Portugal Expels Dutch from Brazil
The Dutch garrison at Recife capitulated in January 1654, ending twenty-four years of Dutch rule in north-eastern Brazil. The Dutch West India Company had taken Pernambuco in 1630, going for the richest sugar-producing region in the world rather than for trading posts, and held a coastal strip some 1,500 kilometres long at its greatest extent. Its most successful period was under Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen from 1637 to 1644, who governed with a tolerance unusual anywhere at the time — Catholics kept their churches, and the Jewish community of Recife built the first synagogue in the Americas — and who brought painters, astronomers and naturalists whose work is the best visual record of seventeenth-century Brazil. He also took Elmina and the Angolan slaving ports to supply the mills. The company recalled him as too expensive, and its administration then pressed the Portuguese planters for the debts they owed it. The revolt began in 1645 among those planters, and was fought by a coalition the Dutch could not answer: Portuguese landowners, an indigenous force under Felipe Camarão, and a regiment of free and formerly enslaved Africans under Henrique Dias. Portugal, having recovered its own independence from Spain in 1640, gave quiet support. The Dutch were beaten decisively at the two battles of Guararapes in 1648 and 1649 and held out in Recife for five more years. Portugal paid an indemnity in 1661. Much of the Jewish community sailed for the Caribbean, and twenty-three of them reached New Amsterdam in 1654. The sugar knowledge the Dutch took with them founded the Caribbean plantations that broke Brazil's monopoly within a generation.
- Year: 1648 CE
- Category: Military
