IV
Until the great Dutch navigator, Willim Cornelis Schouten, found the way around Cape Horn nearly a hundred years later, however, no practical advantage over her rival resulted to Spain from Magellan’s discoveries—so far as trade with the East Indies was concerned, that is. The passage through the Strait was too perilous for sailing vessels, the distance across the Pacific too great. Yet only a year before Magellan set out on his famous voyage an era began in her new possessions that was to pour into her coffers a stream of gold in comparison with which the profits Portugal was deriving from her trade with the Orient seemed trivial. For in that year Hernando Cortés, the greatest soldier and statesman Spain ever sent to the new world, began his conquest of Mexico.
Except for the spirit of emulation it inspired, except for the knowledge it brought of the existence in the newly discovered countries of a people less barbarous than the aborigines of the Antilles, of mines that were worth while and of enormous hoards of treasure, the story of that conquest has no place in the history of South America, and, therefore, will not be gone into here. It is related somewhere as an interesting commentary that in an obscure little house in the City of Mexico still lives a modest, well-educated gentleman who is directly descended from the Emperor of the Aztecs. Señor Montezuma entertains no hope of a restoration, it is said, but quietly accepts the meager pension allowed him by the present government, while the heirs of Cortés receive immense revenues from their Mexican estates and the Marquis del Valle, as the present-day Cortés is called, lives in luxury and is a man of influence and power in the land.
In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was commissioned by the King of Spain to locate the Papal meridian in America and then to follow in Magellan’s track and determine the corresponding longitude on the Asiatic side; but, when he put in at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, he heard rumors of a great and wealthy people who dwelt near the headwaters of the river—rumors like those Grijalva had heard respecting the Aztecs and which had led to the Mexican conquest by Cortés; only these wonderful accounts were of a South American empire. In proof of what they said, the Indians of the Plata exhibited silver ornaments that had passed from hand to hand from the highlands of Bolivia and Peru, along the river to the Atlantic; and, too strongly tempted to resist, and trusting that the discovery of the rich mines from which this silver came would excuse their disobedience, Cabot and his company abandoned their survey and spent three years exploring and prospecting along the Uruguay and Paraná as far north as the present site of the city of Asunción. As their forces and provisions were inadequate to enable them to penetrate farther, the search was in vain; and so, having found, on their return to a fort they had established, that it had been taken by the Indians and the garrison massacred, Cabot abandoned the effort and went back to Spain to make what explanation he could.
The news of this supposed encroachment, added to the ever increasing poaching of the French, proved what was needed to stimulate the Portuguese at last to make a serious attempt at colonization in Brazil. One Christovão Jaques and a few settlers had already established a small sugar factory in the neighborhood of the present site of Pernambuco, and it had been found that much of the land in the northern part of the country was admirably adapted to the cultivation of that staple, the demand for which in Europe was constantly increasing. Five vessels were sent out, therefore, under the command of Martim Affonso da Souza. Early in 1531 he drew near Cape St. Roque, captured three French ships laden with brazil wood, sent part of his own fleet north to explore the coast beyond, and with the other ships sailed south and dropped anchor near the site of what is now the great coffee port of Santos. There he established São Vicente, the first permanent colony in Brazil.
There also they came across one João Ramalho, a former sailor who had been put ashore for mutiny years before by a ship on its way to India and was living among the natives of the neighborhood with his half-breed children. Glad enough to welcome his countrymen, he disposed the Indians to peace and showed the Portuguese the way up the mountains to the vast plateau that begins only a few miles from the sea. There, near the present site of São Paulo, was founded another settlement, from whence they could stretch out in all directions over what was destined to become the greatest coffee-producing country in the world.
A year or two afterward, encouraged by Da Souza’s success, Duarte Coelho set out with a carefully selected and more numerous company and founded the colony of Pernambuco. Here, as in the south, the country back of the coast was fertile and easily accessible and there was little trouble with the Indians. Sugar planting proved wonderfully profitable, Coelho turned out to be a good manager, and so politic was he in the relations with the mother country that within a few years the colony had become self-supporting and, like the other, possessed of all the elements of permanence and prosperity. Soon afterward São Salvador da Bahia was established. With such a beginning, it was not long before the Portuguese began flocking to Brazil as the Spaniards had to the Caribbean.