Backlands (13 page)

The results of such a process, as it was applied with no variants over the course of the centuries, can be imagined.

The colonial government did foresee such things. From 1713 on, successive decrees were issued with an aim to halt such activities, and after the legendary drought of 1791-92, the Great Drought as old backlanders still call it, which brought ruination to all the North, from Bahia to Ceará, the central government attributed it to the devastations described above and immediately established a severe prohibition of the cutting of forestlands as the only corrective measure.

This preoccupation had been on its mind for a long time. This fact can be seen in the royal edict of March 17, 1796, which appointed a judge for the preservation of forestland, and the edict of June 11, 1799, which called for “the restriction of the indiscreet and disorderly activities of the inhabitants [of Bahia and Pernambuco] who have desolated precious woodlands with fire and ax, those which were once so abundant and today have been considerably reduced, etc.”

This is what had been said previously about the region we have been attempting to describe.

There are other equally eloquent facts.

The ancient routes of the pioneers in the North, the bold men of the
caatingas
, call for comparison with those of the
bandeirantes
of the South. At every step we can note vivid allusions to the harshness of the terrains they crossed as they explored the plains in search of the silver mines of Belchior Dias Moréia. Almost all of them passed along the edge of the backland of Canudos, with a stop at Monte Santo, called
Pico-arassa
by the Tapuias at that time. Pedro Barbosa Leal in a letter to the Conde de Sabugosa spoke of “cold fields” (at night, most certainly, because of the intense irradiation of the unsheltered soil) where they cut through miles on end of
caatinga
, without water and without any hope that there might be some, as umbra and
mandacarú
roots took care of them as they worked hard at opening a path.

Already at that time, as can be seen, the plants that our backlanders of today call upon had a proverbial function.

And this is an ancient ill. Working side by side with the elements, the northeasterly winds, the suction of levels of air, the dog days, wind erosion, sudden storms, man has been a nefarious component of the forces that have been demolishing the climate. If he did not create all this, he did transform it. The ax of the man in the
caatingas
served as a supplement to the scorching sun with his burnings.

He may have created the desert, but he can still undo it by correcting the past. The task is not impossible. What is called for is a historical comparison.

A person crossing the high Tunisian flatlands between Béja and Bizerte, at the edge of the Sahara, and coming out of the gullies following the whimsical and twisting course of the wadis will still come across the remains of ancient Roman constructions. There are old and worn-down rows of brick walls and tumbledown structures partly covered by the passage of twenty centuries. These legacies of the great colonizers are also evidence of their intelligent activities and the barbarous neglect on the part of the Arabs who took their place.

After the task of destroying Carthage, the Romans set themselves to the incomparably more serious work of conquering an antagonistic nature and behind them they left a beautiful trace of their historic expansion.

They must certainly have perceived the underlying trouble of the region, sterile less from the scarcity of rains than from a poor distribution of natural contours. They corrected this. The torrential period as it occurs there is quite intense in some quarters, with a higher measurement of rainfall than in other fertile and flourishing countries. As in the backlands of our own country, worse than useless, it was harmful. It fell onto unprotected land, uprooting vegetation that was poorly anchored to a hard soil. It swirled along for many weeks in overflowing streams, flooding the flatlands. And there it would immediately disappear, pouring off to the north and the east and into the Mediterranean, leaving the soil, after a transitory rebirth, all the more naked and sterile. The desert seemed to be advancing from the south, taking over the whole area and removing the last barriers against the drive of the simoom.

The Romans made it retreat. They controlled the torrents and dammed up the strong flow as that brutal regime fought back tenaciously, but having been blocked off it gave way completely under the control of a network of dams. Avoiding the most difficult solution of systematic irrigation, they did succeed in making the water remain on the land for a longer time. The gullies were divided off into a network of holding pools, and these waterholes were enclosed by the walls that cut through valleys and wadis so the waters came to a halt and filled up the spaces between hills. This conserved great bodies of water for a long time until they were lost through evaporation, with the overflow carried off in lateral canals to lower areas where it flowed into drainage ditches and sluices and spread out soaking the soil. In this way the system of dams, along with other advantages, made up an attempt at general irrigation. In addition to this, all that surface of liquid that was scattered about abundantly was gathered together in one single Quixadá, monumental and useless, exposed to evaporation, which ended acting on the climate and improving it. Finally Tunisia, where the favored sons of the Phoenicians had landed, and which up till then had been limited to a seacoast inhabited by merchants and wandering nomads whose rounded tents gleamed like beached vessels, had been transfigured into a classic area of ancient agriculture. It was the granary of Italy and the Romans’ almost only supplier of wheat.

The French of today have copied them to a large degree with these same processes but without the need to erect any costly monumental walls. They have made barrier dams with walls of dry stones and turf, blocking off the most likely disposed wadis, and they have dug out along the edges of the heights surrounding them conduits to drain the water off onto the surrounding terrain through a network of irrigation ditches.

In this way the wild waters have been calmed as they have lost the accumulated force of violent floods, spreading out in thousands of outlets with crisscrossed branches. The historic region, free of inert Muslim apathy, has been transformed and has returned again to its ancient aspect. France has preserved the remains of the rich heritage of Roman civilization after a decline of centuries.

So if we trace, even imprecisely, the hypsometric chart of the northern backlands, we can see how close we are to an identical attempt with equally certain results.

The idea is not new. It was suggested a long time ago in the memorable sessions of the Instituto Politécnico of Rio in 1877. Counselor Beaurepaire Rohan’s driving spirit may have been suggested by the same comparison we have drawn above.

