Pedro Álvares Cabral Reaches Brazil
Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted the Brazilian coast on 22 April 1500 while sailing to India, and Portugal claimed it. He had left Lisbon in March with thirteen ships and 1,500 men, the largest fleet Portugal had yet sent east, following the route Vasco da Gama had opened. That route required a wide westward arc into the South Atlantic to pick up favourable winds around the doldrums, and Cabral swung further west than his instructions specified. He struck land at a hill he named Monte Pascoal, anchored, and spent nine days in contact with Tupiniquim people, exchanging goods and holding a Mass. He named it the Island of the True Cross, sent a ship home with the news, left two convicts behind, and continued to India. Whether the landfall was accidental is the standing question. The Treaty of Tordesillas six years earlier had moved the dividing line to 370 leagues west of Cape Verde, at Portuguese insistence and against Spanish preference, and the line falls through eastern Brazil. Some historians conclude the Portuguese already suspected land was there; the evidence is circumstantial and the argument is unresolved. The rest of the voyage was costly. Four ships were lost in a storm off the Cape, including one commanded by Bartolomeu Dias, who drowned near the cape he had discovered. Cabral reached Calicut, bombarded it after his factory was attacked, and came home with four ships and a cargo that repaid the expedition. Portugal ignored Brazil for thirty years. Systematic settlement began only in the 1530s, once the French started cutting brazilwood there.
- Year: 1500 CE
- Category: Political
