Brazilian manatees (re)discovered: Early modern accounts reflecting the overexploitation of aquatic resources and the emergence of conservation concerns

Introduction

Found to be strange and exotic in the past, as they still are today, manatees (Order Sirenia, Family Trichechidae) are large, slow-moving, herbivorous marine mammals that inhabit tropical and subtropical Atlantic coastal waters and estuaries, mangroves and river basins. ¹ The Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis) is part of the culture and traditions of communities of the Amazon basin, from its major tributaries, smaller rivers and lakes in Peru, Colombia and Ecuador to its mouth in Brazil. The same is true for the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) that range the Atlantic from Florida, the east coast of Mexico and Central America and northern South America, to north-eastern Brazil. Although usually loners, manatees may gather in large groups in feeding areas, for mating and the birth of young. ²

Manatees’ physical characteristics, including mammary glands located in the axillary region (vaguely similar to the human female breasts), have always made them particularly fascinating to human eyes. Consequently, since their first description, and over time, naturalists and humanists have posed questions such as: what are manatees – a big fish or an aquatic mammal? How do they reproduce? How can people use them and for what purpose? What is their function in nature? Are they real animals or descendants from magical beings? These are just some of the pragmatic and theological queries that have arisen since the first encounters between Europeans and these animals.

European explorers and settlers invariably admired manatees. Yet their first encounters also resulted in an immediate and direct attempt to hunt these ‘new’ creatures, ³ as the newly arrived people preyed on natural populations in their appropriation of geographical space and nature. The same happened with monk seals in West Africa and the Caribbean. ⁴ But early historical records also indicate that indigenous people preyed upon these large and strange-looking aquatic animals. They were captured, killed and used for certain purposes, but not intensively until the arrival of Europeans. This was a continuous practice over time, and although global perceptions towards these currently endangered animals have changed dramatically in recent years, some local communities in South America and Africa still regard them as they did in the past. ⁵ They resemble the whale, which has also been imbued with symbolic meaning since time immemorial, ⁶ while simultaneously serving as a very important and valuable resource.

This article aims to assess historical and cultural memories of the natural world in certain regional contexts, and to address present-day nature conservation issues. It is also designed to contextualize historical accounts of anatomy, behaviour and the utilization of manatees in Brazil over time, and to chart the trajectories of change in general perceptions towards natural resources. Portuguese and Spanish documentary sources relating to the Americas, mainly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, support this investigation – notably travel literature books, letters from Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and explorers, chronicles, scientific treatises, illustrated broadsheets, leaflets and images in naturalists’ records, sailors’ reports, folklore sources and literature. The authors found around 30 references to manatees in the Atlantic, but in the present discussion only those that refer to the Americas will be taken into account.

Early modern accounts of manatees

Christopher Columbus was probably the first European to see West Indian manatees (T. manatus) when he arrived in the ‘West Indies’ and compared the exotic animal to a mermaid:

On the 9th January, 1493 three mermaids emerged from the sea waters, not so kind as they were thought to be, but ‘somehow they had a human face’ … They would often be seen by the Portuguese sailors, and Columbus himself pointed out the fact that he had already seen others in the coast of Guinea. ⁷

Columbus might have been already familiar with the West African manatee (Thrichechus senegalensis), possibly sighted while navigating the West African coast under the flag of the Portuguese crown. Thus, the first European to meet manatees must also have seen them on the West African coast by the end of the fifteenth century, and there is later documentation on sightings of the Western Indian and the Brazilian manatees. The first reference to manatees by a Portuguese chronicler was made by Galvão in a compilation about Portuguese discoveries, in which he referred to:

a fish, called monatim, which is big, strong and has a head, face and flesh of a cow. Its arms are close to the shoulders, which it uses to swim; most of its feed are herbs … it has some stones on his head that can be used to calm the pain from kidney stones, and the female has teats, that uses to feed her babies born alive. ⁸

Concerning Brazil, the first reference dated back to 1585 in a report written by Father José de Anchieta about the Captaincy of S. Vincente. ⁹ Descriptions of manatees from Brazil – which in some regions could be one of two possible species (see Figure 1) – were not only common and regular during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but were also repeated in several authors’ work. In fact, in the accounts we analysed, there were references to both the Amazonian and the West Indian manatee. Sometimes it was even possible to name the species, either because some authors stated that the manatee is a marine mammal that comes into fresh water, like the West Indian manatee, or due to the description of their anatomical features, such as the presence or absence of nails which distinguishes the two species. The following description by Fernão Cardim, for instance, identified the West Indian manatee species as follows:

… with its round hands like shovels and on them has five fingers attached with each other and each has nails, as humans … ¹⁰

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Figure 1.

