128 Françoise Latour da Veiga Pinto,
A. Carreiraguese ports to Dutch trade. But when the truce ended, fighting broke out afresh.
The Dutch systematically attacked the vital centres of the empire, disrupted the
trade with the Orient, and occupied one by one the key points of sugar produc-
tion in Brazil and their sources of supply of slaves in Africa. From 1630 to
1641 north-eastern Brazil, including Recife, Pernambuco and Maranhäo, fell
into the hands of the Dutch, while Bahia was twice compelled to surrender.
After the signature of the peace treaty with Britain in 1635, Holland continued
the war and made themselves masters of the Portuguese possessions in Africa :
Mpinda, Sao Tomé, Luanda and Benguela fell into their hands in rapid succes-
sion in 1641.
The Dutch then gained the support of the African chiefs, who were
anxious to shake off the Portuguese yoke. The manikongo Garcia II and the
Governor of Sonho dealt direct with the Dutch East India Company, even
sending emissaries to Brazil and Holland to establish closer trading relations.
Angola, moreover, was very far from being pacified or colonized, and took
advantage of the Dutch-Portuguese conflict; the uprising there was personified
by the legendary Queen Nzinga, who succeeded in rallying around her the
Mbundu peoples of Ndongo and Matamba. Caught between two fires, the
Portuguese in Angola seemed to be in a desperate situation. Events turned in
their favour, however, after the restoration of a Portuguese dynasty in 1640.
The Dutch refused to make peace, for Portugal in her weakened state seemed
doomed to lose her Atlantic empire. But the Portuguese settlers in Brazil
rebelled against the Dutch and drove them out of the country. Then, following
the liberation of the American colony, the great landowers were soon concerned
to re-establish the slave trade on a normal footing so as to provide their
plantations with slaves. Thus it was from Brazil that the three expeditions set
out that were to drive the Dutch from the coasts of Angola and the mouth of
the Congo. In 1648 the Portuguese reoccupied the main centres of the slave
trade south of the Equator.
From that time onwards, Brazil became the mainstay of the Portuguese
empire. Trade with India having become secondary, Portugal's economic sphere
of influence was to be centred on the Atlantic through the triangular trade :
the two poles of attraction being Brazil with its plantations (and later its mines)
and Africa as the supplier of manpower. Portugal's role was merely to provide
manufactured goods and to serve as a staging-post between her two colonies.
Portugal then directed all her efforts towards her American colony,
which was rapidly developing. Sugar was now in everyday use in Europe. The
plantations needed slaves, and the Brazilian Indians (who had the protection
of the Jesuits, and were not such good workers as the Africans) were replaced
by Negroes. The industrialization of sugar-cane cultivation was to lead to a
great 'slave famine' from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards,
not only in Brazil but throughout America.