A Seventeenth-Century French Capuchin Mission among the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil: Atlantic Perspectives and Comparative Insights

In 1612-13, fifteen Capuchin missionaries joined the newly founded French colony on the island of Maragnan (Maranhão) some hundred miles south of the Amazon. Sponsored by the Regent Queen Marie de Médicis, this colonial enterprise aimed at converting the local Tupinambá Indian population, as well as at establishing a viable French foothold at the strategic border between Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil. Although this episode—which lasted until the violent destruction of the colony by the Portuguese in 1616—represented one of the most significant French efforts at colonizing parts of the Americas in the first half of the seventeenth century, it remains poorly known. Scholars have traditionally analyzed the Capuchin mission in the context of the Wars of Religion that were dividing Europe at the time, or in isolation from other French colonial attempts. This paper integrates the history of the short-lived Capuchin mission among the Tupinambás within the larger context of the French Atlantic so as to offer new insights about the methods of the missionaries and the complex cultural forces that shaped their work in Brazil. I argue that, rather than merely using tested Catholic methods of conversion, the Capuchins drew upon a long history of interactions between French and Tupinambás in the area, which included many nonverbal and performative features profoundly influenced by local indigenous cultures. In particular, this paper will draw parallels between the Maragnan mission and the experiences of the French—both Protestant and Catholics—in the earlier French Huguenot colony in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro (France Antarctique), and in the Caribbean and in Florida, challenging the traditional oppositional paradigm between Catholic and Protestant approaches to indigenous conversion and emphasizing the transmission of knowledge and new syncretic repertoires for communication from one colony to another in the early Atlantic world.