During the long Dutch war many Pernambucan negroes had fled into the interior, where they had established themselves in independent communities and refused to recognise white supremacy. They fortified their villages with palisades, obtained wives by raids on the plantations, elected chiefs, devised rude forms of administering justice, and adopted a religion which was a mixture of the nature worship of their African ancestors with the outward forms of Christianity. In spite of numerous efforts to destroy them, these strange republics lasted fifty years. It was not until 1697 that a Paulista chief, Domingos Jorge, who was employed after the regulars had failed, succeeded in shutting the negroes up in their great palisade at Palmares. Seven thousand men took part in the assault, and of the ten thousand negroes who defended it none were spared. This was the only serious attempt at revolt on the part of the blacks which ever occurred in Brazil. Except for a few easily suppressed insurrections which mostly occurred in Bahia among the recent arrivals, the negroes remained in abject submission until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. The comparative mildness of the Brazilian treatment of negroes, the practice of voluntary manumission, and the fact that no impenetrable race barrier existed all contributed to make slavery a less fearful thing in Brazil than in North America. Both Spain and Portugal claimed the coast between Santos and the river Plate under the treaty of Tordesillas, but neither nation had made any serious attempt to take possession up to the end of the seventeenth century. As a matter of fact, the Tordesillas line passed near the southern boundary of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, but the Portuguese maps pushed all Brazil eight degrees to the east, and Portugal claimed that the line passed near the point where the Parana and Uruguay unite to form the Plate. The Paulistas had made this claim effective over much of the disputed territory.