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While heading to the East around the southern tip of Africa, some Portuguese ships were blown off course and landed at South America - less than 2,600 kilometers (1,625 miles) at the most narrow gap from Africa. In South America they found people called Tupi. Unlike the Spanish experience with Aztecs and Incas, the Portuguese found the Tupi Indians with little wealth they could plunder. Portugal's king left the area to Portuguese adventurers and tradesmen to find what they could. A few settlements were established in what they called Terra da Vera Cruz (Land of the True Cross), and at first the only export by the Portuguese from the area was a red colored dyewood called brazil. "Brazil" was a shorter and more down to earth expression than "Terra da Vera Cruz," and Brazil was what the land would be called.
Tupi is today described today as a family of languages, and the Tupi are described as having arrived where the Portuguese did centuries before and expelling people who had been there before them. The Tupi were hunter-gatherers as well as beginning agriculturists. They grew corn, sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, tobacco, cotton, peppers, pineapples and papaya. These, their religion, the sweet waters of the region and their items of handicraft, such as baskets, had been abundance for them, and they found prestige and joy in exchanging or giving things away.
Their system of justice was revenge. Like other tribal people they allowed petty conflicts and imagined offenses to escalate into wars. No Tupi state had arisen to unite them and impose a stable order and peace. Tupi religion contributed to their wars by creating a demand for captives to sacrifice to their gods. The Tupi ate from the bodies of those they sacrificed to their god, believing that they were ingesting the character of the person whose flesh they were eating - a ritual cannibalism. Tupi warriors rejected eating the flesh of people for whom they had contempt, which meant that they preferred the flesh of other Tupi warriors.
Tupi religion played a role in the Tupi at first accepting the Portuguese. They believed that the Portuguese had arrived by the magic of their supreme god, the creator Maíra, and they believed that it was their duty to be generous and helpful to the Portuguese - despite what they saw as Portuguese ugliness. The Portuguese endeared themselves to one side or another in the frequent wars of the Tupi, or they incited one side against another and contributed to victories in battle and authority - and began to assume authority for themselves and their own god.
The Tupi and other Indians suffered, largely from the diseases that the Portuguese brought: small pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis and measles. They asked why they, Maíra's chose people, were suffering so much, and they wondered whether their god Maíra had died. Missionaries provided them with an answer. They told the suffering Indians that they were being punished for their sins and that a good god in heaven might cast them to hell forever. And some Indians ran from the Portuguese and their god, into the interior - gods seen as occupying places as had once been believed by Europeans.
The Tupi saw the Portuguese as grasping and perpetually distressed. The Portuguese saw the Tupi as too content and too lazy and as leading useless lives. Their solution was to force Tupi into slavery.
The wealth that Spain was taking out of their areas in the Americas inspired more interest in Brazil by opportunistic Portuguese, and in 1531 five vessels and four hundred colonists arrived on Brazil's coast, and that year they established a colony they called São Vicente (Saint Vincent), on the coast about 500 kilometers (300 miles) southward from what today is Rio de Janeiro.
Those who emigrated to Brazil were looking for land and an easy life. They had no intention of doing manual work, expecting that they could have the Tupi do their work for them. When the Indians refused to work for the colonists, the colonists made slaves of them, by taking those captured in the frequent wars between Indian tribes or by taking people in raids on Indian villages.
The Portuguese were slower in conquering the Indians of Brazil than Cortez was in conquering the Aztecs, or Pizarro the Incas. The Aztecs and Incas had been more unified by organization and culture than the Indians that the Portuguese faced, and they had a wilderness in which to hide.
Failing to enslave enough Tupi, the Portuguese in 1532 began shipping African slaves to Brazil. Africans had an immunity to tropical diseases that served them well in Brazil and they were believed to be able workers in mining and tropical agriculture. A circular trade was established, the Portuguese taking metal manufactured goods to Africa, trading these goods for slaves, shipping slaves to America and transporting from Brazil whatever they thought they could sell in Portugal.
In the 1530s the Portuguese established another colony, Olinda, far to the north, on the shore near the eastern most point of the continent. In 1549 the Portuguese founded their colonial capital city in Brazil: São Salvador da Bahia ( Salvador). By now their original colony at São Vicente had a population of around 5,000. In 1554 the Portuguese founded São Paulo. Meanwhile, French Huguenots running from persecution had settled at Rio de Janeiro, and in 1560 the Portuguese drove them out and began building their own settlement there.
The attempt to exploit the Tupi continued. Fighting the Indians was described by a Portuguese Jesuit, Father José de Anchieta, in his poem De Gestis Meni de Saa, written around 1560. Anchieta, who would be called the "Apostle of Brazil" and made a saint, wrote of the "heroic deeds" of soldiers "in the immense wilderness." He wrote of the Portuguese destroying Indian villages and fields. These wars had been proposed by another Jesuit, Father Nóbrega, in 1558. as putting an end to cannibalism and the "hellish mouth that has eaten so many Christians." For the Portuguese soldiers it was a war to exterminate and subjugate. The Portuguese had begun building plantations. The churchmen and others saw this as a legitimate war, and the taking of slaves from warfare as right. They argued for the taking of slaves in legitimate war rather than waiting for the illegal taking of slaves. Jesuit correspondence with the King of Portugal supported subjugating and enslaving Indians in order to convert them, and, the letter went on, "Your Highness will draw much profit because there will be many stock farms and many plantations, even if there be not much gold and silver." [note]
The Jesuit program was to settle the Indians into villages (aldeias) that they ran, similar to Spanish missions and forced Indian villages. Here the Indians were denied the nomadic hunting and gathering ways, and here they could absorb Christian doctrine and morality, learn a trade, pursue their native crafts, learn to read and write and were protected from illegal enslavement. Father José de Anchieta was the major architect of this program. He wrote catechisms and religious songs and verses in the Tupi language.
The Jesuits in Brazil came into conflict with Brazil's colonists much as Jesuits in Spanish America came into conflict with Spanish colonists. The colonists wanted a supply of labor and the Jesuits wanted to protect their Indians, which led to appeals by both sides to the king of Portugal. The crown's decree of 1574 reflected a partial victory for the Jesuits, granting them full control over the Indians in their villages while permitting the colonists to enslave Indians captured in "legitimate" warfare.
The dearth of Indian slaves led the colonists to purchase more slaves from Africa. By 1600, the colony had around 120 sugar plantations, with sugar and dyewood being its main exports, sugar exports around 50 million tons a year. In the colony were around 30,000 black slaves and about 50,000 Portuguese and mixed Portuguese and Indian (the product mainly of Portuguese fathers and Indian mothers). The subdued Indians and other Indians in contact with the Portuguese numbered around 120,000. And there were around 680 head of cattle. By 1700, there were around 1.5 million head of cattle. Tobacco exports had increased. The white and mixed race population was around 150,000. There was a new mining industry, including gold in central Brazil, and black slaves had increased to around 150,000. [note]
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| 16-19th centuries |
Latin America to 1700 
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