Syncretism – The word syncretism means mixture! In Brazil, there was not only syncretism related to the religious aspect, but in many other forms of expression of the various peoples who contributed to the formation of the Brazilian people.

In Brazil, sugar cane was introduced by Martim Afonso de Souza, who also owned the first sugar mill built in the country, in association with the Dutchman Johann Van Hielst (known as João Vaniste), a representative of the Schetz, wealthy shipowners, merchants and bankers from Amsterdam (BUENO, 2003, p. 44).

From the arrival of the grantees, sugar cultivation acquired stupendous momentum in Brazil.

Unable by law to exploit brazilwood (a monopoly of the crown), the grantees – Duarte Coelho at the head – brought settlers from Madeira Island with them, began to cut down the coastal forests and set up their first mills.

The increase in population in Europe, the relative fall in the price of the product, the fertility of the northeastern massapé – all contributed to making sugar a product that was increasingly consumed in the cities and fought over on the market.

The Portuguese coloniser of Brazil was the first among modern colonisers to shift the basis of tropical colonisation from the pure extraction of mineral, vegetable or animal wealth – gold, silver, timber, amber – to that of local wealth creation.

Although wealth – that created by them under the pressure of American circumstances – at the cost of slave labour: touched, therefore, by that perversion of economic instinct that soon diverted the Portuguese from the activity of producing values to that of exploiting, transporting or acquiring them (2003, p. 79).

Colonial society in Brazil, especially in Pernambuco and the Recôncavo of Bahia, developed patriarchally and aristocratically in the shadow of the great sugar plantations, not in haphazard and stable groups; in large houses of rammed earth or stone and lime, not in adventurers’ shacks.

Oliveira Martins observes that the colonial population in Brazil, “especially in the north, was aristocratically constituted, that is, the houses of Portugal sent branches overseas; from the very beginning of the colony it presented a different aspect to the turbulent immigration of the Castilians in Central and Western America”.

And before him, Southey had already written that in the plantation houses of Pernambuco, in the first centuries of colonisation, the decency and comfort that would be sought in vain among the populations of Paraguay and the Plata were to be found (2003, p. 79).

But the vigour and great profitability of the sugarcane plantation seem to have crossed only in passing through the casa-grande that housed the engenho lords.

O real profit went to those who shipped the sugar to Europe. These profits were used to make new loans to the plantation owners, who thus lived in “perpetual debt, from which they periodically clamoured for forgiveness”.

In any case, after one or two good harvests, many owners sold everything they had and returned to Portugal.

Whoever sees in the darkness of the night those tremendous furnaces perpetually burning […] the noise of the wheels, of the chains, of the people all coloured the same night, and groaning everything, without respite or rest; whoever sees all the confusing and thundering machinery and apparatus of that Babylon, cannot doubt, even if he has seen Etnas and Vesúvios, that it is a likeness of hell.

The Portuguese coloniser of Brazil was the first among modern colonisers to shift the basis of tropical colonisation from the extraction of mineral, vegetable or animal wealth – gold, silver, wood, amber, marim – to that of local wealth creation.

Although wealth – created by them under the pressure of American circumstances – at the cost of slave labour: touched, therefore, by that perversion of economic instinct that soon diverted the Portuguese from the activity of producing values to that of exploiting, transporting or acquiring them.

No culture, no people, no people after the Portuguese, exerted a greater influence on the Brazilian than the black.

Almost every Brazilian bears the mark of this influence. From the black woman who cradled him and suckled him.

From the sinhama (wet nurse) who fed him, herself making the food ball with her fingers.

The blacks imported from Africa – as has already been said – generally had a superior culture to the Indians.

In addition, blacks were better adapted to the tropics. Unlike the Indian or the caboclo, who were discouraged by the rigour of the sun.

In modern terms, the black was extroverted (cheerful, easy, fun, accommodating, confident) and the Indian an introvert (sad, difficult, bison-like, reluctant) (FREIRE, 2001, p. 27).

The Angolas were Bantu; like those from the Congo, they were good for rough labour.

The “skilful” Angolas were good at starting the “boçais” in eito work (clearing a plantation with a hoe or hand tools).