From the discussions of that time, in which the best scientists of their day were involved, and from the solid experience of Capanema to the fine mind of André Rebouças, it was the only possible, practical, and truly useful way remaining.
³⁴

The idea was advanced then to make use of solid masonry cisterns, a great number of artesian wells perforating the plains, and huge deposits or great storage areas for the reserves thus accumulated, vast waterholes made from artificial dams, and, finally, as though to characterize the thorough use of a knowledge of engineering, great stills for the distillation of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. . . .

A more modest judgment of the immediate effect of such a historic lesson, however, is suggested by the most elementary of examples, and it has taken the place of these. In addition to being practical, it is the most logical.

In reality, among the determining agents of the drought, interposed in an appreciable way is the makeup of the soil. No matter what the intensity of the complex and more remote causes that we have sketched out previously, their influence is manifest only when one considers the absorbent and emissive capacity of the exposed terrain, the slant of the strata that shape it, and the harshness of the topographical relief, all of which, along with the height of summer and the intense wear of the torrents, make it worse. As it comes out of the lingering hot suns into sudden inundations, land that is poorly protected by its deciduous vegetation gives way gradually to an invasion by a regime that can frankly be called a desert.

The strong storms that quench the dull fire of the droughts, in spite of the rebirth they bring along with them, set up the region for greater troubles. They harshly denude it, leaving it more and more unprotected from summers to come. They furrow it into harsh contours. They lash it and sterilize it. And when they disappear, they have left it all the more naked to the violence of the sun’s rays. The region goes through a deplorable interlude that resembles a vicious circle of catastrophes. As J. Yoffily has pointed out in his
Notes on Paraíba
: “Worthy of attention is the steep declivity toward the sea existing in the backlands terrain where its rivers run . . . as rain falls on those rocky flatlands with scant vegetation, the water runs freely through furrows or channels, it bringing on true avalanches that destroy everything in their path . . .”

Therefore, the only means of adapting to this must be a correction of these natural dispositions. Laying aside the determining factors of this onslaught, which lie in the laws of astronomy and geography, beyond human intervention, the means mentioned are the only ones possible for any appreciable modifications.

The process is one that we have outlined in a brief historical review and by its very simplicity it dispenses with any useless technical details.

France is following it today without any variations as it revives the scheme of some very ancient constructions.

Damming up the gullies after choosing them intelligently at closely spaced points across the extensive backland territory would bring about three inevitable results: It would narrow the violent damage to the soil and considerably reduce its woeful consequences; rich areas of cultivation would be formed in the web of its flow; and a state of balance would be maintained against the instability of the climate because the numerous small pools, in their uniform distribution, would constitute a wide surface of evaporation and over the passage of the seasons would be a natural and moderating influence like that of an inland sea, and this would be of extreme importance.

There is little hope of any other way out. The cisterns, artesian wells, and scattered and distantly spaced lakes like the one at Quixadá have a local but unappreciable value. Their aim is most often a lessening of the final consequences of the drought—thirst. What really must be fought and overcome in the backlands of the North is the desert.

The martyrdom of man in those parts is but a reflection of a greater torture, one more widespread and one that takes in the whole economy of life.

It is the age-old martyrdom of the land. . . .

CHAPTER II

MAN

V. Antecedents to Canudos. Rapid Growth. Governance of the Settlement. A Diverse Population. A Police Force of Bandits. The Temple. Waiting Room to Heaven. The Prayers. Strange Groupings. Why Not Preach Against the Republic? An Aborted Mission. A Curse on the Jerusalem of Mud Huts.

The origins of the mixed races of Brazil is a problem that will challenge the efforts of the best scholarly minds for a long time to come. The influences that have effected varying degrees of change on three ethnic groups have been little studied. This is an entirely new field in Brazil. The domain of Brazilian anthropological research has attracted some of our finest minds. Our studies of indigenous prehistory are models of serious research and they definitively establish, contrary to the fanciful builders of the Aleutian bridge, that the peoples of the Americas comprise aboriginal races.

Many illustrious scholars support this noble effort to prove that the
Homo sapiens americanus
is autonomous among races. There are the in-depth paleontological studies of Wilhelm Lund; Morton’s name distinguishes itself, as does the brilliant intuition of Frederick Hartt, Meyer’s thorough scientific reasoning and organization, and the rare lucidity of Trajano de Moura; and the work of many others supports Nott and Gordon in substantiating, in a more complete manner, that America is a breeding ground apart from the great nursery of central Asia.

The underlying question has thus been defined. Either the American man of Brazil rises from the “man of the Lagoa Santa” crossed with the pre-Columbian
sambaquís
, or he is the descendent of an invading race from the north, highly modified by later crossbreeding and by the environment, as may be the case of the Tupis, who were so numerous at the time of the discovery.
¹
No matter what their provenance, our backlanders, with their distinctive anthropological features, can be considered to be the fast-disappearing descendents of older races native to our land.

Having clarified the fundamental question regarding the origins of the indigenous elements of our population, the research turned toward a definition of their special psychological characteristics. It is not necessary for us to review these findings, some of which were sound, since the subject is out of our area of competence and we should not stray from our original objective.

The two other formative elements of our people have not been given the same level of scholarly attention. The Bantu, or Kaffir, Negro in his various forms has until this time been neglected. Only recently has a persistent researcher, Nina Rodrigues, done a careful analysis of their original and interesting religious beliefs. Whatever African branch the transplanted Negro might represent, he certainly carried the preponderant attributes of the
Homo afarensis
son of barbaric and desolate lands where natural selection, more than any other process, is the result of ferocity and brute strength.