From 1502 to 1512, the Portuguese claim on Brazil was leased by the crown to a Lisbon merchant consortium led by Fernão de Loronha for commercial exploitation. Loronha set up an extensive enterprise along the coast focusing on the harvesting of brazilwood. A dyewood that produces a deep red dye, reminiscent of the color of glowing embers, brazilwood was much in demand by the European cloth industry and previously had to be imported from India at great expense. Loronha is estimated to have harvested some 20,000 quintals of brazilwood on the Brazilian coast by 1506. By the 1510s, French interlopers from the Atlantic clothmaking ports of Normandy and Brittany began to also routinely visit the Brazilian coast to do their own (illegal) brazilwood harvesting.