All That Glitters: Native Knowledge and Regal Dreams in Southeastern Brazil, 1760s–1810s

During the second half of the eighteenth century, Portuguese imperial administrators moved to secure Brazil’s southeastern Atlantic Forest. A portion of this internal frontier, strategically located between the mining heartland of Minas Gerais and the colonial capital of Rio de Janeiro, became the site of an official drive to counter the perceived threat of colonists conspiring with Indians to smuggle untaxed gold and gemstones through the coastal mountains to seafaring contrabandists. Concern was fueled by a belief that Coroado and Coropó Indians guarded knowledge of undiscovered mineral deposits in lands they still controlled. In pursuit of its objectives, Lisbon had to rely on Indigenous informants in order to understand events deep in the tropical forest. Although many of the motivations shaping Native accounts and their silences remain difficult to ascertain, royal officials drew their own conclusions, susceptible to hearsay that fed fantasies of untapped riches, and disdainful of evidence that did not accord with imperial purposes. After two decades of frustrated efforts to impede illegal conduct in the area, the crown acted decisively in the mid-1780s, deploying military expeditions from both the interior and the coast to arrest a particularly infamous accused smuggler and his band, and to lay hold of the area once and for all. Concentrating on the inland reaches of this zone, this paper explores the contested mastery of backcountry geographic and strategic knowledge. Over several decades, Coroado and Coropó informants provided vital intelligence, navigating the fraught terrain between concealment and cooperation. Even after disrupting the illegal mining operation it targeted, the state found its effort to exert sovereign rule and promote supervised settlement undermined by the gaps between what was knowable, what was indecipherable, and what was achievable when imperial agents were forced to rely on forest dwellers who had long resisted submission to colonial rule.