The Portuguese discovery of Brazil, when
Pedro Alvares Cabral landed in southern Bahia on April 23, 1500, was an accident, an episode in Portugal's thrust to found a seaborne empire in the East Indies during the sixteenth century. Cabral was blown off course as he steered far to the west to avoid the African doldrums on his way to Calcutta: after a cursory week exploring the coast he continued to India, 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. The 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 Africa and the lucrative Far East spice trade, neglected this new addition to its empire for the first few decades. Apart from a few lumber camps and scattered stockades, the Portuguese made no attempt at settlement. Consequently, other European countries were not slow to move in, with French and English privateers using the coast as a base to raid the spice ships. Finally, in 1532, João III was provoked into action. He divided up the coastline into sesmarias , 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.
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 da Sousa , 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 Indian 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, as sugar plantations sprang up around Salvador and Olinda. Brazil, no longer seen merely as a possible staging point on the way to the Far East, became an increasingly important piece of the far-flung Portuguese Empire. When Europe's taste for sugar took off in the early seventeenth century, the Northeast of Brazil quickly became very valuable real estate - and a tempting target for the expanding maritime powers of northern Europe, jealous of the Iberian monopoly in the New World.
