During the two decades after the Portuguese first arrived on the Brazilian coast, their presence remained occasional and intermittent, limited in the main to the visits of small ships loading dyewood. The Portuguese Crown made efforts to clear foreign competitors, especially Norman and Breton ships, from the coast, and to that end Martim Afonso de Sousa captained an expedition in 1532 that sought to ensure Portugal's control of the new land. Acting on his advice and that of his cousin, the powerful courtier Dom António de Ataíde, the king Dom João III divided the coast into territorial grants that could be assigned to individuals who would assume the responsibility of protecting, settling, and developing their areas. The coast was divided into fifteen parcels called hereditary captaincies, and these were assigned to twelve Portuguese courtiers and soldiers, mostly members of the lesser nobility. Each man who received an award, or carta de doação, was called a donatario. Each recipient bore the title of captain as well.

The apparent model for these grants was the Portuguese senhorio, or seignory, which awarded rights and privileges in perpetuity but was not based on feudal obligations. The rights of taxation, justice, administration, and the privileges to promote settlement and economic development were conceded and detailed by the king. The donation that delineated the relationship between the donatario and the king was accompanied by a foral that spelled out the obligations of the colonists to the donatary captains. In the Middle Ages, these had been granted by the lord to the people in his domain, but by the time of the settlement of Brazil, the Crown had taken upon itself the granting of these documents, thus reducing the independence of the nobility. The donatarial captaincies were an imaginative adaptation of Portuguese medieval precedents to the challenge of colonization but proved in the long term to be unsatisfactory. Some areas were never settled; others floundered because of neglect, wars with native peoples, and internal dissension. Nevertheless, the captaincies provided the first administrative structure for the settlement of the colony.

(From História da Colonização Portuguesa do Brasil [Oporto, 1924], vol. III, pp. 312–13).