Brazil benefited from her lack of wealthy cities offering loot. As a consequence of that lack she was not flooded, as were Mexico and Peru, with gold-seeking, brutal adventurers, but was instead slowly colonized by genuine settlers. Some of them did not come willingly, for Portugal used certain tracts spasmodically as penal settlements, but in the Middle Ages severe punishment was frequently dealt out for offences that would today be considered light, and many of the convicts thrust across the Atlantic turned out to be good citizens: good or bad, they were the stuff of which bold pioneers are made, and to their extraordinary hardihood and that of their tireless descendants of mixed blood the conquest of interior Brazil was due.
Portugal delayed occupation of Brazil until other European countries began to establish themselves along different parts of the neglected shore. In 1515 the mouth of the Rio de la Plata had been discovered by Juan de Solis, and Spanish settlements were set up south of the Portuguese claims—still indefinite. In 1540 the Spanish captain Orellana made his wonderful journey from Peru over the Andes and down the Amazon, and roused the interest of Europe, but long before then the Dutch were trying to establish outposts on northerly Amazonian tributaries, and the French had settled a little colony at Pernambuco.
Of these the Portuguese made short shrift, a fleet being sent from Lisbon specially for their expulsion, but the settlement made by royal orders on the same spot met with no better fate, for in 1527 French raiders sacked the infant colony, to be followed a few months later by an English raiding party under Hawkins. The Portuguese Government, forced to take measures, determined on a plan which had already given good results on the island of Madeira. Instead of assuming the burden of colonization on the account of the government, large grants of land were made to Portuguese of high standing or wealth; on them fell the burden of settlement, but on the other hand to them would accrue the chief rewards of tropical adventure and industry. The Crown attained several objects at one stroke—the colonizing of a difficult country, the rewarding of many noblemen whose claims were apt to be troublesome, while at the same time an outlet was provided for the adventurous and turbulent. The waning of her power in India left Portugal with a surging class of stout-hearted folk upon her hands: she sent them to Brazil, and suffered as Brazil benefited.
The allotment of Brazil into separate capitanias (captaincies) was made in 1530; the average coastal strip presented to the holders was fifty leagues, and as to the depth of the land commanded was a matter for the individual captain: he could have as much as he could conquer. No one had any idea of what the hinterlands contained, for, with the exception of the riverine explorations of the Spanish on the Orinoco and the Plata, Europeans had not visited the South American interior east of the Andes.
Martim Affonso de Souza came out in 1531 as Admiral of the Coast, empowered to mark out the capitanias and to keep one for himself; he found French vessels hovering about Pernambuco, seized them, and went on to Bahia (Bahia de Todos os Santos) named thirty years before and frequently visited, where he found a Portuguese sailor, survivor of a shipwreck, married to the daughter of an Indian ruler and living like a patriarch with a large family already grown up about him. This Caramarú, “big fish caught among rocks,” was of great help to the Portuguese when the colony was founded, and his half-breed family, possessing Indian knowledge and Portuguese leanings, formed the nucleus of the true hardy Brazilian of the north coast. Sailing south on his delimitation errand, Affonso de Souza entered Rio harbour, but passed on to mark out his own capitania on the hot sands of the São Paulo coast, near the present Santos, under the name of São Vicente. By a freak of fate, here the story of old Caramarú was duplicated. On the uplands beyond the Serra do Mar another Portuguese sailor was living, one João Ramalho married to the daughter of the native chief Tibiriça, and also surrounded by an extraordinary number of descendants: these children and grandchildren of Ramalho were the first mamelucos, that bold tribe who were thorns in the flesh of the Jesuits, but who were instrumental in giving Matto Grosso, Goyaz and Minas Geraes to Brazil.
Martim Affonso de Souza marked out twelve capitanias, but of the accepted applicants few besides himself made serious and systematic efforts to settle and hold their great lands; the rights offered them were very large, including almost every authority of the king himself except that of coining money: possession was perpetual and hereditary.[[1]] “If these hereditary captaincies had continued to exist,” says the Brazilian historian, Luis de Queiros, “we should have today so many republics, corresponding to the number of territorial divisions, and not a homogenous whole which a nation so full of life and hope as Brazil constitutes. By good luck, however, almost all of the recipients of the grants were unsuccessful in their attempts at colonization, and some of them did not make any real beginning....”
In the far north nothing was done by the donatario to colonize Ceará, and it was not until the French had for years established themselves on that coast and inside the mouth of the Amazon that, in 1616, a Portuguese military expedition from Maranhão turned out these rivals and founded Pará. Genuine colonization work was done at three outstanding points—Pernambuco, Bahia, and São Vicente, or rather, São Paulo, which became active nuclei of agricultural production, of a sturdy population born on the soil, dowered with a clannish fighting spirit that, local as it was, did much that was of extreme value in the evolution of Brazil. The strength of two of these centres, S. Paulo and Bahia, was largely derived from the two old Portuguese castaways, the battered heroes Ramalho and Correia; that of the third markedly successful colony, Pernambuco, was due to the powerful personality and real ability of the Captain, Duarte Coelho; he was aided by the fertility of the soil of the north-eastern promontory, Pernambuco showing itself so prolific a producer of sugar that it began to feed the mother country from very early colonial days, no less than forty-five ships a year calling to fetch sugar and brazil-wood. Settled with good immigrants by Duarte Coelho, who protested successfully against the dumping of convicts upon his capitania and ruled his people like a feudal lord, Pernambuco was the only territory that escaped control by the Captain-General sent out by the Crown in 1549 to try the effect of centralized power upon the languishing capitanias. Hardy and jealous of their independence, the Pernambucanos remained a little kingdom apart, ruled over by Duarte Coelho and his wife’s relatives after him, until the Dutch appeared in strength off the north Brazilian coast and from 1630 onwards for over twenty years held possession of Pernambuco and a long strip of the coast above it. The Pernambucanos have always been a factor to be reckoned with in Brazilian affairs: the territory they hold is richly productive and has never looked back in commercial importance. They do not forget that great tracts of land were in early days won by their ancestors by hard fighting from the Indians, nor that they have sent many an able son to high places in the governing of Brazil. It was the productivity of the Pernambuco (“Nova Lusitania”) and Bahia colonies that made colonial Brazil valuable and attracted hardy settlers to her shores.
Ponte Santa Isabel, Recife (Pernambuco).
Praça Mauá—one of Rio’s wharves.
Water-front at Bahia, Lower City.
Bahia was the queen city of Brazil from 1549, when Thomé de Souza was sent out as Captain-General and made this the administrative and political head of the country, until 1762, when Rio de Janeiro became the Vice-regal Capital; she also was a fighting city, seized and sacked now and again but successful in getting rid of her foes in the end, and she was the centre of tobacco cultivation from early days. When gold and diamonds were discovered in the interior valleys and serras the Bahianos played a plucky part in exploration and opening, as well as charting, regions of forest and sertão hitherto unseen by white men. To the men of Bahia, as well as to the courageous legions of Pernambucanos led by the Albuquerque family, Brazil owes much: but the great pioneers, the unsurpassed confronters of hardship, the men who made Brazil the huge country that she is instead of the strip upon the Atlantic seaboard that she might have remained, were the bandeirantes of São Paulo.