text: History Hundreds of years before the arrival of the Portuguese, the Tupinambá are said to have migrated from the South coast of Brazil to the Northern coast for the sake of better hunting and agricultural opportunities. From here they settled into communities that would sustain a population of about 100 people. The size and strength of the communities made them infamous in combat, but left them with very few alliances. The Tupinambá originally helped the Portuguese in enslaving other native populations, but the Portuguese eventually started to go after the Tupinambá as well. It was in part due to this lack of alliances that the Portuguese were able to conquer the group.
  The Tupinambás were abundantly described in André Thevet's 1572  (English: The New Found World, or Antarctike), in Jean de Léry's  (English: History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil) (1578), and Hans Staden's  (English: True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, lit. ... of a Landscape of the Wild Naked People), in which he describes the Tupinamba practicing cannibalism. Thevet and Léry were an inspiration for Montaigne's famous essay Of Cannibals, and influenced the creation of the myth of the "noble savage" during the Enlightenment.
  The Tupinambá may have given their name to the common French word for the Jerusalem Artichoke, the topinambour.