Tomé de Sousa
Tomé de Sousa was the soldier João III sent to Brazil in 1549 as its first governor-general, with a thousand people in six ships, a set of regulations, the first Jesuits and the plan of a city, and in four years he built Salvador on its bluff above the Bay of All Saints, made it the capital for the next two hundred and fourteen years, and turned a coast of failed private captaincies into a colony the crown governed. He was born about 1503, the illegitimate son of a prior of the military order of Christ, fought in Morocco and in India, and was chosen when the king decided that the fifteen hereditary captaincies he had granted in the 1530s, of which only two were paying, needed a governor over them. The regimento of December 1548 he carried was the constitution of Portuguese Brazil. It made him captain-general over the donatários, told him to build a fortified capital in the captaincy of Bahia that the crown had bought back from its founder's heirs, to make war on the Indians who resisted and peace with those who did not, to forbid the private slave raids that had turned the coast against the colonists, and to bring the treasurer, the chief justice and the customs with him. He landed on 29 March 1549 and by November had the walls, the church, the governor's house and the jail of Salvador up, laid out on the plan of a Lisbon architect. He was distributing sugar lands. The Jesuits under Manuel da Nóbrega who came with him founded the first schools and the mission villages. They quarrelled at once with the settlers over the Indians. He sailed the coast south to São Vicente in 1552 inspecting the captaincies, ordered the cattle brought from the Cape Verde islands that became the herds of the interior, and went home in 1553 to the king's council, where he was consulted on Brazil for the rest of his life and died in 1579. His successor Duarte da Costa lost the harmony he had kept, and the third governor, Mem de Sá, made the colony with the same instruments over seventeen years.
- Lived: 1503 CE – 1579 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: governor, soldier
