The lack of uniformity sets up Chapter 5, which focuses on the places that were developing along the main course of the Amazon and the lower parts of its tributaries. Most of these settlements were missions, and by the early eighteenth century they had taken on board a dual identity of being connected to the hinterland and to the colonial centre of Belém. This chapter seeks to show the riverine areas were not emptied, as many scholars have wrongly assumed. A more nuanced historical understanding of the ethnic profiles between missions and the hinterlands is revealed, where the core elements of each place include ethnic composition, its location (chosen or imposed), economic contribution to the colonial economy, military and missionary presence, and relationship to hinterland. We thus have the three spaces emerging by the mid eighteenth century – the Amerindian complexes in the hinterland, the colonial sphere centred on Belém, and the riverine settlements which formed their own assemblies.

Chapter 3 examines the reorganization of Indigenous regional networks in the areas near to Belém in the Lower Amazon. To avoid enslavement by the Portuguese, some Indigenous communities moved away from the easy-to-access riverbanks. Other Indigenous people successfully engaged with the Crown on their own terms, which allowed them a measure of autonomy to build communities, use their skills for their own benefit, and meet the demands of settlers. These changes and movements led to the development of what the Portuguese called the sertão, a place where people and forest and river products could be retrieved. From an Indigenous perspective, a regrouping occurred as people fled slavery upriver and moved to the riverbank to access colonial goods, such as metal tools.

This chapter explores the ways that rivers could shift from cultural and economic resource to sites of risk. Beginning with a close reading of the early medieval historian Gregory of Tours, it argues that as a bishop, Gregory saw rivers both as sites of regular and significant economic and cultural risk and of potential religious salvation. This balance between practical and religious response and representation weaves through the chapter, which draws heavily on hagiographical accounts and historical sources to explore cultural constructions of “risk.” Rivers were sources of economic and political instability, and threats to cultural memory and cohesion. Floods, shipwrecks, drought, and other disasters are found throughout medieval narrative, and form the basis of this chapter’s analysis. Finally, this chapter argues that medieval authors also saw rivers as connected to existential threats: the “Flood,” sin, demons, and the dissolution of memory and cultural identity. Paired with these fears, those same rivers became sources of salvation and markers of sanctity.