After failing to wrest Brazil from the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the French turned their attention to the region north of the Amazon and south of the Orinoco River. The Guiana ventures the French launched during the middle decades of the seventeenth century met with numerous disasters, many of them self-inflicted, including bankruptcies, mutinies, murder, and costly rivalries between companies based in Paris and Rouen. Despite their many setbacks during the seventeenth century, however, the French were determined to establish plantations on the island of Cayenne in modern French Guiana. By the eighteenth century, French planters were cultivating sugar and tobacco in and around Cayenne using primarily the labour of African slaves. The nucleus, thus, of the future colony of French Guiana had been laid, in a territory sandwiched between the English colony of Guyana and the Dutch colony of Suriname, to the northwest, and Portuguese-controlled territory to the south and east. Prospering in Guiana was never easy, for the French or their African slaves, as the 1762–4 disaster of Kourou attests. But by then, the indigenous Galibí inhabitants of Cayenne (members of the Carib language group) seem to have been largely “written out” of the history of Guiana, except when they appear as a minority of slaves among a sea of Africans on a plantation.