A concise biographical overview

Jean-Philippe Bettendorff was born on August 25, 1625, in Lintgen, in the Alzette valley, into a wealthy and pious family. His father, Matthieu André Bettendorff, served as a local administrator (mayeur) in the surrounding area under the authority of the abbey of Saint-Maximin in Trier—the largest landowner in the region at the time. His mother, Marguerite Reinerts, died when Jean-Philippe was a teenager. He had an older brother, Nicolas, and a younger half-sister, Susanne (the latter from his father’s second marriage). Despite being born into a century of continuous war—the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659)—Bettendorff managed to acquire a solid humanist education. From 1635 to 1659, he lived in various towns along the long strip of land in Western Europe that marked the intersection of the Latin and the Germanic cultures. During this period he studied humanities at the Jesuit college in Luxembourg, philosophy at the University of Trier on the Moselle River, civil law at the University of Cuneo in Piedmont, doing the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Tournai, the regencies in several Jesuit colleges in the Spanish Netherlands (Douai, Lille, Dinant, Luxembourg, Namur, and Huy) to acquire pedagogical skills and, finally, theology in Douai.

According to Bettendorff, he was fluent in six languages: Latin, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Spanish. Like most young Jesuits at that time, he wanted to be sent to the Orient (Japan and China); however, in spring 1659 he was assigned to the Mission of Maranhão, which was considered to be one of the most difficult. In autumn that year, shortly after his priestly ordination, Bettendorff set out for Portugal with a Flemish confrere from the Artois region. Along the way, the two young missionaries were confronted with the realities of their century. First, while they were still in Flanders, German mercenaries tried to attack them. Then, while waiting in Holland for a ship to set sail for Portugal, they had to remove their cassocks and celebrate mass in secret in this predominantly Calvinist republic—which, incidentally, they admired because of the cleanliness of its cities and the industriousness of its wealthy merchants. Finally, as they approached the port of Lisbon, the young religious could see in the distance the ships of the Moroccan corsairs, who sought to intercept the Portuguese caravels returning from South Asia, Brazil, or Africa. In the Lusitanian metropolis, the young Luxembourgish missionary learned Portuguese as well as Tupi, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Portuguese America.

On January 20, 1661, Bettendorff, in the company of his friend and compatriot Gaspar Misch, who had joined him in Lisbon a few months earlier, reached the port of São Luís—then the main city of the State of Maranhão and Grão-Pará—where they would both spend the rest of their lives. The two Luxembourgers were immediately sent to remote missions in the vast Amazonian floodplain: Misch to assist a Portuguese confrere near the fort of Gurupá, and Bettendorff to build a mission in the strategic area at the mouth of the Tapajós River (today, the city of Santarém). A few months later, an uprising of the Portuguese settlers led to the expulsion of most of the missionaries, including the superior, Father Antônio Vieira. Very quickly, Bettendorff stood out among the reduced group of Jesuits who had managed to escape exile. Indeed, from 1662 until 1693, he occupied, almost without interruption, the posts of rector of the two urban colleges and superior of the Mission.

In 1684, after a second uprising of settlers and merchants in São Luís, Bettendorff traveled to Lisbon, where as procurator he pleaded the cause of the Jesuit missionaries. This resulted in the introduction of a framework law, the Regimento das Missões (1686), which guaranteed the full autonomy of the missions under the authority of the priests, who were recognized as tutors of the native neophytes and catechumens. This regulation also provided the red thread for the Portuguese—and, from 1822, the Brazilian—authorities’ policies on the native peoples until the middle of the twentieth century. After returning to the Amazon, in 1688, Bettendorff sought to complete the consolidation of the Jesuit project in the region by introducing all the stages of religious formation, standardizing the catechetical discourse, imposing a shared daily regime for all missionaries, and rebuilding the urban colleges in Belém and São Luís.

