Monte Pascoal on the horizon: Cabral's fleet reaches Brazil, 22 April 1500

The first sign was weed. On Tuesday 21 April 1500, two days after Easter, the lookouts of a Portuguese fleet in the South Atlantic saw long strands floating past, which the sailors called botelho and rabo-de-asno, donkey's tail. The pilots reckoned they were 660 or 670 leagues from the Cape Verde islands. On Wednesday morning birds the crews called fura-buchos flew over the ships.2 sources2 sources

Late that afternoon, at the hour of vespers, land rose on the western horizon. Pero Vaz de Caminha, a clerk on the flagship, wrote down what he saw.1 source1 source

Pascoal means “of Easter”. The captain-major, Pedro Álvares Cabral, had the lead thrown and found 25 fathoms of water. At sunset the twelve ships still with him anchored about six leagues offshore, in 19 fathoms on a clean bottom, and waited for morning. Their orders were for India.2 sources2 sources

Vasco da Gama had come home from India in 1499 having reached Calicut, on the Malabar coast, but with little cargo. King Manuel I at once ordered a much larger fleet to follow. It was to set up a trading post, or factory, at Calicut, win over its ruler, the Zamorin, or make war on him if he refused, and send two ships under Bartolomeu Dias and his brother Diogo to Sofala, in today's Mozambique, where gold was traded.2 sources2 sources

Command went to Pedro Álvares Cabral, a nobleman in his early thirties from Belmonte, in the Beira, appointed by royal letter of 15 February 1500. His family had served the Order of Christ for a century, and he was a knight of the Order himself. Little is known of his career before 1500.3 sources3 sources

The commercial staff sailed in the flagship. The chief factor was Aires Correia, and one of his clerks was Pero Vaz de Caminha, a man of about fifty who had inherited from his father the post of master of the balance at the Porto mint. Another passenger was a royal physician and astronomer known as Master John, sent to fix the ships' position by the stars.3 sources3 sources

The fleet left the Tagus on Monday 9 March, the day after the king handed Cabral his banner at the chapel of Restelo, in Belém. It passed the Canaries on the 14th and São Nicolau, in the Cape Verde islands, on Sunday the 22nd. That night Vasco de Ataíde's ship disappeared. Caminha insists there was no heavy weather or contrary wind to explain it, and two days of searching found nothing.2 sources2 sources

To reach the Cape of Good Hope a sailing ship could not simply hug Africa. South of Guinea lay belts of calm and then the south-east trade wind, blowing against any ship trying to go south. In 1497 Gama had been the first to cross the open South Atlantic, far from the African coast. A memorandum attributed to him, written for Cabral, spells out the route.1 source1 source

Cabral's pilots kept to the south-west for a month, carried by the north-east trades and by westward currents they had no means of measuring, since longitude could not yet be found at sea. By Greenlee's reckoning the fleet crossed the equator around 30 degrees west and ran on south-south-west, well out from a coast nobody aboard knew was there.1 source1 source

On Thursday 23 April the small ships led the fleet in, sounding as they went, and anchored half a league off the mouth of a river. Men were walking on the beach. Cabral sent Nicolau Coelho in a boat, and by the time he reached the river some 18 or 20 had gathered, naked and carrying bows. At his sign they laid the bows down. The surf made talk impossible, so Coelho handed over a red cap, a linen cap and a black hat, and received a headdress of long feathers and a string of small white beads.2 sources2 sources

That night a south-easterly gale made the anchors drag. On Friday the 24th the fleet ran about ten leagues north and found a reef with a sheltered harbour behind it, which Cabral named Porto Seguro, the safe port. It is today's Baía Cabrália. There the pilot Afonso Lopes took two young men from a canoe and brought them to the flagship after dark.3 sources3 sources

Cabral received them by torchlight, seated on a chair with a carpet at his feet and a heavy gold collar round his neck. One of the visitors looked at the collar, pointed to the land and back again; he did the same with a silver candlestick. Offered bread, honey and dried figs, they spat most of it out. Wine they tasted once and refused. Then they lay down on the carpet and went to sleep, and Cabral had cushions put under their heads.1 source1 source

On Saturday the ships moved inside the reef. Coelho and Bartolomeu Dias rowed the two men back, dressed in new shirts and red caps, with Caminha and a young convict, Afonso Ribeiro, who was to live among the Tupiniquim and learn their ways. Nearly 200 men waited on the shore with bows. The two guests ran off across a river into the palms, and before long people were wading out to help fill the water casks.1 source1 source

On Low Sunday, 26 April, Frei Henrique said Mass on an islet in the bay, the first in what became Brazil. Onlookers on the beach blew horns and danced. After the midday meal the captains agreed to send the supply ship home with the news, and not to carry anyone off by force. That afternoon Diogo Dias, Bartolomeu's brother, crossed the river with a bagpiper and danced with them, hand in hand, until they turned wary and went off upstream.2 sources2 sources

Over the next days the Portuguese cut wood and filled casks, and the two sides mixed more freely. On Monday Ribeiro, two other convicts and Diogo Dias walked a league and a half inland to a village of nine or ten houses, each as long as the flagship and home to thirty or forty people, who slept in hammocks slung between posts. The same day Master John went ashore with two pilots, measured the sun at noon with an astrolabe and put Porto Seguro at 17 degrees south, close to the true 16 degrees 21 minutes.2 sources2 sources

