THE DIAMANTINE DEMARCATION

The stage upon which the course of Chica da Silva's life played out was the village of Tejuco, now the town of Diamantina, and its surroundings in the captaincy of Minas Gerais, an outpost of the Portuguese Empire. Though remote, the village was a kaleidoscope of the world around it, and the life that unfolded there was a mirror to the age.

Throughout the entire Western world, the eighteenth century was a period of enormous transformation. Discontent reigned in all corners, and revolts brimmed over into what came to be known as the “age of revolutions.” At either end of a period of just less than a hundred years, the power of kings was to reach its peak in the figure of Louis XIV, the Sun King, as France was to become the stage for the most important revolutionary movement of the modern age. Meanwhile, in the gold-rich backwoods of Minas Gerais, the partisans of the Inconfidência Mineira met to draft seditious plans for the independence of the richest region in Portuguese America.

Not even the heavens could resist the thirst for change. As a premonition of the turbulent century to come, the English astronomer Edmund Halley called the world's attention to the fact that three important stars, Sirius, Procyon, and Arcturus, had changed their angular distances – immutable since the age of the Greeks.