Bettendorff was also involved in many other spheres. As a pragmatic economist, he prioritized the cultivation of cacao for export. As a talented artist, he propagated the Baroque style by painting altarpieces and by building churches and chapels. As a conscientious jurist, he examined the condition of the indigenous (índios) captured during the official expeditions and criticized the excesses committed against them by certain governors, captains, and soldiers. As an attentive ethnographer, he described some of the rites and customs of the indigenous peoples, especially those of the Tapajós. Lastly, as a zealous missionary, he wrote at least four catechisms in indigenous languages and founded spiritual brotherhoods for settlers in the main towns of the colony. Although the historical sources are biased (over-complimentary) about Bettendorff’s activities, they nevertheless allow us to perceive the pragmatic character of his multiple actions.

Thus, over the last four decades of the seventeenth century, the Luxembourgish Jesuit left an imprint on the formation of colonial society in the Portuguese Amazon. Bettendorff died of liver disease on August 5, 1698, in Belém, just one year after the death of his compatriot Gaspar Misch. The corpus of his writings—composed in Portuguese, Latin, and French—includes a detailed chronicle on the Mission of Maranhão, a bilingual Portuguese–Tupi catechism, and an abundant correspondence archived in Rome, Évora, Brussels and Luxembourg.²

The Portuguese Amazon in the seventeenth century

The second half of the seventeenth century, when Bettendorff was living in the Amazon region, can be considered as a time of profound crisis on account of the uninterrupted series of wars, epidemics, and violent conquests that affected large areas of nearly all continents. The Portuguese Empire, with its global network of trade routes and trading posts, was no exception. Thus, a long-lasting economic depression (1670–1700) accompanied the waning of the Lusitanian influence, especially in South Asia, and its subsequent concentration on the Atlantic space. There were several reasons for this development: first, the increasing competition from sugar and tobacco produced on the Caribbean islands under French, English, and Dutch dominion; second, the indebtedness of the Portuguese Crown as a consequence of quarrelling with the Castilians since the ascent of the Bragança dynasty in 1640; and thirdly, the eventual suppression of the long-tolerated and profitable smuggling of slaves to the Spanish colonies in South America. As a response, Portugal, like other Western European countries at that time, began to centralize and rationalize its administrative structures and launch new economic initiatives (Alencastro 2006, 71–74; Labourdette 2000, 343–423; Mauro 1972, 70).

In this context, it is necessary to highlight the policy of King Pedro II and his finance minister, Luís de Meneses, the Count of Ericeira. In the 1670s, they began seeking to promote domestic production (mostly of textiles and wine) in continental Portugal in order to equalize the trade balance, which was marked by an excess of imports and a decline in exports. The Crown also prioritized certain overseas possessions, in particular agricultural and silvicultural production in its two American colonies: Brazil and Maranhão.³ Yet Portugal’s economic recovery was compromised by another commercial depression, which followed the overproduction of sugar and tobacco in the 1680s and the suicide of Luís de Meneses in 1690 (Serrão & Marques 2001, 197–213 and 271–274; Bourdon 1994, 70–74; Chambouleyron 2010, 77–169).

Throughout this period, the Society of Jesus proved to be a loyal supporter of the Bragança dynasty, which came to power in 1640. Indeed, Father Antônio Vieira had even been one of the closest counsellors of João VI, the first Bragança king, before crossing the ocean in 1652 to re-establish the Maranhão Mission, which then comprised the entire Amazon region under Portuguese rule (Alencastro 2006, 80–81; Cardoso 2000). In 1655, Vieira obtained the official tutorship of the Society of Jesus over the colony’s indigenous populations and succeeded in extending the mission network by founding, according to Dauril Alden, more than fifty establishments (Alden 1996, 113). Dissatisfied with this Jesuit monopoly over the only workforce available (the indigenous people), the settlers expelled the religious in 1661. Some years later, the fathers regained some influence as they supported the new prince regent, Pedro—who would become King Pedro II—and his economic initiatives for the Amazon colony. In 1680, Vieira thus helped to conceive a law that made the labor force more accessible by declaring the indigenous people free, while simultaneously maintaining the fathers’ control over them. But growing discontent among the Portuguese settlers, who felt marginalized by the Crown’s policy, led to another uprising, and the Jesuits were expelled from São Luís in 1684. Subsequent negotiations in Lisbon resulted in the Regimento das Missões, a statute that granted considerable autonomy to the missions and regulated the annual allocation of indigenous laborers to settlers and authorities. Bettendorff was directly involved in these negotiations (Arenz 2022, 242–253; Perrone-Moisés 1992, 117–123).