Present-day geographic distribution of the three species of manatees in the Atlantic and historical observations in Brazil, with an indication of an approximate geographical position (n = 8).

Pêro Magalhães de Gândavo, Fernão Cardim, Frei Cristóvão de Lisboa and Ambrósio Brandão included descriptions of manatees in their works. ¹¹ Another relevant documentary source is Historia Tragico-Maritima, ¹² an eighteenth-century collection of narrative accounts of Portuguese maritime travels and shipwrecks from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, replete with descriptions of fauna, flora, people and their habits. In these sources, which characterise the new natural and cultural world of the Americas, the descriptions are similar, as most of them derived from one another. Typically, each author added some new information, or even his own comments and opinions, but most of them are consistent in the information they provide about manatees. Through a process of information sharing and dissemination, several descriptions of these animals seem to have emerged roughly simultaneously. Several authors refer to indigenous names for the animal, usually using the terms ‘peixe-boy’ (ox-fish) or ‘vaca do mar’ (sea-cow), as well as their local, tupi names: ‘goarágoá’, ‘guaragua’ or ‘juarauhá’, sometimes translated as ‘guará-guará’ or ‘y-guá-ri-guá’. ¹³ They refer to their morphological characteristics, such as their large size and weight, sometimes mentioning particular features like the presence or absence of nails, the medicinal properties of some body parts, and a few hunting techniques. These authors also describe the animals’ aquatic habitat as well as noting that it was allowed to eat them on holy days as they were classed as fish. In fact, almost all the writers mentioned the animals as a ‘special kind of fish’ because it breast feeds its offspring and breathes through nostrils out of the water:

This fish has features like land animals, especially the ox … on the nostrils it has two ‘courinhos’ with which it closes them, and snorts by them; and may not be long under water without snorting; … under these arms the females have two breasts with which they feed their offspring, and they do not have more than one. ¹⁴

Most of these early modern descriptions, across different parts of present-day Brazil and adjacent territories, give an indication of the abundance and historical distribution of such animals, while all of them emphasize the animal’s massive size, which resembled that of an ox (manatees have an average length of 2.5 metres and an average weight of 400 kg). ¹⁵ For instance, Brandão stated:

These manatees, which exist here in large scale, are food to the dwellers of Maranhão, due to their deficient supply of meat. ¹⁶

We found 12 references to Brazil in the sources and from those it was possible to bring together eight locations with an approximate geographical position (Figure 1). This is particularly relevant as it offers an insight into the distribution regions of West Indian manatees in the past, which were much broader than today.

Manatees in European natural history discourses

Although the word ‘manatim’ was not used in European natural history treatises until the seventeenth century, it had been registered for the first time in Spanish in 1526 in the Sumario de la Natural Historia de las Indias by Oviedo. ¹⁷ Here, it appeared with the term ‘lamatim’, which probably derives from the French word lamentation, meaning lament or lamentation – a reference to the manatees’ groans and grunts. ¹⁸ Spanish conquerors and explorers coined the term manati in the Greater Antilles in 1516, while it also seems to have originated in native American languages, meaning ‘nipple’. In his work, Oviedo refers to ‘los pescados y pesquerías’ (see Figure 2):

The manatee is a fish of the sea, a big one, and is far larger than a shark in greatness and length, and is very ugly (…). ¹⁹

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Figure 2.

West Indian manatee’s representations in the work La Historia General de las Indias of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés. On the left, the earliest illustration of a sirenian to be published from the 1535 edition (Courtesy of Caryn Self-Sullivan and Daryl P. Domning at http://67.59.130.204/biblio/). On the right, the woodcut from the 1547 edition (Salamanca, Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University).

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the work of Oviedo was assimilated into European natural history circles by means of copies and translations. A reference to his manatee appeared in Clusius’ work (1605), ²⁰ with a different illustration, which, in turn, was copied to Aldrovandi’s work of 1613 (see Figure 3). ²¹

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Figure 3.

The manatee in Carolus Clusius’s Exoticorum.

Aldrovandi coined the terms Manati and Vacca marina, which was later used by Linnaeus in classifying the species as T. manatus. ²² Linnaeus identified its habitat as the marine environment of the Americas and the defined type locality as the West Indies.

