Kaete

The Caeté were a Tupi-Guarani people of the Brazilian coast, holding the shore between the mouth of the São Francisco River and the island of Itamaracá, with the Potiguara to their north and the Tupinambá to their south. They grew maize, peanuts, tobacco, squash and cotton, and had a reputation among both Indians and Portuguese as especially fierce warriors who took captives for cannibalistic rites. Portuguese slaving struck them hardest in the 1550s, and in 1556 they killed and ate the shipwrecked bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha and his companions on the Alagoas coast. The crown answered with a declared holy war: between 1556 and 1558 Jerónimo de Albuquerque carried out an extermination campaign between the São Francisco and Cabo de Santo Agostinho, under a royal decree allowing the perpetual enslavement of everyone captured.

Further campaigns followed, including Cristóvão de Barros's revenge expedition of 1587 during the War of Sergipe, and in the 1580s the surviving Caeté migrated far north to the country between the Caeté and Turiaçu rivers in Maranhão. There the Portuguese formally created the Captaincy of Caeté in 1622, and Jesuit mission villages became the towns of Vila de Souza in 1634 and São João Batista in 1672. Rivalry over the office of village principal, the Principais created under the Native Directory, sparked the Caeté Upheaval of the 1740s and the expulsion of the Jesuits; in 1753 Vila de Souza was moved across the river and re-founded as Bragança, and the captaincy was dissolved.