The mission network and the indigenous populations

The main purpose of the missions in the Amazon region was to evangelize the indigenous populations and ensure their submission to a Catholic sovereign by confining them to a network of interconnected rural settlements. There, the natives lived as neophytes and catechumens under a regime of repetitive catechesis and compulsory labor. For example, in all missions, before going to work in the fields or in the pottery and carpentry workshops, the indigenous were obliged (even before dawn) to attend mass and listen to a brief catechetical instruction, which was repeated in the evening followed by certain baroque devotional practices (processions, litanies, and chants).⁴ One of the rules established by Father Vieira determined that:

Every day of the week, once morning prayer is over, a Mass will be said so that the Indians can hear it before going to their fields; and for this purpose, prayer will be held in time so that when the sun rises, Mass will at least begin, and when finished, the Indians will be taught aloud the ordinary prayers: namely Our Father, Hail Mary, the Creed, the Commandments of the Law of God, and of the Holy Mother Church; and the sacraments, act of contrition, and confession, generally the dialogues of the brief catechism, which contain the mysteries of faith.⁵

In order to maintain this convent-like way of life, preferably without any external interference, the fathers would set up the missions at some distance from the European settlements (small towns, farms, and forts), but always alongside the strategic natural axis constituted by the Amazon River and its numerous tributaries. According to their specific tasks, there were four main types of missions: a) the farms, or fazendas, which were attached to one of the two urban Jesuit colleges in Belém and São Luís (generally situated in the surroundings of these main towns); b) the villages exclusively designated to royal service (such as the saltworks on the Atlantic coast); c) the so-called aldeamentos de repartição (“villages of partition”), missions whose male labor force was annually inventoried and assigned to either external (settlers or authorities) or internal work; and d) the aldeamentos de doutrina (“villages of doctrine”), small establishments dedicated to religious instruction—especially of recently contacted groups, which were exempt from external labor for at least two years.⁶

The farms played an essential role in the subsistence of the urban colleges and the production of supplies for the missions in the distant backcountry, then known as sertão. The bigger ones possessed sugar mills, plantations of sugar cane, cacao trees and cassava roots, as well as facilities and pasture for livestock-breeding and small workshops for producing canoes, furniture, ceramics, or cotton cloth (Leite 1943, vol. 3, 249 and 279–280; Alden 1996, 421). The farms, run by the missionaries, concentrated most of the specialized labor force that was also urgently needed by the settlers (as farm workers) or the authorities (as rowers, auxiliary soldiers, or workers for the construction of public buildings). In this context, the Jesuits were repeatedly accused of accumulating wealth and retaining native workers for their own ventures (Souza Júnior 2012, 143–329; Neves Neto 2013, 17–109).

Bettendorff saw for himself how useful the chain of well-functioning farms along the river routes was for the missionaries. When he was appointed to the Tapajós mission in 1661, on his way upstream he stopped at the mission farms of Mortigura and Cametá. From the first of these he received manioc flour, the most important travelling provisions at that time, and from the second he obtained some live turtles, which were either captured in the river or bred at the farm (Bettendorff 1990, 159). Another report which he wrote in 1665—just four years after his arrival, when he had already become the rector of the central residence in São Luís—provides a general overview of the mission’s economic situation and details the productiveness of some of the farms.⁷ Bettendorff’s report begins with a description of one of the most relevant and prosperous rural establishments in the Maranhão captaincy:

