DISCOVERY
On the 9th of March, 1500, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese nobleman
of illustrious birth, but not yet distinguished by any notable feats in
war or seamanship, sailed from Lisbon for the East Indies. This
expedition was sent out to continue the work begun by Vasco da Gama in
the first all-sea voyage to India. It was an advance-guard for the
larger armament that two years later founded the Portuguese empire on
the coasts of India. Vasco da Gama himself wrote Cabral's sailing
orders. The latter was instructed, after passing the Cape Verde Islands
in 14 deg. North, to sail directly south, as long as the wind was
favourable. If forced to change his course, he was ordered to keep on
the starboard tack, even though it led him south-west. When he reached
the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope--34 deg. South--he was to bear away to
the east.
These sailing instructions have been the subject of much discussion.
Many believe their sole purpose was to enable Cabral to avoid the Guinea
calms, so annoying to sailing ships near the African coast. Others
contend that Da Gama had seen signs of land to the west on his own
voyage, and that its discovery was a real, though secondary, object of
the expedition. In any event the Brazilian coast is too near the natural
route around Africa to have escaped encounter, and would infallibly have
shortly been seen by some one else.
[Illustration: OLD TOWER AT LISBON WHENCE THE FLEET SAILED.]
Forty-two days after leaving Lisbon, Cabral's fleet saw unmistakable
signs of land, being then in latitude 17 degrees south and longitude 36
degrees west. From the Cape Verde Islands, just off the western point of
Africa, he had made 2300 miles, and had come 500 miles to the west. The
next day a mountain was sighted, which he called Paschoal, because it
was Easter week. This mountain is in the southern part of the state of
Bahia, about four hundred miles north-east of Rio, and on a coast that
to this day is sparsely inhabited and rarely visited. The following day
the whole fleet came to an anchor a mile and a half from the shore, and
just north of the dangerous Abrolhos reefs. This was the 23rd of April,
Old Style, which corresponds with the 3rd of May in the Gregorian
calendar. The date is a national holiday in Brazil, and the anniversary
for the annual convening of Congress.
Because no quadrupeds or large rivers were seen, Cabral thought he had
discovered an island and named it the "Island of the True Cross." The
name has not survived except in poetry. He stopped ten days on the
coast, took formal possession, and sent expeditions on shore which
entered into communication with the Indians, who were seen in
considerable numbers. It is characteristic that the first question asked
of the Indians was if they knew what gold and silver were. They were
peaceable and friendly, and the old chronicle describes them as of a
dark reddish complexion with good features, and muscular, well-shaped
bodies. They wore no clothes, their lower lips and cheeks were
perforated to carry great ornaments of white bone, and their hair was
elaborately dressed and adorned with feathers.
These were fair specimens of the Tupi-Guaranies, the largest of the four
great families into which the Brazilian aborigines have been classified.
The others are the Caribs, the Arawaks, and the Botacudos. There are
also traces of tribes who inhabited the country remote centuries ago. In
caves in Minas Geraes skeletons have been found remarkably like those of
the earliest Europeans. The theory is that these Indians came from
Europe by land in that remote geological epoch when Scandinavia was
joined to Greenland. Later came Mongoloids, probably by way of the
Behring Strait, who appear largely to have exterminated their European
predecessors, and to have been the ancestors of the modern Indians.
When America was discovered, the four great families were spread in
scattering and widely differing tribes over the whole of Brazil and the
adjacent countries. Their state of culture varied from that of the most
squalid tribes of Botacudos, who had not even reached the Stone Age,
lived in brush shelters, slept in the ashes of their fires, practised
promiscuous marriage, and had no idea of religion except a fear of
malignant spirits; up to Arawaks, who were cleanly, had a well-defined
tribal organisation, and built marvellous canoes, or Tupis, who
cultivated the soil, built fair houses, used rude machinery for making
mandioc flour, spun cotton, wove cloth, and were good potters. But the
civilisation of the best of them was stationary. No Brazilian tribe ever
got beyond the condition where the struggle to obtain food was its sole
preoccupation. No civilisation like that of Mexico, Peru, or Yucatan
ever existed. Disaggregation, failure, and obliteration were the rule.
Organically unfitted to cope with their surroundings they never devised
a method of getting a good and permanent food-supply. Defective
nutrition sapped their powers to resist strains. Their muscular
appearance was not accompanied by corresponding endurance. Their
European taskmasters could never understand why they died from the
effects of exertion to which a white man would easily have been equal.
