France Antarctique

The colony was never large. A first fleet carried some 600 people; a second wave in 1557 brought about 300 more; by 1558 the garrison was down to about 80 men. What made it consequential was not its size but its position. Guanabara was the best natural harbour on that stretch of coast, the Tupinambá of the bay were hostile to the Portuguese, and the French had been trading along the Brazilian shore for half a century. A fortified French base there threatened the Portuguese route to India and the whole structure of Portuguese America. Portugal took five years to organise a proper response, and another seven to finish the job.

The colony also produced one of the most extraordinary bodies of writing of the sixteenth century. André Thevet's cosmography, Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, the letters of the Jesuits and the Protestant martyrology of Jean Crespin turned a failed settlement of a few hundred men into a permanent European argument about cannibalism, civility and the nature of the New World. Montaigne read them. So did Claude Lévi-Strauss, four centuries later.

The dates in this entry are given as the sixteenth-century sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use in both France and Portugal, which ran ten days behind the Gregorian.

At a glance

Why were French ships already trading on this coast?

French sailors reached Brazil within a few years of Cabral. A Honfleur ship, l'Espoir, was sent out in 1503, traded spades, hardware, mirrors and cloth for brazilwood, and was then captured by channel pirates on the way home; the crew got back to Normandy and talked. That was enough. Within a generation the Norman and Breton ports — Dieppe, Honfleur, Rouen, Saint-Malo — had turned the Brazilian coast into a seasonal trade, and the object of it was a tree.

Brazilwood, Paubrasilia echinata, has a dense orange-red heartwood that yields a dye called brazilin, and in a Europe without synthetic colour it was the best red available for luxury cloth. The Portuguese crown treated it as a monopoly from the start. A Lisbon consortium headed by Fernão de Loronha was licensed from 1502 to send six ships a year, explore the coast, keep a fort, and — from 1505 — import up to 20,000 quintals of brazilwood annually for a payment of 4,000 ducats. A Portuguese voyage of 1511, the Bretoa, came home with about 2,082 quintals cut from some 300 trees. Those are the figures the surviving accounts give for two early voyages, and they are enough to show the scale of the trade and the size of the prize.

French merchants simply took part of it without asking. At least ten French ships made the Brazil run in 1526 alone; one expedition in 1529 reportedly brought back 8,400 quintals, close to half the Portuguese contractor's annual quota. The financier behind much of this was Jean Ango of Dieppe, who backed Jean Parmentier, Hughes Roger and Giovanni da Verrazzano in Brazilian voyages in the early 1520s and obtained a letter of marque from François I in 1529 to attack Portuguese shipping. The method was not colonisation but beach landing: ships anchored, and men who had lived for years among the Tupinambá — the French called them truchements, interpreters — brought the Indians down to the shore with the cut logs and handled the exchange.

Those interpreters were the colony's real infrastructure. They took indigenous wives, learned Tupi, and organised the felling and carrying between one voyage and the next. Portuguese America had its own version of this arrangement, and it was precisely what the crown in Lisbon could not control. When the Portuguese tried to police the coast — Cristóvão Jaques ran coastguard squadrons from 1516 to 1528, attacking French shipping and closing the old feitoria at Cabo Frio — the trade simply moved to another bay. A fort was the only way to stop it, and a fort was what Villegaignon was sent to build.

What did the French crown think it was buying?

The decision was taken at court in the winter of 1554. The French crown gave Villegaignon 10,000 livres tournois for an enterprise the warrant refused to specify or declare, and told his principal minister, Gaspard de Coligny, to prepare it. The wording of the warrant mattered: this was a semi-secret operation, run through the admiral's patronage and the Dieppe shipowners rather than as a formal royal colony, and the sum was modest — enough to fit out two ships and a store ship, not enough to found a state.

Three things lay behind it. The first was the legal argument. François I had refused to accept that the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 and the papal bulls could divide the world between Portugal and Spain without reference to anyone else; the French position, repeated for decades, was that possession and trade, not a line on a map, made a claim. A fortified post at Guanabara would have turned that argument into a fact, and given French privateers a base from which to intercept the Portuguese carracks coming home from India.

