up a new life of their own among the local inhabitants, obliterating their past altogether (e.g. the 'Bachelor of Cananeia') History In the early years of Portuguese discoveries and empire-building in the 15th and 16th centuries, outbound ships usually carried a small number of degredados, to assist in tasks deemed too hazardous or onerous for ordinary crewmen; e.g. upon reaching an unfamiliar shore, a degredado or two were usually landed first to test if the native inhabitants were hostile. After opening contact was made, degredados were often assigned to spend the nights in the native town or village (while the rest of the crew slept aboard ships), to build up trust and collect information. If relations turned hostile, it was degredados who were charged with the dangerous job of carrying negotiating terms between the ships and local rulers. In the 16th and 17th centuries, degredados formed a substantial portion of early colonists in Portuguese empire. The Moroccan enclaves, the Atlantic islands, Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe and more distant African colonies such as Portuguese Angola, Benguela and Portuguese Mozambique, were built up and significantly (if not mostly) populated by degredados. Many of the original Brazilian colonies were also founded with degradado colonists, e.g. Vasco Fernandes Coutinho carried some 70 degredados to found Espírito Santo in 1536; royal governor Tomé de Sousa carried an estimated 400-600 degredados to establish Salvador, the original capital of Portuguese Brazil, in 1549. Famous degredados João Nunes a New Christian degredado taken by Vasco da Gama on the first expedition to India. On account of his rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, Nunes was the first to go ashore in Calicut, India, and it is Nunes (not Gama) who uttered the famous phrase "We came to seek Christians and spices". Luís de Moura, a degredado taken by Pedro Álvares Cabral on the second armada (1500). Dropped off in East Africa, Moura would serve for many years as the effective Portuguese factor and representative to the Sultan of Malindi, an important Portuguese ally in East Africa. António Fernandes - a sometime carpenter who had been exiled to Sofala in either 1500 or 1505; Fernandes went on to conduct a series of overland exploration trips in 1512–1515, 300 miles deep into the lands of the Monomatapa and Matabeleland. 'Bachelor of Cananeia' (Bacherel de Cananéia), a mysterious New Christian degredado known simply as 'the Bachelor' Abandoned on the coast