the utmost on their reappearance. Betwixt Cape Agostinho and the river Maranham, seeing a party of the natives on a hill near the shore, they landed, and endeavoured to open some degree of intercourse; but the natives not liking their appearance, attempted to drive them away, killed eight of them, wounded more, and pursued them with fury to their boat. The Spaniards, of course, did not spare the natives, and soon afterwards shewed that the natives were very much in the right in repelling them, for on entering the Maranham, where the natives did receive them cordially, they seized about thirty of these innocent people and carried them off for slaves.
Scarcely had Pinzon departed, when Cabral, with the Portuguese squadron, made his accidental visit to the same coast. In the following year Amerigo Vespucci was sent thither to make further discoveries, and having advanced as far southward as 52°, returned home. In 1503, he was sent out again, and effected a settlement in 18° S. in what was afterwards called the Captaincy of Porto Seguro. One of the very first acts of Portugal was to ship thither as colonists the refuse of her prisons, as Spain had done to her colonies, and as Portugal also had done to Africa and India; a horrible mode of inflicting the worst curses of European society on new countries, and of presenting to the natives under the name of Christians, men rank and fuming with every species of brutal vice and pestiferous corruption.
Ten years after the discovery of Brazil, a young noble, Diego Alvarez, who was going out on a voyage of adventure, was wrecked on the coast of Bahia, and was received with cordiality by the natives, and named
