Fuelwood • In· Colonial Brazil

. ' Fuelwood •in· Colonial Brazil The Economkand Social Consequences of Fuel Depletion for the Bah ian RecOnc:avo,l 549-1820 . Shawn'W. Miller mong the various tasks that con contributed to the contest, in which all eyes of the early Portuguese, the fuel stituted the daily routine of . .colonists participated, for one crucial capacity of the Brazilian forest was ABrazil's sugar economy, col natural resource: wood. · boundless. · lecting fuel from the colony's plentiful Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish forests was among the most extensive. Discovery of the Forest explorers, the people who initiated In addition to preparing land for the expansion of Europe, carrie from planting, cutting cane at harvest, and At the height of the Bahian sugar an environment that had long been refining it ar.rhe mill, African slaves harvest, a view from the bluffs of the stripped of its trees. In fact the entire through four centuries had the addi Bay of All Saints contained a great Mediterranean seaboard, except a · tional burden of gathering the crucial deal of smoke, for all along the north~ few isolated and coveted pockets, energy source that fuelled the sugar ern shoreline, to a few kilometers had been bereft of forests for centu~ mill. This article is in part a study of inland, a considerable array of fires ries. Growing populations and the • - that resource's depletion and of sugar pushed arching columns into the pre growing material demands for ships of vailing southeasterly winds. The :-"- production's detrimental effect on discovery, war, and trade continued N - Brazil's Atlantic forest. But it is more simple process of boiling the water to make European wood resources ....8 immediately an examination of the and impurities from sugarcane's v~scid increasingly scarce and costly, thus. impact that· the forest's retreat had on juice, an ei;sential stage in sugar refine explaining the general amazement the fortunes of the colonial capital, ment and one requiring large quanti European sailors expressed at the Bahia, located in northeastern Brazil. 1 ties of wood fuel, was in full swing. sight of the New World's plentiful Fuel's increasing scarcity increased Ashes to ashes, the cooling clouds of forests. When the Portuguese, dur labor and capital costs related to fuel smoke came finally to settle on what ing the earliest stage of their quest ·supply, exacerbated elite social con remained of Brazil's once primeval. for the African route to the East, flict, multiplied petitions to the forests. With rarely a pause, the fires came acrriss one particularly heavily Crown, and eventually dictated the of the sugar mills burned as many as forested island, the first they would adoption of more efficient firing tech nine months of the year, more than colonize, they narried it "Madeira," nology. Moreover, activities that vied twenty hours of the day and six days meaning "wood.", Poet-adventurer with the sugar mill's furnaces for fuel of the week; as long as there was fuel Lufs de Cariloes wrote a century to feed them. And to the smoke-filled and a half later that the island was Brazilian Sugar Mills 181 0 0 ·.:E :I 0 ~:g_ :::;> 0 3 F"'!J'He 1 (lehJ Colonial Brazil, drawn by author. Figure 2 (right} The Bay of All Saints; 1759. Salvador, the colonial capital, was the point of· embarkation for sugar exported to Europe. Sugar mills clustered (1/ong the bay's northern arms and estuaries. The map in figure 2 was drawn by the author;after a 1759 map by]ose Antonio Caldas, whose original utilized a mushroom of rising smoke to represent each milL more renowned for its namesake than wood and its by-product, charcoal, purged it, graded it, and then bo_xed it. for any other particular fame. 2 In were the only practical sources of fuel. for transport to the city of Salvador . 1500, en route to the spices of India, Any attempt at sugar production with where it awaited the near-annual con Pedro Alvares Cabral bumped into the out a ready stockpile of forested land voy arrival for shipment to European South American continent and chris would not succeed no matter how markets. The mill also represented a tened it "Land of the Holy Cross." favorable other environmental factors concentration both of capital (in the The name that finally stuck originated such as climate and soil. form of machinery, buildings, and_ in the red dyewood commonly called Despit~ the delight of early arrivals slaves) and political power in the pau-brasil {brazilwood), South Amer · to Brazil's tree-blanketed northeast, the hands of the senhor de engenho, a ica's first trade contribution to the · novelty of the bounty quickly receded. proto-capitalist who not only held Portuguese colonial empire. To the Residents ofwood-rich regions often extensive cane plantings, but also held doughty sailors of the fifteenth-century . perceive timber, lumber, and firewoo~. the sugar region's essential mechanical Mediterranean; wood was neither to be as common as oxygenin