Seven miles from the town, we possess a farm called Anindiba. It has a chapel dedicated to Saint Ignatius, where the [indigenous] servants attend divine services and instruction of the doctrine. The whole property occupies one square mile and is very fertile, ideal for manioc and sugar cane. It has many trees that can be cut easily. Four villages of Indians inhabit our property. At that farm, we have more than sixty servants, children, and adults altogether, to cultivate the fields. A curiboca or cafuzo, that is, a son of an Ethiopian [African] man and an Indian woman, who is our servant, administers the farm. The poor ones, although born more to sleep, eat, and drink than to work, provide us with manioc flour, enough for one year, maize, oil, and brandy, as well as cloth made of cotton, and other things.⁸

The report also mentions smaller properties in the outskirts of São Luís. One of them occupied an entire island of one and a half square miles on which “lives a fisherman with his wife and children, an Ethiopian [African], with an Ethiopian [African] wife, a daughter and other descendants, and also three servants, and he takes care of a herd of cattle, which includes 67 animals, some goats, about 30 pigs and chicken. The women are our laundresses and weavers.”⁹ The document continues presenting succinctly diverse rural scenes in farms and missions throughout the Amazon estuary and valley, revealing a clear concern with the precarious and constantly fluctuating supplies of manioc flour and fish for the Mission and for the Colony.¹⁰

In the official annual statistics (or Catalogus) that Bettendorff sent to the General Superior in Rome in 1671, he reports the existence of several small properties that had been donated by benefactors in Belém and São Luís. Just as they did on their farms, on these land strips the Jesuits produced a wide variety of food to sustain the residents of their urban colleges (mainly young students and novices, but also a growing number of elderly and sick missionaries) and, to a lesser extent, they produced commodities for export. Bettendorff emphasizes the production of salt (a royal monopoly) and animal products in Maranhão, and the production of sugar, cotton, and cacao, as well as manioc flour, in Pará. He also records that most of their indigenous workers in Maranhão were legal slaves, while those in Pará were officially free but obligated to live on the farms—just as those in the inland missions were.¹¹

In this context it is important to point out that the Jesuits never denied compulsory labor, and even allowed the enslavement of indigenous people under certain conditions. In this regard, they were largely in agreement with the settlers and the authorities on the exploitation of the native populations and their integration into colonial society. The crucial disagreement was over the interpretation and implementation of laws on indigenous labor. In January 1662, Father Vieira clarified his order’s position in Lisbon after being expelled from the Amazon region for categorically denouncing any kind of illegal indigenous slavery:

It is not my intention that there may not be any slaves; after all, I tried at this royal court [in 1655], as it is well known, and one can see from my proposal […] that a council of the greatest scholars should be established to discuss this item and that the cases of legal captivity should be defined by law. But because we [the Jesuits] are in favor of the legal cases and against the illegal ones, they [the settlers] don’t like to have us in that land and, therefore, they throw us out of it.¹²

In some ways, beyond being fierce competitors, the settlers and the missionaries were close and interdependent partners—at least as far as the regional economy was concerned. Every year, these two main agent groups not only divided the indigenous workers among themselves according to the legal provisions (albeit they frequently disagreed on the terms of allocation, treatment, and remuneration) but also produced and traded very similar commodities. Nevertheless, it was mainly traditional indigenous know-how that made possible the relatively stable production of food (primarily manioc flour, the main staple food) and the seasonal gathering of tropical rainforest products (especially cacao, clove bark, sarsaparilla, and copaiba oil). For this reason, in the early days of colonization, formal alliances with the most important indigenous groups—mostly speakers of Tupi languages—were vital for the European colonizers, because these groups acquainted the settlers with the unfamiliar tropical environment. To use a metaphor employed by Nádia Farage, certain indigenous peoples became the colonizers’ “bulwark of the hinterland” (Farage 1991).

