colonists would have had fewer high-ranking officials competing for available opportunities. Jesuits and other religious orders in Pernambuco In 1561, the Jesuits returned to Pernambuco. Jesuit history in Brazil is much better known than that of many other religious orders. However, despite the many complaints by the Jesuits about the settlers, both lay, and clergy, there were several religious establishments in Pernambuco before and even during the Dutch period. Local third orders and similar organizations, such as funerary groups, were founded in this pre-Dutch period. Moreover, that most well-known Portuguese charitable organization Misericordia was established in Olinda early in the Sixteenth Century. Further, long before the Dutch came, the Franciscans established friaries in Olinda and four other communities, the Carmelites also had a friary in Olinda, and the Benedictines an Olinda monastery as well as a plantation in the countryside, and all these were in addition to the secular clergy in the churches. The religious orders, especially the Jesuits, gathered indigenous peoples into 'Aldeias' (villages) to civilize and Christianize them. The Jesuits, in particular, became advocates and protectors of the Indians. It is likely, because the Jesuits were absent from Pernambuco from 1554 until 1561, that the effective genocide of indigenous tribes in Pernambuco was more due to military campaigns, such as those led by the donatary family, than to the gathering and acculturating efforts of the religious orders, such as those in Bahia that suffered epidemics that killed tens of thousands of indigenous people gathered in aldeias in 1552 through 1561, Moreover, the depopulation of indigenous peoples from Pernambuco was also advanced by migrations such as the when 60,000 Tupinambá from Pernambuco departed into the interior and thence to Maranhão (where in the next century their descendants would again suffer Portuguese colonization.) By 1584, there were reports of areas of 30 miles without a single tribal village, and Pernambuco, once heavily populated by indigenous peoples and dependent on their labor, suffered a labor shortage. Sugar and slavery The history of Pernambuco cannot be separated from the development of the sugar industry. There were periods of great prosperity and periods when sugar was less dominant, often due to fluctuations in the market place. Nevertheless, since the Sixteenth Century, sugar has always been an important part of the Pernambucan economy. Little more than five years after arriving in Pernambuco Duarte Coelho visited Portugal, found backers to invest in engenhos (sugar mills),