page_title: Captaincies of Brazil
section_title: Establishment as colonies
hierarchical_section_title: Captaincies of Brazil / Establishment as colonies
context_page_description: The Captaincies of Brazil were captaincies of the Portuguese Empire, administrative divisions and hereditary fiefs of Portugal in the colony of Terra de Santa Cruz, later called Brazil, on the Atlantic coast of northeastern South America. Each was granted to a single donee, a Portuguese nobleman who was given the title captain General. Except for two, Pernambuco and São Vicente, they were administrative and economic failures. They were effectively subsumed by the Governorates General and the States of Brazil and Maranhão starting in 1549, and the last of the privately granted captaincies reverted to the Crown in 1754. Their final boundaries in the latter half of the eighteenth century became the basis for the provinces of Brazil.
context_section_description: Following the successful expedition of Martim Afonso de Sousa in 1530, in order to exploit the trade in brazilwood discovered on the Atlantic coast, as well as explore rumors of vast riches in silver and gold in the interior, the Portuguese Crown determined to establish permanent colonies in their claim on the new continent. The Portuguese realized that they had no human or financial resources to invest in a large and distant colony, and decided to enlist private entrepreneurs, called donatários. Each would become owner and administrator of a capitania or captaincy, a land grant. This system had previously been successful in settling of the Portuguese colonies in Africa.
  The captaincies were drawn as stripes parallel to the equator, commencing at the Atlantic coast and terminating in the west at the Tordesillas Line (where Spanish territory began). They were established by King John III of Portugal in 1534. Within a system of royal patronage and nepotism, five of the captaincies were given to two cousins of finance minister António de Ataíde: Martim Afonso de Sousa and his brother Pero Lopes. An additional captaincy was issued to Pero de Gois, captain of Afonso's 1530 expedition. The remaining captaincies were granted to a trusted mixture of military men (more precisely called conquistadores) and court bureaucrats.
  Each captaincy was to be of fifty leagues "height" (measured north-south), but in practice, boundaries were marked by pairs of rivers, a plethora of which emptied into the Atlantic Ocean on the northeastern coast of the continent. So actual heights varied, as shown in the map at right. Initially fifteen, they were granted to twelve donees. They were the following (north to south):
  All but four captaincies failed, due to inadequate resources of the donees and lack of support from the Crown. Four donees failed to take possession of their lands, and four more quickly succumbed to Indians. Only four captaincies survived past 1549: São Vicente, Pernambuco, Ilhéus and Porto Seguro.
caption: Brazil in 1709 with São Paulo at its largest