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A BRAZILIAN MYSTIC
BEING THE LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO
Uniform with this Volume
THE BRAZILIANS AND THEIR
COUNTRY.
By Clayton Sedgwick Cooper.
CARTAGENA AND THE BANKS
OF THE SINU.
By R. B. CUNNiNGHAME Graham.
A
BRAZILIAN MYSTIC
BEING
THE LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO
BY
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
'Adeus, campo, e adeus matto
Adeus, casa onde morei !
J a" que & fori,oso partir
Algum dia te verei !"
Brazilian Rhymt.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920
/.5 -^ ^
74^
Umversity rj Cslibrrta
WlTHD^
TO
MY VALUED FRIEND
^ DON JOSE MARIA BRACERAS
in
S
I
PREFACE
Some years ago, when he was President, after having
read some tales of mine about the Gauchos, the
late Colonel Roosevelt wrote a letter to me. In it he
said : ** What you and Hudson have done for South
America, many have done for our frontiersmen in
Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Others have
written of the Mexican frontiersmen, and written well
about them. No one, as far as I know," so he said,
" has touched the subject of the frontiersmen of
Brazil. Why don't you do it ? for you have been
there, know them, and speak their lingo. The field
is open to you."
I was duly flattered and turned the question over
in my mind ; then forgot all about it. Things of
importance, such as going out to dinner and endeavour-
ing to arrive neither too early nor too late, but just
exactly to descend before the door at the right moment
— that is to say two or three minutes before eight —
came in between the Brazilian frontiersman and my
memory, as they are apt to do in civilised society,
The years went by, with each one certifying his
fellow that had passed, in blameless endeavour, such
as that I have described.
Then came the war, and on my passage out to
Uruguay, I found myself one morning entering the
harbour of Bahia, on the Brazilian coast. The sea was
Vlll
PREFACE
oily ; " Portuguese men-of-war " hoisted their fairy
little sails, and as the vessel slowed down to half speed,
passing the ruinous old fort at the entrance of the
bay, backed by a grove of coco-palms looking like
ostrich feathers, she put up shoals of flying fish that
swept along the surface of the waves, just as a flock of
swallows sweep across a field.
The red-roofed city, with its spires and convents,
its tall old houses, those in the lower part reaching up
almost to the foundations of the houses on the cliflf,
was unrolled, as it were, in a gigantic cinematograph
as the ship steamed into the bay. Eight or ten
German vessels were interned and rode at anchor,
blistering in the sun. Fleets of the curious catamarans,
known as jangadas in Brazil, were making out to sea.
Their occupants sat upon a little stool, on the three
logs that constitute the embarkation, with feet almost
awash, whilst the white-pointed little sails gave the
jangadas an air of copying the nautiluses.
Myriads of islands dotted the surface of the vast
inlet, the houses on them painted sky-blue and pink
or a pale yellow colour. So fair the scene was
from the vessel's deck, it seemed that one had come
into a land so peaceful that it was quite impossible
there could exist in it evil or malice, hatred and envy,
or any of the vices or the crimes that curse humanity.
One understood the feelings of the apostles when they
wished to build their tabernacles ; only the difficulty of
finding an Elias or a Moses worth while to build a
shanty for, restrained one from incontinently taking
up some land and starting in to build.
I stood still gazing, when a voice beside me broke
PREFACE ix
the spell, bringing me back again to reality, or the
illusion of reality that we delude ourselves is life.
" Friend Don Roberto," said the voice, " what
things have happened in Bahia! and that not long ago.
Scarcely two hundred miles from where we stand
took place the rising of Antonio Conselheiro, the last
of the Gnostics, who defied all the Brazilian forces for
a year or so, and was eventually slain with all his
followers. The episode took place not more than five-
and-twenty years ago ; you ought to read and then to
write about it, for it was made by Providence on
purpose for you, and is well fitted to your pen."
I turned and saw my friend Braceras standing by my
side, dressed in immaculate white duck. He wore
a jipi-japa hat, that must have cost him at the least a
hundred dollars. His small and well-arched feet,
encased in neat buckskin shoes, showed him a Spaniard
of the Spaniards from old Castile, just where it
borders on Vizcaya, and the race is purest of the pure.
