Women in the Americas in early modern North America. Throughout the Americas, bondage existed—in warmer climates, where plantation systems developed, or in the northern areas, where women were either transported as criminals or worked as indentured servants. As early as the 1530s, Portugal began using slave labor in Brazil to work sugarcane plantations. Initially, the Portuguese used indigenous people as slaves, but in 1574, the crown decreed that unless the native people were cannibals, already slaves, or were spoils of a "just war", they could not be enslaved. The Spanish also used native people as forced labor, but because under the "encomienda" system, neither
Portuguese colonization of the Americas possible voyage of 1473 and several other possible pre-Columbian expeditions to North America in the 15th century, mostly from the Azores in the case of the Portuguese (included in donation royal letters), remain matters of great controversy for scholars. Their existence is based on brief or fragmentary historical documents that are unclear concerning the destinations of voyages. In 1506, King Manuel I of Portugal created taxes for the cod fisheries in Newfoundland waters. João Álvares Fagundes and Pêro de Barcelos established fishing outposts in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia around 1521. These were later abandoned, however, when Portuguese colonizers began to