4.3—The Portuguese Colonies (12 min video)

Transcript

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Welcome back yet again. Today we’re going to take a look at the Portuguese and the French. These two different cultures that both founded unique colonies over here in the Americas. Now the Portuguese you may not know much about. There’s actually one specific nation in the the Americas that speaks the Portuguese language. Do you know what that is? It’s actually the nation of Brazil, which you probably just said and then pressed your mom right now, right? Anyway, the nation of Brazil speaks the Portuguese language because they were essentially a colony founded by Portugal. Now, the thing I find interesting about Portugal is besides founding Brazil, they also founded colonies in India, they founded colonies throughout the Pacific and especially around Africa.

But the Portuguese primarily founded what we call trade colonies or trading post colonies as we mentioned in the first lecture for this week. Now these colonies, as I told you earlier, were designed to make money. They weren’t really designed to be there for a really long time necessarily. They weren’t really designed to expand. That’s why, for example, the Portuguese colony of Goa, if you look at it on a map, is actually quite small. It’s just kind of this little tiny carving out of the whole nation of India. But they did leave their mark. In fact, if you speak to Indians from Goa today, quite often they have some knowledge of the Portuguese language, or they eat a food that is part Portuguese and part Indian, or they even have a Christian faith because they have that influence from the Portuguese.

Now, the most famous explorer for the Portuguese was a man by the name of Amerigo Vespucci, which, if you think about that name, it really has nothing to do with Portuguese because he wasn’t Portuguese. He himself was what we call Italian. He was actually from the city of Florence. And he worked for some heavy hitters in those days. He worked for a family known as the Medicis. And if you’ve ever studied the Renaissance, the Medicis are kind of like the bad guys of the Renaissance. They were a powerful family who controlled all kinds of power through both the state and the church. And if you got in their way, that’s okay, they would invite you to dinner and poison you and you would not be going home again. So in other words, getting invited to the Medici house for dinner was something you wanted to avoid at all cost. It actually became kind of the joke around Florence, albeit a dark joke all the same. But even so, Vespucci knew how to kind of keep his head around the and in 1492, the same year Columbus sails over here, Vespucci was sent over to Spain to the court to try and make deals with them, between them and the Medici family.

Now, he was able to make a few deals, but that’s not why we remember him. The reason why we remember him is that eventually he left the Medici’s, He then left the Spanish court because they would not put him on board any ship. He himself was an explorer. He himself was a great navigator. But the Portuguese were willing to hire him. What’s interesting about Vespucci is Vespucci was desperate to find a southern pole star. So we have Polaris in the North Hemisphere. We have this pole star that we can look at in the night sky that all things revolve around, at least from our perspective here on Earth.

But he wanted to find something similar in the southern hemisphere. In fact, he thought about it so much and he read so much about it to try and find this, that he lost sleep over these things.

Even so, Vespucci himself was an amazing astronomer. They say that Vespucci, using just his eyes, and perhaps maybe his own fingers or his thumb to measure things on the horizon, he could look at the stars or look at planets in motion, and he could measure latitude and longitude fairly accurately without the use of any other assistance.

That’s an incredible ability that Vespucci actually had. Well, in the year 1501, Portugal gave him a ship and they sent him sailing west. And this is nine years after Columbus. But even though it’s nine years after Columbus, no one has yet discovered what they thought to be India. You have to remember, when Columbus landed in those islands in the Caribbean, he thought he was landing in the islands outside of India or possibly outside of China.

That’s why we called the peoples from these lands Indians for so long, because we assumed at first that they were Indians or related to the Indian peoples.

But Vespucci set out to actually find the great continent, whether it be India, China, or something new altogether. Vespucci really believed it was something new altogether. In the year 1501, he found it. In fact, he discovered the coast of South America. He was the first in his day to do so, and as a result, that continent and the continent north of it would be named after him.

America after Amerigo. Now after he actually discovered these things, what’s incredible is he mapped the whole of South America. He in fact mapped the whole of the Southern Hemisphere. But what’s most incredible is that Vespucci wrote down all of his experiences and all of his voyages in journals and then he published them back home.

Now that’s important because remember I mentioned that ideas have consequences, that ideas cause people to think a certain way. And so when Vespucci published these ideas about what the new world was like, he was able to show people that the new world had incredible opportunities and incredible beauties.