This aside, from the mid-seventeenth century onward, the insertion of more and more indigenous groups into colonial society, primarily by confining and supervising them in the missions, was fundamental to the further economic development of the missionary establishments, as has already been emphasized. Bettendorff was (after Vieira) the Jesuit who made his voice most heard regarding the treatment of indigenous people in the colony. Unlike his predecessor, instead of insisting on the “freedom of the Indians,” the priest from Luxembourg used arguments that were less idealistic, resolutely advocating for the autonomy of the missions as legally recognized institutions.

The autonomy of the missions

In December 1686, King Pedro II enacted the previously mentioned Regimento das Missões, a law concerning the status of the missions and the governance of its indigenous inhabitants. Bettendorff, a graduate in law, followed the negotiations in the metropolis in his role as extraordinary procurator of the Maranhão Mission. He had traveled to Lisbon with a recommendation from the provincial superior in Brazil, although some of the older confreres, among them Vieira, had certain doubts concerning the ability of “that German father.” But thanks to the mediation of some influential Jesuits at court, Bettendorff was granted two receptions with the king. Later, his close relationship with the new queen consort, Maria Sophia of Neuburg, a German princess, facilitated his access to the royal family. Nevertheless, his most important ally was the royal secretary Roque Monteiro Paim, who not only kept Bettendorff informed but also conveyed his opinions to the extraordinary commission nominated by the king to solve the “Amazonian question”—that is, the disagreement between the Society of Jesus and the residents of the colony (Arenz 2010, 49–53).

The most controversial issues were the annual distribution of indigenous laborers among settlers, authorities, and missions, and the restoration of the missionaries’ temporal (civilian) power over the indigenous population. In both cases, the commission formulated two strategic compromises after hearing the representatives of the residents and the religious. Regarding the distribution of laborers, this became bipartite—between residents and villages—instead of tripartite. In addition, the periods of work outside the missions were extended and made more flexible to accommodate the seasonal harvests. As for the temporal administration of the priests, the residents’ representative insisted on its complete abolition, arguing that the Jesuits should dedicate themselves exclusively to evangelization. In response, Father Bettendorff categorically demanded the restoration of temporal power over the indigenous population, pointing out that “without the temporal administration of the Indians, the Mission cannot subsist.”¹³ After the new governor of the colony, Gomes Freire de Andrade, had been consulted, the “dual administration” (temporal and spiritual) of the missionaries was definitively restored.

The Regimento das Missões, which Mathias Kiemen considers to be a “masterpiece of legislation” (Kiemen 1954, 163), stemmed from these two compromises to “give a convenient form to the reduction of the Gentiles of the State of Maranhão, […], and to the distribution, […] for the good of their souls, and to advance the life of all by honest work.”¹⁴ The twenty-four paragraphs can be summed up under four main topics. First, it stated that the villages would have significant autonomy, guaranteed through the restoration of the “dual administration,” the appointment of two “Procurators of the Indians,” and the supervision of the entry of non-indigenous people. Second, the villages were to be regrouped in strategic locations, with a minimum population of 150 couples per village, thus ensuring the presence of enough workers and facilitating, if necessary, populational and commercial exchanges within the network. Third, services within and outside the villages were to be organized according to the annual inventory of the male labor force, which was to be divided so that one half remained in the missions and the other half was sent outside. Fourth, in exceptional circumstances, the settlers and the authorities would be able to request indigenous workers for urgent services, mainly as rowers (men), wet nurses, or helpers in the production of manioc flour (women).¹⁵

The compromises established by the Regimento das Missões were intended to satisfy the two groups that were most concerned. The law ensured that the settlers had more indigenous workers available (and for a longer period), while the Jesuits not only regained temporal administration but also managed to expand the autonomy of the missions. Although excluded from the negotiations, the indigenous people obtained through the autonomy clause the conditions under which they could conceive a certain normality of daily life based on the continuation and transmission of certain traditions. In addition, the complex ongoing process of cultural mediation between the indigenous population and the Jesuits was intensified, compelling them to create, despite the asymmetric character of their relationship, “shared codes” (terms or practices) that resulted in a certain convergence of their respective symbolic horizons.¹⁶ Furthermore, despite the obligatory confinement, the new law permitted more mobility and increasing interaction of the indigenous with other members of colonial society while working outside the missions.¹⁷

