Spanish Rule and Dutch Incursions

Philip II of Spain inherited the Portuguese crown in 1580. The period of Spanish rule was marked by frequent aggressions against Brazil by the English and Dutch, the traditional enemies of Spain. A Dutch fleet seized Bahia in 1624, but the city was recaptured by a combined force of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Native Americans the following year. The Dutch attacked again in 1630, and an expedition sponsored by the Dutch West India Company captured Pernambuco (now Recife) and Olinda. Most of the territory between Maranhão Island and the lower course of the São Francisco River fell to the Dutch in subsequent operations. Under the able governorship of Count Joan Mauritz van Nassau-Siegen, the Dutch-occupied part of Brazil prospered for several years. Nassau-Siegen resigned in 1644, however, in protest against the exploitative policies of the Dutch West India Company. Shortly after his departure the Portuguese colonists, with support from their mother country, rose in rebellion against Dutch rule. The Dutch capitulated in 1654, after nearly a decade of struggle, and in 1661 renounced by treaty their claims to Brazilian territory

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.

History of Brazil

The Native American peoples who were the original inhabitants of what is now Brazil included the Arawak and Carib groups in the north, the Tupí-Guaraní of the east coast and the Amazon River valley, the Ge of eastern and southern Brazil, and the Pano in the west. For the most part these groups were essentially seminomadic peoples, who subsisted by hunting and gathering and simple agriculture. Those groups in the more remote areas of the interior maintained their traditional way of life until the late 20th century, when their existence was threatened by the advancing frontier. See Native Americans.

HISTORY OF BRAZIL

The Portuguese were the first European settlers to arrive in the area, led by adventurous Pedro Cabral, who began the colonial period in 1500. The Portuguese reportedly found native Indians numbering around seven million. Most tribes were peripatetic, with only limited agriculture and temporary dwellings, although villages often had as many as 5000 inhabitants. Cultural life appears to have been richly developed, although both tribal warfare and cannibalism were ubiquitous. The few remaining traces of Brazil's Indian tribes reveal little of their lifestyle, unlike the evidence from other Andean tribes. Today, fewer than 200,000 of Brazil's indigenous people survive, most of whom inhabit the jungle areas.

Other Portuguese explorers followed Cabral, in search of valuable goods for European trade but also for unsettled land and the opportunity to escape poverty in Portugal itself. The only item of value they discovered was the pau do brasil (brazil wood tree) from which they created red dye. Unlike the colonizing philosophy of the Spanish, the Portuguese in Brazil were much less focused at first on conquering, controlling, and developing the country. Most were impoverished sailors, who were far more interested in profitable trade and subsistence agriculture than in territorial expansion. The country's interior remained unexplored.
Nonetheless, sugar soon came to Brazil, and with it came imported slaves. To a degree unequaled in most of the American colonies, the Portuguese settlers frequently intermarried with both the Indians and the African slaves, and there were also mixed marriages between the Africans and Indians. As a result, Brazil's population is intermingled to a degree that is unseen elsewhere. Most Brazilians possess some combination of European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and Middle Eastern lineage,and this multiplicity of cultural legacies is a notable feature of current Brazilian culture.

The move to open the country's interior coincided with the discovery in the 1690s of gold in the south-central part of the country. The country's gold deposits didn't pan out, however, and by the close of the 18th century the country's focus had returned to the coastal agricultural regions. In 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte closed in on Portugal's capital city of Lisbon, the Prince Regent shipped himself off to Brazil. Once there, Dom Joao established the colony as the capital of his empire. By 1821 things in Europe had cooled down sufficiently that Dom Joao could return to Lisbon, and he left his son Dom Pedro I in charge of Brazil. When the king attempted the following year to return Brazil to subordinate status as a colony, Dom Pedro flourished his sword and declared the country's independence from Portugal (and his own independence from his father).
In the 19th century coffee took the place of sugar as Brazil's most important product. The boom in coffee production brought a wave of almost one million European immigrants, mostly Italians, and also brought about the Brazilian republic. In 1889, the wealthy coffee magnates backed a military coup, the emperor fled, and Brazil was no more an imperial country. The coffee planters virtually owned the country and the government for the next thirty years, until the worldwide depression evaporated coffee demand. For the next half century Brazil struggled with governmental instability, military coups, and a fragile economy. In 1989, the country enjoyed its first democratic election in almost three decades. Unfortunately, the Brazilians made the mistake of electing Fernando Collor de Mello. Mello's corruption did nothing to help the economy, but his peaceful removal from office indicated at least that the country's political and governmental structures are stable.

Brazil has the sixth largest population in the world--about 148 million people--which has doubled in the past 30 years. Because of its size, there are only 15 people per sq. km, concentrated mainly along the coast and in the major cities, where two-thirds of the people now live: over 19 million in greater Sao Paulo and 10 million in greater Rio.

The immigrant Portuguese language was greatly influenced by the numerous Indian and African dialects they encountered, but it remains the dominant language in Brazil today. In fact, the Brazilian dialect has become the dominant influence in the development of the Portuguese language, for the simple reason that Brazil has 15 times the population of Portugal and a much more dynamic linguistic environment.

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