Brazil

Abstract

The second region in which the West India Company was extremely busy was Brazil, or ‘New Holland,’ as the Dutch called it when they were finally able to gain control of it. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Brazil was the great sugar producing country of the world, and the Dutch were attracted to that area as bees to honey. Actually, ships from the Netherlands had visited Brazil before the century began. Three Dutch ships touched at that country in 1587, and in the years following there were many more visits of Dutch vessels, some on ostensibly legal voyages, and others outright smugglers. Dutch bribes were ample, Portuguese official flesh was weak, and Lowlands vessels obtained sugar cargoes so easily that in the early part of the seventeenth century, a pound of sugar cost less in Amsterdam than it did in Lisbon. In 1622, there were twenty-five sugar refineries in Amsterdam, and the Hollanders exported sugar all over Western Europe. When the West India Company was formed, the incorporators had well in mind the profits which would accrue to them if they could conquer the sugar-rich Portuguese colony. Since at the time the enemy Spain controlled Portugal, there would even be virtue in such armed robbery. A contemporary writer declared that ‘The West India Company could find nothing more profitable for itself, nothing of greater service to the republic, and nothing more calamitous for the kingdom of Spain than the conquest of Brazil.’ The writer pointed out that many people of small means might go to Brazil; and, by raising sugar or tobacco or by keeping shops, could gather a fortune and return to the fatherland, as was constantly being done by Portuguese and Spanish migrants to the colonies.