The Ardas came from Dahomey. They were “so fiery that they want to cut everything in one fell swoop”, as Henrique Dias said of them.

The Minas (Nagô) from the Gold Coast. Dahomey and the Gold Coast were the centres of Sudanese culture.

The Sudanese black is one of the tallest people on earth. In Senegal, they even look like they’re walking on stilts; with their shirts, from a distance they resemble souls from another world.

The blacks of Guinea, beautiful in body, were excellent for domestic service, especially the women.

The blacks from Cape Verde were the best and most robust of all, and the most expensive.

The Bantu were, of all people, the most characteristic blacks; but they did not, as we have seen, comprise all the African elements imported into Brazil. Alongside the Bantu language, our blacks spoke other languages or dialects of the Sudanese group (Jeje, Hauçá, Nagô or Yoruba).

The very plantation owners of colonial times who, through the chronicles of Cardim and Soares, we have become accustomed to imagining feasting on a rich variety of ripe fruit, fresh vegetables and loins of excellent beef, people with a bountiful table eating like bums – they, their families, their adherents, their friends, their guests; the plantation owners of Pernambuco and Bahia themselves ate poorly: Beef of poor quality and only once in a while, little and diseased fruit, rare vegetables.

The abundance or excellence of food that was surprising was by exception and not general among these large landowners (2003, p. 98).

A large part of their food they afforded themselves the foolish luxury of ordering from Portugal and the islands; as a result they consumed food that was not always well preserved: meat, cereals and even nuts, devoid of their nutritional principles, when not spoilt by poor packaging or the circumstances of irregular and lengthy transport.

Oddly enough, the table of our colonial aristocracy lacked fresh vegetables, green meat and milk. This certainly led to many of the diseases of the digestive system, common at the time and attributed by many caturra doctors to “bad air” (2003, p. 98).

If we accept the opinion of the literati of the time, we can say that, despite the appearance to the contrary, even the richest farmers ate poorly, eating tough beef.

Only once in a while did they taste fruit. Even more rarely, vegetables.

The lack of good food was compensated for by an excess of sweets: guavas, marmalades, cashew sweets and sugar cane honey, alfenins and cocadas.

When a priest passed through, the larders were opened with effort and farm animals were killed: ducks, piglets and goats.

In Pernambuco, a chronicler tells us, “fishing slaves” were tasked with fetching “all kinds of fish and shellfish” on these occasions.

The abundance recorded in some mills was not the norm. Those who had the luxury of ordering food from the Kingdom consumed poorly preserved food.

The mill owners suffered from stomach ailments, which doctors of the time attributed not to the poor diet, but to the bad air of the tropics. The saúva, the floods or the drought made the supply of fresh food even more difficult.

Syphilis marked their bodies, leaving them scarred with sores.

Most of the sugar mills were nestled in the forest, not far from the port centres, which can be explained by the greater fertility of the land, which was well-dressed in green, and by the abundance of firewood needed for the hungry furnaces, which were fed by labour that sometimes lasted eight or nine months, day and night.

And they didn’t have to move too far from the coast, otherwise, since the price of export goods was the same, they wouldn’t be able to compete with the farmers closer to the market, whose product wouldn’t be affected by transport costs.

In Pernambuco, they settled along the rivers that centre on the Atlantic side of the Borborema plateau, in the Mata zone, where rounded hills and hillsides predominate.

The corollary of the land was water. If irrigation was unnecessary thanks to the rich massapé, both cattle and people needed fresh water. They also used it in the mills, presses and mills.

Not surprisingly, most of the mills were located on the banks of rivers such as the Paraguaçu, Jaguaribe and Sergipe in Bahia, and the Beberibe, Jaboatão, Uma and Serinhaém in Pernambuco.

Inside the real fortresses of adobe and rammed earth, which were the big houses, there was simplicity and even discomfort.

The furniture was poor and scarce: chests of drawers, chests of drawers, chests of drawers and hangers. All rough pieces made by the mill worker.

Some preferred the sweetness of hammocks, a refreshing solution on hot nights. Balconies in the middle of the main façade and small porches gave the mill owner a view of his land, sugar cane and people.

Hirsute ground floors, veritable closed warehouses, illuminated by portholes, allowed them to better defend themselves against the enemy.