Early modern Portuguese authors wrote about manatees, sometimes displaying illustrations, among which the description and drawing in the work by Frei Cristóvão de Lisboa is notable due to the accuracy of the features of the animal in his illustrations. ²³ Other contemporary authors, such as Cavazzi and Cadornega, ²⁴ provided good written descriptions and illustrations of West African manatees (see Figure 4). However, their knowledge about the animal, mostly reliant on local peoples’ understanding, was lost to coeval scholars, as it has been to the modern disciplines of natural history and zoology.

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Figure 4.

West African manatee, commonly called ‘woman-fish’.

With just a couple of exceptions, ²⁵ the stories and publications of Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, Spanish authors concerning the natural history of the ‘East and West Indies’ were not considered very relevant to the development of European natural history. Moreover, Portuguese accounts of natural novelties and exoticism remained locked away in manuscripts held by bureaucrats, who had been warned not to reveal the state’s commercial secrets and interests. Thus, like discoveries and accounts of the exotic nature of the Southern Atlantic, manatees from the Portuguese America remained obscure in the annals of natural history.

Exploitation of manatees and evolution of conservation concerns

Manatees’ historical captures and uses are reported for several regions of South America and the Caribbean where exploitation has taken place since pre-Columbian times, which has resulted in most populations being extirpated by now. ²⁶ Manatees have long served as an important food resource for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin and have been hunted since time immemorial, as shown by bones found in shell mounds. ²⁷ They have always been surrounded by local myths and legends and are part of Amazonian and Brazilian folklore – from the history of the two lovers who were transformed into manatees when bathing in the Amazon, to the name of a manatee-shaped dark patch near Orion constellation 33, and other present-day superstitions. ²⁸

Before Europeans started exploiting manatees, local people were already catching them. In fact, different parts of the animal were utilized by natives: the meat for consumption; the two-centimetre thick hides were doused with hot ashes to make stiff shields that could resist arrows and shots; and the shoulder-blade was used as a cooking spatula. ²⁹ Like many other local products derived from plants and animals, they were a component in traditional medicine. Father José de Anchieta describes how manatees were used for medicine and human food:

In the torrent rivers that run into the sea there are sea cows that weight between 20 and 30 arrobas. Inside their brains there is a remedial stone for the ones who have kidney stones, and their meat is valuable, it goes well with collard and tastes like cow meat; if spiced, it tastes like mutton and also like pork and is easily slaughtered. ³⁰

Brandão also mentions their capture and uses as food:

… the fish they call ox are found in large-scale, they are larger than the ones they are named after, have a strange size and face; they gather them in those places, as in a vivarium, and there they easily kill them with barbs, because they are easily caught and found while swimming. These manatees are no different (food, whatsoever) from cow meat; they are very similar to meat and several people would eat them as such, and after telling them it was fish, they still would not believe. ³¹

And in another case, Gândavo wrote:

There they breed [In the Captainship of Ilheos] several manatees whose snout is like an ox and whose two knuckles they use to swim, they do not have scales or resemblance to a fish, but in the tail. Killed with harpoons, they are so fat and big, that some even weight thirty or forty arrobas. It is a very flavourful fish that almost tastes like pork or deer. We may cook it with kale and stew it like meat; nobody would consider it a fish, unless knowing it beforehand. The females have two breasts where the calves suckle to survive and they are fed milk (a thing that no other fish can do). They exist in some bays and rivers of this coast and reared in the sea, but they drink fresh water and for this reason several come to this lagoon, or somewhere where a stream drowns into the sea. ³²

Their abundance and the ease with which they could be caught made manatees an easy target for local people and settlers, and therefore they were commonly taken during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Brazil. In most cases, we cannot account for the number of manatees captured, but some conclusions can nevertheless be inferred from such variables as the number of vessels loaded, barrels filled or people fed.

