Spanish and Portuguese South America during the Colonial Period; Vol. 1 of 2

by Robert Grant Watson

1504.

In the spring of the ensuing year (1503) Vespucci again sailed from Lisbon with a squadron of six vessels, of which, however, he only commanded one ship. After many disasters and the loss of one vessel of the squadron, he reached Brazil, with his own ship alone, at the celebrated bay of All Saints, Bahia. There he remained two months in the hope of being joined by the rest of the fleet. He then sailed two hundred and sixty leagues to the south, where he remained for five months, building a fort and taking in a cargo of brazil-wood. In the fort he left a garrison of twenty-four men and set sail for Lisbon, where he arrived in June 1504. The other four vessels of the squadron were never afterwards heard of.

Early in the following year Amerigo Vespucci was at Seville on his way to the Spanish court in quest of employment, and was the bearer of a letter from Columbus to his son Diego, in which the great navigator, speaking of Vespucci, says, “Fortune has been adverse to him as to many others. His labours have not profited him as they reasonably should have done.... He goes with the determination to do all that is possible for me.” It is pathetic to hear the great discoverer thus speaking of the man whose name was to usurp the place of Columbus on the two continents of the New World.

The cargo of brazil-wood which had been brought by Amerigo to Lisbon was so much esteemed that a trade in it at once sprang up, and the result was that the coast whence it was procured, and finally the whole neighbouring country, came to be called Brazil. The Portuguese Government determined to colonize the land, and accordingly despatched thither, in the first instance, a portion of the criminal population of Portugal.

1508.

Amerigo Vespucci being once more in the service of the king of Castile, in which he obtained the rank of chief pilot, which he held until his death, it was determined to take advantage of his previous discoveries, and in the year 1508 Pinzon and Solis proceeded on an expedition to Cape St. Augustine and thence southwards, taking possession of several points at which they landed, in the name of the king of Spain. As before this date the Pope Alexander VI. had assigned to the Castilian and Lusitanian crowns, respectively, the line beyond which their respective discoveries might in either case be taken possession of, the Portuguese king now complained that the proceedings of this last Spanish expedition on the coast of South America were an infringement of the grant which had been made to him by the Sovereign Pontiff. Notwithstanding this, the king of Castile in the year 1515 despatched Juan de Solis on another expedition to the south, in the hope of finding the means of communication with the ocean which more than a year before this time had been reached overland by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. This expedition resulted in the discovery of a stream to which Solis gave the name of the Sweet Sea; for the extent of its fresh waters forbade him to entertain the idea of its being a river. The Sweet Sea was named by a subsequent navigator the River of Silver, from the ornaments of that metal found amongst the people on the banks of the Paraguay, which flows into the Paraná, which with the Uruguay forms the Plata, and is now known to us as the Plata or the River Plate. This discovery cost De Solis his life; for, having landed incautiously on the island of Martin Garcia, he was set upon by the natives and murdered.

1519.

And here it is necessary to mention the great navigator who should rank next to Columbus in South American discovery. Fernando Magalhaens (in Spanish Magallanes), better known as Magellan, was born in Oporto late in the fifteenth century. He entered the Portuguese navy at the usual early age, and served in India under Albuquerque. Fancying that his merits at Malacca had been overlooked, he retired from the service of Portugal, and made proposals for new discoveries to Cardinal Ximenes. He shared the view of Columbus that there must exist somewhere a western passage to the seas beyond America, which seas had been seen by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. Having held out the inducement of obtaining the Moluccas by sailing westward, inasmuch as by the compact between Spain and Portugal all countries discovered 180° west of the Azores were to belong to the former country, he obtained a fleet of five vessels, manned by two hundred and thirty-four persons, which sailed from Seville under his command on August 10th, 1519.

They steered for Brazil, and in the middle of the following December he entered the river Plata. Finding that it was not a strait, he sought his way southward, and took refuge in a harbour on the coast of Patagonia in the 49th degree of S. latitude, to which he gave the name of Port San Julian. During his stay here he had to repress a conspiracy amongst the four commanders of his squadron, who were Spaniards, and who resented his being placed over them. Of these, two were hanged, a third was stabbed, and the fourth was put on shore.

1520.