The second was commercial. Not only brazilwood: the coast produced cotton, pepper, parrots, monkeys and hardwoods, and the bay was a good harbour with fresh water and an Indian population already used to French goods. Villegaignon had visited the Cabo Frio region in the summer of 1554, talked to the Tamoios, and come back with a report on Portuguese habits and a stock of trade goods which he sold at a profit on his return.

The third was prestige, and here the French were already deep in a performance culture around Brazil. On 1 October 1550, for the royal entry of Henri II into Rouen, the city staged a Brazilian festival: some 50 Tupinambá and 250 Norman sailors, in featherwork or stripped to leaf belts, re-enacted daily life, a battle, and a naumachie in which a French ship attacked a Portuguese caravel. Whether the Indians were genuine Tupinambá brought back on French ships, as the organisers claimed, or Normans in costume, is disputed; what is not disputed is that Rouen's drapers knew exactly where their red dye came from and that the crown had been told the coast was a French sphere of influence.

None of this amounted to a colonial policy. There was no office for Brazil, no budget line, no plan for peopling the place, and nothing resembling the company and annual supply that sustained New France after 1608. The crown paid once and then looked away, and when Henri II died in a joust in 1559 and the religious wars began, it looked away altogether.

Who was Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon?

Villegaignon was born at Provins around 1510, the son of a royal prosecutor, and educated at the colleges of La Marche and Montaigu in Paris — where, by his own later account and that of his enemies, he had sat in the same classrooms as John Calvin. He took a law degree at Orléans, then entered the Order of St John of Jerusalem in 1531 on the recommendation of his uncle, the Grand Master Philippe Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and became a knight of Malta.

His career before Brazil was that of a fighting sailor with a taste for the spectacular. He served in Charles V's expedition against Algiers in 1541 and wrote an account of it. In 1548 he commanded the squadron sent to Scotland to bring the young Mary Stuart to France, and did it by taking galleys around the north of Scotland past the Orkneys and down the Irish Sea — a route considered impossible for galleys and unexpected by the English fleet. He failed to save Tripoli for the Order in 1551, campaigned in Hungary and Piedmont, and in 1553 was made vice-admiral of Brittany.

He was also, by the standards of his time, a religious intellectual. He had written on the eucharist, he corresponded with Geneva, and he seems to have believed for a while that the Reformation and the Roman church might be reconciled on terms he could define. Thierry Wanegffelen's study of him places him among the moyenneurs, the "middle ones" who wanted a reform without a schism. That is the key to everything that happened in Brazil: Villegaignon wanted Protestant colonists and Catholic orthodoxy at the same time, and could not see why they would not agree.

He was brave, vain, autocratic and litigious. He quarrelled with his own council, hanged two of his settlers for conspiracy, drowned three for their faith, and spent his last decade in France writing polemics against the Calvinists he had invited to his colony. He was wounded at the siege of Rouen in 1562, was made governor of Sens in 1567, and died in January 1571 at the commandery of Beauvais-en-Gâtinais — not, as some older reference works still say, in 1572.

What did the first settlers build, and what went wrong at once?

The fleet left Le Havre in the summer of 1555. Thevet, who sailed on it, says the embarkation began on 6 May; other accounts have the ships putting back into Dieppe twice and finally sailing on 14 August. There were two large ships and a small store ship, some 600 people aboard, a Scottish bodyguard for the commander, a Tupinambá interpreter with his wife, two Benedictine monks who knew botany, and a captain, Nicolas Barré, who later published his own account of the voyage. After being driven off the Canaries by the guns of Tenerife, they made the Brazilian coast at Cabo Frio on 10 November and entered Guanabara four days later.

They first tried a rock in the mouth of the bay — the French called it le Rattier, the Portuguese Ilha da Laje — and were driven off by the swell. They then occupied Serigipe, a small island a few hundred metres off the shore where Rio's airport now stands, and built Fort Coligny there in about three months with Tupinambá labour, naming it after the admiral who had sponsored them. The site had one great advantage and one fatal defect. It commanded the water approaches and was hard to assault except by boat; and it had no fresh water. Thevet, who saw it, wrote that the island was "very pleasant, clothed with a great quantity of palms, cedars and brazilwood trees", and that "there is no fresh water that is not a good way off". Every drop the garrison drank had to be fetched from the mainland or from a lake below the Corcovado.

