Mem de Sá
Mem de Sá was the third governor-general of Brazil and the longest, fourteen years from 1558 to his death in 1572, the man who drove the French out of Guanabara Bay, refounded Rio de Janeiro on the site they had held, broke the Tupinamba around Bahia and settled the survivors in the Jesuit villages, and made the Portuguese colony, which had been a few coastal captaincies with a fort at Salvador, into something that could be governed. He was a judge, a doctor of law from Coimbra and a member of the high court at Lisbon, past fifty and a widower when the king sent him out, and his brother was the poet Sa de Miranda. He arrived at Salvador in December 1557 to find the second governor dead and the settlers at war with the Tupinamba, who had eaten the first bishop of Brazil on the beach two years before. He made war on the villages north of the bay, took Paraguacu, and forbade the settlers to enslave Indians who had submitted. Instead they were gathered under the Jesuits in aldeias, villages by the mission, an arrangement the colonists resented and the Jesuit Nobrega called the first of its kind. The French Huguenots had been on an island in Guanabara Bay since 1555. Mem de Sa sailed south with two ships and the Jesuits in 1560, stormed the fort of Coligny in March, and could not hold the bay for want of men; the French and their Tamoio allies came back to the mainland. His nephew Estacio de Sa founded a town on the bay in 1565 and was mortally wounded fighting for it in January 1567, and Mem de Sa came down with a fleet, drove the French and Tamoio off in two battles that month, and refounded the city of Sao Sebastiao do Rio de Janeiro on the hill it kept until the twentieth century. He asked to go home from 1563 and was never allowed. He owned a sugar mill on the Sergipe river that was the largest in Brazil, and the Jesuit poet Anchieta wrote him a Latin epic. He died at Salvador in March 1572, and the crown, which had no one to replace him, divided the colony in two.
- Lived: 1500 CE – 1572 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: governor, colonial administrator
