other animals under the same roofs.
For their part, the Portuguese colonists—disappointed that the instant riches promised by the new world had proved elusive—were knuckling down to the hard work of oppressing the natives, forcing them to work in sugar mills. A majority of their settlements had failed, and in some cases Portuguese leaders had been cornered and ritually executed (the first bishop of Brazil must have tasted particularly sweet to the Caeté tribesmen who ate him in 1556). The memory of the very first encounter between Europeans and Indians, at which the two groups exchanged hats and waved their arms around to communicate, had faded.
To add to the problems of the Portuguese living in Brazil, the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns under Philip II made them a legitimate target for English privateers such as Sir Thomas Cavendish, the commander of the small flotilla of five ships that transported our hero to Brazil. Cavendish had already sailed around the world, crossing the Atlantic, passing through the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America and then working his way through the Pacific, round the Cape of Good Hope and back to Plymouth. This success, which brought him fame and a knighthood, must have raised the expectations of Knivet and the other sailors on his expedition. Cavendish’s last crew had set off from England wearing wool and leather and returned dressed in Asian silks.
The voyage of 1591 started well enough. The boats sailed down to Portugal and on to the Canary Islands, then considered the easiest point of departure for a transatlantic crossing. Heading farther south they stalled in the doldrums—a zone close to the equator that can becalm ships and rattle aircraft—for nearly a month, before a sturdy wind carried them to Brazil in 20 days.
On making landfall the sailors began to fight each other over food. Knivet reports that when one man got hold of a good chunk of meat he would drag it off to a hole or to “the Wildernesse under some Trees”, and stay there until there was nothing left but bones. The long crossing, the distance from home, and the scarcity of comforts for men who must have spent the previous weeks dreaming of plenty, had eroded the conventions of polite society in just under two months.
Captivity and compassion
Their stomachs filled, the English plotted their first raid on a Portuguese settlement. The port of Santos—now Brazil’s biggest and home to a celebrated football team, whose black and white shirt was made famous by Pelé—was then a village with a collection of sugar mills attached. Knivet and his comrades waited for the church bell to ring for mass, then rushed ashore. They rounded up some 300 men, women and children in church and took temporary control of the place. Their stocks replenished and some sugar mills destroyed, they moved on to the town of São Vicente, burning mills as they went.
At this point a problem familiar to invaders of many lands, past and present, reared its head. The party was big enough to terrorise and capture some Portuguese settlements, but too small to hold on to them. The English returned to their ships at Santos and set off towards the Plata river, on whose banks Buenos Aires now sits. The Plata is navigable for hundreds of miles and would therefore allow Cavendish and his ships to explore inland, and perhaps find some of the gold and silver that always seemed to lie beyond the next set of hills.
A storm blew up and two of the ships collided. The weather was freezing; Knivet reports getting frostbite and twice almost being flung overboard by powerful waves. Their rigs shredded, the remaining boats limped back to Santos. This time the Portuguese were not in church. The Englishmen who went ashore in search of food were killed. Knivet, who stayed on board, escaped only to be shipwrecked again, and to begin his diet of crab and whale meat in solitary confinement on the beach.
With no prospect of returning home he could either surrender to the Portuguese—who might or might not execute him—or try his luck with the Indians. Sleeping by a fire one night, before he had made his choice, Knivet woke to find a tribesman by his side. This Indian led him along the beach to a headland, which the two of them rounded with Knivet, who could not swim, clinging to the man’s back like a child in a swimming pool. Once back on land, the Indian whistled to his companions, who appeared on the cliff top. There was a Portuguese too, the master of the man Knivet thought was rescuing him. He spared Knivet’s life, but sent him to work as a slave at a sugar mill in Rio de Janeiro.
Sugar was to Portuguese Brazil as gold and silver were to the Spanish in Mexico and the Andes, or as tobacco would later be to the English in Virginia. An earlier generation of Portuguese colonists had refined a system of forced labour to grow cash crops on the islands of São Tomé and Madeira. This model was replicated in Brazil, initially with Indians providing the labour in place of the Africans who had performed the role in the earlier experiments. Later it would spread to the Caribbean, and from there to the American South.
Turning a field of sugar cane into the granules that sweeten hot drinks is hard work. The cane, which must be cut back-strainingly close to the ground, contains sharp fibres that lacerate ungloved hands. Once the field is cleared the stubs of cane are burned, giving off a thick black smoke that hangs over the land. The cane must be crushed and its juices boiled until all that is left is a dense syrup, which can then be refined into sugar. Most of the slaves who did this work have left no written trace of their activities, so Knivet’s descriptions of the life of a mill worker are interesting. “I had neither meat nor clothes,” he reports, “but blows as many as Galley slaves.”
Passed from one master to a second, Knivet was eventually trusted to trade with the local Tupi-speaking Indian tribes. The story of first contacts between such tribes and the Portuguese was one of desire for metal tools trumping well-founded suspicion of white men. These exchanges were invariably the prelude to full-scale conquest, as co-operation between Indians and colonists broke down and conflict, slavery and land clearances ensued. In the first century of Portuguese colonisation, perhaps 90% of Brazil’s original population of some 5m Indians (according to the best guess) was wiped out through disease and warfare. Knivet would have taken some tools with him, along with other trinkets, and was expected to come back with slaves.
His first expedition took him to a village where he was ushered into a great hall and told to sit in a hammock. (In the 20th century, before such contact was frowned upon, anthropologists went into remote Indian villages and filmed similar halls: the roofs were made from finely woven palm fronds held up by poles, the floors covered in smooth red earth.) After some time waiting in his “net”, 20 women appeared, wailing. An elderly chief, his body painted red and black, followed. His cheeks and lower lip were pierced and ornamented with a “faire green stone”. He beat his thigh and chest and cried out. Then food was produced.
