The document provides background information on Portugal's colonial empire in the Americas between the 16th and 18th centuries. It discusses Portugal's initial colonization efforts in Brazil in the early 1500s through the establishment of captaincies and settlements. It then covers periods of rivalry with other European powers like the Dutch and English for control of Portuguese trade routes and colonies, which contributed to the decline of the Portuguese Empire. The document also mentions gold discoveries that led to a gold rush in Brazil and increased centralization of power by the Portuguese crown over its empire.

1. Portuguese Empire in the Americas By: David Marsh

2. Antonio de Gouveia: Adventurer and Priest 1508 Antonia de Gouveia was born Antonio de Gouveia was an Azorean priest of obscure origins who lived during the incredible years of the sixteenth century, moved about freely in the Atlantic world that the portuguese had created, and unhinged himself morally and religiously in unhinging times. He knew people in high places, he also knew astrology and alchemy, read fortunes, foretold happenings, practiced medicine with sometimes the success of an amateur, and he thought he had the key to invisibility. Spent his youth in the Azores, when the nine islands were the center of the Atlantic shipping, in 1493 Columbus being the first to reach Azores and that created the regular sailing route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Iberian Peninsula. In 1528, Antonio de Gouveia went to Libson at about the age of twenty years of age, within two years he was made subdeacon and a deacon and then ordained to the holy priesthood in the chapel of Saint Ann. In 1557, He said under oath that he studied Latin and Rhetoric at the University of Coumbra, but he didn’t specify the year. In 1553 he sailed to Italy to further his education in theology and medicine in Rome. On December 30th, 1575 Gouveia did ask the inquisitors to make up their minds about him so that he could prove himself innocent, but was denied that opportunity. He passes out of history in this part in time and no one has records of him since.

3. Catarina de Monte Sinay: Nun and Entrepreneur One August morning in 1758, Catarina de Monte Sinay, enfeebled by old age and illness, called for the convent’s scribes to dictate her last will and testament. 1696 Catarina became Madre Catarina de Monte Sinay from novice Catarin de TellesBarrettos. Catarina vowed to God, the Virgin, Saint Francis, and Saint Clare that she would forever honor her sacred promises to live in poverty, chastity, and abedience. Before the creation of the convent in Brazil, the well-bred young women of the colony in whom religious vocation was discovered to brave a long and dangerous voyage across the Atlantic to profess in convent in Portugal or in the Azores, she lived there for six years as a pupil until her father paid 600,000 reis and contributions to the sacristy, she was then permitted to enter novitiate. Her brother didn’t always follow in their footsteps and did not always honor their family name. He had been mainly interested , like many other leading citizen of the colony, in making money. In 1724, he petitioned the crown of grounds that he was being unjustly deprived of income from his office as scribes of the municipal council by the creation of several villas in nearby Reconcavo of Bahia, each with its own scribe. Joao, Catarina’s brother, thought that the scribe should pay him 20,000 reis annually for the revenue the new offices had taken from him, but he was denied the request by the Crown of Wisdom. Catarina reflected that perhaps she acquired he financial acumen from her father, who had always been alert to a chance for making a profitable undertaking. She had known inclination and talent for making money and in a period of half a century she had built up a working capital of 4,402,000 reis2--- a considerable sum equal approximately to half of the wealthy convent’s total annual income.

4. Francisca: Indian Slave In 1739 Francisca, an Indian slave woman of the city of Belem do Para near the mouth of the Amazon River, was persauded by her young lover, Angelico de Barros Goncalves, to petition the Portuguese colonial authorities for her freedom. Justice found in her favor, but the case was then appealed by Francisca’s owner to the Council of Missions, charged with supervising the administration of the “domestic Indians” of Para. Francisca remained a slave. Most Indian slaves, in Amazonia and elsewhere in colonial America, lived lives that were so severely constricted by hunger, ignorance, disease and harsh discipline that they had no opportunity. Slaves died within a few months to a year of their captivity. Francisca’s homeland was more than a thousand miles to the west and up the Amazon from Belem do Para in the valley of the great Rio Negro, which curves down from what is the Brazil-Columbia-Venezula border region to empty into the Amazon at the modern city Manaus. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a large, powerful tribe of traders and warriors known as the Manao ranged freely over much of the northwestern Amazonia from the base along the middle reaches of the Negro. Late in the seventeenth century, this traditional pattern of intertribal trade underwent a process of rapid change. During this era the Portuguese, less organized and less unanimous in purpose than the Dutch, had settled and erected a new exploitative social order on American soil, rather than simply extracting goods from it.

