We can trace a similar dependence on African labour in early Portuguese Brazil. Martim Afonso de Sousa, credited with founding the first permanent Portuguese settlement there, petitioned the crown for the slave ships to bring the first Africans to the sugar plantation that he had established in 1533. The following year, King John III of Portugal divided the country into nine captaincies to maintain territorial control and facilitate the expansion of sugar cultivation. By the middle of the century, the plantation sector's labour force had become principally African. Meanwhile, England, France and Holland, realizing imperial ambitions in the Caribbean, used their mainland colonies in North and South America as springboards for developing sugar colonies on the islands in the early seventeenth century. Decades later, in the 1660s, Denmark and Norway - then one polity - took possession of Saint Thomas and the neighbouring islands (now known as the United States Virgin Islands) for the sole purpose of planting cane. The proliferation of plantation colonies in the New World tropics and the crash of Amerindian populations after European conquest repeated and expanded the Iberian pattern of dependency upon enslaved African labour. The temporal and spatial unfolding of plantation economies leads to two important considerations. First, Africans emerged the dominant plantation workforce (and the majority immigrant population of the Americas, which lasted until the early nineteenth century). Second, Africans present in the formative period of plantation development not only grew export crops for slaveholders, but were often made responsible for their own subsistence.