A fort called the Nativity: the founding of Belém do Pará, 1616

On Christmas Day 1615 three small vessels slipped out of the harbour of São Luís do Maranhão, on the northern coast of Brazil: a patache, a caravelão and a large launch. Their commander, Captain Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco, carried ten pieces of artillery, provisions for five months, spare anchor cables taken from other ships and a set of written orders dated three days earlier.2 sources2 sources

The orders, from the expedition's overall commander Alexandre de Moura, told him to chart the coast “with the lead in hand”, enter the river of Pará, choose a site he could fortify, win over the Indigenous villages nearby with gifts and, with Indigenous canoes, destroy any Dutch or English trading ships he caught off guard. The chief pilot, António Vicente Cochado, was to map the route for later voyages.1 source1 source

Accounts of the force differ. Moura's papers let Caldeira pick 150 men; Berredo's eighteenth-century history and the IBGE's municipal history give 200. They sailed west for about 150 leagues, stopping at night on the advice of French pilots, against currents that the expedition's clerk, André Pereira, called furious because it was the rainy season.3 sources3 sources

Then they entered a vast bay of fresh water. Caldeira thought he had reached the Amazon itself. In fact the bay, which its Indigenous people called Paraná-Guaçu and Brazilians now call Guajará, is formed by the mouths of the Guamá, Moju and Acará rivers, on the southern edge of the Amazon delta. Its shores and islands were Tupinambá country, held by Tupi-speaking villages that had their own alliances and enemies.3 sources3 sources

In 1615 Portugal had no king of its own. Since 1580 its crown had belonged to the Spanish Habsburgs, and Philip III of Spain ruled as Philip II of Portugal. This was the Iberian Union, which lasted until 1640. To the Portuguese of the time, “Maranhão” meant the whole unconquered north, from Ceará to the Spanish Indies, roughly the area of today's Brazilian Amazon.4 sources4 sources

The French got there first. In March 1612 three ships with about 500 men left Cancale in Brittany under Daniel de La Touche, Lord of La Ravardière, backed by the regent Marie de' Medici. They reached Maranhão in July and built a fort on its largest island, Saint-Louis. Capuchin friars came with them, and French and Tupinambá met in the friars' convent to learn each other's languages. The colony was later called Equinoctial France.1 source1 source

Madrid knew of it by October 1612. The expedition that went to remove the French, from Recife in August 1614, was small: about 300 Portuguese soldiers. It depended on Indigenous archers, rowers, interpreters and the women who carried supplies, recruited village by village. At the Battle of Guaxenduba, on 19 November 1614, contemporary figures give 1,500 to 2,500 Indigenous fighters on the French side against about 200 Indigenous allies of the Portuguese, a famous mismatch that the historian Alírio Cardoso thinks unlikely.1 source1 source

After Guaxenduba the two sides agreed a truce and sent envoys to Paris and Lisbon. Alexandre de Moura's relief fleet then reached São Luís, and on 2 November 1615 La Ravardière handed over the fort. He was taken to Lisbon and held in the Tower of Belém for years, because ministers in Lisbon and Madrid feared what he knew of the Brazilian coast. Some of his men stayed behind and became the Portuguese expedition's guides and interpreters.1 source1 source

Caldeira chose a rise on a point of land where the Guamá meets the bay, beside a creek called the Piri. He named the fort Presépio, the Christmas crib, after the day his ships had sailed. Around it grew a settlement called Feliz Lusitânia, “happy Portugal”, placed under the protection of Santa Maria de Belém, Our Lady of Bethlehem. The name Belém stuck.3 sources3 sources

The first fort was a square palisade of rammed earth and stakes, reinforced with gabions, wicker baskets packed with soil. Berredo, whose history appeared in 1749, says a large number of Indigenous people helped raise it. The historian André da Silva Lima thinks it was probably built on the site of a Tupinambá village, reusing its stockade, and that labour was paid in trade goods. A local tradition naming the village chief as Paraguaçu has not been confirmed in the archives.3 sources3 sources

Archaeologists working in the fort's moat and courtyard between 2000 and 2003 found Tupinambá pottery about a metre below the surface. Lime kilns beside the fort and the papers of Caldeira's widow show that he also cleared land for sugar cane. Pereira says the fort went up quickly. Lima reads the royal letters otherwise: on 18 September 1616 the king complained that supplies and munitions for “the fort that Francisco Caldeira de Castelo Branco founded in the river of the Amazons” were moving too slowly.1 source1 source