In all his writings, Bettendorff insisted in the strict fulfillment of legal regulations, especially those dealing with the status of the natives. In his final years, when he understood the difficulties inherent in making the new law work, the Luxembourger father vehemently denounced the

men who seek nothing but their own advantage, and employ the Indians at their will, since they [the indigenous people] never consented to be governed except by the laws of His Majesty, and, moreover, many of them were brought down to the missions by the priests of the Society of Jesus, or came by their own will, and they are where they want to be, for these lands belong to the Indians, natives to them, and no one can take them away from them without committing a great injustice, nor force them to work except in accordance with the laws of His Majesty, for neither they nor their ancestors committed themselves to more.¹⁸

Despite the difficulties in fully implementing the law, the Regimento das Missões remained in force until June 1755, when the indigenous were emancipated from guardianship and the religious removed from the temporal administration. It should be noted that the law of 1686 not only shaped the lives of the native peoples and fostered a specific ethnogenesis among them, but also shaped colonial society as a whole.

The production of cacao

From the end of the seventeenth century, rainforest products became very popular in Europe—as ingredients in remedies and for refining and preserving food.¹⁹ With some exceptions, such as cacau manso (cultivated cacao, differing from the “wild” or bravo variety), most of the native spices were gathered in the sertões and transported in canoes rowed by indigenous to the seaport in Belém, where they were shipped to the metropolis. In a certain manner, the native groups’ traditions of collecting plants, roots, and vegetal oils was established as a new production system, which also included strategic commercialization. This junction of traditional activities and mercantilist logic is comprised in the term “extractivism” (Droulers 2001, 71).

One of the most common services performed by indigenous laborers for the colonial authorities, private merchants, and religious orders was the gathering of cacao. Indeed, cacao was a key forest product, as it was very abundant in the vast sertões. The natives knew where to find the widely dispersed cacao groves, and how and when to collect their fruits. Bettendorff mentions the considerable concentration of cacao trees along the riverbanks of the Amazon and its many tributaries, especially in the western part of the basin in the valley of the Madeira River (Bettendorff 1990, 464).

From the 1670s, cacao was definitively the most important product in the region that was being exported to Lisbon. The Jesuits, who were among the first to become aware of the success of this commodity in the European markets, started to cultivate it systematically and even involved the settlers in this venture. In a letter from 1677, Bettendorff informs the General Superior, Giovanni Paolo Oliva, that he had introduced the cacao tree, common in the captaincy of Pará, to the coastal plain of neighboring Maranhão:

Three years ago [1674], I planted twice a thousand cocoa trees, of which more than a thousand became trees. Apart from the flowers, they are already producing fruits, called cocoa, from which chocolate is made. All the residents of Maranhão are very pleased with this help for their lives and their businesses, which, thanks to my care and zeal, was brought to them from Pará to Maranhão. To some I gave fruits, each of which contains at least forty-six grains, and the same number of trees [seedlings]. By continuing to share with all these people, they will be well off in the future or at least live comfortably. Six trees and, at most, ten give one arroba each year, as the measure is called [here]; one thousand trees yield a hundred arrobas [of grains], which are sold for more than a thousand cruzados. This year, I intend to plant at least six thousand trees as a source of income for the Mission. May God favor their growth, for it is for his greater glory that they will be planted.²⁰

In another report, written one year later, Bettendorff clarifies that his initiative of planting the cacao trees and, in particular, his decision to involve the settlers was in response to a request from “the Governor to satisfy the wish of the Most Serene Prince [the future King Pedro II].”²¹ Many other letters in his official correspondence as superior refer to cacao as one of the most valuable products for the sustenance of the mission and the colony.²² His successor, the Italian-born Father Pedro Luís Consalvi, stressed Bettendorff’s role in the cacao enterprise by informing the General Superior that “in a very innovative way, Father Rector planted cacao, from which is made the beverage known as chocolate.”²³