And so people began to come over here for those various reasons, for trade, for military control or strategic controls we talked about, or for exploitation, or even for settlements.

But he attracted people here by his writings. Now before we move on to the French, there’s one more thing I want to mention about the Portuguese. And that is the fact that the Portuguese were the first people to reintroduce slavery into Christendom. By Christendom, I mean the West, I mean essentially Europe, those nations that had historically been Christian and for centuries had gotten rid of slavery.

Here’s how it returns. It’s important that you understand the story. Think back to Henry the Navigator. I’ve talked about him already a few times and he’s one of those figures in history that just kind of pops up here and there because he left such an imprint. If you remember, I told you earlier in a previous lesson that Henry the Navigator was like a crusader. like Columbus. In fact, he and his brothers at one point went on crusade against a Muslim city in North Africa called Quetta. And when they conquered this territory, they found in there 200 African slaves. And then the Navigator had to make a decision. What does he do with these 200 African slaves? Now, one option would be simply to free them, and that would be our inclination today. Okay, you just free them. But there was one issue. If you freed them, where would they go? They had been ripped apart from their homes. Many of them had never known home. In fact, the only home they had known was the city of Queta and their masters, and they essentially didn’t have immediate survival skills. And so Henry had a concern of, “Okay, what do we do with them now?” So Henry brought them back to Portugal. And Henry actually took several of them into his house, and they became kind of his personal servants. Now this sounds a little strange because he still uses them essentially as slaves. He was kind to them and he did actually teach them things like how to read, he taught them the faith and so forth, and he freed them upon his death.

So he was essentially a good master even though he was practicing slavery, which is the problem here. This whole idea is going to come up again and again in American history. But what’s intriguing about this, or really what is tragic about this whole scene, It’s the Portuguese noticed, and also the Spanish noticed, that these African slaves were essentially a one-time deal. You paid once for them, and then you could work them for the rest of their lives, and they would provide lots of profits for you, and you didn’t have to pay them. And so the Portuguese and the Spanish both began heavily to use slaves in the New World, to work their huge plantations, where they would harvest things like cocoa, or things like tobacco, or things like bananas, or things for making rum.

They would also use these slaves in the mines to try and dig up silver and gold from the earth. As a result, these slaves, because they were seen now as property, and as a way to make more money, these slaves were often mistreated, and some of the most horrific stories come out of these colonies, because these are the exploitation colonies, essentially.

Keep that in mind as we talk about these other nations. Now the nation we’re going to look to right now at the end of today’s lesson is the nation of the French. If you remember I told you earlier that the French, while they did establish trading posts, the French were primarily interested in strategic control. So what they would do is they would establish a base somewhere, often in the wilderness, often in the middle of the forest. This is what George Washington found when he was sent on a mission up to what we now call Pittsburgh to see if the French were building a fortress there.

They were. It was in the middle of these three rivers but guess what? There was nothing else for hundreds of miles. It was in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t as if they were founding new homes or founding a new civilization. They just wanted to control that territory. That was the way that the French actually did these things. Now the French, who tried out to control things like the Carolinas, South and North Carolina, They tried to control Georgia. They tried to control Florida. They were unsuccessful in all of those places. That’s why most of those places, except for the Carolinas, no longer bear French names. They bear Spanish, or in the case of Georgia, an English name. But with places like Detroit, or places like St. Louis, or New Orleans, or the area of Quebec, that is where the French were successful. Now, there’s one person you need to write down, primarily, for the French, and that is the man by the name of Samuel de Champlain. And Samuel de Champlain explored what we call the St. Lawrence River, in fact. He was the one who gave the name to the St. Lawrence River. He also became the first governor of what was called New France. And there in the region of Quebec, he ruled over this vast territory that more than doubled or tripled the whole size of France’s domains elsewhere. So it was an incredible opportunity and an incredibly vast and potentially valuable piece of land. But still, the French were most successful because they had people like fur trappers and people like fishermen throughout all of New France. Those were the people who actually provided the means for the French to be successful. But there’s one key idea here to remember. The French were not over here for new settlements. The French were not over here to bring their families or to create homes. So as a result, those French colonies or that new France never completely took off. In fact, other than places like New Orleans and places like Quebec, French largely is not really spoken because a different type of colony came into those areas, to the other areas, and took the dominance.

But we’ll talk about that more later.