Caldeira's men soon learned they were not alone. A French deserter told them that Dutch traders were living in villages upriver, learning the languages. A Dutchman captured in one village said he was waiting for his brother to settle at the very spot where the fort now stood, and that three Dutch ships had left a few days before. Pereira reported 250 to 300 Dutch in two wooden forts with two sugar mills.1 source1 source

Northern Europeans had been trading in the region for years; the Irishman Philip Purcell made voyages there from about 1609. In 1616 a ship from Flushing, in the Dutch Republic, the Golden Cock, landed 130 men, many of them English, some with their families. They built a fort between two tributaries and traded with a people the English called the Supanes, who helped them plant tobacco and annatto, a red dye.1 source1 source

Each side relied on Indigenous allies, and those allies chose sides for their own reasons. On the night of 9 August 1616 Portuguese troops under Pedro Teixeira attacked a Dutch ship near the Xingu; one account says it was set alight with Tupinambá fire arrows. From 1623 expeditions from Belém, made up of a few dozen soldiers and hundreds of Indigenous archers, burned the foreigners' forts and tobacco fields one by one.2 sources2 sources

The friendship Pereira described did not last. Caldeira sent men into the interior on “resgate” expeditions, a word meaning ransom that colonists used for buying or seizing Indigenous captives as slaves. A Franciscan friar, António de Merciana, wrote that Captain Manuel de Sousa de Sá, on Caldeira's orders, had also made war on a Nheengaíba people who lived in houses raised on stilts. It lasted 30 days; nearly a thousand Nheengaíba were killed and 360 captured and sold as slaves, for one Portuguese death.1 source1 source

The spark came from Maranhão. Late in 1617 a Tupinambá man baptised Amaro, who had learned to read and write with the Capuchins, spread word that he had a letter from Caldeira ordering the enslavement of every village between Belém and São Luís. Whether the letter was real is unknown. The rising began at Cumã, near São Luís. A priest on a relief ship that reached Maranhão on 14 January 1618 reported that the Cumã villagers had killed 37 colonists.2 sources2 sources

In Pará it began at Caeté, where two men buying captives for Caldeira were killed, and spread to the villages around the fort. Merciana wrote that the Tupinambá, “the most friendly”, had risen, leaving the Portuguese with one poor village of Tapuia, as the Portuguese called non-Tupi peoples, next to the fort, and the Apirapé, more than a hundred leagues away. Besieged colonists went hungry; with no match cord left for their guns, soldiers cut strips from their hammocks and slept on the ground.1 source1 source

Belém was also fighting itself. When Caldeira's nephew, António Cabral, stabbed a popular captain, Álvaro Neto, in the street and Caldeira let him go free, the garrison and townspeople rose in September 1618, put the captain-major in leg irons and chose Baltasar Rodrigues de Melo in his place. On 7 January 1619 Tupinambá warriors tried to storm the fort. Their leader, known to the Portuguese as Cabelo de Velha (“Old Woman's Hair”), was shot dead by Gaspar Cardoso, and the attackers withdrew.2 sources2 sources

The reprisal was planned in Brazil. On 22 March 1619 the governor-general, Luís de Sousa, ordered Captain Bento Maciel Parente to make the war on the Tupinambá “more vivid” than on other peoples. He left the amount of bloodshed to the captain's “conscience”, adding that the less cruel the war, the more justified it would be. Maciel raised 80 soldiers and 400 Indigenous archers at his own cost in the captaincies of Itamaracá, Paraíba and Rio Grande, north of Pernambuco, and marched from Tapuitapera, near São Luís, towards Belém.2 sources2 sources

Belém's new captain-major ran a campaign of his own. On 4 June 1619 Jerónimo Fragoso de Albuquerque, with four ships, many canoes, 100 soldiers and a large number of Indigenous allies, stormed the Tupinambá entrenchment at Iguapé, then moved on to other villages and burned them. Maciel's column reached Belém at the end of June.1 source1 source

Berredo, governor of Maranhão a century later, wrote that Maciel “extinguished the last remnants” of the Tupinambá in that region. Captives were sold to planters in the town. Maciel said the rebels had killed more than 100 Portuguese; Maurício de Heriarte, writing in 1662, gave 222, and said that of more than 600 Indigenous settlements in the province when the Portuguese came, 15 villages now lived alongside them. Lima adds that war, flight inland and epidemic disease all cut the population.2 sources2 sources

