Though we now make our first inquiry into the conduct of the Portuguese towards the natives of their colonies, and enter upon so immense a scene of action as that of the vast empire of Brazil, our notice may happily be condensed into a comparatively small space, because the features of the settlement of Paraguay by the Spaniards, and that of Brazil by the Portuguese are wonderfully similar. The natives were of a like character, bold and warlike, and were treated in like fashion. They were destroyed, enslaved, given away in Encomiendos, just as it suited the purpose of the invaders; the Jesuits arrived, and undertook their defence and civilization, and were finally expelled, like their brethren of Paraguay, as pestilential fellows, that would not let the colonists “do as they pleased with their own.” Yanez Pinzon, the Spaniard, was the first who discovered the coast of Brazil, in A.D. 1500, and coasting northward from Cape Agostinho, he gave the natives such a taste of the faith and intentions of the whites as must have prepared them to resist them to 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.