The Tupinambá were one of the various Tupi ethnic groups that inhabited present-day Brazil before the conquest of the region by Portuguese colonial settlers. The Tupinambás lived in São Luis, Maranhão. Their language survives today in the form of Nheengatu.
The Tupinambás were abundantly described in the Cosmographie universelle (1572) of André Thevet, in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578), by Jean de Léry and Hans Staden's True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World. Thevet and Léry were an inspiration for Montaigne's famous essay Des Cannibales, and influenced the creation of the myth of the "noble savage" during the Enlightenment.
Original 1557 Hans Staden woodcut of the Tupinambá portrayed in a cannibalistic feast.
A Tupinambá named "Louis Henri" who visited Louis XIII in Paris in 1613, in Claude d'Abbeville, Histoire de la mission.
Catarina Paraguaçu, wife of Portuguese sailor Diogo Álvares Correia, in an 1871 painting