Meantime some disputes having arisen between the Governor and the Bishop, the latter resolved to return to Lisbon, but was wrecked on the coast at a place called the Baixos de San Francisco, and there seized, and with one hundred other white persons put to death by the Cahetes. The revenge of the Portuguese was horrible, the Cahetes were hunted, slaughtered, and all but exterminated. In the year 1557, Joam III. died. His appointment of Mem de Sa, before his death, to the government of Brazil, prevented the country from immediately feeling the evils which a regency generally entails even in an established government, but which are sure to fall with tenfold weight upon a rising colony. Mem de Sa was a man of more enlightened mind, and more humane principles than most of those to whom the government of the Brazilian provinces had been intrusted. He arrived at Bahia in 1558, and earnestly applied himself to learn the relations in which the Portuguese, the Creoles, the Indians, and the mixed race stood to each other. His first acts were directed towards reclaiming the allied Indians from some of their most brutal practices, and to induce them to form settlements near those of the Jesuits. The selfish planters, interested in keeping up the feuds of the Indians, in order to procure slaves, exclaimed against these proceedings as violations of the freedom of the natives, and they were equally displeased at the orders issued, to set at liberty all the Indians who had been wrongfully enslaved. One powerful colonist alone refused to obey: Mem de Sa ordered his house to be surrounded and instantly levelled with the ground. Such an act was certainly calculated to inspire the Indians with confidence in his good intentions towards them, at the same time that his vigorous measures to punish them for any infraction of their engagements kept them in awe.