Adrift on an Inland Sea

Adrift on an Inland Sea assesses the limits of Portuguese imperial information gathering and administrative control in unconsolidated interior territories (sertões) by interpreting four frontier expeditions that took place in the Captaincy of Minas Gerais, Brazil, from the 1750s onward. Hal Langfur demonstrates how opportunists, government officials, and scientists depended on Indigenous and Afro-descendant intermediaries to attain their objectives and how guides and translators exerted agency in return. He identifies a shift in orientation from the increasingly elusive discovery and extraction of mineral riches to the production of purported scientific knowledge as a new form of wealth. Underpinning the development of new discourses about Brazil's backlands were backlands residents, typically poor men of color who went unnamed, uncredited, or denigrated as inconstant or unreliable by expedition leaders.By analyzing narratives written by expedition leaders, Langfur uncovers varied discursive and concrete strategies used to achieve their objectives. Inácio Correia Pamplona, a wealthy merchant recruited to engage in Indigenous conquest and to dismantle quilombos (autonomous runaway slave communities), invoked the heroic tradition of the Paulista bandeirantes to glorify his relatively modest exploits in lands previously explored. Military commanders used Indigenous intermediaries to locate and destroy clandestine mining operations led by Manuel Henriques, also known as Mão de Luva (Gloved Hand). The mineralogist José Vieira Couto sought to revitalize Portugal's imperial ambitions through the discovery of mineral wealth, the mapping of territory, and the creation of an expedition account infused with an aura of scientific discovery. Finally, the German naturalist Prince Maximilian Alexander Phillip von Wied-Neuwied applied insights from the emerging field of ethnography to document cultural practices of Jê-speaking Indigenous peoples.Langfur employs archival sources, oral histories and traditions, and chronicles to reconstruct how knowledge about sertões was produced, reproduced, and disseminated. The themes of misinformation and the limits of empire are perhaps most evocatively presented in section 3, “Science for the Sertão,” which interprets the mining expedition of José Vieira Couto. Here both intermediaries and leaders appear in sharpest relief, due to Couto's careful construction of his expedition narrative and surviving oral and written traditions about Couto's guide, Isidoro de Amorim Pereira, the “black prospector king.” Isidoro had been recruited to Couto's expedition after presenting a magnificent diamond to the governor of Minas Gerais in the hope of being pardoned for alleged crimes. Accompanying him was his son, Bento, and numerous prospectors including women and children. Isidoro and Bento led Couto on a wild-goose chase, arduously hacking trails through dense brush when established roads could have been used to arrive at their destinations in a fraction of the time. Langfur demonstrates with considerable humor how Couto's quest became progressively more frustrating and absurd, culminating in a comical description of Bento lazing in the bushes singing love ballads while the party searched for diamonds. Almost no gold or diamonds were found.Another strength is Langfur's use of painstaking investigation to challenge heroic traditions, myths, and rhetoric of backlands historical figures. For example, he handily discredits a nineteenth-century account of Isidoro that falsely portrayed him as martyred leader of a quilombo. Langfur similarly recasts in a more prosaic light Mão de Luva, whom some oral traditions had fancifully portrayed as the star-crossed suitor of Queen Maria I. To this list of diminished heroes, we can add Inácio Correia Pamplona, who traveled with an impressive retinue of people and livestock, including musicians and poets. His expedition diary reveals that his followers composed and recited fulsome poetry in his honor as they processed through the backlands. Pamplona's mastery of the vocabulary of patronage proved persuasive in his acquisition of wealth, land, and royal favor, despite his lack of meaningful accomplishments.The motives of Indigenous intermediaries remain somewhat more elusive due to source limitations. Nonetheless, Langfur persuasively reconstructs varied strategies, showing how some informants exchanged knowledge and services for trade goods. Others used Indigenous intelligence networks to track the movements of expeditions and to use that knowledge to their best advantage. Indigenous people also set limits, for example, when they prevented Wied-Neuwied from plundering grave sites. In many instances, Indigenous participation is evident, yet silent. Langfur aptly observes that Wied-Neuwied must have employed Indigenous informants to produce his ethnography of Jê speakers of the Jequitinhonha River, yet nowhere does he credit their contributions.Langfur concludes by contextualizing his four aggregated microhistories within a broader analytical framework, comparing Portuguese late imperial approaches to Brazil's sertões with internal frontiers in Anglo North America and Spanish America as these regions navigated the transition to political independence. In so doing, he expands the potential audience for this work. Clearly written, broadly framed, evocative, and at times amusing, this book is likely to appeal broadly to undergraduate and graduate students and historians of borderlands, empire, ethnohistory, Brazil, and the Atlantic world

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