It is hard to know what to make of this ceremony, though it is possible that it marked the adoption of Knivet into the tribe, rather like the ritual performed by the Powhatans and misunderstood by Captain John Smith in Virginia a few decades later. If so, his affiliation proved temporary; he returned to Rio with around 70 slaves in tow.
The life of a slave trader was less grim than a mill worker’s, but Knivet was still a thousand leagues from Plymouth and as far as ever from making his fortune. When he heard that Richard Hawkins, son of Sir John Hawkins, an early slave trader and architect of the Elizabethan navy, was nearby, he tried to escape and join the ship. But Knivet’s small boat was dashed on the rocks and he was soon recaptured.
This time his punishment was harsher. Initially condemned to death “as a Runaway and a Lutheran”, his life was spared thanks to the intercession of Jesuit priests.
Neither meat nor clothes, but blows as many as Galley slaves
The Jesuits, who were also early colonists in Brazil, had a tense relationship with the Portuguese planters, who disapproved of the monks’ habit of herding potential Indian slaves into mission towns for the salvation of their souls. Spared death, Knivet was whipped in public, imprisoned and then sent back to a sugar mill with iron hoops tied around his legs lest he try to escape again.
Close encounters
The manager of this mill beat Knivet repeatedly. “I grew desperate and carelesse what I did to end my life,” he writes. One cold night he fell asleep for half an hour by the furnace used to boil the juice from the sugar cane. The manager beat him so hard that Knivet thought his ribs were broken. He leapt up, grasped his master close, and with a knife that he had been carrying for the purpose “hurt him in the side, the backe, and the arme”. Convinced that he had killed the man (he hadn’t), and by now freed from the leg irons, he ran off into the forest.
Pursued by his captors, Knivet recounts that he hid in a tree for two days. Wandering alone along a beach once more, he met another man who had run away from his master, an Indian called Quarisisacupa. “Never man found truer friendship of any then I did of him,” he writes. Together they wandered inland, a journey through a wilderness supposedly populated by leopards (this is plausible, as jaguars do live in Brazil), lions (which do not), crocodiles (just about possible), sirurucus (a large, venomous cobra that now faces extinction) and other serpents.
The lion, like the dragon in the shallows off Ilhabella, might have been an irresistible invention by a writer whose audience would have expected travellers to the new world to come back with tales of exotic beasts. Or perhaps it was a hallucination—or merely a case of misidentification by someone who had never seen one before. In any case, the beast is a rare impostor in a story that otherwise fits with other contemporary accounts, even if no other witnesses to Knivet’s own wanderings have left anything by way of corroboration. Some other early writers about Brazil were far more imaginative: despite never actually existing, a fierce tribe of female warriors were reported so often that they have a giant river named after them (the Amazon).
Knivet and Quarisisacupa made their way back to the Indian village where he had been welcomed before and found the same chief in charge. They stayed for nine months, one of the longest sojourns by an outsider with a Brazilian tribe until the invention of anthropologists. Knivet gives frustratingly few details of what life was like, though it is clear he enjoyed himself enough to want to stay. At one point he made a speech to the tribesmen, denouncing the Portuguese for their cruelty and duplicity, and imploring them, like a tropical Henry V, to join him in battle against them.
When the Portuguese did come, to trade rather than fight, their knives and axes again proved too shiny to resist. This time Knivet was one of the goods traded in return for tools, despite entreating the Portuguese commander “to give me leave to end my life amongst the Cannibals”.
Bloudie crueltie and Heathen mercy
Knivet was pressed into service once more as a slave-gatherer. It might seem odd that someone who compared “the bloudie crueltie of Christian Portugals” unfavourably with “the Heathen mercy of savage Man-eaters” should use his understanding of tribal customs and languages to boost Brazil’s sugar production so barbarically. But slavery was part of the furniture of European minds until well into the 18th century; and besides, he must have had little choice in the matter.
This work took him farther afield, where he encountered stranger tribes: “when I saw them first,” he writes of one group, “I thought they had beene borne with feathers on their heads and bodies, like fowles of the aire”. Knivet drew on these adventures to write one of the earliest contributions to the ethnography of the continent, which forms an annex to his brief memoir.
He did eventually make it back to England, though not before another failed escape had taken him across the Atlantic, to Portuguese Angola, and back again. What became of him after his homecoming is unclear. But the story he wrote was published by Richard Hakluyt, a director of the Virginia Company and enthusiastic lobbyist for empire, in 1625. It has been oddly neglected by English-speaking historians: at the time of writing Knivet has no Wikipedia entry in English, a sure sign of obscurity.
His voyages belong to the first age of globalisation, before the success of colonial ventures seemed guaranteed, and before the borders drawn by European expansion hardened into the familiar form they have today. Knivet moved easily between the worlds of the Portuguese and the Indians: he greatly preferred the latter. His compassion for them and horror at their treatment forms part of a thin but tough thread of sympathy running through the colonisation of the Americas—from the sermon given on Hispaniola by Antonio de Montesinos in 1511, to Montaigne’s essay “On The Cannibals” in 1580, through to the movements to abolish slavery and, some would add, to modern conceptions of human rights.
Knivet’s tale offers a glimpse of how a different history—collaborative rather than repressive—might have unfolded. The timing of its publication makes it probable that some of the Puritans who took part in the Great Migration of the 1630s would have read it before they set out. If so, they might well have expected to make a better job of relations with the natives than had the horrid Portuguese Catholics. They didn’t.
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