Boats, food, indian slaves and courage to face terrifying threats where some of the ingredients of that enterprise.
They didn’t know the distances and had not much information in respect to the tribes to be found on the trail. Their best guess about such doubts were
given by the indians, already tamed and forced to get along. The tiny and poor village would be the biggest metropolis in South America, but in those days it was just a place for fierce people to arrange their expeditions.
There was no law and the portuguese crown had no influence on it, what turned out to bee a bless, given the fact that the government used to tie people’s initiatives and impose taxes in everything.
Histories were told of head shrinking tribes and other frightening techniques to scare enemies to avoid their territories. In respect to the bodies, the rule was to be eaten in rituals, but only the brave. Cowards should not be eaten, for cowardice was deemed a contagious disease. But for the kind of man the village attracted those threats weren’t enough to stop them. So they invested all the money in their possession and borrowed more from some investors that had a high probability of losing their savings. These were in risk of losing just money while the adventurers would lose the sanity, the peace and, not infrequently, life itself.
After thousands of miles, opening the way into the shut rainforest, walking on all kinds of ground and suffering the fevers and all the deprivations one may imagine, they realized they were lost. By the calculations they should have reached the Andes but they were stuck in somewhere in the middle of a South American tropical forest. Men were dying in despair and the bodies left in shallow graves scattered over the trail.
At some point they, the few ones that were left some reasoning, decided they should try to escape the hell by a river heading for the north. And then, after some more several weeks of ordeal they managed to reach the Amazon estuary and the city of Belem.
From the almost two thousand who started the expedition only two dozen were given the chance to survive to try again to find the Eldorado.
Raposo was one of them. He was shaken by the torments of that almost mortal experience, but his will is something not easily erased and after some rest he is ready for other sagas.
An opportunity to earn some money appears by the government need to fight a slave insurrection in the country’s northeast region. Slaves of african descent have managed to escape and set an settlement in a hilly place, under the rule of Zumbi.
Earlier attempts to defeat the rebels were repelled and for many years the place attracted escapees from sugarcane plantations around. Something have to be done to sweep away the challenge to the law and order.
And so was done by Raposo and other men brought from S. Paulo. But that was not the only time they were drafted to help the authorities without enough strength to avoid challenges to the law and order. When the dutch invaders were to be expelled from the Terra de Santa Cruz, these adventurers were called up from the distant Village to help to oust the enemies.
For all that, Raposo and some others of his kind were the main reason that Terra de Santa Cruz is today a country named Brasil, huge and unified by language and culture.