The short answer
They were strips of land into which King João III divided Brazil’s coast from 1534, running from the shore inland to the Tordesillas line. He granted them to twelve lords, the donatários, who paid for settlement themselves and passed the grants to their heirs. Almost all failed; only Pernambuco and São Vicente thrived, on sugar.
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A coast too big to guard
For three decades after Portuguese ships first reached Brazil in 1500, the Crown did little there but load brazilwood, the red dye wood, from trading posts and passing ships. Portugal’s money and attention were in India. But the French were trading on the same coast with their Tupinambá allies. As late as 1550, the city of Rouen welcomed the king of France with a Brazilian village staged on the riverbank, peopled by some fifty real Tupinambá. A coast without settlers was a coast Portugal could lose.
Settlement on someone else’s budget
King João III’s answer, from 1534, was to occupy the coast without paying for it. He sliced it into strips running from the shore inland to the line agreed with Spain at Tordesillas, and granted each to a donatário, a man the king trusted. The grantee paid for everything: ships, settlers, weapons, sugar mills. In return he received land and rights. He could found towns, hand out land to settlers in grants called sesmarias, and collect certain dues. Two documents set out his rights and duties: a letter of grant (carta de doação) and a charter (foral).
The land itself remained the king’s. A donatário could not sell his captaincy, but he passed it to his sons, which is why the captaincies are called hereditary. There were twelve donatários in all. A map by the cartographer Luís Teixeira, from about 1574, now in the Ajuda Library in Lisbon, shows the strips side by side like slices of a loaf.
Why almost all of them failed
Most never took off. Keeping a settlement alive across an ocean was expensive, and few people wanted to go. The strips were huge and help was months away. Some donatários never set foot in Brazil at all. And settlement ran into the people who already lived there: in several captaincies, war with Indigenous peoples destroyed mills and settlements.
The two that worked
Only Pernambuco, in the Northeast, and São Vicente, on the coast of today’s São Paulo state, prospered, and for the same reason: sugar. In Pernambuco the donatário Duarte Coelho came in person, founded Olinda and filled the lowlands with cane fields and mills. São Vicente, founded in 1532 by Martim Afonso de Sousa, was Brazil’s first town, and it grew cane too.
Sugar mills devoured labor. First the settlers enslaved Indigenous people. Then, more and more, Africans: in 1559 a royal decree let each mill owner bring up to 120 enslaved people from the Congo while paying only a third of the duty. So began the trade that would shape Brazil for three centuries. Its scale is in How many enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil?
What came next
In 1548 the king changed course and created a governor-general to rule the whole colony for the Crown. The next year Tomé de Sousa founded Salvador, as What was the first capital of Brazil? explains. The captaincies did not vanish overnight. They lived on, more and more under royal control, and several left their names on today’s Brazilian states, among them Pernambuco, Bahia and Espírito Santo.
Sources
- Luís Teixeira, map of the captaincies of Brazil (c. 1574), Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon
- Royal alvará of March 29, 1559, on enslaved people from the Congo for the sugar mills
- Boris Fausto, História do Brasil (1994)
- Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, Brasil: uma biografia (2015)
- Maurício Goulart, A escravidão africana no Brasil (1949)