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Caeté

Tupi people of the São Francisco river mouth and Pernambuco coast, notorious for killing and reputedly eating shipwrecked Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha in 1556; a Portuguese war of extermination (1556-58, renewed 1587) destroyed them as a coastal nation, survivors scattering north toward the Maranhão-Pará border.

Destroyed as a coastal nation by the Portuguese wars of 1556–58 and 1587 after the killing of Bishop Sardinha; survivors scattered toward the Maranhão–Pará border. Not a modern land base — ~135 people recorded as self-identified Caeté descendants.

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Moments from the Chronicle

• 1556 The Caeté and Bishop Sardinha Brazil's first bishop, Pero Fernandes Sardinha, is shipwrecked at the mouth of the Coruripe (in present-day Alagoas, then the Captaincy of Pernambuco) and reputedly eaten by the Caeté; the Portuguese declare the nation 'enemies of the faith,' and over the following decades Jerônimo de Albuquerque and others all but exterminate them in punitive war and slaving. Some historians hold the cannibalism story was exaggerated to justify clearing the Caeté from the sugar coast.

Further reading

• 1491 Charles C. Mann · 1978

  An accessible account of the pre-Columbian Americas and the conquest that gutted Amazonian and coastal Brazilian river peoples like the Cocama, Potiguara and Tamoio.

• The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Frank Salomon · 1996

  Surveys the coastal and interior Tupi of the central northeast (broad regional context).

Sources

• Caeté — Wikidata Q2398013