Recife Brazil We are in the Port of Recife, where the Dutch woman Sara Hendricx landed in 1637. She arrived in Brazil dressed as a man on a ship belonging to the Dutch West India Company, the private company that explored possessions in America and Africa on behalf of the Dutch State in the 17th century. Her story, fragmented and reconstructed from different documents from the period, reinforces the power and gender relations that so oppressed and still oppress women's lives, bodies and choices, as well as the secondary role relegated to them in Western historiography.