European Exploration and Early Settlement

The Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the first known European in the region now constituting Brazil. Landing near the site of present-day Recife on January 26, 1500, he subsequently drifted northward as far as the mouth of the Orinoco River. The newly found territory fell within the region assigned to Portugal by the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), a Spanish-Portuguese agreement that modified the Line of Demarcation promulgated in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI. Probably for this reason, Spain made no territorial claims on the basis of Pinzón's discovery. In April 1500, the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral also reached the coast of present-day Brazil and formally claimed the surrounding region in the name of Portugal. The territory was named Terra da Vera Cruz (Portuguese for "Land of the True Cross"). An expedition under the command of the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci was sent to Terra da Vera Cruz by the Portuguese government in 1501. In the course of his explorations Vespucci named many capes and bays, including a bay which he called Rio de Janeiro. He returned to Portugal with a cargo of brazilwood, and from that time forward Terra da Vera Cruz bore the name of the valuable wood Brazil.
In 1530 the Portuguese king John III initiated a program of systematic Brazilian colonization. As a first step the king divided Brazil into 15 districts, or captaincies, and granted each of the districts, in perpetuity, to a person prominent at the Portuguese court. The grantees, known as donatarios, were vested with extraordinary powers over their domains.
Because of the dangers implicit in the French depredations along the Brazilian coast, King John revoked most of the powers held by the donatarios and placed Brazil under the rule of a governor-general. The first governor-general, Thomé de Souza, arrived in Brazil in 1549, organized a central government, with the newly founded city of Salvador, or Bahia, as his capital, instituted comprehensive administrative and judicial reforms, and established a coastal defense system. Large numbers of slaves were brought into the region from Africa to overcome the shortage of laborers. São Paulo, in the south, was founded in 1554.
In 1555 the French founded a colony on the shores of Rio de Janeiro Bay. The Portuguese destroyed the French colony in 1560, and in 1567 they established on its site the city of Rio de Janeiro.