Um porto atlântico colonial da América portuguesa: a participação de Jaraguá na formação do território alagoano e na gênese da cidade de Maceió

Abstract

This thesis consists of a study about the port of Jaraguá which is located in Maceió, the capital city of the State of Alagoas, Brazil, spanning the XVI-XVIII centuries. The study examines the role played by this port towards the emergence of Maceió itself as well as in the process of formation of the Alagoas territory. The thesis aims to contribute to scientific knowledge about colonial Brazilian ports in general and Maceió colonial history in particular, a subject that has received only scant attention both in academic investigation and Alagoas historiography. Scientific enquiry has examined mainly the Maceió of the XIX century focusing on the contribution of Jaraguá in relation to two key events, namely: the elevation from town to village status in 1815 as a result of the opening of the Brazilian ports in 1808 to international trade, and the transfer of the capital from Alagoas do Sul to Maceió in 1839. Unveiling Jaraguá as a colonial port in the Portuguese America consists in understanding it at the heart of the imbricated relations concerning the Portuguese colonizing project for Brazil. With this in focus, analysis was undertaken to understand the conquest, control and defense actions that were designed for the Brazilian coast, with specific reference to the southern part of the Capitania of Pernambuco, later to become the Alagoas County. The study focused on the Alagoas’s Atlantic coast, especially the littoral stretch situated between the Pajuçara bay and the French port as well as the local lagoon region. These colonial areas held strong administrative, legal, defensive and economic ties to Jaraguá. It is impossible to examine this port without consideration to key themes of the colonial history of this region, such as overseas navigation, the Portuguese maritime expansion, and the Brazilian urban formation in the first centuries of colonization. In addition, it was necessary to understand it subjectively, as a frontier between sea and land, and a space of physical and symbolic exchanges. All these conceptual aspects shaped the dimensithon of the colonial ports shared by men of the sea and of the land, agents in the construction of the southern Atlantic and the first urban agglomerations built in the vast Brazilian territory, which depended on the sea ports for the Lusitanian mercantile enterprise to succeed and for the safety of life during colonial times. A broad and rich documental, textual and cartographic corpus was used as a mainstay to identify Jaraguá's functions throughout the period of time formed by the three colonial centuries. These functions were distinct in their nature and degree of operation in three different geographical scales: the local scale, the scale of the Brazilian colony, and that of the Portuguese overseas operations. These functions revealed Jaraguá as an indigenous and smuggling port (16th and 17th centuries), as a military port in times of peace and war (17th and 18th centuries), and as a commercial port (from the 18th century), in which Alagoas sugar and valuable shipbuilding woods were shipped to the ports of Pernambuco, Bahia and Lisbon. The commercial activity articulated with the nautical construction was capable not only of transforming the port maritime space, but also to impel the development of the Massayó town in the seven hundreds. All these functions reflect Jaraguá's participation in the Portuguese colonization project and Brazil’s colonial dynamics, and also reaffirm their contribution in the origins of the maritime city of Maceió.