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John Trinidade had only one female slave; his other workpeople were a brother and sister-in-law, two godsons, a free negro, one or two Indians, and a family of Muras. Both he and his wife were mamelucos; the negro children called them always father and mother.
But, as Manoel remarked, the fellow may have been one of the unpardoned rebel leaders who had settled here after the recapture of Santarem in 1836, and lived in fear of being inquired for by the authorities of Santarem. After all our troubles we found Cypriano absent from home. His house was a large one, and full of people, old and young, women and children, all of whom were Indians or mamelucos.
Matters of boundaries and frontiers possessed no interest whatever for these Paolistas or Mamelucos, by which latter name the swashbuckling members of this community were better known. The Conqueror of Peru. From an engraving after the original portrait in the Palace of the Viceroys at Lima.
The young mamelucos were pleasant, gentle fellows; they could read and write, and amused themselves on the voyage with a book containing descriptions and statistics of foreign countries, in which they seemed to take great interest one reading while the others listened.
The Cametaenses boast, as they have a right to do, of theirs being the only large town which resisted successfully the anarchists in the great rebellion of 1835-6. While the whites of Para were submitting to the rule of half-savage revolutionists, the mamelucos of Cameta placed themselves under the leadership of a courageous priest, named Prudencio.
These characteristics of the Para Indians are applicable, of course, to some extent, to the Mamelucos, who now constitute a great proportion of the population.
The coast and the interior of the land are peopled by civilised Indians and Mamelucos, with a mixture of free negroes and mulattos. They are poor, for the waters are not abundant in fish, and they are dependent for a livelihood solely on their small plantations, and the scant supply of game found in the woods.
There is a good deal of formality in the intercourse of these half-wild mamelucos, which, I believe, has been chiefly derived from their Indian forefathers, although a little of it may have been copied from the Portuguese. A little distance from the house were the open sheds under which the farinha for the use of the establishment was manufactured.
The trade, wholesale and retail, was in the hands of the Portuguese, of whom there were about 2500 in the place. Many handicrafts were exercised by coloured people, mulattos, mamelucos, free negroes, and Indians.
At the heels of this plague came the smallpox. The yellow fever had fallen most severely on the whites and mamelucos, the negroes wholly escaping; but the smallpox attacked more especially the Indians, negroes, and people of mixed colour, sparing the whites almost entirely, and taking off about a twentieth part of the population in the course of the four months of its stay.
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