The settlement on the shore, Henriville, was never more than a name and a few huts. The French depended on the Tupinambá for food — fish, venison, game and cassava roots — paid for in small knives, billhooks and fish-hooks, and this dependence shaped everything. It meant the colony could not coerce its neighbours, only negotiate with them, and it meant that when the Indians lost patience the French went hungry.

They lost patience quickly. Thevet left for France in February 1556, and two days later some 30 colonists, led by a Norman interpreter who had been forced to marry an Indian woman, plotted to kill Villegaignon and take the fort. The plot was betrayed by a Scottish guard; two of the conspirators were tried by the colony's council and hanged, the rest punished. Villegaignon responded by requiring every Frenchman living with an Indian woman to marry her before a notary. Many simply left for the forest, where life was easier and the food was better. Others deserted onto passing ships. By the time the second fleet arrived, the garrison was short of food, short of women, short of discipline, and convinced that its commander was a tyrant.

What did the Huguenots of 1557 expect to find?

In 1556 Villegaignon sent to Geneva for pastors. Calvin responded by sending a mission rather than a single minister: two pastors, Pierre Richier, a man in his fifties, and Guillaume Chartier, a young theology student, with twelve others, among them a shoemaker from the Côte-d'Or named Jean de Léry. The party left Geneva on 10 September 1556, stopped at Châtillon to see Coligny, and sailed from France on 19 November with three ships, about 300 colonists, and five young women intended as wives for the settlers.

They reached Guanabara on 7 March 1557. Villegaignon received them courteously, and for a few weeks the colony had the look of a functioning Reformed congregation. On Sunday 21 March 1557 the Lord's Supper was celebrated at Fort Coligny, with the Genevans examining and admitting the communicants beforehand — arguably the first Reformed communion in the Americas. A former Sorbonne doctor named Jean de Cointa, who had come out with the first fleet, publicly abjured the Roman church at the same time. Villegaignon himself, after the sermon, made the captains, masters and pilots who had not professed the faith leave the room, then knelt and recited two long prayers, copies of which Léry later printed word for word.

The trouble was that Villegaignon's prayers were not Calvinist prayers. Within weeks the commander was circulating questions to the ministers, demanding that they state their doctrine in writing on the points he chose, and the answers he got were not the answers he wanted. Four of the colonists — Jean du Bordel, Matthieu Verneuil, Pierre Bourdon and André la Fon — produced a statement of faith that became known, much later, as the Confession of Guanabara. It is the first Protestant text written in the Americas, and it was written by men who understood that it might be read as a confession in the other sense.

Two things had changed since 1555. In France, the drift towards civil war made a Protestant colony useful to Coligny and dangerous to everyone else. In Brazil, the commander discovered that his own theology was not the one he had imported. Villegaignon wanted a church purified of Roman superstition but still Catholic in substance; the Genevans wanted the real thing. Neither side had any vocabulary for compromise, and neither was willing to let the other define the colony.

Why did the Calvinist mission collapse?

It collapsed over the eucharist, and then over everything else. At Pentecost 1557, when the congregation communicated for the second time, Villegaignon insisted that water be mixed with the wine in the cup, citing Cyprian and Clement, and argued that the consecrated bread benefited the body as much as the soul. He also wanted salt and oil mixed with the water of baptism, and held that a minister could not marry a second time. Léry, who had to listen to this, thought it the theology of a man who read Scripture by puns — he records Villegaignon proving the real presence from the healing of the leper, on the grounds that Christ said "I will, be thou clean" and therefore meant what he said about the bread.

By October the Calvinists had been moved off the island and onto the mainland, to a place called la Briqueterie where other French dissidents were already living on the mainland. The two pastors sailed for France at the beginning of 1558; Léry left on 4 January 1558 on a passing merchant ship, and had a voyage home so bad — five months, storms, a leaking hull, three weeks of near-starvation — that the temptation to eat the dead came up among the crew.

Five of the Genevans had turned back at the last moment to stay in Brazil. When they reached Villegaignon's fort, he had three of them drowned: Pierre Bourdon, Jean du Bordel and Matthieu Verneuil. The other two, André la Fon and Jacques le Balleur, survived; le Balleur, a tailor, was later hanged at Salvador by the Portuguese, though the date and the circumstances are uncertain and the edifying story that the Jesuit Anchieta helped him die faster is later hagiography rather than record. Léry gave the three men's confession and the record of their trial to the Genevan printer Jean Crespin, who printed them in his Histoire des martyrs (1564). It was the first Protestant martyrdom in the Americas, and it was inflicted by a Catholic Frenchman on French Calvinists, not by the Portuguese.