The voyage account of the ship S. Francisco in 1596 is rich in descriptions of fauna and its uses, including manatees:

A very different thing is the Manatee, that we call ox-fish; we saw in the City of Santo Domingo a mother and a calf alive; the calf could on its own feed a couple of hundred men and there would still be enough to invite a few others. ³³

And in the following pages of the same account:

We stew this ox-fish with everything that we throw in a cow pot: and its meat is so similar, that we brought to our victualling some barrels of it salted, from Brazil, and we often ate it all the way to Puerto Rico. ³⁴

However, in at least one account from 1614 the number of captured manatees is given, which reflects the abundance of the animal in the early seventeenth century, as stated in the Jornada do Maranhão:

… and in the sea and rivers there are infinite sorts and quantities of fishes, which are often taken by hand and strokes, and of ox-fishes, which meat is like the cow’s, with the same colour, taste and smell, and they are so abundant in this place that, just from one river, the French took two hundred and fifty. ³⁵

In 1659, Father António Vieira wrote a letter to the Portuguese King Afonso VI stating that more than 20 Dutch ships a year sailed from Brazil loaded with unspecified manatee products. ³⁶ The abundant fat of the animal, that could reach 100 kg for a large specimen, was melted at first to produce lighting oil, and later on, in the eighteenth century, butter. ³⁷ In the eighteenth century, probably due to the high profits of this activity and the trade in different local animals, a Portuguese Royal Fishery was established in the Amazon basin to process turtle eggs, fish and manatees. Between 1776 and 1778, about 1500 manatees were killed, resulting in 3873 arrobas (58,095 kilos) of meat and 1613 pots of butter. ³⁸

The unregulated capture of a high number of animals led to the emergence of concerns about the management of such a valuable resource that, by the late eighteenth century, was already known to be finite. In fact, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira (1756–1815), who was commissioned by the Portuguese state to direct a Philosophical Journey to Brazil, could be considered a pioneer in terms of nature conservation and natural resource management. ³⁹ He drew attention to the fact that highly predatory fishing methods were threatening the health of regional economies in Brazil, citing the unregulated and indiscriminate capture of manatees, sea turtles and other aquatic animals. ⁴⁰ He stressed that all the animals were harpooned, with no distinction of size or age, even pregnant females, which he believed to be the reason for the decrease of animal numbers in some lakes. This is one example of the political consciousness of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira regarding nature conservation, a cause that he pursued through his writings, drawings and specimens, which he sent back to Portugal (see Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Naturalised manatee from the eighteenth century (probably a specimen sent to Portugal by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, 1782–1793?).

Such environmental concern is present in the work of various authors, including the naturalist and statesman José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a contemporary of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, who, in his report about whaling and fisheries in Brazil, strongly criticised the disorderly and unregulated ways in which whales were being hunted. ⁴¹ His concern went beyond whales; he mentioned the letter of Father António Vieira and the above-mentioned account of Nau S. Francisco, stating that at that moment the number of hunted manatees was decreasing. ⁴²

Thus, like other coeval authors, ⁴³ Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira was a rare example of eco-visionary foresight blossoming in some remote regions of Brazil, to be developed, together with a Brazilian identity, in the following century. Despite these concerns, the hunting and use of manatees and its related products continued to be an important economic activity throughout the centuries and beyond the independence of Brazil in the nineteenth century (see Figure 6). A nineteenth-century statistical report on the industry and commerce of the Province of Amazonas shows the export of 224 arrobas (3360 kilos) of manatee meat, 4702 pots of manatee butter and 546 pots of manatee mixira – a preserved mixture made from the animal meat cooked in its own oil – from Rio Negro to Pará, apparently a smaller amount than in the previous century. ⁴⁴ Captures kept occurring over time, achieving the highest numbers in the middle of the 20th century and, as with other overexploited aquatic populations, manatees decreased significantly in modern times, both at population and species level. ⁴⁵ Manatees were easily hunted, typically captured with nets near the shores and then killed with hand harpoons. In Brazil, for instance, as in neighbouring Venezuela, ⁴⁶ they were hunted by indigenous people and European settlers and killed for their meat, oil and hide. ⁴⁷ They are still killed and used to this day.

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Figure 6.

A hook made from manatee bone (probably sent to Portugal by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, 1782–1793?).

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species presently lists the Amazonian and the West Indian Manatees as vulnerable, ⁴⁸ with the major threats in Brazil being hunting, changing and destruction of habitats, incidental captures, vessel strikes and genetic problems within populations. ⁴⁹ Although protected by law since 1982, manatees are still poached with harpoon, mainly for their meat, for subsistence and illegal commerce. ⁵⁰ Locally, manatee hunting is considered to require fishermen’s intellectual and physical qualities and a great knowledge about the habitat and manatees’ behaviour, which is traditionally passed down from father to son. ⁵¹ Manatees’ senses are well known, and due to their accurate hearing capacities, fishermen attribute to them some kind of ‘power’. There are several local beliefs associated with these animals; it is said that it brings bad luck and incapacity to hunt more manatees. It is also said that only some men are empowered by God to kill them and that the young male manatees are only separated from their mothers after mating with them. ⁵² Furthermore, manatee fat is still used in traditional medicine, for example in cases of wounds, inflamed sprains, muscle strain, arthritis and osteoporosis, ⁵³ showing how important this animal still is for local communities.

