Simple, brutal, ingenious and fearless, the Brazilian pathfinders provide as monumental a saga as the pioneers of the American West or the Voortrekkers of South Africa. The blood of a seafaring people mixed in their veins with that of wandering tribes and made them conquerors of the sertão (backlands.)

The bandeirantes were pathfinders, slavers, prospectors and militiamen, in different phases of their trek. Though some might spend only a few months on the march, journeys of several years and thousands of miles were not uncommon.

The differences between the bandeirante and the planter — between the family of Bernardo da Silva and that of Nicolau Cavalcanti — are fundamental to the story of Brazil. The noted social historian Gilberto Freyre ("Masters and Slaves") described these two forces as the great foci of creative energy in the early centuries of colonization:

The Pernambucan line of action was a vertical one which effected the regional concentration of effort in the establishment of sugar raising and the sugar industry, the consolidation of a slave holding and agrarian society, and the expulsion of the Dutch, who disturbed this effort and the process of forming an aristocracy. This is in contrast to the activity of the Paulistas or the horizontal mobility of the slave hunters and gold seekers, the founders of the backlands cattle ranches and the missionaries. ( The Mansions and the Shanties, Gilberto Freyre, Alfred A. Knopf, 1966)

As among any pioneering group in a time when life had not the same value as ours has for us, there were terrible excesses among the bandeirantes.

Their half-breed progeny became the arch-persecutors of their mother's people. To the supplications of the Jesuits, these case-hardened brigands replied that the Indians had been baptized and were now sure of going to heaven. Worse, they set afoot that poisonous thing, rumor, that the Jesuits had rounded up these forest cattle in order that the slavers might drive them to the killing pens more easily...They used to bring home strings of human ears from Goias as proud exhibits of their prowess in exterminating the Indians. (The Conquest of Brazil, Roy Nash, Barcourt, Brace and Co., 1926)

This chapter tells the story of Bernardo da Silva, his son, Amador, his grandsons, Olimpio and Trajano. They operate out of São Paulo, home base for the most famous bandeirantes.(Indians, mostly free men, predominated in the society of São Paulo in the 16th and early 17th century: mamelucos were next and outnumbered Europeans. The influential families generally bore some Indian blood and provided most of the leaders of the bandeiras, with a few notable exceptions such as Antonio Raposo Tavares, who was European born.)

In 1628, the 12-yearold Amador accompanies Bernardo on what is to be the old man's last bandeira: A raid against the Jesuits, a bitter role for the son of Father Inácio Cavalcanti and Unauá, both dead these many years. Amador's mother is Arosha, a grand-daughter of Jaguaretê, who had so mockingly disposed of Inácio. Bernardo has fourteen other children from his wife and concubines, and is the patriarch of the Jaguaretê clan. He can be likened to one of those terrifying Biblical figures who sacrificed their sons to Jehovah, and endured like Job the devastating torment of scourge and catastrophe.

Bernardo's clan is allied to that of Antonio Raposo Tavares, perhaps the greatest bandeirante of all. As they march off on this latest expedition, Bernardo and Amador proudly take up the head of the column with Raposo. It is to be the biggest slave raid ever mounted with 3,000 men, including 2,000 Indians, headed for the Jesuit reductions in the south, where they arrive early in September 1628.

First, they build a palisade of wooden stakes near the Jesuit villages, a "pen" for the "cattle" they will round up. There are sorties into the district to collect "strays" not yet under the protection of the Fathers. Amador pleads with Bernardo to allow him on one of these forays; he goes along and takes his first captive, a boy and girl of his age. A shaky truce holds between the Fathers and the bandeirantes, the former protesting the raids but careful to preserve the integrity of their villages.

In January, the bandeirantes find the excuse they need: Tatabrana, a former slave of Bernardo who had run away from Sao Paulo is seen in one of the villages. They demand his return, are refused and attack:

...and the Jesuit Mola foresaw the onslaught and immediately prepared to receive it by baptizing all those about to be threatened, baptizing them for seven hours until he could no longer raise his arm, and them continuing with someone lifting it for him. Raposo's men sacked the reduction, butchered all who resisted and took 2,000 Indiana into slavery. (The Jesuits, 1534-1921, Thomas Campbell, Encyclopedia Press, 1921.)

