Brazil

BRAZIL

On 22 April 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467 or 1468–1520), commander of the thirteen-ship fleet that was following up Vasco da Gama's (c. 1460–1524) epoch-making voyage to India (1497–1498), sighted Brazil or, more accurately, Portuguese America. In 1501 Gonçalo Coelho led an expedition that explored almost two thousand miles of Brazil's coastline. The following year Brazil was leased to brazilwood interests, and over the next few decades several trading posts (feitorias) were established. By 1516 King Manuel (1469–1521; ruled 1495–1521) was sending small coast guard fleets to patrol against French and Spanish interlopers in the region. On 3 December 1530 Martim Afonso de Sousa and his brother Pero Lopes de Sousa, with a fleet of five ships carrying almost four hundred settlers, sailed from Portugal to explore and colonize Portuguese America. They set up a colony at São Vicente in 1532. In 1534 King John (João) III (1502–1557; ruled 1521–1557) divided Brazil into fifteen captaincies stretching from the Amazon in the north to Sant'Ana in the south and granted them to twelve lord proprietors (donatários). The two most successful of these captaincies were Pernambuco in the northeast and São Vicente in the south.

In 1548 the administration of Portuguese America was placed in the hands of a governor-general. The first governor-general arrived the following year and made Salvador in Bahia his capital shortly after that captaincy came under royal control. As time went by an increasing number of other captaincies also became royal colonies. By 1540 there were an estimated two thousand Portuguese settlers in Brazil. By 1600 the number had risen to twenty-five thousand. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese population had probably reached fifty thousand.

In 1551 Portuguese America's first bishopric also was established in Bahia. It remained Portuguese America's only diocese until 1676–1677, when three new dioceses—Rio de Janeiro, Olinda, and Maranhão—were created and Bahia was raised to the status of an archdiocese. In the eighteenth century another three dioceses were created: Pará (1719), Mariana (1745), and São Paulo (1745). Though these dioceses had parish priests under their jurisdictions, members of the regular orders probably played a more important role in Brazil's religious life. The Jesuits, who began arriving in 1549, were the most important order until their expulsion in 1759. Franciscans, Benedictines, and Carmelites also played important roles beginning in the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century they were joined by the Capuchins, Mercedarians, and Oratorians. Because of crown prohibitions, Brazil was slow in establishing convents for women, the first one not being founded until 1677. A tribunal of the Inquisition was never established in Brazil, though there were visitations in 1591–1595 (Bahia and Pernambuco), 1618 (Bahia), and 1763–1769 (Pará).

In 1549 a chief justice official—the ouvidorgeral —was appointed for all of Portuguese America (there were also justice officials for each of the captaincies). It was not until 1609 that judges of Brazil's first High Court (Relação) arrived in Brazil's capital. The High Court was disbanded in 1626 but was revived in 1652.

Toward the end of the sixteenth century the most important captaincies in Brazil, ranked by wealth, mostly from sugar production, were Pernambuco and Bahia (the two having more than 80 percent of the wealth). The other captaincies included Itamaracá, Ilhéus, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, São Vicente, Porto Seguro, and Paraíba. Paraíba had been occupied by the Portuguese in 1584 as they expanded northward from Pernambuco. In 1599 Natal was founded in what became Rio Grande do Norte.

The late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century were the age of sugar in Brazil. The sugar industry required large amounts of capital and credit. One of its greatest demands was labor. Initially American Indians made up the workforce, but they were soon replaced by African slaves, who quickly became the most numerous part of Brazil's population. The best estimate is that during the years 1500–1800 more than 2.5 million African slaves arrived in Portuguese America, 1.7 million during the eighteenth century.

By the middle of the seventeenth century tobacco had become another important crop for local consumption, for export to Europe, and for use in the African slave trade. Cattle raising for food, transportation, and hides was another important part of the colonial Brazilian economy, especially on the various frontier regions.

