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by establishing French military settlements on the Amazon. In their absence, São Luis
was attacked by Portuguese forces, and after continuous assaults, by 1615 the French
had been expelled from Brazilian territories below the Amazon, mostly taking refuge in
their Guiana outposts.
11
While La Ravadière was being routed, King James of England deeded British rights
from the Amazon to the Essequibo River (about 780 kilometers apart) to his agents
Thomas Challoner and John Rovenson. These two appealed to financier Robert North
(hence the North Cape, or Cabo Norte), whose influence extended to many of Britain's
wealthiest nobles, who were pleased to take on this interesting mercantile adventure un-
der the name of the charter company, the North Company. King James was not alone
in his interest in charter companies. There had been many Dutch incursions into trop-
ical America (and North America, for that matter), and by 1621 the Dutch West Indies
charter company was formed. Its main concerns were in the south Atlantic in northeast-
ern Brazil, but the colony of Suriname, or Dutch Guiana, was being developed on the
Wild Coast with very loose boundaries. Dutch settlements existed on the north shore of
the Amazon from the Jarí River to the estuary, at the mouths of the southern tributaries
of the Xingu and the Tapajos, and the Guiana coast at the Essequibo River, where the
Netherlands appeared to also threaten the Spanish claims on the upper Orinoco. It was
here in the Wild Coast colony that many Dutch plantation owners (with their slaves and
capital) resettled after defeat by the Portuguese on the northeastern coast of Brazil in
1654.
12
The Portuguese crown was concerned that the largely unexplored territories above
the Amazon would be sucked into northern European empires and parceled up like the
Caribbean and North America. Portuguese colonial governors in Brazil had been dis-
tracted by the protracted war with the Dutch over Pernambuco and the rebel slave state
of Palmares. Brazil was too big and Amazonia too different to manage under the ex-
isting ruling structure, In response to what seemed an emerging territorial catastrophe,
in 1621 Philip IV decreed that Portuguese Amazonia should be administered as dis-
tinct captaincies—Maranhão, Grão Pará, and Ceará—and as a separate colony, since
winds and currents drove toward the Northern Hemisphere and made it easier to reach
the Amazon from Lisbon than from Salvador. The initial strategy of Pedro Teixeira, the
first commander of the Amazonian captaincies of Grão Pará and Maranhão, was ag-
gressive military action to eradicate foreign forts and colonies on the Amazon channel.
WhileTeixeira'smodernfameaccruestohisremarkablevoyageuptheAmazontoQuito
and back with 47 canoes, 1,200 black and Indian militia, and 120 armed military men
who pounded in markers, claiming the lands they passed through in the name of the
Portuguese empire, his renown at the time followed from his obliteration of Dutch and
English settlements along the main channel. In this process he captured the command-
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