A native South American warrior.
18th century-São José Fortress near Florianópolis, in Southern Brazil.
South America is generally denied any military history between Pizarro’s overthrow of the Incas in the 1530s and the Wars of Liberation in the early nineteenth century. This is misleading. The conquistadors had taken only a fraction of South America, and in succeeding centuries conflict between Spanish and Portuguese colonies and natives continued. In addition, there were rebellions in these colonies and warfare between native groups, while, although this was less common, there was also conflict between the Spaniards and the Portuguese. In some areas, the colonial powers made considerable advances
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This was particularly true in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, where the discovery of goldfields in the interior led to an intensification of European activity and, inevitably, to a native response. The Cuiaba goldfields were discovered in 1719 and the consequences of exploitation soon worried the Native Americans. A convoy of gold seekers in canoes was destroyed by the Paiagua on the River Paraguay in 1725 and another was mauled the following year. The Paiagua fired their bows more rapidly than the Portuguese their muskets, and they also made masterly use of their canoes, not least by leaping into the water and tipping them up to protect themselves from musket fire. In 1730 the annual flotilla carrying gold was ambushed and mostly destroyed on the way back from Cuiaba. Punitive expeditions achieved little in 1730 and 1731, but in 1734 the combination of surprise attack and fire-power devastated the Paiagua. Although the Paiagua mounted successful attacks in 1735 and 1736, their casualties led to a slackening of activity and they were also affected by disease and by the attacks of the Guaicuru Indians. By the 1780s the Paiagua had been largely wiped out, but their story shows the danger of assuming a simple model of European military superiority. Elsewhere, the use of native allies was important: Portuguese troops were unable to defeat the Caiapo, who ambushed Portuguese settlements and convoys, but the Bororo, under the leadership of a Portuguese woodsman Antonio Pires de Campos, pressed them hard in a bitter war between 1745 and 1751.
The ability to win and exploit local allies reflected the lack of native unity. (The situation had been the same when the Turks attacked Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.) This, disease and the consequences of enslavement all helped the Portuguese far more than any particular success in contact warfare. Portuguese fire-power was important but natives such as the Muras in central Amazonia learned to avoid it.
The Muras, adept with their bows and arrows, and effective owing to their mobility, harried Portuguese settlements and trade routes in the 1760s and 1770s, but they could only check, not reverse, the tide of advance. The same was true of native resistance to the Spaniards (on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, in the Guajiro Peninsula in Colombia in the 1770s and by the Araucanians in Chile) and to the British (by the Maroons, runaway slaves, in the interior of Jamaica in the 1730s and by the native Caribs on the West Indian island of St Vincent).
European control was anchored by fortifications, for example those along the Bio Bio river in Chile, such as the fortress of Nacimiento, or the Spanish fortress at Pensacola in western Florida founded in 1698, or that at Monterey, established in 1770 as the capital of New California.
