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A Legacy of Inequality 19

This section of a 1502 map of the world shows the coastline of Brazil, which had been “discovered” by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral two years earlier. The Brazil area was already inhabited by millions of Native Americans when the first Portuguese settlers arrived.

Cabral followed a more westerly course than had Vasco da Gama, and, carried by wind and tide, his fleet landed on the coast of South America in what is today Brazil on April 22, 1500. Cabral named his discovery Terra da Vera Cruz (“Land of the True Cross”) and claimed it for Portugal. King João III of Portugal sent the first settlers to Brazil in 1531. Three years later, he divided the coast into 15 sections, placing them under the private ownership of friends of the crown. The colonists soon discovered that the land and climate were ideal for growing sugarcane. Plantations required plentiful labor, though. Portuguese plantation owners tried a number of methods to force the indigenous people to work in the sugar fields, but none worked well. So the colony resorted to slavery. Bandeirantes , men from São Paulo usually born of Indian mothers and Portuguese fathers, hunted the Indians into the interior. By the mid-1600s, they had pursued their prey all the way to the peaks of the Peruvian Andes.