Discussion

In the light of Portuguese expansion into the South Atlantic, obtaining knowledge about a New World was undoubtedly a strong stimulus, both to look at the world from a new geographical and cultural perspective, and also – through descriptions of the novelty, exoticism, beauty and strangeness of nature – to appreciate its value as an economic resource. Moreover, like the lands and the people, natural resources – in this case, aquatic animals – were considered to be susceptible to appropriation. The capture of these mammals by Europeans was a consequence of several factors, most of them related to the essence of being human: 1) fear of something strange, big, new and previously unknown that could be potentially dangerous; 2) a utilitarian interest in the animal and its by-products for magic and medicinal purposes; 3) the possibility of obtaining and trading commercial and valuable resources, such as butter and a ‘kind of meat’ that could be eaten on holy days. Again, marine animals were given mythical and mundane properties, ⁵⁴ being able to nourish both mind and body. ⁵⁵

The historical evidence presented here supports the contention that European settlers pursued pre-existing patterns of exploitation developed by local people, who used manatees as an important resource. It is clear that many perceptions and uses of manatees have persisted from the sixteenth century to this day. Around the eighteenth century, we find some ideas related to nature and its resources that are similar to current ecological concerns and reflections. The concept of nature conservation and, above all, resource management, started to emerge. The image of the Earth as an integrated and living entity, the obstructive impact of human action, the risk of social and economic collapse due to environmental degradation and the need to promote a sustainable form of development, are present in the writing of some authors of that period in respect of Brazilian colonial biodiversity. ⁵⁶ But even though there was an early concern regarding the regulation of the use of manatees as important natural resources, the intensification of hunting and its long-term continuity led to a serious depletion of their populations and to a severe constriction of their distribution.

Indeed, this work shows evidence of a former distribution area along the Atlantic coast of South America that was larger than nowadays. Although the species are not yet extinct, they are close to extirpation in several geographical areas. Current conservation issues have yet to be addressed in the countries where manatees still live, and a proper discussion of their historical environmental and cultural importance remains to be carried out. ⁵⁷ Addressing extirpation and extinction of the post-Columbian population may provide the opportunity to understand the interplay of social and ecological factors. ⁵⁸ The early modern Portuguese sources for the Atlantic and Brazil provide relevant information regarding the presence of humans and their use of species like manatees. However, research in different scientific domains still needs to be carried out, most notably: 1) present-day conservation issues in Brazil, also in relation to ethnozoology; 2) investigation of modern fishing statistics in Brazil, in order to evaluate close to pristine population and changes over time in local abundances; 3) replication of such research concerning African manatees, where a similar process may have taken place; 4) replication of this research using dugongs as the Indian counterpart of manatees. It is also important to draw attention to the importance of analysing the historical contexts in which the primary sources were generated and the fact that Portuguese and Spanish sources still need to be discussed within an Anglo-Saxon dominated framework. In addition, we need to keep in mind the importance of researching the historical impact of humans on natural populations and the change or persistency of local peoples’ perceptions in a global world.

Manatees were captured in different geographical areas of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus; the increase in human population accelerated their decline up to the present day and severely depleted manatee populations. ⁵⁹ The present work draws on the authors’ long-term research related to early modern descriptions, representations and perceptions of the marine environment and its natural populations using hybrid practices of investigation. ⁶⁰ It also reflects recent directions of research in the history of natural history as well as in the history of marine environments. ⁶¹ The histories of marine and aquatic environments and animals are still understudied by present-day scholars, as are their habitats and historical relationships with local and foreign people. ⁶²

We expect that, in the future, a clear understanding of the past value and use of manatees may contribute to the establishment and evolution of knowledge about the natural world and of the impact of humans on natural ecosystems. Likewise, these animals shall also be taken into account when discussing conservation concerns, in the way that conceptions and perceptions were constructed in early modern times by Europeans and local people in different parts of the Atlantic world.