In addition to the imperial and economic undertaking of discovery and colonization of lands distant from Europe, these years were filled with pronounced advancements in cartography, shipbuilding and navigational instruments, of which the Portuguese explorers took advantage.

[3] In 1494, the two kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula divided the New World between them in the Treaty of Tordesillas, and in 1500 navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral landed in what is now Brazil and laid claim to it in the name of king Manuel I of Portugal.

[12] Just a few months before Cabral landed, Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón came to the northeastern coast of Brazil and deployed many armed men ashore with no means of communicating with the indigenous people.

Worried about foreign incursions and hoping to find mineral riches, the Portuguese crown decided to send large missions to take possession of the land and fight the French.

The Jesuits' work to dominate the indigenous native’s cultural expression and way of living helped the Portuguese expel the French from a colony they had established at present-day Rio de Janeiro.

These captaincies were granted by royal decree to private owners, namely to merchants, soldiers, sailors, and petty nobility, saving the Portuguese crown from the high costs of colonization.

The captaincy of São Vicente, owned by Martim Afonso de Sousa, also produced sugar but its main economic activity was capturing indigenous native people to trade them as slaves.

With the failure of most captaincies and the menacing presence of French ships along the Brazilian coast, the government of king John III decided to turn the colonization of Brazil back into a royal enterprise.

The fact that the first bishop of Brazil, Pero Fernandes Sardinha, was killed and eaten by the Caeté natives after a shipwreck in 1556 illustrates how strained the situation was between the Portuguese and many indigenous communities.

[19] The aldeia model would again be used, though also unsuccessfully, by the Governor of the captaincy of São Paulo, Luís António de Sousa Botelho Mourão [pt], in 1765, in order to encourage mestizos, natives, and mulattoes to abandon slash-and-burn agriculture and adopt a sedentary farming lifestyle.

A new slave trade emerged where indigenous people were brought from the sertões or "inland wilderness frontiers" by mixed-race mameluco under the loophole in the 1570 law that they were captured in just wars against native groups who "customarily" attacked the Portuguese.

Also unlike most Spanish settlements, Brazilian cities and towns did not have a uniform lay-out of central plaza and a check board pattern of streets, often because the topography defeated such an orderly layout.

During the Nieuw Holland episode, the colonists of the Dutch West India Company in Brazil were in a constant state of siege, in spite of the presence of the count John Maurice of Nassau as governor (1637–1644) in Recife (renamed Mauritstaad).

[49] While the reasons for fugitive settlement are varied, quilombos were rarely wholly self-sufficient and although inhabitants may have engaged in agricultural pursuits, they depended on a kind of parasitic economy where proximity to settled areas were usually prerequisites for their long-term success.

Unlike the palenque in Spanish America or maroon settlements in the West Indies, Portuguese officials rebuked any kind of agreements to standardize the quilombos out of the fear of drawing even more fugitive slaves to their communities.

The terminology for the settlements and leaders come directly from Angola, with quilombo, an Angolan word for military villages of diverse settlers, and the nganga a nzumbi "was the priest responsible for the spiritual defense of the community.

"[34] The Dutch and later the Portuguese attempted several times to conquer Palmares, until an army led by famed São Paulo-born Domingos Jorge Velho managed to destroy the great quilombo and kill Zumbi in 1695.

[59] The Bahian quilombo of Buraco de Tatu is described as a "well-organized" village in which people probably practiced monogamy and lived on rectangular-shaped houses that made up neat rows, emulating a plantation senzala.

When white fugitives fleeing tax collectors, military enlistment, and the law entered the backlands of the Atlantic Forest, they formed racially-mixed settlements that became sites of "cultural and genetic exchange".

[64] In 1755, in an attempt to transform this wandering population into a more productive, assimilated peasantry modeled on Europe's own peasants, the marquis of Pombal abolished the enslavement of natives and legal discrimination against the Europeans who married them, banning the use of the term caboclo, a pejorative used to refer to a mestizo or a detribalized indigenous person.

[64] Portuguese colonial authorities were characterized by their refusal to cooperate or negotiate with quilombos, seeing them as a threat to the social order,[65] but caboclo settlements integrated the indigenous into what Darren describes as "neo-European customs [or an Africanized version of them]".

[64] Frontier army agent Guido Thomaz Marlière noted: "a fugitive black can accomplish more among the Indians than all the missionaries together..."[64] One quilombo in specific, Piolho, was "officially tolerated" for its ability to pacify indigenous tribes.

Several historians have noted that the trade deficit of Portugal in relation to the British while the Methuen Treaty was in force served to redirect much of the gold mined in Brazil during the 18th century to Britain.

According to the treaty, Colónia do Sacramento was to be given to Spain in exchange for the territories of São Miguel das Missões, a region occupied by Jesuit missions dedicated to evangelizing the Guaraní natives.

In 1788/89, Minas Gerais was the setting of the most important conspiracy against colonial authorities, the so-called Inconfidência Mineira, inspired by the ideals of the French liberal philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment and the successful American Revolution of 1776.

The Portuguese colonists viewed farming as a beneficial taming of the frontier, urging mestizos, mulattoes, and indigenous peoples to abandon life in the wild forest and adopt agriculture.

[64] Botelho encouraged mestizos, mulattos, assimilated indigenous people, and Paulista farmers to take up the plow and use the manure of draft animals as fertilizer, but his reforms did not work for several reasons.

[64] One governor in Minas Gerais noted with dismay that white settlers seemed to reject all forms of intensive manual labor in the hopes of increasing their chances at upward social mobility.

[64] In the long term, burning these grasses caused erosion, reduced soil permeability, and produced degraded, innutritious pasture prone to becoming hosting ticks and poisonous plant species.

The office of Viceroy of Brazil ceased to exist upon the arrival of the royal family in Rio de Janeiro, since the Prince Regent, the future King John VI, assumed personal control of the government of the colony, that became the provisional seat of the whole Portuguese Empire.