First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil

This article covers much of the first century of the history of Brazil. The quincentennial commemorations of the Vasco da Gama voyage (1498) to India and that of Pedro Alvares Cabral (1500), which “discovered” Brazil, stimulated in Portugal and Brazil as well as in the academic communities interested in their histories a surge in research, reeditions of classic accounts, and a rise in the curiosity of, and readership by, the general public. This article includes major works from this recent historiographical boom along with classical studies that have long served as the basis for understanding Brazil’s first century. The article covers the period from 1500 to c. 1580 when a dynastic crisis brought Portugal and its empire under the control of King Phillip II of Spain. At first a number of royally commissioned voyages of exploration visited the Brazilian coast, but, for the most part, contact was in private hands since the Portuguese Crown granted contracts for the extraction of dyewood. In the 16th century, French competitors contested the Portuguese presence on the coast and the relations of the Portuguese with native peoples. By the 1530s, to secure this region from foreign competition, Portugal instituted a system of proprietary captaincies to develop settlements. A few of the captaincies (e.g., Pernambuco, São Vicente) flourished due to the beginnings of a sugar industry, but most of them failed such that, in 1549, to secure the colony, a royal governor and judicial and treasury officers were dispatched along with c. 1,300 men. Jesuit missionaries accompanied them and a capital city was established at Salvador. During the next three decades, the Portuguese settled and took control of the Brazilian coast, eliminating a French attempt at colonization and, in its place, founding the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1565. Meanwhile, relations with Brazil’s indigenous population shifted as missionary efforts, epidemic diseases, and the need for laborers in the growing sugar plantation economy resulted in war, enslavement, and depopulation. By the 1560s, colonists in Brazil had turned to the existing Portuguese slave trade with Africa to augment their supply of workers. By c. 1570 a multiracial society had formed. Although the laws and institutions of Portugal clearly provided governing structures for the colony, the extent to which Brazil’s colonial situation, the influences of indigenous and then African cultures, and the growing importance of slavery distinguished the colony from its metropolis has recently become a central issue of debate about the origins and the nature of early Brazil.