Cunhambebe

Image description: This is a black-and-white engraving. The central figure is an indigenous man, wearing a feather headband on his head and a cord band around his neck. He holds a long, cylindrical musical instrument with both hands. In the background, there is a round, rounded object, possibly a mirror, hanging on the wall.

The most important indigenous leader in our pre-colonial history, Cunhambebe is regarded as the fiercest fighter against Portuguese domination along the entire coast, and he led the Tupinambás from Cabo Frio to Bertioga in the 1550s. His main village stood on the banks of the Ariró River, in Angra dos Reis. Nowadays, this region is a district of Angra, and the site bears his name. Fearless, Cunhambebe commanded a group of powerful warriors who haunted the Portuguese of São Vicente for more than ten years. A palisade, built by the Portuguese to block the passage of Tupinambá canoes through the Bertioga channel in 1547, was destroyed by Cunhambebe in 1551. He boasted of having already defeated the Portuguese countless times and claimed to have freed many of his people from slavery.

There are at least three assumptions about the meaning of how he was called. The most accepted one is that Cunhambebe would be the combination of kunhã (woman) and mbeb (nasalized form of peb + a); flattened. Kunhambeba would be a man with "flattened woman's breasts," or rather, an enormous man with a quite prominent chest. Researchers generally conclude that the nickname referred to his physical build and especially to his muscular chest. This matches the description made by the Frenchman André Thevet, who encountered him in Rio de Janeiro as "robust, with strong limbs, about 2 meters tall, and the boldest, cruelest, and most feared by all."

Cunhambebe was also a morubixaba-uaçu – in times of war, he was the supreme leader. This is made clear in the accounts left by Hans Staden in the year 1554. Staden was the gunner at Fort Bertioga and was captured by a group of Tupinambás from Ubatuba. Treated as a trophy of war, the German was taken to Cunhambebe in the village on the Ariró river.

There he came across 15 heads of Maracajá natives, allies of the Portuguese, impaled on stakes at the entrance to the village. Hans Staden entered the main longhouse and soon recognized who Cunhambebe was. He had a green stone in his lower lip and wore an enormous rosary of shells with several loops around his neck. It was Cunhambebe himself who ordered the natives of Ubatuba to bring Hans Staden to him so that he could ask about the plans of his enemies – the Portuguese and the Tupiniquim. At one point, he asks whether the Portuguese feared him, to which Hans Staden replies: "Yes, they speak a lot about you and the great wars you usually wage against them; but now they are fortifying Bertioga better." At that moment, Cunhambebe reveals, just like Aimberê, that he too had already been captured by the Portuguese. A fact that must have been one of the reasons for his revolt. "I wanted to capture them from time to time, just as they had captured me in the woods."

Image description: The image is a black-and-white engraving. On the left, we see a human face with short hair and a thoughtful expression. On the right, there are three containers of different shapes, arranged in a horizontal line. The first is a wide, low container, the second is a taller, narrower container, and the third is a small, narrow container. Above the containers, there is a kind of scale or measuring instrument.

One year after this passage, another source would report more information about this legendary Tupinambá warrior. The French friar André Thevet recounted details of the meeting that took place between Cunhambebe and Villegaignon, in Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after the French arrived in Guanabara, in 1555, a messenger was sent to notify the morubixaba-uaçu of Angra dos Reis, and Cunhambebe personally went to Rio de Janeiro to meet the French commander.

The account by the Franciscan friar Thevet makes it possible to infer that Tupinambá leader's excitement at the arrival of a large number of potential allies. According to the friar, Cunhambebe "from three o'clock in the morning would already set about speaking of his victories and revenge against his enemies, always accompanying his words with threatening gestures." Thevet also writes, based on information from Cunhambebe himself, that his village was "enormous, entirely fortified all around with bastions and war platforms, even having fire-mouths (cannons) and some falconets taken from the Portuguese."

Villegaignon granted an audience to Cunhambebe, showing himself well disposed toward him, as did the rest of the retinue. In his speech to impress the French allies, Cunhambebe said that he had killed and devoured so many Portuguese and enemy indigenous people “that their number reached five thousand”. He went on to show the Normans who he was: “Thanks to my heroic deeds I received the title of the greatest morubixaba that ever existed among us”, “my enemies were never able to attack me”, “I am great, I am powerful, I am strong” and “I freed many people from the clutches of my enemies”. He knew how important French support was for the fight against the Portuguese. He then began asking about their beliefs and imitating the Europeans when they prayed.

Image description: The image is a black-and-white engraving. It shows a figure wearing a crown of leaves and feathers, with a bow and arrows on his back. The figure is nude down to the knees, wearing a band of feathers at the waist. His right hand points to the side, while his left holds the bow. At the top of the image is the number "108" and the text "lysis Aldrouandi." Below that is written "Icon Regis Quoniambee."

According to Thevet, Cunhambebe stayed among them for 18 days in Guanabara, a period that may have been crucial to his demise. As soon as dozens of Frenchmen landed on the bay's beaches to begin colonizing the land, within a few days a severe epidemic broke out among the natives. With no antibodies for the diseases brought from European ports, the Tupinambás found themselves in a situation of calamity. The number of dead in this tragedy is impossible to measure. André Thevet later wrote that more than 8,000 indigenous people would have died. Another witness to the Tupinambá despair over such unprecedented mortality, Nicolas Barré points to a death toll ten times smaller. Dated May 25, 1556, Barré's letter states that eight hundred natives perished in that epidemic, though Villegaignon's pilot probably had contact with only a few coastal villages. Either way, the dead were many, and the situation was so severe that it significantly contributed to the decline of the Tupinambá population in Guanabara.

In the following months, Thevet indicates that "there were no longer people among them who could cut the pau-brasil and transport it to the ships" and that the "majority of the morubixabas died from this plague." In this Tupinambá tragedy, not even the healthy and stout Cunhambebe managed to resist. According to Thevet, the chief leader of the Rio de Janeiro warriors returned ill to Angra dos Reis, where he came to pass away, in the year 1556.