the air. means of production. In the Reroncavo; unremarkable nor unappreciated.3 . But, inthe way that an oxygen short a fertile crescent of land surrounding ·. The first important Brazilian export age causes desperate burning in the the Bay of All Saints, life, work, religion, was wood, but the more· important · lungs, rapid destruction of Bahia's vir ·trade, planter aspirations, and natural second commodity, cane sugar, could gin forests forced millers and planters, resources centered on the engenho, a not have made its unrivaled contribu shipbuilders and carpenters, brick quasi-urban, quasi~industrial·entity tion to colonial development had makers and tanners, even common on the rural, colonial landscape. The_ Cabral encountered a land of fewer folk living in the city, to grasp for their sugar mill fueled Bahia's economic trees. As if to claim parity of worth share of a steadily diminishing resource. and demographic growth, and Brazil's with precious metals, the nature of forests fueled the mill. 4 sugarcane dictated that, it be processed Fuel Requirements Estimates ofthe expense of fuel~ by fire; and unless the purifying flames . Engenllo. wood as a commodity in sugar pro were applied soon after harvest, the at the duction vary according to the sources. touch ofthe refined product would be The Bahian sugar mill, known as and periods analyzed. One· study indi significantly lessened. To make this the engenho, was simply the combina cates that in 1752 firewood amounted rapid procedure possible, large quanti tion of apparatus by which planters to 10 percent of finished sugar's sell ties of firewood had to be within easy turned cane into varying qualities ing price; as a percentage of cost, the 5 reach of the ~ugar mill's furnaces. ' of crystallized sugar. The engenho figure would probably be greater. · Before the mid-eighteenth century, pressed juice from the cane~ boiled it, 182 Forest & Conservation History 38 (October 1994) . ' Another source reveals thaduel costs · sugar. For many miUs, transportition, · expelled the col9nists from many in. Bahian engenhos were ofi:en much livestock, and equipment costs un southern areas induding Jaguaribe, . higher {see table 1 ). · . avoidably .included fuelwood-related Gichoeira; Camamu, and Maragogipe. · Although fuel expenses never~domi expenses, especiafly in cases where the Author and inventor Juan Lopes nated engenho account books, the cost mill used its slaves and other capitaho Sierra noted the impact ofexpulsion: · of fuel generally stood at about one gather wood, making total cost of , · "Everytbmg dealing with provisions fifth of total operating costs. Fuel costs fuelwood acquisition greater than the was missing thloti.ghoutthesquth, were probably .even greater than some -table reflects. and the northern part lacked the neC numbers in the table suggest. The mill essary items for the sugar mills such as · could either employ its own slaves, Labor in the Forest· . wood, fotms, bricks, tiles and crates; . ·oxen, and salaried labor in gathering Because of this the mills had to close~ firewood or it could purchase fuel Getting fuel to th~ fire was a labor~ With production halted, commerce wood, sometimes more cheaply, from intensive· operation. Initially, mill ceased." 7 Even before the 1670s, those who cutthe forests indepen owners found abundant forests at - · many mills at the bay's shoreline dendy. Engenho Sergipe in' 1611 ~rid their front doorstep, ,but the double 'depended on fuel' sources far from. Engenho Sao Caetano recorded little ' onslaught of land clearing for agrkul their base of operation. Jose da Silva or no fuel expenses yet both must ture and timber felling for fuel and Lis boa, .the colony's inspeqor of the have used fuel, so fuel-associated costs construction soon pushed this impor royal forest:S in the late-eighteenth were not always properly categorized. tant resource far froin the mills' easy century, added as sources of fuelwood These two mills ostensibly paid little reach. The competitive adva!ltage Itaparica and· its neighboring isles to outside fuel suppliers, but they switched from mills having local fuel · located northeast of ]aguaribe in the would still have engaged their own sources to mills located at the water's south~m part of the bay-"a volumi capital in the collection of local fire edge where firewood from other loca nous article ofcommerce" that the wood. The higher transportation and tions could be easily delivered. In islanders sold to sugar mill's as well livestock costs of the mills at Sao many instances fuel traveled long dis . as to the citizens of Salvador.8 Caetano and Buranhaem; whose tances over wat~r to the mill. The for-. Fuelwood, ftom its felling to its fiery reported fuel expenditures are about ests of Jagua,ribe, iocated more than 'destructidn, might require as many as half the -average, support this conten seventy kilometers south of mj.lls on four modes of transportation, con tion.

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