The bandeirantes now spread out, devastating the settlements and capturing a total of 7,000 Indians, a disaster meeting the worst of Father Inácio's troubled visions. Bernardo is wounded in an attack. On the thirty-day march back to São Paulo, his condition worsens and he dies, after a final blessing from one of two Jesuits who have chosen to accompany the captives. This nightmare journey has been described by one of these missionaries, Brother Simon Maceta:

They had to cross many rivers, swamps, lakes mountains, carrying their little ones on their backs, seeing them turn sick and die from hunger, cold, exertions, the maltreatment of the Portuguese, and the rigors of the Journey. All day they were scolded and at night, the Portuguese kept them from sleeping, wearing them out with constant shouting and sermonizing which they themselves did or ordered their Tupi Indians to do. The captured headmen were promised, to discourage their escaping, that they would have a good life in São Paulo with houses and lands, and on the other hand, if they fled they would be killed and in fact when same did run away, they sent their Tupi after them and they were brought back and cruelly whipped.(ibid)

A score of slaves are destined for the Cavalcanti estate up north but cannot be delivered because the Dutch have begun their conquest of Pernambuco. The division, both geographical and spiritual, between north and south is such that the bandeirantes pay little attention to the Dutch threat until late in the 1630's. A decade after the great reduction raid, Amador accepts command of a troop of 150 Paulistas raised by Raposo Tavares to fight the Dutch, the first contingent of its kind. Moving north to the backlands of Pernambuco, they carry on a desultory guerilla campaign.

On secret missions deep into Dutch territory, Amador reaches the Cavalcanti lands. Alvares Cavalcanti, grandson of Tomás, has remained on the plantation during the occupation. The Dutch suspect, correctly, that he is part of an underground movement cooperating with the insurgents. He is arrested, an attempt by Amador to release him fails and, in the presence of his wife Henriqueta, sons Simão and Pedro, he is executed. Simão and Pedro are banished to Angola, then also held by the Dutch. Henriqueta, aided by Amador, flees to Bahia. The plantation is given over to a Dutchman.

Amador's group joins other Luso-Brazilians sniping away at the occupiers until 1647 when an organized campaign is mounted. For the first time the different elements of the nascent Brazilian nation come together: Blacks, Indians, Lusitanians and the mainly mameluco Paulistas. In April,1648, at the first Battle of the Guararapes, they defeat the Dutch.

Toward the end of the campaign, Amador receives a summons from Raposo: He is to take part in a mighty pathfinding adventure. Leaving São Paulo in May, 1648, they go downstream along the Tieté river to the region of Corumbá, where they spend the rainy season. The following year they pass through the São José range to the Guaporé, down the Madeira and the Amazon to Belém, a distance of more than 6,000 miles. They face sickness and famine, they are attacked by Indians, they spend weeks fighting the rapids of the Madeira. Away for three years, Amador is so changed when he returns that his family fails to recognize him.

They accomplished the longest and most arduous exploration carried out in the whole of America, not only up to that time, but until the beginning of the 19th century.

Amador farms near São Paulo and for some years there is an attempt to settle down with his tempestuous wife, Maria, daughter of a   "New-Christian" peddler, a converted Jew from Bahia. The farm is a failure, the bandeirante spending mist of his time with his cronies in São Paulo.

Besides its geographic and geo-political importance in boundary making, the 1649-1651 bandeira had also searched for gold and silver. Traces were found but of little importance.

Amador, fading in the atmosphere of enforced domesticity, keeps alive a dream of locating such treasures. In 1672, ignoring Maria's protests, he equips an expedition and takes along his two older sons, Olimpio and Trajano. After terrible hardships and the loss of many of their company, they headquarter between the headwaters of the Doce and São Francisco rivers.

Obsessed with Indian legends of an emerald mountain, Amador keeps his men here for four years (1674 - 1678), exploring in every direction. There is a mutiny among his followers in the sixth year of their wanderings. Amador suppresses it, personally executing one of the leading conspirators: his son, Olimpio. At last, on the shores of a lake, he discovers emeralds. Worn out by fatigue and hardship, he dies at the Rio das Velhas (1681) but is spared the knowledge of learning that his "emeralds" are but tourmalines. Trajano, his son, carries on the search and a decade later finds gold near the present city of Sabará.

In the century before the bandeirante expeditions there had been some probes into the interior but, for the most part, it had remained an unknown land of fantastic mysteries, monsters and legends. By the end of the bandeirante era, they had extended Brazil's borders far beyond the Tordesillas line; penetrated the Amazon basin, established routes from south to north and west, opened trails for the settlement of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Goiás as well as for the effective occupation of Paraná¡ and Rio Grande do Sul.

The gold rushes of California and South Africa have obscured the great Brazilian gold (and diamond) discoveries of the 18th century and their far-reaching effects. Brazilian gold accounted for 80 percent of the world supply at the time. Sent to Portugal, by trade agreement much of it went to England, where it is said to have hastened the industrial revolution. This led to the decline of French industry and the advent of the French revolution.

It has also been said that Brazil began to exist with the bandeirantes. They were the first to forge a true national identity through their disinterest in a "motherland" they had never seen, their trailblazing advances through the backlands and their love for the daughters of the forest and the bonded women of Africa.