Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Brazil was discovered twice. First came a Spaniard, Vicente Pinzon, an old companion of Columbus: he found and reconnoitred the mouth of the Amazon, and sailed south to a point which he named Santa Maria de la Consolación, but which is now known as Cape St. Augustine. On his return to Spain his report roused no interest at a Court where new discoveries of land only added to the embarras de richesses, and the attention of the adventurous was already taken up with the West Indies; the second discovery (if we ignore the tale of the sight of Brazilian shores by Diogo de Lepe, whose wanderings were, in any case, unfruitful) was a pure accident, but, occurring to a Portuguese, was immediately seized upon as a basis of claim to part of the new lands in the West. This was on May 3, 1500, three months after the voyage of Pinzon to the Amazon. Spain, to whom the all-powerful Pope Alexander VI had allotted in the famous bull of 1495 all the new lands discovered or to be discovered in the West, while Portugal was given rights to discoveries in the East, might have contested this claim but for two reasons: the first was that the Treaty of Tordesillas had shifted the Pope’s dividing line westward to a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands so that Portugal could retain her Atlantic island discoveries; the second was that either by accident or design the early cartographers drew Brazil’s easterly outline about twenty-two degrees more to the east than it should have been, so that the whole of the enormous tract of what is Brazil today fell within the legitimate claims of Portugal. It was but a matter of equity that Portugal should have a share in the lands of the West, for to the work of that Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, the initiative for sea adventure was due. Henry, inheritor of sea traditions on both sides of his parentage, for his mother was an English princess, daughter of John of Gaunt, spent his life in a long sea dream translated into deeds; for forty years he lived on the lonely promontory of Sagres, his observatory full of charts, the haunt of shipmasters and geographers, with his shipyards below the windows ever busy with the building of stout caravels: from 1420 until his death in 1460 the Navigator urged and bullied his captains to go southward down the coast of Africa, where no sailor had penetrated within Christian times, whatever they had done in the days of the bold Phoenicians.

Thus were the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira rediscovered and settled, the pilots venturing with terror into that “Green Sea of Darkness” where sea monsters threatened their passage, and at last daring to sail farther into the southern waters where not only the water but the land boiled with the terrible heat, they said. Rounding Cape Bojador they found a coast populated with sturdy blacks, began the slave trade that demoralized half the world; in 1486 Bartholomeo Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms” and proved that there was indeed as Henry, dead for a quarter of a century, had dreamed, a southern gateway to the Spice Isles of the East—the goal of adventurers ever since Marco Polo’s tale was spread abroad.

By this discovery the whole imagination of seafaring Europe was awakened: small wonder that Columbus in the end got a hearing when he talked of a sea-path to the East by way of the West, or that, on his return with a story of rich lands, Spain should have been satisfied to believe the theory that the shores of Cathay had been found. Columbus, who became half demented towards the close of his life, never knew that he had found anything but lands on the edge of Cathay; he once forced his men to take an oath to this effect under the penalty of hanging them to the yards of his ship.

To his obsession was chiefly due the lack of any clear conception in Europe of the existence of a great new continent until the Portuguese captain stumbled upon Brazil in 1500, although three years before Alonzo de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci had coasted the Caribbean, charting the north coast of Venezuela and Colombia as well as the east of Central America. That year of 1497 was the great year of discoveries, in sea adventure, for then began the series of voyages of the Cabot family, Labrador being discovered in that first scouring of the north seas by Europeans; from that year also dates that strange chapter of oriental history, Portuguese rule in India, when Vasco da Gama sailed past the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut.

Early in 1500 Captain Pedro Alvares Cabral was despatched with a fleet of thirteen ships to follow up the conquests of da Gama; warned of the calms off the African coast which later became notorious among sailors as the “doldrums,” he stood far out to sea, was caught in strong currents, and found himself to his astonishment off an unknown coast.

Sailing south until a safe landing place was reached (Porto Seguro, some twelve miles north of the little town on the Bahian coast that today bears the name) he landed on Good Friday morning, was received in a friendly manner by the South American natives to whom Europe was thus discovered, took possession of the territory in the name of the Portuguese King, sent a ship back to Lisbon under André Gonçalves to report the discovery, and sailed on again to India.

Dom Manoel was sufficiently interested by the tale of Gonçalves to make farther investigation, equipped three vessels and sent them under the command of the Sevillian pilot Amerigo Vespucci to examine the new Terra da Vera Cruz. On the way they met Cabral’s fleet returning from India, and this explorer put his helm about and with them re-found eastern South America, sailing along and charting most of the coast of Brazil. It is the precision and not the inaccuracies of these sixteenth century maps that form their most remarkable feature.

On this journey much hostility was shown by coast-dwelling natives, and a couple of landing parties met with disaster; the cannibal taste of the “Indians” was plainly demonstrated. No settlement was made. A year later, in 1503, Duarte Coelho came with another fleet, seeking the waterway to India that was one of the dreams of adventurous Europe: another, allied to the first, was the quest of Prester John. Anyone who could find a quick sea-path to India and at the same time find and form an alliance with the mysterious Christian Priest-King, would wield power beyond rivalry.

Duarte Coelho was unlucky. His flagship and three other vessels were cast away on Fernando Noronha island, the other two reaching the shelter of what is today Bahia. Here the natives were kindly disposed, a little colony of twenty-four men elected to stay behind near Caravellas, and after a stay of five months the rest of the explorers went back to Portugal. They took with them logs cut from the coastal forests which proved to yield a dye equal to that known in Europe as “brasil,” a much prized deep red colour: they also carried back Brazilian monkeys and some of the parrots and macaws still common in the north. Many of the old maps of Brazil are marked “Terra dos Papagaios” (Land of Parrots) instead of the official “Terra da Vera (or Santa) Cruz,” but it was not long before the new country became generally known as the Land of Brazil-wood, and finally as Brazil.

From 1503 onwards no attempt at settlement or conquest of the land was made for thirty years; captains on their way to India called at the coast for fresh water, and on the return sailed into some northern wooded bay and cut brazil-wood. The real attention of Portugal was taken up with the splendid spoil that fell so readily to her hands in India; she loaded her caravels with the silks and spices and precious stones of the East, just as Spain a little later loaded her stout ships with the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas. Territory offering nothing more and nothing less than fertile soil and genial climate was little considered in the midst of those visions of gold: since then the whole world has been plunged in blood for the sake of such wide spaces of land. Land in great areas only became highly valorized, both in the Americas and Africa, when the virile races of Europe needed space for their teeming, dominating children.