With the abolition of the slave trade in 1836, the extraction of raw materials such as ivory, beeswax and gum copal, as well as the production of palm and groundnut oil, orchid weed, coffee and cotton increased greatly in colonial Angola, to supply the European and North American markets. The new "legitimate" commercial activities received incentives from the colonial government and  
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[^0]:    10 Gil 1854, p. 14. Some authors have reproduced the story as true although there is no proof that such a tunnel ever existed. See Moreira Bastos Feliciano, 2003, p. 30.
11 British and Foreign State Papers, Library of the University of Michigan, Vol. 40, pp. 539-40.
12 ANA, Luanda, Avulsos, Cx. 145, "Passaporte para o Interior", 21 September 1849.
13 Biblioteca Municipal de Luanda (BML), Códice 37, "Receita da Ciza dos Prédios dessa Cidade", 180933, pp. 76, 88, 99, 99v, 121v, 128v.
14 BML, Códice 055, Vol. II, "Registo de Entradas e Saídas do Milho", 1850-1857.  
private investors. Dona Ana Joaquina, for example, invested in the production of sugar cane and aguardente (sugar cane brandy), establishing mills in the immediate hinterland of Luanda. ${ }^{15}$ During his stay in Angola in the early 1850s, the Portuguese traveller Francisco Travassos Valdez visited the arimo Capele in the district of Icolo e Bengo, which belonged to Dona Ana Joaquina (Valdez, 1861, p. 277). On that occasion, the overseer informed him that the agricultural property counted on the labour of some 1,400 enslaved Africans (Valdez, 1861, p. 277). Valdez also observed the existence of a sugar mill established there in 1846 by a Frenchman named Pedro Regueure, whom Dona Ana Joaquina had hired to set up the mill to make sugar and distil aguardente. Despite having spent more than 10,000,000 réis on this enterprise, Dona Ana Joaquina was not able to reap the expected results. In early 1850, she hired Manoel Farias, a settler from Brazil, who finished the work Regueure had started. ${ }^{16}$