However, there was no shortage of observers at the time, who were able to enthuse about the grandeur of the complex: “a water mill very adorned with buildings”, “a mill with large buildings and a church”, “a mill adorned with buildings with a very concerted chapel and beautiful cane fields”, said the Portuguese chronicler and mill owner Gabriel Soares de Souza, describing them in 1587.

The rigidity of the house was opposed, on feast days, by the exaggeration of the clothing: “They dressed themselves, their wives and their children in all sorts of velvets, damasks  and other silks, and in this they had a lot of excess […] the scripts and saddles of the horses were made of the same silks that they were dressed in,” commented an elevated Cardim, during the sugar cane expansion phase.

According to Cardim, weddings were celebrated with banquets, bullfights, cane and ring games and wine from Portugal.

Many named their engenhos after patron saints: São Francisco, São Cosme, São Damião and Santo Antônio.

Others had African names – Maçangana. Still others were named after fruits and trees: Pau-de-Sangue, Cajueiro-de-baixo, Jenipapo;

At the centre of his family, the engenho lord had to radiate authority, respect and action.

Under his command were children, poor relatives, brothers, bastards, godchildren, confectionery, embroidery – alternated with pious devotional practices. In her absence, however, she took on her work responsibilities with the same vigour as her husband.

At the centre of his family, the engenho lord had to radiate authority, respect and action.

His children, poor relatives, brothers, bastards, godchildren, servants and slaves were all under his command.

A wife, sometimes much younger, moved in his shadow. She lived to bear children, carrying out domestic activities in the meantime – sewing, confectionery, embroidery – alternating with pious devotional practices. In his absence, however, she took on her work responsibilities with the same vigour as her husband;

Her family was the outer formulation of a society, but not the domain of sexual pleasure. The possibility of using female slaves created a racial division of sex in the masters’ world.

The white wife was the housewife, the mother of the children. The indigenous, and later the black and mulatto, were the pleasure territory.

Disputes over access to land also marked the occupation of the sugar lands, and there was no shortage of those who “infiltrated slyly and stealthily” – as one observer put it in 1635 – into virgin lands in the hope of getting rich by setting up sugar mills.

The sugar mill was an extremely complex structure. A structure that expanded in the Northeast of Brazil in its classic form, i.e. associated with large plantations and slave labour, in the 16th and 17th centuries or so.

Although based on large capitals capable of guaranteeing large-scale production, the sugar business also relied on small entrepreneurs who supplied the sugar mill with their sugar cane.

A Dutch report from 1640 states that only 40 per cent of the mills in Pernambuco milled their own cane, and the rest depended on the raw material brought in by these farmers.

The sugar business didn’t just involve masters and slaves. It required a diverse group of specialised workers and aggregates, who orbited around its fringes, providing the landlord with their services. They were sugar masters, purgers, wholesalers, caulkers, boilermakers, carpenters, bricklayers, boatmen, among others.

They were joined by other groups who animated the economic and social life of the coastal areas: merchants, farmers, artisans, subsistence and sugar cane planters and even unemployed people made up a complex fragmentation of small or large landowners.

The number of slaves they owned (from two to dozens) allowed us to infer the diversity of social origins and economic situations.

In the 18th century, with the decline of the activity and the increase in freedmen, some freedmen also became owners of sugar cane farms.

Sugar cane began to be cultivated in São Vicente and Pernambuco, later spreading to Bahia and Maranhão. Wherever it succeeded – mediocre as in São Vicente or maximum as in Pernambuco, the Recôncavo and Maranhão – it led to a society and a way of life with more or less aristocratic and slave-like tendencies.

Consequently, they had similar economic interests.

Economic antagonism would later emerge between men with capital, who could afford the costs of sugar cane farming and the sugar industry, and those less favoured with resources, who were forced to spread out into the hinterlands in search of slaves – a kind of living capital – or to stay there as cattle breeders.

An antagonism that the vast land could tolerate without upsetting the economic balance.

The result, however, was a Brazil that was anti-slavery or indifferent to the interests of slavery, represented by Ceará in particular, and in general by the sertanejo or cowboy (2003, p. 93).