Brazil Brazil was the anchor Jewish community from which other Western communities took root. Portuguese Jews arrived in Brazil in 1503 led by explorers Fernando de Norohha and Gaspar da Gama who had obtained a virtual monopoly on settlement in the region from the king of Portugal. They brought sugar cane, technical skills and slaves and soon transformed Brazil into the most important area of sugar production in the world. So important, that the scholars concede that Portugal could not have survived as an independent nation without the Brazilian sugar trade.56   Sugar was first produced in Asia but as late as the beginning of the fifteenth century, sugar was so expensive in Europe that it was sold only in pharmacies for medicinal purposes. Portuguese Jews developed their mastery in the trade by establishing plantations on the island of Sao Thorne off the west coast of Africa employing at times as many as 3,000 Negro slaves.57   The first colonists came annually on two ships with criminals, Jews and prostitutes, for the purpose of catching parrots. Those condemned as sinners sought refuge in Brazil's open range5817 and the Jews saw the commercial potential and established as many as 200 settlements along the Brazilian coast in the 16th century.5918 They quickly became the dominant class, writes Lee M. Friedman: A not inconsiderable number of the wealthiest Brazilian traders were [Jews].60 [21] The Jewish sugar Planters prospered living on large plantations and making extensive use of local Indian labor and imported Black slaves.61 By 1600, the plantations, the bulk of the slave trade and more than one hundred sugar mills with at least 10,000 Black Africans, and most of the exports of processed sugar were in the hands of the Jewish settlers,62 Stephen Fortune: As early as the [22] sixteenth century, Jews were interested in the large profits to be derived from the slave trade as a consequence of the sugar industry, and they appear to have had no compunction regarding their activity in human merchandising.63 In Voyage of Francis Pyrard, the author returns to Portugal from Bahia in 1611 and describes a fellow passenger: Though the Portuguese had staked a claim to the region they could not find enough colonists for its development, despite the fabulous profits of those who risked settlement.  There was, say the historians, a desperate need for European manpower in the face of Indians who died rather than submit to regimented labor and blacks who died of too much regimented labor.65   The Portuguese difficulties presented an opportunity to the Dutch who heard of the immense wealth of the New World and sought to gain access. Dutch merchants had been carrying on a profitable commerce with the Portuguese Jewish colonists and this relationship was a major factor in the establishment of the Dutch West India Company, the all powerful but private European land development corporation formed to conquer the rich northeast coast of Brazil.