On Tuesday two carpenters made a large cross from a tree cut the day before, and the onlookers, Caminha thought, were more interested in the iron tools than the cross. They cut their own timber with stone wedges bound to handles. On Friday 1 May the cross went up near the river with the king's arms nailed to it, and a second Mass was said at its foot while some fifty or sixty Tupiniquim knelt and rose with the Portuguese.1 source1 source

When the fleet sailed on Saturday 2 May it left two convicts behind with instructions to learn the language. Two ship's boys had slipped ashore in a skiff on the last night and did not come back. The supply ship under Gaspar de Lemos headed back to Lisbon with the letters, parrots and feather work.3 sources3 sources

Caminha wrote as the days passed, almost a diary, and dated the finished letter Friday 1 May 1500, "from this Porto Seguro of your island of Vera Cruz". He apologised for its length and ended by asking the king to bring home his son-in-law, Jorge de Osório, from exile on São Tomé.3 sources3 sources

The letter is the fullest of three eyewitness accounts. Master John wrote a short one the same day, on his latitude and the stars, with a sketch of the Southern Cross; he noted that the pilot Pero Escolar put the fleet 150 leagues further on than he did. A third account, by an unnamed member of the fleet who lived to come home, survives only in Italian and was printed in 1507.2 sources2 sources

Caminha never saw his letter again. He was one of some fifty Portuguese killed when the factory at Calicut was stormed on 16 December 1500. The seven sheets stayed in the royal archive, little known, until the Spanish historian Juan Bautista Muñoz found them before 1790. They were first printed in 1817. The historian Jaime Cortesão called the letter the account of Brazil's birth.3 sources3 sources

Nobody in 1500 recorded a debate about why the fleet was so far west. King Manuel, announcing the news to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1501, put it down to Providence: the new land was very convenient for the India voyage, and it seemed that Our Lord had miraculously wished it to be found. Caminha wrote that God's bringing them there was not without cause.2 sources2 sources

The chroniclers of the next generation gave a seaman's reason. João de Barros wrote that Cabral stood far out to sea to avoid the calms off Guinea and make sure of doubling the Cape. Most of the pilots, he added, took the new coast for a large island like those Columbus had found.2 sources2 sources

The case for design rests on what Lisbon may already have known. Portugal had insisted on a Tordesillas line 370 leagues out, and some historians read that as a sign that it suspected land lay there. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, a navigator who signed that treaty, later wrote in his Esmeraldo de situ orbis that King Manuel had sent him in 1498 to explore the western part of the ocean, where a great mainland lay. The Spaniard Vicente Yáñez Pinzón may have touched the north-east of Brazil in January 1500.3 sources3 sources

Historians still divide. João Paulo Oliveira e Costa writes that Cabral carried two missions, the first being a discreet search for land in the south-west. The supply ship reached Lisbon unnoticed, which he takes as proof that its crew had orders to keep quiet. William Brooks Greenlee, who translated the sources in 1938, saw no sign that Lisbon already knew the land. The fleet made no effort to explore, sent a ship home with news it would not have needed to send about a known coast, and no contemporary named any earlier discoverer. He allowed that the planners may have hoped to find land on the way, but thought the main motive was the safest route to the Cape.3 sources3 sources

The crossing to the Cape went badly. A comet hung in the sky for eight to ten nights from 12 May, and then a sudden squall struck the fleet with its sails half set. Four ships went down with everyone aboard, Bartolomeu Dias's among them. The sources disagree on the day: an eyewitness and Damião de Góis give Sunday 24 May, Barros the 23rd, and Oliveira e Costa's modern chronology the 20th.4 sources4 sources

Six ships anchored off Calicut on 13 September. Talks with the Zamorin dragged on, and on 16 December a crowd stormed the Portuguese factory and killed more than fifty men. Cabral seized and burned ten Arab ships in the harbour and bombarded the city for a day, then loaded spices at Cochin, whose ruler welcomed a rival to Calicut. The survivors reached the Tagus between late June and late July 1501.3 sources3 sources

The king called the new land Santa Cruz, Holy Cross. Within a few years traders were shipping its red dyewood, pau-brasil, to Flanders, and the wood gave the country its name; Barros complained that the name of a wood for dyeing cloth had displaced the name of the Cross. In May 1501 Manuel sent ships under Gonçalo Coelho to find out how far the coast went. Cabral never commanded again after a quarrel over the 1502 fleet. He died in 1520 and was buried at Santarém.4 sources4 sources

For centuries Brazil marked the discovery on 3 May, the feast of the Holy Cross, a date that goes back to chroniclers such as Gaspar Correia. The date now used is Caminha's 22 April; marking it in 2020, Portugal's navy museum called Cabral, officially, the first European to reach Brazil.3 sources3 sources

The anniversary has also become a day of argument. On 22 April 2000 the presidents of Brazil and Portugal led the 500th-anniversary ceremonies at Porto Seguro, and the government put up a huge metal cross at Coroa Vermelha, on Indigenous land, where the first Mass was said. Indigenous, Black and landless groups marched under the banner of the Other 500. Military police broke up the march with tear gas, rubber bullets and batons; Amnesty International reported 30 injured and 141 detained.1 source1 source

Monte Pascoal itself is now the centre of a national and historical park of about 22,400 hectares, created in 1961. Pataxó guides from the Barra Velha indigenous land lead walkers up a 1.7-kilometre trail to the 536-metre summit, the land the fleet saw first.1 source1 source