Portugal was the leading European country in exploring the edges of the known world in the 15th century. It then became a colonizing country in the early 1500s with Brazil as its major colony. While Portugal’s colonization of Brazil is widely recognized, what is less known is that it spent some effort in exploring the northern portion of the Western Atlantic. The line that Pope Alexander VI drew in 1493 dividing the world into half for Spain and half for Portugal, beside giving a little bit of South America to Portugal, also granted most of Greenland to it as well. The 1494 revision to that line agreed to by Spain and Portugal not only gave Portugal more of South American but also all of Greenland, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador. Because of that the Portuguese claimed it had the original rights in the area visited by the English explorer John Cabot in 1497 and 1498 and that may have been one reason England did not continue exploring the area for a number of years.
In 1499 and 1500, the Portuguese mariner João Fernandes Lavrador visited the northeast Atlantic coast and Greenland, which explains the appearance of “Labrador” on some maps of the period. And in 1501-02, the Portuguese brothers Corte-Real explored Greenland and what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland/Labrador, reclaiming the lands as part of the Portuguese Empire. A few years later a few fishing outposts were established in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia but were later abandoned when the Portuguese royalty and colonizers began to focus their efforts mainly in South America.
In April 1500, a fleet of Portuguese ships commanded by Pedro Alvarez Cabal was headed for India on the ocean currents and prevailing wind patterns that took the fleet first to the west and then shifted it into a southeasterly direction toward the southern tip of Africa. The maneuver brought Cabal close to land and believing it to be an island, he named it the Island of the True Cross claiming it for the Portugal Crown. Around the same time, Amerigo Vespucci was participating as an observer with a Portuguese exploratory voyage and he saw the same land. Vespucci’s account of his journey and the letters he sent to influential Portuguese leaders convinced everyone that the lands Cabal and he had encountered were not islands close to the Asia mainland, but a continent. And for some strange reason his name – Amerigo – became attached to that continent, and eventually to the whole Western Hemisphere.
Over the next 20 years or so after Vespucci’s and Cabral’s reports, there were sporadic explorations of the Eastern coast of the land and some of its rivers. There are no reports of extensive contacts with Indigenous Peoples, nor of finding evidence of great wealth in minerals or precious stones. The only commodity the Portuguese discovered and eventually exported to Europe was Brazilwood, which was used as a dye for cloth. Several natural harbors along the coast were established to collect and prepare the wood for shipping. The city of Sao Vicente was formally founded in 1532, but it had been a departure port for Brazilwood since 1515.
The Portugal monarchy and business leaders wanted to establish a colony in the land given to them by Pope Alexander VI. But the financial return from the wood trade alone wasn’t sufficient to support one and Portugal didn’t have the treasury to subsidize a colony. In 1534 the concept of Captaincy Colonies was establish as a method to establish and administer land grants. The Portuguese government granted 15 large tracts of land to private investors who were required to manage the colony, but who could also benefit from the natural resources of their property. Captaincy Colonies was similar to the Spanish Encomienda system in which selected Spanish men were rewarded land which also included the Indigenous Peoples living on that land as their slaves. The Portugal version turned out not to be a particularly effective strategy. Most of the colonies failed for one reason or another, poor management being the most common reason. And some were subject to Indigenous uprisings to the point where colonists were driven away and in at least one instance, killed. The two or three tracts that did survived had established sugar farms and used African rather than Indigenous slaves. Those few successful Captaincy Colonies were replicated and the growing, harvesting and exporting Brazilian sugar became the primary source of wealth for the Portuguese empire beginning in the mid-16th century. Permanent settlements were established and Sao Salvador was founded as the capital in 1549.
There isn’t a large body of evidence on the relationship between the Portuguese colonizers and the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil. There’s an early drawing showing Indigenous men cutting and hauling Brazilwood, but it doesn’t appear they were restrained or being threatened in any way. We know a group of Jesuit priests were offering refuge to mistreated slaves, but it isn’t clear if the slaves were native or African. There are the reports of Captaincy Colonies being attacked by the Indigenous inhabitants, but we don’t have much context of those events. And it was reported that one Captaincy Colony survived for a period of time by capturing Indigenous men and selling them to the other colonies to augment the African slaves. From that limited information, one could conclude that the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil were not enslaved in large numbers, though they probably were attacked and removed in some manner from their land. And that conclusion is reenforced by the fact that Portugal used African slaves more than any other country, importing an estimated 5.8 million Africans – 40% of the total enslaved people trafficked from Africa to the Americas. Brazil was also the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888.