The Dutch take Pernambuco and become a Brazilian slaving power

The Dutch West India Company took Pernambuco in 1630, including Recife and the sugar country behind it, and held the region for the next twenty four years. The immediate prize was the sugar, already the most valuable plantation industry in the Americas. The lasting effect was on the shipping. Dutch slaving voyages had been fitted out in the Netherlands and sent south. Once the company held a Brazilian port, its voyages were organised at Recife, crossing to the African coast and returning with no European leg at all. The Dutch went after the supply as well. They took Elmina on the Gold Coast in 1637 and Luanda in Angola in 1641, so that for a few years a single company held the plantations, the receiving ports and the African sources together. It did not last. Portugal recovered Luanda in 1648 and Pernambuco in 1654. What survived the collapse was the route, which every later Brazilian slaver used, and the Dutch capital and technique that went on to build the sugar industry of the Caribbean.

The first small party of French settlers reached Tortuga, the island lying off the north coast of what is now Haiti, in 1629. They were pirates, cattle rustlers and buccaneers who lived by raiding Spanish shipping and by hunting the wild cattle that roamed the larger island. Hides were their trade and their food. From that base they fought the Spanish and gradually pushed onto Hispaniola itself, where they began planting cacao, cotton and indigo. Farming was what let the settlements hold their ground, since a camp that grows food does not have to move. The fort on Tortuga became the pivot of the fighting between European powers for the island. Nothing about this beginning suggested a colony. Within seventy years the western third of Hispaniola would be French territory, and within a hundred and sixty it would be the most profitable piece of ground in the Atlantic world.

The French and English driven out of Saint Kitts settled on Tortuga, taking it off the small Spanish garrison holding it. A contemporary called them smoked out hornets, which is close to accurate. What they built had no chief and no formal articles beyond the agreements men made with one another case by case, and an early writer described them as amphibious, since they lived half on land and half at sea. They hunted the wild cattle of northern Hispaniola and cured the meat on wooden frames over slow fires, a method taken from the indigenous people of the islands. The French word for the frame produced boucanier, which English turned into buccaneer, and the same practice gave every language the word barbecue. They called themselves the Brethren of the Coast. By 1667 their way of life had been written down by the first historians of the Antilles, so a stateless community of hunters and sea raiders was described in print while it was still going.

Dom Jeronimo Chingulia was educated by Augustinians in Goa, married a Portuguese woman and was installed as king of Malindi and Mombasa. In 1631 he renounced Christianity and massacred every Christian who would not renounce it with him. Among those who refused and died was his cousin Dom Antonio of Malindi, also educated abroad, who had served in the Portuguese navy and whose leadership during the crisis several witnesses attested. Evidence was gathered afterwards for a possible canonisation of the martyrs. The list of names sent to Rome contained four priests, forty seven men, thirty nine women and fifty nine children, and every one of them was Portuguese. About a hundred and fifty Africans died in the same massacre. None was included, not even Dom Antonio. The stated conclusion was that God had chosen to honour the Portuguese nation by showing the firmness of its faith.