PROVINCE OF PORTO SEGURO. 



299 



to nominate his son, Don Pedro Deniz de Lancastre, from whose successors it 

 reverted to the crown in the reign of Joseph I. iti a very bad state and with 

 only two towns. One hundred miireas (about £25) de juro, or right, six 

 hundred miireas (about £150) in money, and two moyos (about seventy Win- 

 chester bushels each) of wheat every year as long as the vendor lived, was the 

 price stipulated in the writings of the sale. The Jesuits, who founded a house in 

 the capital in 1553, with the intention of better reducing the Indians to Catho- 

 licism, only left two aldeias entirely Indian, of which they were the curates. 

 Amongst the most able of those in the course of two hundred and five years, 

 who became curates in these missions, many went there to be catechised previous 

 to studying theology at the college of Bahia, in order to learn more perfectly 

 the idiom of the Indians, who were not taught the Portuguese language, as they 

 only treated or had intercourse with the curates, who were well acquainted with 

 their language. 



The Abatyra Indians, at the period before alluded to, destroyed, amongst 

 other places, the towns of Juassema and St. Andre, founded by the duke. 

 These Indians, now unknown, are said to be a horde of the Aimores, or per- 

 haps this was the name by which the Tupininquins designated them in general. 

 The Aimores are believed to have been a tribe of northern Tapuyas, who, in 

 ancient times, in consequence of the wars, proceeded southward, and retired 

 to the west of the serra which afterwards took their name. The neighbouring 

 nations called them Aimbores, and the Portuguese, from corruption, Aimores ; 

 but, for a considerable time, they have had no other name amongst the Chris- 

 tians than Botocudos, in consequence of their custom of perforating the 

 ears and lips. They always wander about, divided into parties of forty 

 to sixty families, destroying game, and gathering wild fruits, their ordinary 

 aliment. Some paint the body, at times, a green colour, at others yellow ; 

 and in order to free themselves from the attacks of the mosquito, at cer- 

 tain seasons, or in places where they most incommode them, they varnish 

 the skin with the juice or milk of certain trees. Their arms are the bow 

 and the arrow barbed on both sides. They have no other conveyance by 

 water, but jangadas, or catamarans, rudely formed of the trunks of the 

 jangada tree, and put together with very little care, with which they cross large 

 rivers. Their combats, like those of all other Indians, are from ambuscades, 

 and they commonly make the assault after dark, and only when they judge 

 that they are taking their enemy by surprise. Some tribes, when they have deter- 



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