Villegaignon left for France in October 1559 to answer the accusations against him, leaving his nephew Legendre de Boissy, sieur de Bois-le-Comte, in command. He never returned. In France he wrote against the Calvinists, fought on the Catholic side, and died in 1571, having spent his fortune and his reputation on a colony that had come to regard him as its worst enemy.

Who were the Tamoios, and what did the French mean to them?

The Indians of the Guanabara hinterland were Tupinambá, speakers of a Tupi language, living in large fortified villages of long houses and practising ritual cannibalism on captured enemies. Their enemies were the Tupiniquim of São Vicente, who were allied to the Portuguese, and the Portuguese themselves, who had been enslaving them since the 1530s. In the mid-1550s a coalition of Tupinambá groups between the Paraíba valley and the bay — the Portuguese called them Tamoios, from a Tupi word for ancestors — went to war against the Portuguese and their Tupiniquim allies. Its leaders were Cunhambebe of Angra dos Reis, Aimberê of Ubatuba, Pindobuçu and Guaixará.

Cunhambebe is the one we can see most clearly, because Hans Staden, a German gunner held captive by the Tupinambá for nine months, described him. Staden says the Tupinambá had no government or laws worth the name, that each hut had its headman, and that deference went to whichever man had most experience of war: "such was the before-mentioned Konyan Bebe". He was a war leader, not a king; his authority ran through kinship, reputation and success in war.

The French fitted into this system as suppliers, not rulers. They gave the Tamoios iron tools, knives and — the Portuguese complained — firearms and powder, and they took brazilwood and captives' labour in return. Villegaignon's alliance with Cunhambebe was the colony's real defence; without it the fort was indefensible, and with it the Portuguese could not take the bay. When the French later claimed that the Indians were their subjects, they were flattering themselves.

The alliance had limits that the French never solved. The Tupinambá made war for their own reasons, on their own timetable, and their wars had nothing to do with the eucharist or the king of France. They resented being made to carry stone and timber for the fort. An epidemic — the sources do not agree on its date or its disease, though smallpox and influenza are the usual candidates — killed many of them, including Cunhambebe, and weakened the coalition at exactly the moment the Portuguese began to move. The French could advise, trade and fight alongside; they could not command.

Why did Portugal wait until 1560 to act?

Because until 1558 the Portuguese did not know what they were dealing with. The crown had tried to settle the coast properly since 1534, when John III divided Brazil into hereditary captainancies, and since 1549 had a governor-general at Salvador with a royal instructions book and a garrison. São Vicente, founded in 1532, was a going concern. But the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro had never been granted to anyone who made it work, and the bay was, in practice, French water.

Tomé de Sousa, the first governor-general, had visited Guanabara in 1553 and recommended a settlement there "honourable and good" to contain the French; nothing was done. In June 1558 Mem de Sá, who had succeeded as governor-general, wrote from Espírito Santo that he had sent two vessels to try to catch a French launch and find out "how many they are, what they do, and what they intend". Only in 1559 did he get a proper account, from a French deserter at Ilhéus — a gentleman the Portuguese called "monsenhor de Bolés", often identified with the ex-Dominican Jean de Cointa, who had fallen out with Villegaignon and gone over to the Portuguese. From him Mem de Sá learned that the commander was a vice-admiral of Brittany, that the fort was strong, and that Villegaignon meant to bring ships from France to prey on the India fleet.

That last piece of intelligence decided the matter. A French base at Guanabara was not a smuggling post; it was a strategic threat to the Carreira da Índia. A fleet under Bartolomeu de Vasconcelos da Cunha arrived from Portugal in late November 1559, and Mem de Sá took it south instead of using it where it had been intended. The expedition left Salvador on 16 January 1560, picked up reinforcements at Ilhéus, Porto Seguro, Espírito Santo and São Vicente, and anchored off Guanabara on 21 February.

