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 instance, for the Portuguese town of Póvoa de Varzim, most of its seafarers dying abroad, most of the deaths occurred in the Route of the Antilles, in the West Indies. At the turn of the 17th century, with the union with Castile, the Spanish kings favored the free movement of the people, and other lands of the New World, such as Peru and the Gulf of Mexico, were open to the Portuguese merchants. The Portuguese founded the first Uruguayan city, Colónia do Sacramento. Portuguese colonization of the Americas Portugal was the leading country in the European exploration of the world