The allotment of Brazil into separate _capitanias_ (captaincies) was made in 1530; the average coastal strip presented to the holders was fifty leagues, and as to the depth of the land commanded was a matter for the individual captain: he could have as much as he could conquer. No one had any idea of what the hinterlands contained, for, with the exception of the riverine explorations of the Spanish on the Orinoco and the Plata, Europeans had not visited the South American interior east of the Andes. Martim Affonso de Souza came out in 1531 as Admiral of the Coast, empowered to mark out the capitanias and to keep one for himself; he found French vessels hovering about Pernambuco, seized them, and went on to Bahia (Bahia de Todos os Santos) named thirty years before and frequently visited, where he found a Portuguese sailor, survivor of a shipwreck, married to the daughter of an Indian ruler and living like a patriarch with a large family already grown up about him. This Caramarú, “big fish caught among rocks,” was of great help to the Portuguese when the colony was founded, and his half-breed family, possessing Indian knowledge and Portuguese leanings, formed the nucleus of the true hardy Brazilian of the north coast. Sailing south on his delimitation errand, Affonso de Souza entered Rio harbour, but passed on to mark out his own capitania on the hot sands of the São Paulo coast, near the present Santos, under the name of São Vicente. By a freak of fate, here the story of old Caramarú was duplicated. On the uplands beyond the Serra do Mar another Portuguese sailor was living, one João Ramalho married to the daughter of the native chief Tibiriça, and also surrounded by an extraordinary number of descendants: these children and grandchildren of Ramalho were the first _mamelucos_, that bold tribe who were thorns in the flesh of the Jesuits, but who were instrumental in giving Matto Grosso, Goyaz and Minas Geraes to Brazil. Martim Affonso de Souza marked out twelve capitanias, but of the accepted applicants few besides himself made serious and systematic efforts to settle and hold their great lands; the rights offered them were very large, including almost every authority of the king himself except that of coining money: possession was perpetual and hereditary.[1] “If these hereditary captaincies had continued to exist,” says the Brazilian historian, Luis de Queiros, “we should have today so many republics, corresponding to the number of territorial divisions, and not a homogenous whole which a nation so full of life and hope as Brazil constitutes. By good luck, however, almost all of the recipients of the grants were unsuccessful in their attempts at colonization, and some of them did not make any real beginning....”