Summary Of Chapter 5 Of 1491

Brazil is home to nearly 60% of the Amazon Rainforest. The Brazilian government recognizes only 13% of the total land mass of Brazil as being designated to its native tribes. Of this 13% total land mass, 98.5% lies in the Amazon Rainforest (http://survivalinternational.org/tribes/brazilian). In Chapter 5 of Mann’s 1491, Mann retells the story of the Gonzalo Pizarro exhibition. The first recorded and written description of the Amazon comes from Gaspar de Carvajal, the chaplain on the Pizarro voyage. Carvajal’s account was not recognized as being factual by most historians and was not even published until the 19th century however, in his manuscripts he states “the farther down we went the more thickly populated and the better did we find land”
(Mann, p319). While many of Carvajal’s tales must have been exaggerated, one thing holds true; this land as Mann has suggested was not a scarcely populated land waiting to be discovered. Carvajal’s little account of the humans they encountered along the river that borders Peru and Brazil “depicts a crowded and prosperous land” (Mann, p319). Researchers are discovering more and more that the pre-Columbian natives had larger and more sophisticated populations than were originally thought to have been in existent. Brazil and the Amazon Rainforest were the home to many sophisticated peoples.
Mann states that Charles R.
Clement believed that “the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over” (Mann, p.341). Peach palms are the example that he uses for further proof of his theory. The wood from peach palms is very sturdy; the fruit is “soaked with oil and rich in beta-carotene, vitamin C, and, surprisingly, protein. When dried, the white or pink pulp makes flour for thin, tortilla-like cakes; when boiled and smoked, it becomes hors d’oeuvres; when cooked and fermented, it makes beer” (Mann, p341). The natives had ingenious methods for working the land so that it would provide, and have many uses; the peach palm is just one example of how the natives made the rainforest ‘work for them’. According to The Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, the natives did not raise livestock or plow fields; they ate “inhame, which is very plentiful here, and those seeds and fruits that the earth and the trees give of themselves” (Early Brazil, p.6). Is it possible that Pero Vaz de Caminha was referring to the peach
palms? There have been many theories about the size and sophistication of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Brazil; some have said there’s no way that the populations could have been as large, or that they weren’t advanced until the introduction of European technology.
One thing that researchers and scientists are discovering is that the original theory that the natives were living a primitive, insubstantial existence is false. Researcher Michael Heckenberger found remains of a “grid-like pattern of 150-acre towns and smaller villages, connected by complex road networks and arranged around large plazas where public rituals would take place”
(Mongabay.com). The most prevalent ideas about Indians in the Americas are that they were barbaric. The descriptions of the encounters with the Indians vary “with positive and negative characteristics according to their greater or lesser degrees of resistance to the Portuguese” (Fausto, p.7). Upon arrival, a majority of explorers were initially met with friendly and welcoming natives. Some of the accounts from the first encounters with the natives mention how they had been met with friendly people, who seemed “as if they were more our friends than we theirs” and that they wanted to “tame” and convert the natives (Early Brazil, p. 6-7). The pre-Columbian natives of Brazil faced the same fate as almost every other civilization that had been “discovered” and colonized by the Europeans; they were met with brutality, enslaved, and extinguished due to the diseases brought over by the Europeans. Prior to the Portuguese invasion of the 1500’s, it is estimated that there were almost 11 million natives living in Brazil. By the 1600’s 90% of the natives had been exterminated by diseases introduced by the Europeans. Flus, measles, and small pox were the leading causes of death to 99,000 people a year; an average of 271 people died every day. It is even more discerning that thousands more died over the centuries, having been enslaved and mistreated by the colonists. Today, only 0.4% of Brazil’s population is indigenous. Brazil was once a nation that was the home to roughly 2,000 tribes, now only accounts for about 240 tribes (http://www.survival international.org/tribes/brazilian).