The numbers in the sources vary widely — some give 26 sail and 2,000 men, which is probably the whole armada rather than the attacking force. What is clear is that the fight was short. Mem de Sá sent an ultimatum on 15 March; Bois-le-Comte refused; the Portuguese landed, took the powder store and the water tank, and the garrison abandoned the fort before dawn on 17 March. The Portuguese celebrated mass on the island that day and then demolished the works, because Mem de Sá had neither the men nor the supplies to hold the place. He sailed away to São Vicente, leaving the French scattered around the bay among the Indians, as Belchior puts it.

What happened between the fall of the fort and the founding of Rio?

For six years the French carried on without a fort. Bois-le-Comte kept up a war of ambushes from the mainland, and French ships kept coming for brazilwood. The Portuguese settlers of São Vicente complained that the French were arming the Tamoios with firearms and powder "with which they give them great courage to attempt whatever they wish". Brás Cubas asked Lisbon in April 1562 for bombards, powder and a settlement at Rio, and got nothing for three years.

The Portuguese answer in the interval was diplomacy. In April 1563 the Jesuits Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta went to Iperoig, near modern Ubatuba, to negotiate with the Tamoio chiefs. Nóbrega took Cunhambebe's son back to São Vicente to talk; Anchieta stayed behind as a hostage, and whiled away the months composing a Latin poem to the Virgin on the sand of the beach. A peace was concluded in 1563 on terms that included freeing the Indian captives held by Portuguese settlers. It was the only realistic basis for a settlement, and the settlers broke it almost immediately by enslaving Indians again. The war resumed, and the French were still there.

What finally moved Lisbon was the Jesuits' argument that Rio had to be occupied, not merely raided. Nóbrega wanted a city on the bay like Salvador, both to hold the coast and to gather the Indians into mission villages. In January 1564 Mem de Sá sent a small squadron south under his nephew Estácio de Sá, with the ouvidor Brás Fragoso, to do what could be done. Estácio reached Guanabara in February, fought inconclusive actions for two months, and then sailed to São Vicente for men and food, where he stayed nearly a year — the captaincy was recovering from a smallpox epidemic and the municipal council of São Paulo refused to supply flour.

He sailed again on 22 January 1565 with five small ships, Indians from São Vicente and Cananéia, Tupiniquim allies and the Jesuits. This time the Portuguese did not leave.

How was Rio de Janeiro founded?

On 1 March 1565 Estácio de Sá landed on a strip of beach between the Sugarloaf and the hill called Cara de Cão, at the mouth of the bay, and began building a stone-and-timber enclosure — the origin of the Fortress of São João. He named the place São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, after the Portuguese king Sebastian, and a chapel of wattle and daub was dedicated to the saint, who became the city's patron. The site was chosen for defence, not for living: it had a beach, a spring, and a hill behind it, and it was as far as possible from the French and their Tamoio allies.

The French attacked within days. On 6 March three ships from Cabo Frio tried to bombard the half-built wall; the Portuguese held, counter-attacked and drove them off. A French ship was taken and released after its guns and munitions were removed. For the next two years the city existed under arrow-fire, with poisoned arrows, night alarms, and a garrison that was always hungry. Anchieta, who was there, wrote that it had seemed impossible to settle Rio "with so few people and supplies", and that only the captain-major's refusal to give up had carried it through.

Estácio did the administrative work of a town as well as the military work of a campaign. He appointed a judge, a prosecutor, a bailiff and a notary; he granted sesmarias, the Portuguese land concessions, the first in July 1565 to one Pedro Rodrigues; he fixed the municipal boundaries at a league and a half from the Casa de Pedra; he founded the confraternity of São Sebastião. The first years were a scramble of small holdings and Indian raids. Among the grantees of 1566 was Marim Paris, a Frenchman who had been one of Villegaignon's colonists, which says something about how porous the lines were.

The city was also, from the beginning, a Jesuit project as much as a military one. Nóbrega and Anchieta wanted a Portuguese town that could hold the Indians in villages and keep the French out; the crown wanted a naval base; the settlers wanted land and slaves. The three aims coincided for long enough to build a town.

How did France Antarctique end?

