So...my timeline turned out to be rather more than a week

. I developed kind of a bad case of writers block-I knew what I wanted to happen in the 18th-20th centuries, but couldn't bring myself to write the actual Dutch takeover of southern Brazil. But, to restart this, here goes.
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While the attempts of the Brazilian
Marranos to resist Portuguese domination-through Field Rabbis, secret religious services, and outlaw bands-have long become the stuff of legend, in reality they very nearly failed. By the 1620's, the Inquisition had become the terror of Portuguese America, its dictates reinforced with the boots of colonial garrisons. Field Rabbis were dissappearing, recaltrant Jews were being executed, and Judaism in Portuguese America seemed on the road to annihilation. But, when all hope had begun to fade for the Portuguese American Jews, history would again intervene.
The Dutch had long coveted the riches of the Brazilian sugar plantations, and the 1620's would see a series of raids against Portuguese America, in ever increasing intensity. Finally, in 1628, a Dutch West India Company force sailed to the city of Recife, laid siege to it, and captured it.
The fall of Recife was greated with jubilation-both in Amsterdam, and among its rather large population of Jews-most of whom were prisoners sentenced to work on sugar plantations by the Inquisition. The newly liberated Jews flocked to the center of the city, where they soon became a major presence, building South America's first synagogue in the city center. Jews from all over Latin America flocked to the city. Over the next few years, the Dutch gradually expanded their control outward from Recife, capturing Natal in 1633. By the mid-1630's they had come to control most of northern and northeastern Brazil, but its capital, the fortress of Salvador, eluded them.
As the Dutch expanded their control in the north, the situation for Jews in the South grew even grimmer. After Recife fell, a massive pogrom in Salvador claimed dozens of lives. Perhaps the most infamous incident, however, would take place in what was is now Vilemstad, and was then the city of Sao Fernando [OTL Vitoria, Espirito Santo].
Sao Fernando, like several other cities in Brazil, had originally been founded by a group of deported
Conversos, and their descendants-many still secret Jews-had dominated the population for several decades afterward. However, after 1600, Portugual had begun settling Christians on the small island on which Sao Fernando lay. The two groups kept to their own tightly segregated neighborhoods, and the string of Dutch successes had brought the already high level of tension to a boiling point. Finally, on February 17th, 1635, a series of rumors that the Jews of Sao Fernando were plotting with the Dutch caused the Christian population to descend on them in an orgy of murder, rape, and looting. The Portuguese civilians were soon joined by the royal garrison, and at any rate, the disarmed Jews could hardly put up much resistance. The violence went on for four days, at the end of which the great majority of the city's Jews were either dead or had fled the island to hide in the mainland's wilderness. It was events like these that sent a stream of refugees northward-ironic, considering what would later happen. But soon, an entirely new development would turn things completely around.
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Adao Falero had been born in Rio de Janeiro-he never remembered the exact date, though it was certainly sometime in the early 1600's. Adao's parents had been
Marranos-and when he was 15, their secret Judaism would become known to the authorities. Adao worked at Rio de Janeiro's docks, and thus was away from home when the Inquisition came for his family. Forwarned by a friend, Adao stowed away on a departing ship before the Inquisition would find him. He was discovered, but fortunately, the captain assumed he was a simple stowaway, and he was whipped before being impressed into service as a cabin boy.
In Havana, Adao jumped ship, and signed onto another departing vessel before his old master could find him. The new captain was kinder, and Adao spent the next few years on various Portuguese and Spanish ships, sailing around the Caribbean and even to Lisbon and Seville. But he never forgot that he was a Jew, and never forgot the trauma of hearing that he'd never see his parents or sister again. So, when he was about 19, Adao signed onto the crew of a ship bound for Amsterdam, where he'd heard a Jew could practice freely without fear of arrest. And, after a short while sailing on Dutch merchentmen, Adao heard about something that, to his twenty-ish mind, sounded a lot more adventurous-privateering. Here, at last, was the chance to strike back against the people who'd sent his family way. And so Adao returned to the Caribbean-but this time, bent on revenge.
The 1630's found Adao a privateer captain, commander of a stolen Spanish frigate his crew had named the
Sea Serpent. Perhaps wanting to be closer to his childhood home, Adao had made Pernambuco his home base, and earned his living as an oceangoing mercenary, or else raiding on his own up and down the Portuguese Brazilian coast. Adao listened for any hint of what had happened to his family-and to his dismay, soon found out. Several former sugar-cane laborers remembered his mother and father-but both had died in the plantations long before the Dutch showed up. His sister, a girl known for her beauty, had been taken to the overseer's house. No one had seen her for six months afterwards, until she managed to jump out of a 3rd floor window. Two weeks after Adao had heard this, garbled reports of Sao Fernando had begun to reach Pernambuco. And Adao knew pinprick raids would never satisfy him. He needed to do something bigger. And, using the same force of personality that had brought him from cabin boy to privateer captain, Adao talked to the masters of several other privateers, and got together a plan.