Caldeira never returned. In 1619 the new captain-major, Jerónimo Fragoso de Albuquerque, shipped him to Portugal under arrest with his nephew and the men who had deposed him. Lima writes that he was held in Lisbon's Limoeiro prison and tried for misgoverning the conquest; his widow and heirs later petitioned to keep his lands in Pará. When and where he died is not settled in the sources used here.2 sources2 sources

Because of the distance, and the difficulty of sailing or marching between Ceará and Maranhão, in 1621 the crown split the north off from the State of Brazil as a separate State of Maranhão, whose governor did not answer to the governor-general in Bahia. The first governor named, Diego de Cárcamo, was a Spaniard from Córdoba who never took up the post; the first to arrive, Francisco Coelho de Carvalho, reached São Luís in 1626. In 1627 he granted Belém's town council its first land, and Jesuits arrived in 1636.3 sources3 sources

On 5 February 1637 two Franciscan friars from Quito, Domingos de Brieba and André de Toledo, and a handful of soldiers reached Gurupá, exhausted, after more than a hundred days coming down the Napo and the Amazon from the Spanish side. The governor in São Luís, Jácome Raimundo de Noronha, decided to send an expedition back the other way. Pedro Teixeira, who had sailed with Caldeira in 1615, left Pará on 28 October 1637 (27 October from Cametá, in another account) with 47 canoes, 70 Portuguese soldiers and 1,200 Indigenous men to row and fight; with their women and boys, Acuña counted 2,000 people.2 sources2 sources

Teixeira reached Quito, where the Royal Audience, the colonial court, ordered the Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña to go back with him and report to the Council of the Indies. They left Quito on 16 February 1639 and reached Pará on 12 December. On the way down Teixeira founded a post called Franciscana near the Napo, claiming the land for Philip IV but for the crown of Portugal. At the mouth of the Rio Negro about 300 of the men wanted to go upriver to take slaves, and Acuña served them a written protest.2 sources2 sources

Near the Tapajós, Acuña found troops led by Bento Maciel, the son of the governor of the same name, preparing to attack the Tapajó, who had offered peace. Maciel promised to wait for orders, then attacked as soon as Acuña left. Once the Tapajó had given up their poisoned arrows, the Portuguese penned them in a stockade and let their own Indigenous auxiliaries strip the village bare; an eyewitness told Acuña that the captives' wives and daughters were abused in front of them. Under threat the Tapajó handed over 200 captives of their own, who were sent to Maranhão and Pará as slaves; Acuña saw them himself.1 source1 source

Belém became the gateway through which Portugal pushed up the Amazon and its tributaries. When Spain and Portugal redrew their South American border in the Treaty of Madrid of 1750, they dropped the line of Tordesillas and let each side keep what it actually held. That left most of the Amazon basin to Portugal, and through it to independent Brazil.3 sources3 sources

The late nineteenth century brought Belém's “golden phase” on the back of the rubber trade. The city's iron fish market, the Mercado de Ferro, went up in 1901, and in 1908 the older meat market was rebuilt with cast-iron pavilions from the Macfarlane foundry in Glasgow. In the same years the intendant Antônio Lemos commissioned the painter Theodoro Braga to paint the founding of the city.3 sources3 sources

Braga's canvas of 1908, which hangs in Belém's Museu de Arte, caused a quarrel. It showed a fort built of stone. The historian Arthur Vianna argued that the first fort was of earth and timber, and the art historian Aldrin Figueiredo has since shown that a sketch for the painting had the fort in wood. Vianna's view prevailed.2 sources2 sources

The stone fort that stands today descends from later rebuildings. Between 2000 and 2002 the state culture department restored it as part of the Feliz Lusitânia project, which from 1997 renovated listed buildings in the Cidade Velha, the old town. The fort reopened as a museum on 25 December 2002, a date chosen to mark the expedition's departure from São Luís, with an exhibition on the meeting of Portuguese and Indigenous peoples and the finds from the excavations.2 sources2 sources

Belém had 1,303,403 people at the 2022 census. Beside the fort, on the dock between the old districts of Cidade Velha and Campina, is the Ver-o-Peso, which began in the seventeenth century as the Casa de Haver-o-Peso, the post where goods shipped through Belém were weighed and taxed for the town council. It is now a market and dock, listed by IPHAN, Brazil's national heritage body, since 1977.2 sources2 sources