During much of the second half of the sixteenth century, Portuguese colonists and Jesuit missionaries struggled over the best way to control, convert, and employ the indigenous inhabitants of Brazil. Both the colonists who, with the development of a sugar industry, began to enslave the native peoples, and the Jesuits, who wanted to bring them into missionary villages, hoped to convince the Crown that they were best suited to bring the Indians under Portuguese authority and make them subjects of the king useful to the colony. The Crown issued laws limiting or prohibiting the enslavement of Indians in 1574, 1595, 1609, and 1680, but there were always considerable loopholes in the legislation. During the struggle over control of the Indians, both colonists and Jesuits became highly critical of their opponents, but both sides also wrote in some detail about the indigenous peoples of Brazil.

Of all the indigenous peoples on the coast, the Tupinambá of Bahia received the most attention from early European observers. In this excerpt, the sugar planter, Gabriel Soares de Sousa, presents an extensive and detailed ethnography that demonstrates the curiosity of the early Portuguese observers but also the limitations in describing Native American cultures imposed by European preconceptions and understandings. His account maintains the usual Portuguese distinction between the Tupi-speaking peoples and the tapuyas, or groups that spoke non-Tupi languages. Although he notes the barbarism and cannibalism of the latter, his account also reveals a familiarity and, at times, admiration for their skills.