Bahia

One of the 15 regions (known as captaincies) into which the Portuguese Crown divided the colony of Brazil in the 1530s.

When a Portuguese fleet bound for India was blown across the Atlantic and discovered what became known as Brazil in the early 16th century, it appeared to offer little to the commerce-minded Europeans. Early Portuguese interest centered on the dyewood (or brazilwood) trees found there, and the first colonists set up a factory system similar to the one they used in Africa and Asia. Those who controlled the factories—better understood as trading posts—employed the Natives of Brazil as tree harvesters. Because the isolated factories represented no threat to the Natives, they willingly exchanged their labor for European goods. The shift in Portuguese policy from factories to settlement was precipitated by the French, who made significant inroads into the dyewood trade. Unable to prevent these French incursions by the use of naval power, the Portuguese decided that permanent settlement was the only solution.

Both unwilling and unable to expend the necessary funds to establish Crown-run settlements, the government divided the colony into 15 captaincies that ran from east to west across the country. The captaincy of Bahia lay in the middle of the country and was allocated to Francisco Pereira Coutinho. However, the viability of the settlements was threatened almost immediately when it became apparent that the Portuguese had miscalculated the cultural attitudes of the Native population. The new settlers turned to sugar as a potential source of wealth and assumed that the Native men would be as willing to work in the cane fields as they had been to harvest brazilwood trees. But while the Natives considered tree-cutting to be men’s work, they thought of field work as women’s domain and resisted attempts to turn them into field hands. Furthermore, the establishment of permanent settlements constituted a real threat to the Natives. In 1545, in response to the threat posed by newcomers, the Tupinamba Indians launched a series of attacks that virtually eliminated the Portuguese presence in Bahia.

The Portuguese did not return to Bahia until 1549, at which time they made the region a Crown colony and established the city of Salvador. Blessed with fertile soil and an appropriate amount of rainfall, Bahia (along with the captaincy of Pernambuco) became the center of Portuguese sugar production. By 1570 Bahia boasted 18 sugar mills, a number that had doubled by 1585. At that time Salvador’s population of 14,000 made it the largest city in Brazil. Indeed, so rapid was the recovery of fortunes in Bahia that the Portuguese promoter, Pero de Magalhaes, wrote in 1576 that Bahia “is the part of Brazil most thickly populated by Portuguese.”

But this economic growth came at a devastating price not only to the Natives but to the newest arrivals in South America—African slaves (see slavery). Following their return in 1549, the Portuguese used the natives as forced laborers, but in the 1560s the Natives suffered from epidemics resulting from their exposure to Old World diseases. Further complicating the use of Natives was the growing opposition of the Crown to enslaving the Indians, inspired in part by the Jesuits. Despite these twin problems, the transition to African slaves was slow in Bahia, and it was not until late in the 17th century that most plantations had completed the transition to a workforce composed entirely of Africans.

Through a combination of climate, geography, exploitation, economic management, and European demand, the sugar industry transformed Bahia (and other parts of Brazil) into a critical piece of the Portuguese colonial empire. Inspired by this success, the Dutch in the early 17th century formulated plans to mount a military assault on Brazil to bring it under their control.

Further reading: Leslie Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969).

—John Grigg

Balboa, Vasco Nunez de (1475-1517) conquistador A Spanish conquistador during the early period of exploration and conquest, Vasco Nunez de Balboa in 1513 was the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.

Following a childhood lived in poverty, Balboa first journeyed to the New World in 1500 as part of the wave

Of Spaniards who sought the rich resources of mainland America or Tierra Firme. Tierre Firme, first discovered by Christopher Columbus during his third mission, included the northern coast of present-day Colombia and Venezuela.

Balboa spent several unremarkable years in unsuccessful farming and indebtedness on Hispaniola before, perhaps as a stowaway, he accompanied an expedition to the American mainland. In 1509, as part of a slave-raiding mission to the area, Balboa founded the settlement of Darien. Then, in search of the rumored golden kingdom of Biru vividly described by local Natives, Balboa led a mission across the Isthmus of Panama. While he failed to locate this kingdom of gold, by 1513 Balboa succeeded in crossing the isthmus and thereby claimed the rights as the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean.

Balboa’s accomplishment inspired jealousy in Pedrarias Davila, the governor of the isthmus. Using a fabricated story of treason, Davila and other seasoned conquistadores, including Francisco Pizarro, conspired in Balboa’s arrest. In 1517 Davila called for Balboa’s execution.

In the aftermath of Balboa’s journey across the isthmus, the Spanish used the knowledge of what he found to help them conquer the Native peoples of present-day Peru and Chile. Knowledge of the Pacific also proved crucial to Spanish efforts to control the west coast of Mexico and, eventually, California.

Further reading: Charles Loftus Grant Anderson, Life and Letters of Vasco Nunez de Balboa (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970); John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Kathleen Romoli, Balboa of Darien: Discoverer of the Pacific (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1953); Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (New York and London: Penguin Press, 1992).

—Kimberly Sambol-Tosco