He had the easy manners and the complete immunity
from self-preoccupation that makes a man the equal
of a king, and just as much at home with fishermen,
with cattle-drovers, or any other class of men, as if he
were one of them. His hands were nervous, and his
blue-black hair was just beginning to turn grey, whilst
his dark eyes, his bushy eyebrows, and his closely-
shaven face, gave him the look of an ecclesiastic,
though not of those whose function is but to say Mass
and eat his dinner, as the old adage goes. The name
of Conselheiro was known to me but vaguely, although
I knew religious movements had been continuous in
Brazil since the discovery. I listened to the story, and,
X . PREFACE
when we landed at the capital, bought books about it,
bought more in Santos, and as I read and mused upon
the tale, the letter from the President came back into
my mind.
The events all happened in the wild region known
as the Sertao,* lying between the States of Pernambuco
and Bahia, unknown, I take it, geographically, to
ninety-nine per cent, of educated men.
The followers of Antonio Conselheiro were, almost
to a man, what are known as Jagun9os, a term
invented for the most prominent of the cattle men who
live in the Sertao, and signifying something between a
bully and a fighting-cock, and by degrees applied to
all of them, as the term Gaucho is in Argentina,
Guaso in Chile, and Llanero in the vast, grassy plains
upon the Orinoco, to the same class of man. 'Tis
true they did not live upon a frontier, except the ever-
shifting barrier between the old world and the new, or
that which just as constantly is changing its position
and its course, betwixt our modern life and medievalism.
Still, these are frontiers just as well marked indeed as
those that arbitrarily separate two countries — in fact,
are really better far defined. As I read on about the
semi-Gnostic and his adventures of the spirit, and
the adventurous lives his followers led, although they
too, or most of them, were deeply tinged with either
superstition or religion — for who shall say where the
one ends and his twin brother starts ? — I felt Braceras
* SertSo may be translated " highlands," though that does not
entirely give the sense of the word, which infers what we call "back-
lying " in Scotland. It is a high plateau, covered with scrub.
The mark over the "a," called "til" in Portuguese, gives
a nasal sound, almost as if the word were written " Sertawn."
PREFACE xi
had been right in what he said about the subject, and
of the interest it contained.
The life in the material sense was simple : but in its
background there was evidence of faith of a peculiar
kind, tinged with fanaticism. Their faith, as often
happens, but little influenced their daily lives, which
were passed in the open air on horseback, herding
their cattle, dressed in their deerskin clothes.
As I wrote of it, looking at the drops of moisture
coursing down the window-panes (for it was autumn
in the north when I began to write), 1 used to wonder
if the sun was shining in Brazil, as I remembered it,
for I could see the sodden stooks of corn out in the
fields, with the rain falling on them, and on the ships
in the strait, fairway channel as they crept up and
down the Clyde.
Although Antonio Conselheiro had paid the
penalty of his credulity or faith, I felt the wild
life in the Sertao was going on as usual, and the
vaqueiros were galloping about, with their long, iron-
shod cattle-goads sloped forward, just as of old the
men of Annandale carried their rusty spears.
I fancied I could see them land upon their feet like
cats, when a horse fell with them, just as once, long ago
in Entre Rios, I saw a man fall suddenly and come
off running, unharmed, although his horse had its
neck dislocated. A pity, too, because the horse, a
little " gateado," if I remember rightly, was one that
you could turn upon a hide in Gaucho phrase; and
for the man — your damned bronchitis took him off,
and he died slovenly, within a month or two.
This kind of book is bound to find its way, and
xii PREFACE
shortly, to an old bookstall, there to be sold with other
bargains for a penny, after the fashion of the sparrows
in the Holy Scriptures, for it treats of unfamiliar
people and of a life unknown and unsuspected by the
general. It is no matter, for he who writes a book
writes for his own peculiar pleasure, and if he does
not, he had better far abstain from writing, for that
which pleases not the writer of the work can scarce
please anybody.
If it is fated that my account of the Jagun9o mystic
should lie rotting in the rain upon a stall, so be it, for
so it was decreed ; though it were better fitting it
should cockle in the sun and shrivel up, just as a dead
body shrivels up in the dry air of the Sertao.
Shrivel or rot, it is all one to me. Just as the
struggle is the thing worth struggling for and the
result a secondary affair, so is the writing of a book
what matters to the writer of it, for he has had his
fight.
If it but please himself he has his public and his
reward assured, in regions where the rain cannot
offend him, and where the fiercest sun that ever blazed
upon the sand is tempered pleasantly.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
Ardoch, 19 1 9.