5. First Efforts of Colonization in Brazil In 1534, promoting settlement to overcome the need to defend the territory, John III organized the colonization of Brazil through land grants. As of 1520, the Portuguese had realized that Brazil was likely to be disputed, with Francis I of France challenging the Treaty of Tordesillas and supporting privateers. The increase in brazilwood smuggling pressed this effort to effective occupation of the territory, although since 1503 an expedition under the command of Gonçalo Coelho reported French raids on the Brazilian coasts and, in the same year, MartimAfonso de Sousa went to patrol the whole Brazilian coast, banish the French and create the first colonial towns: São Vicente ( 1532 ) and São Paulo ( 1554 ). Each captain-major should build settlements, grant allotments and administer justice, being responsible for developing and taking the costs of colonization, although not being the owner: he could transmit it to offspring, but not sell it. n 1548 he created the first General Government, sending in Tomé de Sousa as first governor and rescuing the captaincy of the Bay of All Saints, making it a royal captaincy, seat of the Government. From 1565 through 1567 Mem de Sá, a Portuguese colonial official and the third Governor General of Brazil, successfully destroyed a ten year-old French colony called France Antarctique, at Guanabara Bay. He and his nephew, Estácio de Sá, then founded the city of Rio de Janeiro in March 1567. Twelve recipients came from Portuguese gentry who become prominent in Africa and India and senior officials of the court, such as João de Barros and MartimAfonso de Sousa.

6. Iberian Union and rivalry with the Dutch (1580–1663) In 1580, King Philip II of Spain invaded Portugal after a crisis of succession brought about by King Sebastian of Portugal's death during a disastrous Portuguese Alcazarquivir attack on Morocco in 1578. All the Portuguese colonies accepted the new state of affairs except for the Azores, which held out for Antonio, a Portuguese rival claimant to the throne who had garnered the support of Catherine de Medici of France in exchange for the promise to cede Brazil. Spanish forces eventually captured the island in 1583. n 1592, during the war with Spain, an English fleet captured a large Portuguese carrack off the Azores, the Madre de Deus. Loaded with 900 tons of merchandise from India and China, estimated at half a million pounds (nearly half the size of English Treasury at the time). The Dutch took their fight overseas, attacking Spanish and Portuguese colonies and shipping, allying in turn with rival local leaders, and dismantling the Portuguese trade monopoly in Asia. The Portuguese Empire, consisting primarily of exposed coastal settlements vulnerable to being picked off one by one, proved to be an easier target than the Spanish Empire. The Dutch–Portuguese War began with an attack on São Tomé and Príncipe in 1597 and lasted until 1663. The war was waged by the Dutch East India Company (established in 1602) and its West India counterpart (1621), commercial ventures whose aim was to take over the trade networks that the Portuguese had established in Asian spices, West African slaves and Brazilian sugar.

7. Imperial decline (1663–1822) The loss of colonies was one of the reasons that contributed to the end of the personal union with Spain. In 1640 John IV was proclaimed King of Portugal and the Portuguese Restoration War began. In 1661 the Portuguese offered Bombay and Tangier to England as part of a dowry, and over the next hundred years the English gradually became the dominant trader in India, gradually excluding the trade of other powers. In 1668 Spain recognized the end of the Iberian Union and in exchange Portugal ceded Ceuta to the Spanish crown. From 1693 the focus was in a Brazilian region that become known as Minas Gerais, where gold was discovered. Major discoveries of gold and, later, diamonds in Minas Gerais, MatoGrosso and Goias led to a "gold rush", with a large influx of migrants. In 1755 Lisbon suffered a catastrophic earthquake, which together with a subsequent tsunami killed more than 100,000 people out of a population of 275,000. This sharply checked Portuguese colonial ambitions in the late 18th century. In 1774, the two states of Brazil and the Grand Para and Maranhao merged into a single administrative entity. The eighteenth century was marked by increasing centralization of royal power throughout the Portuguese empire, with the power of the Jesuits, protective of the Indians against slavery, brutally suppressed by the Marquis of Pombal, leading to the dissolution of this religious order under ground Portuguese in 1759.