After the discovery of the New World its possession was contested by five sea-going nations of Western Europe—the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch. Of these the Spanish and Portuguese were first in the field, and the Portuguese established themselves in that part of the southern continent now known as Brazil. Their acquisition of this particular territory was largely due to accident: the Portuguese navigator Cabral, sailing in 1500 for the East Indies, via the Cape of Good Hope, shaped his course so far to the west, in order to avoid the calms off the African continent, that he hit off this part of the coast. An important Portuguese settlement grew up on the bay known as Bahia de Todos os Santos (All Saints’ Bay). Further south French Huguenots were the first to discover and colonise the bay of Rio de Janeiro, but the Portuguese finally succeeded in expelling them in 1567, when Rio became the capital of the southern portion of their territory, Bahia retaining its pre-eminence in the north. In the seventeenth century Portugal, and consequently her overseas possessions, fell for a while under the dominion of Spain; with the result that the settlers acquired a new foe in the young power of the Dutch, with whom the Spaniards were at war. The Dutch West India Company was formed with the especial object of capturing Brazil: the first fleet, which sailed in 1623, gained for a time possession of Bahia, and in 1629 the Dutch conquered Olinda and the neighbouring town of Recife, or Pernambuco, where they established themselves under the able leadership of Prince Mauritz of Nassau. In 1640, however, the Portuguese threw off the Spanish yoke, and, as the quarrel of Holland had been with the latter, she allowed herself to be bought out of her conquests in Brazil; an arrangement due in part to the intervention of Charles II of England, who had married a Portuguese princess. There was an old alliance between this country and Portugal, and when in 1739 war broke out between England and Spain, occasioned by the wrongs of a certain Captain Jenkins whose ear the Spaniards had cut off, Commodore Anson selected a Brazilian harbour in which to revictual his ships on his way to harry the Spanish in the Pacific.