While the north was struggling with the Dutch and French and incidentally becoming solidified by the tussle until a genuine national feeling came into existence, Bahia, beating off attacks and remaining the administrative residence of a Captain-General, was the centre of the wealthiest part of the colony; all the slaves brought from Africa were sold here, and although they were partly distributed, this was the chief slave-owning region and is still the place where more pure negroes are to be seen than anywhere else in Brazil. Farther south Espirito Santo, one of the oldest of Brazilian colonies, was growing cane and raising cattle, but suffered from raiding foreigners, as also did Ilhéos; Rio de Janeiro became the seat of a second Captaincy-General in 1608, for a time, with command over S. Vicente and Espirito Santo but had no importance until the discovery of mines made her the chief gateway to the golden regions. Out of the path of the Dutch, whose object was wide agricultural lands, Rio neither suffered nor gained as did the North; at this part of the Brazilian coast the mountain barrier comes right down to the sea’s edge, the granite wall shouldering into the waters of the deeply indented bay: there is very little land suitable for plantations except in narrow valleys until the Serra do Mar is climbed. It was this lack of sugar land that kept Rio uncolonized, lovely as she is, for half a century after the colonies on either side of her were started; settlement by the Portuguese might have been put off still longer if the French under Admiral Villegaignon had not taken possession of the bay in 1555, made friends with the Tamoyo Indians as the Portuguese were never able to do, fortified a rocky island, and established a Huguenot colony here—the ill-fated “_France Antarctique_.” The energetic Mem de Sá, Captain-General after Thomé de Souza, brought a fleet from Bahia, drove the French into hiding on the mainland, sent his nephew, Estacio de Sá, to Portugal to get help, and this gallant young man returned with a strong force in 1565. In two years’ time, with troops from Bahia and São Paulo assisting, the unfortunate Huguenots were utterly defeated, the remnants of the exiles retiring into the woods with their Indian allies and disappearing from history. The body of Estacio de Sá, killed in the last decisive fighting, was buried in the shade of the Pão d’Assucar near the first Portuguese town founded in the bay and named São Sebastião. Another member of the same family, Correia de Sá, was sent to head the new Portuguese settlement, and eventually died there at the age of 113.