Bandeirantes - Bandeiras

Bandeiras

The Bandeiras were the expeditions by citizens of São Paulo, known as Paulistas, designed to enslave indigenous peoples and to find precious metals and stones. The Bandeirantes were the men who participated in these expeditions.

Bandeiras were not state organized – they were privately run, and hence the men paid for their own equipment, and willingly and knowingly traversed into the wilderness for months or years at a time. São Paulo was the home base for the most famous bandeirantes.

Besides the purpose of capturing natives as slaves bandeiras were also used to extend the power of Portugal by expanding its control over the Brazilian interior. Along with this development of property the bandeiras also allowed for the Portuguese to gain a hand in the discovery of mineral wealth, which they were previously unable to lavish in. They have participated in the Battle of Mbororé, (March 11, 1641): Guaranís from Jesuit Reductions against Bandeirantes, and Portuguese explorers after separation of the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.

The course of the Bandeira route was a difficult and perilous one. The men were faced with hunger, fatigue, disease and death. Often there was little food, and because of this, the Bandeirantes got into the habit of planting and harvesting this food as they went. They also built roads as they went, and founded settlements, too. This laid the basis for agriculture and ranching in the interior of Brazil.

Despite the fact that the Jesuit missionaries were the chief opponents of the Bandeirantes, priests accompanied the Bandeira for two reasons: 1. to shrive the dying and the dead, 2. to ease the conscience of the men. The Bandeira heard mass before leaving on their expedition.

In the 1660s, the Portuguese government offered rewards to those who discovered gold and silver deposits in inner Brazil. So, the Bandeirantes, who were driven by greed, ventured into the depths of Brazil not only to capture natives to sell as slaves, but to find mines and get government rewards. As the number of natives diminished, the Bandeirantes began to focus on the precious minerals.

The first Bandeira was in 1628, organized by Antonio Raposo Tavares. This bandeira raided 21 Jesuit villages in the upper Paraná Valley. They captured about 2,500 natives. A bandeira tactic was to set native tribes against each other in order to weaken them, and then to enslave both of them.

As a result of the Bandeiras, the Capitaincy of São Vicente became the basis for the vice-kingdom of Brazil and encompassed current states of Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Tocantins and both Northern and Southern Mato Grosso. With the few outlying Spanish settlements and missions overrun, the defacto control over most of what is now Brazil was recognised by the Treaty of Madrid in 1750.

A notable historian of the Bandeirantes was the genealogist Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme, who covered most of the families of those who undertook the gold rush expeditions. He was born in São Paulo in 1714, into a Paulista family, the son of Bartolomeu Paes de Abreu and Leonor de Siqueira Paes.