The steady growth of demand for cacao in Europe even motivated the colonial authorities to transfer the capital of the colony from São Luís to Belém on the ground that the harbor in the Amazon estuary provided better access to the cacao-producing forests and plantations (Magalhães 2001, 8; Bettendorff 1990, 648). However, the production and export of cacao were not as successful as Bettendorff's letters from the early 1670s claimed. Fluctuations in the colonial market and the climate affected this relatively new economic activity. For example, in 1691, Father Aloísio Conrado Pfeil mentioned a crisis stemming from the lack of cacao and clove bark for export after some bad harvests.²⁴ Furthermore, the settlers continued to complain about the perceived over-commitment of the Jesuits to the cacao trade, reminding them of their spiritual obligations. With regard to this growing discontent, Dauril Alden explains that the

Jesuits, along with the other Orders active in the Amazon, produced some cacao on their own plantations, but they depended primarily upon their Amerindian charges in the interior missions to collect it. Such reliance brought the fathers into direct conflict with vested settler interests. (Alden 1996, 546).

These tensions point to the increasing prospects of profit from cacao and explain the interest of settlers, authorities, and religious orders in increasing its quantity by adapting the once wild-growing tree to rational plantation methods. Referring explicitly to the experience of the Spanish in their colonies, even the regent Dom Pedro insisted in 1675 that cacao should be cultivated in the Amazon region “as it is done in the Indies of Castile.”²⁵ Nonetheless, as mentioned previously, the continuity of seasonal gathering in the sertão missions linked indigenous practices and knowledge with the far-reaching intercontinental trading system that developed around cacao. Father Bettendorff was fully aware that this profitable and extensive business was a means to making the mission self-sufficient.

Lastly, severe epidemics made cacao production extremely precarious. Two outbreaks of contagious disease, in 1661–1662 and 1695–1696, depopulated entire aldeamentos. Besides the high level of mortality, a considerable number of indigenous workers fled the missions during these periods (Neves 2013; Bettendorff 1990, 214–216 and 587–588). Despite these near-regular catastrophic interruptions, however, in general the economy developed advantageously. Therefore, in 1697, at the very end of the seventeenth century, Bettendorff wrote that a ship bound for Portugal could only be loaded with one-third of all the “sugars, tobaccos and, particularly, clove bark and cacao” that had been piled up in the ports of São Luís and Belém (Bettendorff 1990, 648–649). This brief mention reveals, on the one hand, the extent to which agriculture (sugar, tobacco, and cultivated cacao) was intermingled with extractivism (clove bark and wild-growing cacao) around the turn of the eighteenth century and, on the other hand, how far the Amazon region was from being a miserable and precarious periphery—a position that has long been conveyed by historiography.²⁶

Conclusion

The intense agency of indigenous populations inside and outside the missions is clearly noticeable in most of the reports written by Jesuit authors, although the priests tended to emphasize inconstancy and rusticity when writing about their native catechumens and neophytes. In this context, it is important to highlight the role of Father Bettendorff, a missionary from Luxembourg who became a central figure in consolidating the Jesuit missionary network in the second half of the seventeenth century. His lengthy chronicle, and many of his more than fifty official letters, reveal his evident interest in juridical-political and socioeconomic issues and thus testify to his historic contribution to the development of the Amazon region in the first century of Portuguese colonization.

Autonomous missions, which gave protection (at least to some extent) to indigenous groups and their traditional way of life, and cacao production, which sustained (also to some extent) the multiple activities of the religious orders, helped to make the network of missions a crucial socioeconomic and ethnocultural framework that encompassed the vast Amazon basin and its diverse inhabitants. In a certain way, Father Bettendorff’s origins and formative years in a multicultural environment in the “old world” predetermined that this multitalented missionary would become a key agent in this historical process in the “new world.”

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