A BRAZILIAN MYSTIC
BEING THE LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO
INTRODUCTION
What is called the Sertao"^ of the Brazilian provinces
of Pernambuco and Bahia is one of the most curious
regions of South America. It is also one of the least
known to the outside world.
Life goes on there much as it has gone on for the
last three hundred years. The people mostly are
engaged in cattle farming, and live on horseback.
They dress in leather, on account of the dense scrub ;
their daily lives are hard and perilous ; religion
occupies a chief place in their minds.
The two provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco meet
in the vague region of the Sertao, an elevated plateau
between two thousand and three thousand feet in
height, backed by more or less pronounced ranges of
mountains or of hills, whose distance from the coast
rarely exceeds two hundred or two hundred and fifty
miles. This plateau has a climate and a flora of its
own, the former ranging from great extremes of heat
to a considerable degree of cold, taking into considera-
tion the latitude in which it lies.
* Sertao is a word hardly possible to translate except by a peri-
phrasis. It means " wooded, back-lying highlands."
I
2 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
The flora chiefly consists of thorny trees and plants,
Icnown in Brazil as " caatinga," a Tupi word signifying
" bush or scrub."
The country gradually rises from the coast to the
plateau of the Sertao, and the climate, vegetation, and
soil of it are all widely different from those of the
littoral districts.
All these conditions, together with the isolation
in which they have lived for three hundred years,
have left their impress on the population, making them
a race apart — a race of centaurs, deeply imbued with
fanaticism, strong, honest, revengeful, primitive, and
refractory to modern ideas and life to an extraordinary
degree. Their existence centres, and has always done
so, round their cattle, for the Sertao is little fitted for
most kinds of agriculture. The arid nature of the
soil, the long-continued droughts, the extraordinary
difference of the temperature between the day and
night, all tend to make the Sertanejos (i.e., the inhabi-
tants of the Sertao) a people set apart from all the
world. Their ancestors, when they left Portugal,
had just emerged from their long contest with the
Moors. To them, religion was not a faith only, but a
mark of race — a rallying-point, a war-cry, and a bond
uniting them to one another, in a way difficult for
modern men to understand. With us religion is
a personal thing ; we take it, according to our indi-
vidual temperament, in many differing ways. Some,
not the highest minds, look on it as a sort of mumbo-
jumbo whereby to save their souls. Others, again,
regard it as a means whereby life is ennobled, death's
terrors exorcised, and the world improved.
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 3
The Portuguese, when they set out to colonise
Brazil, I fancy, looked at religion chiefly from the
point of view of nationality. If you were a true
Portuguese, white on all four sides, as ran the saying,
you were a Christian. You could not be otherwise,
for Jews and Moors and other infidel were all the
enemies, both of the true faith and of your native land.
Although the Portuguese held the same iron faith as
did the Spaniards of those times, yet in their nature
there was a vein of almost northern mysticism — a
belief in fairies, spirits of the night and of the moun-
tain, a fear of werwolves, and a sort of sentimentalism,
especially to be observed in the two northern provinces,
in which the Celtic strain of blood was most pre-
dominant. Thus were the people, both by descent
and by their isolated life, especially susceptible to wild
religious creeds, and were, in fact, in point of faith,
mental equipment, and religious temperament, not
very much unlike some of the Gnostic sects in Asia
Minor in the first and second centuries. In the
fashion of the Gnostic sects, the people of the Sertao
looked to no central authority. Their parish priest, to
them, was Pope, Council, and Father of the Church.
There might be greater, or as great, authorities in
what they called " as terras grandes" {i.e., the great or
foreign lands); but they looked on them just as one
looks on death, as something terrible and vague,
although not imminent.
These kind of folk, so to speak, culminated in
the State of Bahia, for it is there that they have
always manifested their most peculiar traits. The
territory is immense, bounded on the north by
4 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
the province of Sergipe del Rey and Pernambuco,
on the south by Porto Seguro and Minas Geraes,
on the west by Pernambuco, from which the Rio Sao
Francisco separates it, and on the east by the Atlantic
Ocean. It lies entirely in the tropics, from io° to 16"
south latitude, and is about three hundred and fifty
miles in length by about two hundred and forty broad.
Such a vast extent of territory has given room
for the inhabitants of the Sertao to form a world
entirely of their own.
