Captains of the Sand

In 1937 Jorge Amado published his sixth novel, Captains of the Sand, the last in a series of novels he called ‘The Bahian Novels’ which began in 1931 with Carnival Country. In an afterword, Amado admits (with a certain amount of false modesty) they are the work of a young man and “could not help but be full of defects” but goes on to highlight what he regards as their most important achievement:

“…an absolute solidarity with and a great love for the humanity that lives in these books.”

Captains of the Sand (translated by Gregory Rabassa) tells the story of a gang of homeless boys who live a lawless life with its own code, led by the charismatic ‘Bullet’. The novel’s link to the reality of life in Bahia is emphasised by an opening section consisting of a newspaper article about the “group of assaulting and thieving children who infest our city” bemoaning the failure of the official response, followed by a series of buck-passing letters from those accused of inadequate action. This, of course, immediately places the reader on the side of the boys who have little hope of support to escape the desperate and often dangerous lives they are forced to live, sleeping in an abandoned warehouse, “urchins of all colours, and of the most varied ages, nine to sixteen.”

The story of their leader, fifteen-year-old Bullet, is typical:

“He never knew anything about his mother, his father died of a bullet wound.”

The other boys we become acquainted with also have nicknames, generally self-explanatory: Big Joao is large and strong; the Professor steals books to read; Cat is a ladies’ man (boy), vain enough to steal a ring just to wear it. Legless is lame and is used by the group to infiltrate houses they intend to rob; playing on the sympathy of adults to ask for work then staying for a few days to case out the target before informing the others where all the valuables are to be found. Though he plays the part of an angel, Legless has a reputation for being mean, no doubt fuelled by a past in which he has never known a family, and one particularly traumatic incident when he was arrested and the drunken policemen “made him run around a holding room on his lame leg.”

“In each corner there was one with a long piece of rubber hose. The marks left on his back had disappeared. But inside him the pain of that hour had never gone.”

At one point he is placed in a house where he is treated so well that he is tempted to abandon the Captains, as he experiences love for the first time:

“He remembered at other times when he ran away from a house so it could be raided a great joy came over him. This time there was no joy at all.”

Though the boys have had to grow up fast, Amado reminds us that they are still children when a carousel comes to the city. Legless and another boy, Dry Gulch, get a job working on the carousel, and when Legless gets a chance to ride he does so in childish wonder:

“He goes along like a believer to mass, a lover to the breast of his beloved, a suicide to death.”

When Father Jose Pedro goes with the boys to the carousel, he sees they are “full of desire to ride the horses, spin with the lights.”

“ ‘They were children, yes,’ the priest thought.”

Father Jose Pedro is one of the few adults who wants to help the boys, much to the displeasure of the Church. His early attempts fail because he does not understand them, as he himself realises:

“He saw that it was absurd because freedom was the deepest feeling on the hearts of the Captains of the Sands and he had to try other means.”

It is freedom that the Captains prize above all.

But although Amado portrays the boys sympathetically, he does not gloss over their crimes. Those of theft may be easier to overlook given their poverty, but he also details their treatment of women and girls, whom the boys routinely assault on the beach at night. Even Bullet, when he discovers that the girl he has caught is a virgin, only concedes, “I’ll only do it in the rear.” Later, when the Professor brings a girl back to the warehouse the other boys immediately assume they can all sleep with her, “like vultures over a piece of meat”, though they eventually agree they she can stay as one of the gang.

These are only a few of the many stories, and characters, contained within the novel’s pages. Episodic in form, we also see the members of the gang grow and develop, no better and no worse than the society which has rejected them. Amado would continue writing for another sixty years, but these early novels would remain close to his heart, “based on the love a young man felt for the suffering, the joy, the life of the people of his land.”

Tags: 1937 club, captains of the sand, Jorge Amado