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148 5 TheSwedishNationontheSouthRiver Jean Paul Jacquet arrived in New Netherland in early 1655. He was new to the colony but not to the West India Company, which he had served “in Brazil for many years.” Now, since becoming a freeman, the former soldier hoped to “devote himself . . . to farming.” WIC officials in Amsterdam urged New Netherland’s governor to assist Jacquet “as much as possible” and to assign “as much land to him as he may be able to cultivate.” The loyal company man was looking forward to a life in New Netherland more peaceful and settled than the one he had left behind in “Nieuw Holland,” or Dutch Brazil.1 During the 1630s the West India Company had conquered much of the northeastern coast of Brazil. Portuguese settlers and Indian workers had produced sugar there for a century, and the region had become one of the most valuable plantation districts in the Americas. By seizing the region, the WIC’s promoters hoped at once to profit from the sugar trade while also dealing a blow to the Crown of Spain, which from 1580 to 1640 was united with the Crown of Portugal. Although the WIC succeeded in wresting the territory free from the Iberian empire, the colony’s plantations and mills remained largely in the hands of the Portuguese settlers who had chosen to stay in the conquered territory.2 This arrangement was by design—the company aimed to profit by shipping and processing sugar, not by making it, so it needed the old inhabitants.3 The local population in Brazil did not accept the change passively. In 1645, several years after the fighting had stopped, a the SwediSh nAtion on the South river 149 loose coalition of planters, Indians, and Africans began an armed rebellion against their Dutch rulers.4 They were joined by forces dispatched from Portuguese Bahia and later from Portugal itself. In short order they liberated most of the province, save for Recife, the capital of Nieuw Holland. Having been under siege for nearly a decade, on January 26, 1654, the WIC’s officers finally surrendered the city and the scattered remnants of the company’s possessions in Brazil.5 Jacquet had witnessed the first stages of the uprising in Pernambuco during the summer of 1645. At the time he was a junior officer stationed at Serinhaem, about forty miles south of Recife. Situated on a ridge above the Serinhaem River, the village had a church at one end, a monastery at the other, and twelve sugar mills arrayed around it in the countryside. A Dutch writer described it as a “delightful” place. At the center of the village stood the governor’s house and some outbuildings, which were surrounded by a sixteen-sided palisade. Although it was fortified, it was hardly capable of resisting a large besieging force, which is what confronted the WIC garrison shortly after the rebellion began.6 By the end of July 1645 the rebels had taken command of the Serinhaem River, the source of the town’s water supply and its only exit to the sea. They had plundered the Dutch plantations that circled the town, seizing slaves and slaughtering livestock. Worse was to come. Several thousand soldiers under the command of Martin Soares Moreno and Andre Vidal de Negreiros had arrived from Portuguese Bahia to help pacify the “rebellious Portuguese” who had taken up arms against the Dutch regime. Although Moreno and Vidal claimed that they had come at the request of Nieuw Holland’s high council, in reality they had come to support the rebels. The post at Serinhaem was no match for them. The garrison held only eighty Dutch soldiers and about sixty Indian men. Many of the townspeople had fled to the enemy, and the town’s officers had received no communication from Recife for two months. Moreno and Vidal twice summoned the fort’s defenders to surrender, and on August 6 the leading officers in the fort, including Jacquet, agreed to capitulate. “We did not want to throw ourselves into a blood bath,” they wrote afterward.7 The officers arranged protections for themselves and their soldiers, although many of the latter chose to stay in Serinhaem. Jacquet and the remaining men from the garrison were eventually transported safely to Recife . The articles of surrender, however, did not protect their Tupi allies. Instead, the “Brazilians” were declared to be subjects of the King of Portugal and handed over to the Portuguese commanders. They suffered dearly...

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