Brazil, at the time of the conquest, was divided into
captaincies (capitanias)^ great tracts of land having been
given to men styled " donatories." The first event in
the history of the State of Bahia is the shipwreck
of Diogo Alvarez Correa, a man destined to play
a curious role in the new land to which his ship
was bound. No certainty exists as to the date,
except a passage in Herrera, one of the historians
of the Indies, in which he says, speaking of the
shipwreck of two Spanish vessels that left San Lucar
de Barrameda, in September, 1534, and were wrecked
on the Brazilian coast in 1635 : " Here they found a
Portuguese who said that there were five-and-twenty
years he had been amongst the Indians."*
This Portuguese, one Diogo Alvarez Correa, had by
the time that he was found, after his long residence
amongst the Indians, become a man of note. His
name amongst them was Caramaru, which is in-
terpreted " the man of fire " — a title that he had
acquired by having brought a gun ashore with him.
* " Onde hallaron un Portuguez qvie dixo que avia veyente y cinco
anos que estaua entre los Indies."
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 5
Henderson, in his "History of Brazil,"* says that in
his time (1821) a man still living at Port Seguro had
in his possession an old manuscript which affirms that
Caspar de Lemos, one of the first discoverers of Brazil,
upon a voyage back to Portugal, entered the River
Ilheos, near Bahia, landed, and w^as suddenly attacked
by Indians. Correa, one of his crevs^, had no time to
re-embark, and thus remained amongst the savages.
As he had married many times and oft, amongst the
Indians, and spoke their language, he v^as a valuable
man to find.
In the wrecked Spanish vessel came the first
donatory, one Francisco Peyreya Coutinho, a person-
age of rank. Coutinho was a Portuguese fidalgo-f- —
i.e., a nobleman who had but recently returned from
India, where he had served with honour and rendered
important services to the State. The King, Don
John III., having divided all Brazil into capitanias,
granted Coutinho all the country lying between the
point of Padrao, now known as San Antonio and the
River San Francisco, together with the Reconcava of
Bahia — i.e., the greater part of the extensive bay.
This gentleman fitted out his expedition after
the fashion of the times. As his first action was, after
having run up a stockade, to build a church, quite
evidently he understood the full force of the proverb,
*' Pray to God, but strike home with the mace." J His
expedition comprised a chaplain, what in those days
were known as reformed — i.e.., retired — soldiers, and
* Henderson, " History of Brazil," London, 1821, p. 310.
t Fidftlgo — literally "a son of somebody, or of something."
X A Dios rogando, y con la maza dando.
6 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
many men of wealth. Brazil being a tropical country,
and the Portuguese never having held the Spanish
views upon the ignominy of commerce, and being less
set on finding gold mines, and on the whole far less
ferocious in their desire to save the souls of the poor
Indians, nearly all the donatories embarked in sugar
planting. Coutinho did the same, and all seemed
flourishing for several years. They built a chapel
on the site, where now stands the hermitage of Our
Lady of the Victories.
Negroes were unprocurable, as the slave trade in
Brazil only began in 1574.
The climate made field labour for white men
almost impossible, although the Portuguese did not
look down upon all manual toil, after the Spanish way.
Still, labour was essential for their sugar fields, so they
began to make the Indians slaves. No race of men
in all the world was less inclined to sit down quietly in
a slavish state than were the Indians of Brazil. Thus
war was certain from the first, though the first settlers
never understood the race. One thing is to the credit
of the Portuguese : they seem to have made no pre-
tence about the glory of the Lord as did the Spaniards,
in like circumstances. So when they made a man a
slave they did not trouble overmuch about his soul.
Still, they were not entirely free from the ideas that
influenced their age, and always took a good store of
priests and friars with them to all their conquests —
perhaps as a precaution, or perhaps from habit, or
because it was enjoined upon them by their Govern-
ment. In all the conquests of Brazil the Jesuits took
a considerable share.
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 7
Vincente Moreira, Treasurer to Our Lord the
King of Portugal, in a report he makes to Mem de Sa,
Governor of Brazil, laments that a chief of the Indians,
whom he calls Wry-Mouth (Boca Torta)^ refused to give
up eating human flesh, so that the Government v^«s
forced to march against him and burn his village, and
after burning it, and killing many of the enemy, ordered
the Jesuit father to build a church wherein mass could
be said, the doctrine taught, with reading, writing, and
other good customs. ""^
Still, the Portuguese seem to have kept their
punitive expeditions, as we should call them nowadays,
and their endeavours to introduce " good customs "
and a knowledge of their faith, apart from one
another. We never read, in Brazil at least, of a single
instance of a conqueror who, as Cortes in Mexico, was
even more eager than the priests to bring the Indian
flock into the fold. The usual treatment of the
natives by Coutinho and his followers was bound to
bring the usual results. The Indians broke into revolt.
