The Brazilian historian, Gilberto Freyre, has stated that only the Portuguese had the innate adaptive capacity which enabled them to stay in the tropics and, through intermarriage with indigenous people and imported slaves, create a new culture suitable to the challenges of an underdeveloped tropical environment. He emphasized that it was particularly Northern Europeans who were incapable of adjustment. They returned home after their tours of duty, and those few remaining invariably degenerated. Yet many Dutch and other Europeans stayed on in Batavia (present-day Djakarta), and through intermarriage with Indonesians helped create a new Indonesian-European culture. Admittedly this resulted initially through imitation of the Portuguese style of life, but it is nevertheless evident that the new Indische culture became in many ways as adaptive to local conditions as the mestizo culture of Brazil, and as much a channel for the introduction of new cultural elements.