Stories of a campaign: Portuguese territorial expansion into the quilombos of Alto São Francisco and Alto Paranaíba Rivers in the 18th century

Abstract

The area between Grande, São Francisco, and Paranaíba Rivers was known as Sertão of Campo Grande. It was home to a significant number of quilombos throughout the 18th century, and surrounded by important gold mining and farming centers of the captaincies of Goiás, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo. Aiming at expanding its domains, the Portuguese Crown organized military campaigns to conquer that fertile plateau inhabited by its enemies – quilombolas and Amerindians. In this paper, we will address these expeditions, namely the one led by Ignacio Correya Pamplona in 1769, analyzing the strategies used by the campaign aimed at the Luso-American territorial expansion through fighting the quilombolas and appropriating their lands. For such purpose, we examine a set of documents executed by the expedition members
themselves, which include written reports, drawings depicting the inside of the quilombos, and a map of the region explored. After analyzing these documents and translating the colonial map into recent cartography, we verified that the quilombos destroyed (which had vegetable plots, pestles, manufacturing activities, diverse social-political organizations) were used as the basis to establish the Luso-American colonial structure by the construction of roads, ranches for troops to rest and find supply, demarcation of farms and villages for the subjects of the Bragança Crown. Studying this episode of the war between quilombolas and Luso-Americans shows that, involuntarily, the aforementioned quilombos were pioneer elements for the formation of the territorial network in the area that today is part of the Triângulo Mineiro.