Most of the territory now comprised in the State of
Bahia was at that time inhabited by a tribe of Indians
called Tupinambas, f a fierce and war-like tribe. They
spread at one time over nearly all the coastal districts
of Brazil. Their language was nearly allied to
Guarani, as spoken by the Paraguayans to-day. J Their
* "E leer e escrever e outras boas costumes." — Vincente
Monteiro Tezoureiro del Rey Nosso senhor, in a report to Mem de
Sa, Governor of Brazil, in the " Documentos relativos a Mem de Sa,"
published in the " Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional, do Rio de Janeiro,"
vol. xxvii., p. 194.
t These Indians were a branch of the great Tupi race.
X Guarani and Tupi are closely allied tongues, and in general
nearly all the place-names in that vast territory are in these languages.
8 LIFE AND MIRACLES OF
place-names are almost identical. Anyone with a
smattering of Guarani can make out most of the place-
names in the province of Bahia, apart from those in
Portuguese, given by the conquerors. The Tupi-
nambas seem to have been fiercer and more v^'^arlike
than the Guaranis of Paraguay. Above all things,
they were hardy and enduring to an extraordinary
degree. These qualities they have transmitted to the
Sertanejos of Bahia, most of whom have a tinge of
Indian blood. The Tupinambas, or, to be accurate, the
Tupiniquin Indians, most probably a branch of the
more well-known tribe, soon grew sick of continued
work ; and the very probable injustices they had to
suffer at the hands of Coutinho and his colonists,
especially, we may suppose, the forced introduction of
" good customs," always so disagreeable both to the
Indian and the white man alike, drove them into
revolt. They carried on for six or seven years a long-
drawn-out warfare with the intruders on their lands.
This warfare had all the well-known characteristics
of colonial wars. The Indians attacked by night, and
burned the sugar factories. They cut off small bodies
of the Portuguese, whom they surprised. No doubt,
now and then, they massacred the settlers ; at any rate,
they made the colony untenable. Coutinho had to
Early in the history of Brazil, and perhaps even before the conquest,
Tupi became the general means of communication. It is now much
mixed with Portuguese — for instance, as to numerals, for the Tupis
only counted up to five.
It is " A Lingoa Geral " (the General Language), and it is supposed
was so used by the varying tribes from remote ages. It runs from
the southern part of the Orinoco to Paraguay and the Argentine
province of Corrientes.
ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO 9
re-embark with all his men, taking with him Correa
as interpreter. Driven ashore by a violent gale, not far
from the entrance to the harbour of Bahia, they were
attacked, slaughtered and eaten, for the tribe into
whose hands they fell were cannibals. Correa-
Caramaru escaped, owing to his knowledge of the
Indian tongue.
Eventually, by way of matrimony, often continued
and well thought out, we may suppose, as regards the
rank and circumstances of his brides' families, he
became a prince. His offspring, the Jesuit Vascon-
cellos,^ who wrote his life, informs us, were numerous,
and it is said that many families of Bahia still trace
their ancestry to the " man with the gun."
Caramaru — Correa's head wife, the daughter of an
Indian chief, baptised; as Donna Catharina — sleeps in
the suburb of Victoria, in the Church of Our Lady of
Grace. She accompanied her husband to Europe,
where he must have been as much at sea after so many
years of Indian life as she was herself. Her baptism
took place in Paris. At it she relinquished her
Indian name of Paraguassu, and took that of the
Queen of France.
This Indian lady, worthy to be placed beside
Pocahontas in the roll of fame, has the following
epitaph upon her tomb : " This is the sepulchre-f- of
Donna Catharina Alvarez, Lady of this Captaincy of
* This author did not write till one hundred and fifty years after
Caramaru's death, but I see no reason to doubt his word or his facts.
t " Sepultura de Dona Catharina Alvarez, Senhora desta Capitania
da Bahia, a qual ella, a seu marido Diogo Alvarez Correa, natural de