In 1612 a fort was established in Ceará. By 1615 the French were ousted from Maranhão, and the following year the town of Belém do Pará was founded. In 1621 the state of Maranhão was created. Including Maranhão, Pará, and Ceará, this state was separated from the jurisdiction of the governor general in Bahia, and it remained separate for more than a century and a half. However, the European population remained sparse even into the eighteenth century. The economy depended heavily on Indian labor, and there were frequent clashes between missionaries (especially the Jesuits) and the colonists for such labor. Cacao, which grew wild, became an important product in Pará. Other extractive forest products contributed to the region's economy.

In the meantime, in the south São Paulo, founded in 1554 by the Jesuit Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–1570), became an important center for expansion into land on the Spanish side of the line of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). By the seventeenth century bandeirantes were radiating from São Paulo, looking for precious minerals or for Amerindians to enslave or both. These bandeirantes, or Paulistas, pushed southward, reaching the province of Guairá and raiding Spanish Jesuit mission villages. They also pushed westward and northward, following the many tributaries of the Paraná-Paraguay and Amazon River systems.

In 1624 the Dutch captured the city of Bahia and held it for a year before being ousted by a joint Spanish-Portuguese armada. In 1630 the Dutch attacked and captured Recife and Olinda in Pernambuco and gradually expanded southward to Sergipe and northward to Maranhão. However, Brazilian and Portuguese resistance foiled Dutch efforts to establish themselves permanently in Portuguese America. In 1654, with the surrender of Recife, the Dutch presence in Brazil came to an end. Zumbi, head of the runaway slave community of Palmares, south of Pernambuco, was defeated and killed in 1695, bringing an end to almost a century of efforts to destroy the largest refuge of runaway slaves in the Americas.

Though some alluvial gold had been found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was not until the early 1690s that major gold discoveries began to be made in what became the captaincy of Minas Gerais. In 1709 the captaincy of São Paulo and Minas Gerais was established in an attempt to bring order to that region and to better collect the crown's share of mining revenues. In 1722 gold was discovered further west in Goiás and Cuiabá. In 1729 diamonds were discovered in Serro do Frio in Minas Gerais, about 150 miles north of the first gold discoveries. The precious stones soon became a royal monopoly. Large numbers of slaves were imported into the mining regions from Africa, and by 1750 Minas Gerais was the most heavily populated captaincy in Portuguese America.

In 1680 Colônia do Sacramento on the east bank of the Río de la Plata was founded. An important center for contraband, it was frequently captured and later returned by Spaniards until it was ceded to them by the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1777. In 1737 colonization of Rio Grande do Sul was begun. In 1748 the captaincy of Mato Grosso was created as the Portuguese sought to consolidate territory on what had originally been designated as being on the Spanish side of the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas.

During the years (1750–1777) that the marquês of Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello (1699–1782), was in power as Portugal's chief minister, the remaining captaincies under private control were royalized and absorbed by nearby crown captaincies. Brazil's second High Court (Relação) was established in Rio de Janeiro (1751). In 1763 the capital of Portuguese America was moved to Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil was raised to the status of a viceroyalty. The captaincy of São José do Rio Negro was founded in 1755. In the early 1770s the state of Grão Pará and Maranhão was incorporated into the state of Brazil, and in 1772 Brazil was divided into nine captaincy generals, some of them with subordinate captaincies.

Estimates of Brazil's population by the end of the eighteenth century vary greatly. An oft-cited statistic points to approximately 1 million whites, 1.5 million slaves, 400,000 free persons of African heritage, and several hundred thousand Brazilian Indians. Subsequent studies, however, suggest lower figures. What is clear, however, is that Brazil's population increased significantly during the last half of the eighteenth century.

See also Portugal .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alden, Dauril. Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, with Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1968.

Bethell, Leslie, ed. Colonial Brazil. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.

Boxer, C. R. The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1962.

——. Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686. London, 1952.

Diffie, Bailey W. History of Colonial Brazil, 1500–1792. Malabar, Fla., 1987.

Schwartz, Stuart B. Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1973.

——. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.

Francis A. Dutra