Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE FRENCH IN BRAZIL
The greatest threat to Portugal's claims on Brazil in the early years of colonization came
not from their Spanish rivals but from the French. The colony of
France Antarctique
was
established near present-day Rio in 1555 by Huguenots (French Protestant settlers). In 1560
Mem de Sá, the new Portuguese Governor-General of Brazil, attacked the French, but it wasn't
until 1567 that all the colonists were expelled. Similarly, the colony of
France Équinoxiale
was
established in 1612 at São Luís in the Northeast, but this was destroyed by the Portuguese in
1615. Though unable to maintain a foothold in Brazil, the French had a decisive impact on its
history; in the aftermath of their crackdowns the Portuguese were motivated to establish Rio
de Janeiro and their own incarnation of São Luís.
given that almost every single Portuguese colonist took a local wife in the early years of
settlement, millions of Brazilians are likely to carry indigenous genes today.
The Portuguese
The Portuguese discovery of Brazil, when
Pedro Alvares Cabral
landed in southern
Bahia on April 23, 1500, was off
cially an accident: Cabral was blown off course as he
steered far to the west to avoid the African doldrums on his way to India. After a week
exploring the coast he continued to the Philippines, where he drowned in a shipwreck
a few months later. King Manuel I sent
Amerigo Vespucci
to explore further in 1501.
Reserving the name of the continent for himself, he spent several months sailing along
the coast, calendar in hand, baptizing places after the names of saints' days: entering
Guanabara Bay on New Year's Day 1502, he called it Rio de Janeiro. he land was
called Terra do Brasil, after a tropical redwood that was its first export: the scarlet dye
it yielded was called
brasa
, “a glowing coal”.
Portugal, preoccupied with the lucrative Far East spice trade, neglected this new
addition to its empire for a few decades; apart from some lumber camps, they made
no attempt at settlement. Other European countries were not slow to move in, with
French (see box above) and English privateers in the lead. Finally, in 1532, King
João III was provoked into action. He divided up the coastline into fifteen
sesmarias
or “captaincies” fifty leagues wide and extending indefinitely inland, distributing them
to aristocrats and courtiers in return for undertakings to found settlements. It was
hardly a roaring success: Pernambuco, where sugar took hold, and São Vicente,
gateway to the Jesuit mission station of São Paulo, were the only securely held areas.
Settlement and the rise of sugar
Irritated by the lack of progress, King João repossessed the captaincies in 1548 and
brought Brazil under direct royal control, sending out the first governor-general,
Tomé de Sousa
(1503-79), to the newly designated
capital
at Salvador in 1549. The
first few governors successfully rooted out the European privateers, and - where
sugar
could grow - wiped out indigenous resistance. By the closing decades of the century
increasing numbers of Portuguese settlers were flowing in.
Slaves
began to be imported
from the Portuguese outposts on the African coast in the 1570s, as
sugar plantations
sprang up around Salvador and Olinda. Brazil, no longer seen merely as a possible
1540-1640
1549
1555-67
1565
Sugar-cane
production booms
in the Northeast
Salvador founded by
Tomé de Souza, the first
Governor-General of Brazil
French colonists establish
France Antarctique in the
area of present-day Rio
Rio de Janeiro
founded by the
Portuguese