It ended in January 1567, within a fortnight of the reinforcements arriving. Mem de Sá reached Guanabara on 19 January with a squadron built around ships from Portugal under Cristóvão de Barros, and with the Temiminó under Araribóia, whose people had been driven off the bay by the Tamoios and who fought the campaign as a war of recovery. He attacked the next day at Uruçumirim, the Tamoio entrenched village on the hill above the beach of Glória. The village was taken; a few days later the Portuguese destroyed the village of Paranapuan on the island the Portuguese called Maracaiaguaçu, now Governador; the last French redoubt surrendered without a fight. Mem de Sá reported a year later that he had finished peopling and building the city, that it had been moved to the hill of Castelo, and that "the land was at peace and quiet and the French who were in it had been driven out".

Estácio de Sá did not see it. He was wounded in the face during the fighting at Uruçumirim — an arrow through the eye, in the account that became canonical — and died on 20 February 1567, aged about 47. He was buried in the first chapel at Cara de Cão; his remains were moved to the church on the Castelo hill, and were still there when the hill was demolished in 1922.

The French who survived did not vanish. Many had Indian wives, children and trading partners, and some stayed on the coast, French in language and Catholic or Calvinist in religion, working the brazilwood trade. The Portuguese fought them at Cabo Frio for another decade, and in 1575 a punitive expedition under Antônio Salema destroyed the last Franco-Tamoio stronghold there: two Frenchmen, an Englishman and a Tupinambá priest were hanged, some 500 warriors killed and about 1,500 Indians enslaved. Aimberê, the last of the confederation's leaders, was killed in that war. The French crown tried again in 1612 at São Luís in Maranhão, in "Equinoctial France", and was thrown out in 1615. Permanent French presence in South America only began with the Guiana settlements of the seventeenth century.

What did the colony leave behind?

It left a literature out of all proportion to its size, and a city. Thevet published in 1557 and became the king's cosmographer; his book was savaged by Léry, who had been there longer and disliked him, and the quarrel between them is one of the first great ethnographic disputes in European letters. Léry's Histoire d'un voyage appeared in 1578 and was reprinted four times in his lifetime. It is the fullest French eyewitness account of Tupinambá life in the sixteenth century, and it is also a Protestant polemic written after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, in which Léry's patron Coligny was killed. When Léry describes the Tupinambá eating a prisoner as a ritual of vengeance, he is also describing Paris.

The philosophical afterlife was longer still. Montaigne, who had met Tupinambá visitors at Rouen in 1562, wrote "Des cannibales" in 1580 and used the Brazilian material to ask whether the Europeans were the savages; the essay depends on the French literature of Guanabara, directly or at one remove. In the twentieth century Lévi-Strauss made Léry a founding figure of anthropology, and Frank Lestringant spent a career reconstructing the whole textual world of what he called the Huguenot and the savage. Brazilian historians have their own line, from Varnhagen and Gaffarel in the nineteenth century to the 2001 revaluation by Vasco Mariz and Lucien Provençal and the 2008 archival study of Estácio de Sá by Elysio Belchior.

The physical traces are thin. The island is now called Ilha de Villegagnon and is joined to the mainland by a causeway next to Santos Dumont airport; since 1938 it has housed the Brazilian Naval School, and in 2007 a monument was unveiled there to the Guanabara confession. Fort Coligny's site was rebuilt by the Portuguese in the eighteenth century as the Fortaleza de São Francisco Xavier, and that fort was wrecked by naval bombardment during the Revolt of the Armada in 1893. Of Henriville there is nothing at all.

What survives most visibly is the city. Rio de Janeiro exists because the Portuguese decided, after 1560, that leaving Guanabara to the French was more expensive than occupying it. The French colony failed, but it dictated where Rio would stand, when it would be founded, and who would be its patron saint.

Common myths about France Antarctique

Timeline of France Antarctique

What the map shows next

At 1560 on the map the map colours the whole bay French, because the dataset keeps France Antarctique in one piece from 1556 to 1571. Historically the fort had just been razed and its survivors had moved to the mainland; a single polygon cannot show a colony that had lost its capital and was living in Tupinambá villages.

The same caveat applies at 1565 on the map and 1567 on the map, where the map still shows French territory at the mouth of the bay while Estácio de Sá's beachhead was becoming São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro and the last French redoubt was falling. The 1571 on the map frame is the end of the dataset's range, four years after the colony ceased to exist: read it as the moment when the Portuguese had a city, a captaincy and a coast still worked by French and English ships whenever the crown's attention wandered.