wrote the King that fields of cane were planted and one large engenho was nearing completion. A few years later, in 1550, there were five 'Engenhos' in use and by 1576 Pero de Magalhães Gandavo reported that Pernambuco had about 1000 (Portuguese) inhabitants and twenty-three engenhos (three or four not yet completed). At this early date in a good year, Pernambuco produced more than 50,000 arrobas or 800 tons (1 arroba = 32 lbs ~ 14.75 kg) of sugar. This production would increase ten-fold by the time the Dutch invaded. Cultivating and refining sugar required both a large capital investment and a lot of heavy labor. Aside from Duarte Coelho's return to Portugal to find investors for his first engenho, we know only in general where or whom this investment capital came from for the first few engenhos: probably Lisbon merchants. We do know that slaves provided the labor force. While free and slave labor of indigenous peoples was used, its use was limited not only by diminishing populations but also by the main attributes of culture. Two cultural factors were: First, neither the Tabajaras nor the Caetés peoples were wealth accumulators. As Stuart Schwartz expressed it, "Once a man had enough to eat and a few new tools and weapons, why should he want or work for more?" Second, even with Tupi speaking peoples such as the Tabajara, who already practiced agriculture, cultivating crops was women's work. So it is no surprise to find, as early as 1542, Duarte Coelho already repeating his request to the crown for permission to import African slaves. Unlike the indigenous peoples, Africans would be in a strange new land, without family or familiarity with the environment, thus newly arrived African slaves had nowhere to run and no one to hide them. In 1552, one report said there were already more than a thousand African slaves in Pernambuco. In a later report on the number of African slaves in Brazil, from 1585, a Jesuit wrote that "...there were 14,000, a majority of whom were in Pernambuco." While throughout this period until the Dutch invasion, sugar production varied from year to year, as a result of natural events such as the epidemics around 1560 and 1616 and the droughts of the 1580 and 1584, on the whole, the number of engenhos, the amount of sugar refining, and the number of African slaves increased steadily (see