The prosperity of Brazil attracted the attention of John III., and he at last decided to establish a viceroyalty there, instead of leaving the colonists to govern themselves, and for the first governor-general he selected a nobleman of talent and experience, Dom Thomas de Sousa. At the same time the king revoked his decree forming the three “chief captainships,” and granted his representative full powers to arrange for a new system of administration. In 1549 Dom Thomas de Sousa arrived in Brazil with a fleet of six ships of war, many officials for the new government, a strong force of soldiers, and the first contingent of Jesuits, who were despatched with the especial purpose of converting the natives. Fortunately for Brazil, Thomas de Sousa was a great statesman; he made no attempt to enforce his powers unduly; he carefully avoided interfering with the subordinate captainships, and left the system of local government established in each without modification; he made no attempt to levy taxes or to interfere with the liberties of the people, and even avoided quartering his soldiers in any of the existing towns. He perceived that the weak point of the existing administration was that the captainships were too independent of each other, scattered as they were down the coast like little states, and he therefore determined to found a capital, and to establish a central government, which, without interfering with local liberties, should become a court of appeal, and regulating power over them. The place he selected for his capital was at the head of All Saints Bay, better known as the Bay of Bahia, where he erected the city of San Salvador. This town he made the headquarters of his troops, and the seat of the central government, and the Jesuit fathers also made it their point of departure. The most important question that Thomas de Sousa had to face was the treatment of the aboriginal tribes. The attempts of the Portuguese settlers to reduce them to slavery had been met with stubborn resistance, and a chronic war raged along all the landward boundaries of the captainships. The natives did not often attack the settlements of the Europeans, but they resisted any advance towards the interior, and small parties of Portuguese attempting to settle in the interior were often massacred. Dom Thomas de Sousa determined to check this continuous guerilla warfare by both warlike and peaceful measures. He sent his troops, and led them himself, against tribes which had committed any particular act of atrocity, and punished them severely, and at the same time he gave all the help in his power to the measures of the Jesuits for civilizing them.