****
It had been almost twenty years since Adao Falero had last seen Rio de Janeiro-by now, he'd spent more of his life as a sailor than he had there, a fact he still found hard to believe sometimes. But, as the city's buildings grew larger in his telescope, a thrill went through him. At long last, he was coming home. At that moment, an arm tapped him on the shoulder.
"Some ships are coming out from the harbor, Captain."
"I see them, Joshua. Tell the men to start getting the cannons turned around, and signal the other ships to do the same."
All across the seven-ship flotilla-five privateers, and two galleons the Dutch fleet in Pernambuco had lent to the effort-men swarmed around like ants, readying the black iron guns for combat. The small flotilla got into combat formation-and the three ships from Rio did the same. The enemies sailed closer to each other, until-
"Captain, they're starting to get into range."
"Good. Fire when ready!"
*****
It was amazing how quickly it all went. Within an hour, the three Portuguese defenders were no more-while all of Adao Falero's ships, though hit by a few cannons, floated. The invaders sailed up to Rio's battlements, their cannons dueling with the defenders as the ships got close enough for the soldiers within to jump into small boats and row the quick distance to the walls. Hour by hour, minute by minute, the Portuguese were forced back, royal flags torn down and replaced with the orange-white-blue of Holland. Adao's men-many of them
Marranos like himself-wasted no time in taking their fury out on the men who'd drove them out of their homes. Only one thing dissapointed Adao-the chief Inquistor who'd arrested his parents had departed years ago, and was safe back in Portugal. For Adao, shooting his successor was almost as satisfying.
*****
Safetly in control of Rio, Adao Falero sent word back to Pernambuco, and the Dutch soon followed up on his success in the south. Many of the
Marranos, long tormented by the Portuguese, were happy to form militias and act as scouts, and the cities of the south fell one by one, the remaining secret Jews at last coming into the open. But the Dutch conquest of southern Brazil was often marred by revenge attacks, as persecuted
Marranos struck back at their former persecutors. Perhaps the most notorious would occur at Sao Fernando, a name that had already become infamous among Brazil's Jews. The city was laid siege by a Dutch-privateer flotilla in May 1637-and when it fell, the Privateer element-many of whom, like Adao Falero's force, were Jewish-ran unchecked through the city. In the confusion, a drunken privateer would set off the ammunition store in the city's main fortress-sending the structure, and indeed much of the town, sky high and creating a fire that soon engulfed the rest. The destruction of Sao Fernando citadel would later become the subject of several famous Maurician paintings-but more immediately, the story spread among Brazil's Catholics, and made the name of Sao Fernando as infamous among them as it had been among the Jews.
In 1639, two years after the sack of Sao Fernando, the Dutch again laid siege to Salvador-one of the last major cities in Portuguese hands, and whose capture, they hoped, would spell the end of Portuguese Brazil. But the Catholic planters that still populated much of the countryside-especially in the north-had been growing ever more mutinous, and, as the siege lines tightened around Salvador, a full-scale guerilla revolt broke out in Pernambuco. Meanwhile, the Jewish scouts that the Dutch had hired-and which had proved so helpful in conquering the south-were less useful away from their homeland. The rural Catholic farmers around Salvador knew the terrain, and pinprick raids against the besiegers soon grew. Two months into the siege, a massive relief fleet from Lisbon successfully forced the Dutch blockade of Salvador's harbor and delivered much-needed supplies and reinforcements. Disease broke out amongst the besiegers, and soon they were forced to abandon their effort.
The failure to take Salvador would prove to be a turning point for the Dutch. In the following years, countryside rebellions, helped by an ever-more aggressive Portuguese fleet, began to gradually retake the North. In the South, however, the Dutch managed to maintain control-both because the countryside was friendlier to them, and because the South's less developed sugar industry was second priority for the Portuguese, and at any rate further away. Gradually, a trickle, and then a flood, of Dutch and Jewish refugees began to flow south. The end of the Dutch north would come in 1652, with the fall of their last stronghold at Recife-but the next year, a Dutch-
Marrano force would repulse a Portuguese offensive at the Battle of Sao Mateus River. Afterwards, the two settled into a pattern of pinprick raids until 1656, when the Dutch and Portuguese finally signed a peace treaty acknowledging the latter's loss of southern Brazil.