Pernambuco, Captaincy of

Enslaved Africans begin to brought to Brazil beginning in 1538.

The shift to colonialism is also facilitated by the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns between 1580 and 1640.

Although the two governments on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas are kept separate, trade and travel controls becomes lax.

An active contraband trade develops between Brazilian settlements and Buenos Aires, and Portuguese moving overland appear in Asunción, Potosí, Lima, and even Quito.

Expansion along the Atlantic coast has been gradual.

Using the model of the Atlantic islands, the crown in 1536 had divided the Brazilian coast into fifteen donatory captaincies (donatários).

To induce settlement, the crown offers ten leagues of coastline as personal property, a percentage of the dyewood trade, control over trade of enslaved natives, as well as the exclusive right to build mills.

The reassertion of Portuguese independence under the Braganças in 1640 leads to sporadic conflict in frontier areas and to policies seeking to hold back Spanish advances.

In the Amazon and Rio de la Plata river basins, the Spanish rather than the Portuguese had been first on the scene.

The Spaniards include Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who journeys from the coast of Santa Catarina to Asunción in 1540, and Francisco de Orellana, who descends the Amazon in 1542.

Brazil in 1580 comprises the area from Pernambuco in the north to São Vicente in the south.

With Spanish assistance hereafter, the Portuguese expand north to Paraíba, then west through Ceara and Maranhão against the natives and the French, until they find Belem in 1616.

Beginning in 1621, these possessions are divided into the state of Maranhão (embracing the crown captaincies of Ceara, Maranhão, and Para) and the state of Brazil, centering on Salvador, Bahía.

The most important Spanish advances are the mission settlements, where the Jesuits Christianize native peoples.

Two areas of particular importance lie adjacent to the river systems that delimit Brazil in the south and in the north: the Parana-Paraguay Basin in the south and the Mamore-Guapore Basin in the north.

The Jesuits found eight missions among the Guaraní peoples between the Parana and Paraguai rivers in what is now southern Paraguay from 1609 to 1628.

They press deep into what is today the state of Parana, between the Ivai and Paranapanema rivers, to establish fifteen more in what is called Guaíra Province.

The Guaíra missions are attacked from 1629 to 1631 by slave hunters, known as bandeirantes, from the Portuguese town of São Paulo.

According to the governor of Buenos Aires, these attacks result in the enslavement of more than seventy-thousand Guaraní.

Consequently, the Jesuits decide to evacuate some ten thousand survivors downriver and overland to sites between the Rio Uruguai and the Atlantic, in what becomes the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Other Jesuits fleeing the Guaira missions set up missions among the Itatín people on the eastern bank of the Rio Paraguai in what is now Mato Grosso do Sul, only to be destroyed brutally by bandeirantes in the 1630s and 1640s.

Only twenty-two of forty-eight missions remain in the whole region by 1650.

The Jesuits stop the slave hunters in the south by arming and training the Guaraní, who deal a significant blow to their oppressors in the Battle of Mborore in 1641.

This victory ensure the continued existence of the southern Spanish missions for another century, although they will become a focal point of Portuguese-Spanish conflict in the 1750s.

Broadly speaking, the Battle of Mborore stabilizes the general boundary lines between the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south.

The Spanish had established the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the north of the territory claimed by Portugal in 1561, and from here plant missions in the Mamore-Guapore Basin in about 1682.

Called the Mojos and Chiquitos, these mission provinces are in what is now low-land Bolivia fronting on the states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia.

By 1746 there are twenty-four mission towns in the Mojos and ten in Chiquitos.

The bandeirantes again carry the flag of Portugal into the region, first attacking the Chiquitos missions for slaves and then discovering gold in Mato Grosso (1718-36).

Unsure where these gold discoveries are in relation to the Spanish territories, the members of the Lisbon-based Overseas Council, which administers the colonies, order a comprehensive reconnaissance and the drawing of accurate maps.

Francisco de Melo Palheta leads an expedition from Belem to the Guapore in 1723, reporting to Lisbon the startling news about the numerous prosperous Jesuit missions.

The Portuguese empire at the outset is a commercial rather than a colonial one.

Portugal lacks sufficient population to establish colonies of settlers throughout its maritime empire.

The Portuguese practice is to conquer enough space for a trading fort and a surrounding enclave from which to draw on the wealth and resources of the adjacent country.

A map of this maritime commercial domain would show a series of dots connected by sealanes rather than continuous stretches of territory.

French competition forces the Portuguese shift to colonialism in Brazil.

This shift involves the gradual move from trading for brazilwood to cultivating sugarcane, which requires control of great expanses of land and increasing numbers of slaves.

The first to burst past the Tordesillas Line are the slave hunters.

Brazil’s export economy is at this time based primarily on a wood that yields red and purple dyes called pau-brasil (from which the country derives its name).

Brazil’s Portuguese settlers have engaged in cutting and shipping brazilwood since the 1520s.

The area around Pernambuco (now Recife) had been one of the first in Brazil to be settled by the Portuguese Crown.

João III of Portugal had divided Brazil into Hereditary Captaincies in 1534: realizing that they had no human or financial resources to invest in such a large and distant colony, the Portuguese had decided to assign this task to private entrepreneurs, called Donatários (this system had already been successful in the settlement of the Portuguese colonies in Africa).

Because of several problems, notably the lack of support from the Portuguese metropolis, most Captaincies failed.

One of the few to prosper has been the Captaincy of Pernambuco, which had been assigned to Duarte Coelho Pereira, the man who had founded Olinda in 1535 and become famous for expressing his enchantment with the beauty of the place, giving the name to the city, an anchorage that handles their exports of sugar and their imports.

Coelho’s grant extends from the mouth of the São Francisco River northward to the vicinity of modern Recife, founded in 1548 as a village on the banks of the Capibaribe and Beberibe rivers and on an island near the mouths of the rivers.

Coelho has found in Pernambuco plenty of fertile land and an excellent climate for the cultivation of cane; all he needed was labor to work in the crops and to keep the "engenhos" (rustic wooden machinery) moving.

At first, the Portuguese had tried to use the indigenous peoples of Brazil, but they soon realized that the indigenous culture was not compatible with the work in the engenhos.

Their solution is to import enslaved people from Africa.

Coelho has converted Pernambuco into a great sugar-producing region, offering the first example of a profitable agrarian export from the New World to Europe.

(Recife is today the second largest city in the Northeastern Region of Brazil, the largest metropolitan area and one of the most important cultural, economic, political and science-minded city in this region.)