Augusto Ivan de Freitas Pinheiro and Eliane Canedo
Research and contributions: Cristiane Titoneli
City of mills
From 1575 onwards, the sugarcane boom swept through the Rio de Janeiro Captaincy, imposing radical changes on its landscapes. As the brazilwood trade and whale hunting declined, the colonizers shifted to growing sugarcane, with exports offering the possibility of high profits.
Initially, Portuguese settlers established their plantations and sugar mills on indigenous lands, clearing valleys and hillsides to make way for single-crop sugarcane fields. However, these plantations soon began to expand rapidly, covering the outskirts of the city and also the flatlands in its West Zone (Jacarepaguá, Campo Grande, Guaratiba and Santa Cruz), as well as lowland areas around the Guanabara Bay, including Ilha do Governador island.
These activities expanded at a dynamic pace. At the end of the XVI century, there were only six sugar mills in the Rio de Janeiro Captaincy – and a century later there were already 136 sprawling sugarcane plantations in this region. According to a study by geographer Mauricio Abreu, based on Jesuit archives in the Vatican, there were already more than 160 sugar mills by the XVIII century. They included the Engenho d’El Rei, owned by the Portuguese Crown located on the shores of the Lagoa de Camambucaba, the old name of today’s Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. In addition to plantation houses and slave quarters, they all had the countless facilities needed to process and pack their output. Specializing in export agriculture, their food crops were limited to meeting local subsistence needs, with surplus produce shipped to the city.8
Bustling with pedestrians, carriages and oxcarts, these noisy hubs grew into the embryos of urban neighborhoods over the years, many of which still today retain the names of the sugar mills from which they sprang: Engenho de Dentro, Engenho Velho, Engenho Novo, Engenho da Rainha and Engenho da Tijuca.
These mills processed sugarcane into sugarloaves: loaf-shaped chunks of raw sugar that gave rise to the name of the famous topographical landmark that is an emblem of Rio: the Sugarloaf. Packed into crates weighing twenty to thirty arrobas (300 to 450 kilograms or 700 to 1,000 pounds), they were shipped to the Rio Docklands, where ships set sail for Europe. It thus became vital to turn beaten earth trails into roads that could carry traffic, ensuring fast outflows of goods. In addition to underpinning territorial integration, all these roads led to the Port, which at that time was located on Praia de Manuel de Brito beach, between the Morro de São Bento and Morro do Castelo hills.
The rapid expansion of the export produce sector in the Rio de Janeiro Captaincy siphoned off large amounts of shipping from São Vicente in São Paulo State, with many port activities shifting to Rio de Janeiro during the late XVI and early XVII centuries. This resulted in a massive upsurge in the urban population, with sweeping changes in social structures and the configuration of its urban fabric. The population grew exponentially at this time. From 12,000 inhabitants in 1713, it doubled to 24,397 in 1740 and reached 43,736 in 1799, of whom 14,986 were enslaved.
Visitors to Rio at that time left many comments on record, praising its lush natural beauty, amazing light and vivid colors, but complaining about excessive heat and unpleasant smells, as well as fears prompted by large numbers of Black people in the streets. This was because there were few free workers, with a very small elite – military men, civil servants and merchants – who ran the city in political and economic terms.9
Sugarcane production peaked during the 1630s. From 1632 to 1642, an average of 20 to 25 caravels left Port of Rio each year, loaded with crates of sugar. Another valuable sugarcane sub-product also arrived in the Port: in 1778, there were 176 distilleries in the Rio de Janeiro Captaincy, with 1,752 enslaved workers producing an annual output of 2,477 casks of fiery aguardente exported to the coast of Africa.
Lined with wooden jetties called trapiches, the entire shore was always bustling, with cargoes arriving from upstate joining the output of sugar mills in the North Zone and Baixada lowlands, as well as produce feeding the city, grown by small farmers at the inland end of the bay.