The first had gone badly too. The Portuguese planters of Pernambuco had risen against the Dutch West India Company, and the Dutch, freed from their war with Spain by the peace concluded in 1647, sent an expeditionary force to settle the matter: forty-one ships, six thousand men. It reached Recife - Mauritsstad, as the Company called it - late, and immediately ran into trouble. In April 1648, on the same ground south of the city, the Portuguese routed it at the First Battle of Guararapes. Ten months later Van den Brinck led roughly three and a half thousand troops back to the same hills, against about twenty-six hundred defenders.

The force waiting in the hills is the reason this battle is remembered the way it is in Brazil. Overall command sat with Francisco Barreto de Meneses. Under him, Joao Fernandes Vieira - a landowner born in Funchal, Madeira - and Andre Vidal de Negreiros each led an infantry terco. Filipe Camarao commanded Potiguara warriors, fighting on ground his people had known for far longer than any European had. Henrique Dias, whose parents' free or enslaved status historians still dispute, held the title governador da gente preta and led a regiment of Black soldiers, many of them formerly enslaved men from plantations the war had swept through. The Dutch army opposite was larger and better equipped and mostly did not want to be there: its ranks were filled with mercenaries recruited across Europe, principally from the German lands, who had no stake in Pernambuco at all. They fought in thick, brightly coloured European clothing and heavy armour that slowed them in the heat, and contemporary accounts describe them as pale and sickly.

The Luso-Brazilian force worked the terrain rather than the line. Musket volleys came out of the trees, thinning the Dutch ranks from cover, and then the attackers closed with blades. Coming from the west, they took the Dutch position in the flank - the direction the defensive line had not been drawn to face. Van den Brinck fell mortally wounded. After several hours the Dutch broke and retreated north toward Recife, abandoning their artillery on the field. Casualty figures vary between accounts, but every version records the same lopsided result: Dutch losses running past a thousand killed, wounded and captured, against Portuguese losses in the dozens. Both sides had been fighting on this coast long enough to understand what the numbers meant.

The most useful description of what happened comes from the losing side. Michiel van Goch, writing a few days afterwards, tried to explain the defeat to his superiors and produced something closer to an admission. The enemy's men, he wrote, were naturally agile and surefooted, able to advance or retreat speedily - Brazilians, Tapuyas, Negroes, Mamelucos, all natives of this country, along with Portuguese and Italians whose constitution let them adapt readily to the terrain, so that they could range the woods, cross the swamps and climb or descend the hills with remarkable speed. His own men, he went on, fought ranged in serried ranks after the manner of the fatherland, and were sluggish and flabby, unsuited to this kind of country. It is a rare thing: a defeated officer describing his opponents without contempt, and reserving it for his own side.

The Dutch did not leave immediately. The Company held Recife until 1654, and a treaty formally settling matters was not signed until 1661. But the two defeats at Guararapes, together with the Portuguese recapture of Angola that cut off the enslaved labour the Brazilian colony's sugar economy depended on, changed the arithmetic in Amsterdam. Opinion there concluded that Dutch Brazil no longer had a future worth fighting for, which effectively sealed the colony's fate. Guararapes convinced the Dutch, in one contemporary judgement, that the Portuguese were formidable opponents - something which they had hitherto refused to concede.

Filipe Camarao and Henrique Dias both received honours from the Portuguese crown, and the memory of a force combining white settlers, Indigenous warriors and Black soldiers became central to how Brazil tells the story. Since 1994 the Brazilian Army has officially commemorated Guararapes as the moment its seeds were planted, marking the date of the first battle, 19 April 1648, as Army Day; a 2012 federal law inscribed the commanders in the Book of Heroes of the Nation. Historians add the necessary footnote - there was no Brazilian nation and no Brazilian army in 1649, and no modern unit has institutional continuity with the men in those hills. The battlefield is now the Parque Historico Nacional dos Guararapes. Gillis Peeters painted the fight in Antwerp in 1650; two centuries later Victor Meirelles painted it again, as Brazil went looking for its own beginning and decided it had happened here.