The vast majority had no regular agriculture and lived on the
spontaneous products of the forests and the streams. Land game is not
abundant in the tropics, and they had developed only few good food
plants. What they did procure was spoiled by bad preparation. Such a
people had no chance of successfully resisting the Portuguese invaders,
and their only hope of survival was in contact and admixture with the
more vigorous white and black races.
[Illustration: A TUPI VILLAGE.]
The Tupi-Guaranies occupied one-fourth of Brazil, all of Paraguay and
Uruguay, and much of Bolivia and the Argentine, and it is probable that
the original seats of this family were in the central table-lands or in
Paraguay. All Tupi Indians spoke dialects of one language, which the
Jesuit missionaries soon reduced to grammatical and literary form, and
which became a _lingua franca_ that was understood from the Plate to the
Amazon. Back of the coast Tupis were the Botacudos, the most degraded
and intractable of Brazilian savages, remnants of whom still survive in
their original seats in Espirito Santo, Minas, and Sao Paulo. The
Caribs, with whom students of the history of the Caribbean Sea are
familiar, originated in the plains of Goyaz and Matto Grosso and
emigrated as far north as the Antilles. The Arawaks were most numerous
in Guiana and on the Lower Amazon, but were also spread over central
Brazil.
The Brazilian Indians did not survive the white man's coming to as large
an extent as in Spanish-America. The pure Indian is found in Brazil only
in regions where the white man has not thought it worth while to take
possession, and the proportion of Indian blood is much smaller than in
surrounding countries. In many localities, evidences of Indian descent
are so rare as to be remarkable.
Cabral's voyage was the real discovery of Brazil, if we consider
historical and political consequences. It was the first reported to
Europe; and the Portuguese Crown immediately made formal claim to the
territory. But, as a matter of fact, land which to-day is a part of
Brazilian territory had been seen by Europeans before Cabral landed. In
January, 1500, Vincente Yanez Pinzon, who had commanded the _Nina_ on
the first voyage of Columbus, saw land in the neigbourhood of Cape St.
Roque. Bound westward, he bore away to the west and north, following the
prevailing winds and currents as far as the Orange Cape, the present
extreme northern limits of Brazil. He was, therefore, the discoverer of
the great estuary which forms the mouth of the Amazon. He named it the
"Fresh-Water Sea," because the great river freshens the open ocean far
out of sight of land, but he did not ascend, nor even see, the river
proper. It is also claimed on good evidence that, six months before
Pinzon, another Spanish navigator, Alonso de Ojeda, accompanied by
Amerigo Vespucci, had made the South American coast not far from Cape
St. Roque; and that a month later still another, Diego de Lepe, did the
same.
None of these Spanish voyages produced any results. They were not
reported until after the news of Cabral's discovery had been solemnly
promulgated to the Courts of Europe, and were soon forgotten. The honour
of making Brazil known to Europe belongs to Cabral just as certainly as
that of discovering America does to Columbus. The Spanish voyages are
interesting to antiquarians, but neither they nor the Norwegian voyages
of the eleventh century were followed up, or produced any permanent
results.
The news reached Portugal in the fall of 1500, and no time was lost in
sending out a small fleet to ascertain definitely the extent, value, and
resources of the region. The Portuguese hoped to find a wealthy and
civilised population like that of India--rich and unwarlike nations,
such as the Spaniards did encounter a few years later in Peru and
Mexico. The exploring expedition was under the command of Amerigo
Vespucci, the greatest technical navigator of the age. He shaped his
course so as to keep to the windward and south of the redoubtable
promontory of St. Roque, which the clumsy ships of that day could not
weather in the teeth of the trade-winds and the equatorial current, and,
turning to the south, made a systematic examination of the coast nearly
as far as the river Plate, employing five months in the task. In naming
the rivers, capes and harbours, he saved his inventive faculty and
gratified the popular religious sentiment by calling each one by the
name of the saint on whose anniversary it was reached. Most of these
names have survived. For example, the Sao Francisco, the largest river
between the Amazon and the Plate, is so called because Vespucci reached
it on October 1, 1501, which date is sacred to St. Francis in the Roman
calendar. Rio de Janeiro is so named because he saw the great bay, whose
entrance is narrower than many rivers, on New Year's Day, 1501. He
coasted along for two thousand miles, looking eagerly for gold, silver,
spices, and civilised inhabitants. He was disappointed. The only thing
found which seemed to have an immediate market value was brazil-wood--a
dye-wood that had been used in Europe for centuries and was in great
demand. Its colour was a bright red--hence its name, which means "wood
the colour of fire." It was found in such abundance that the world's
supply has since been drawn from this coast, and among sailors and
merchants the country soon became known as "the Country of Brazil-wood."
The name almost immediately supplanted "Santa Cruz." Vespucci saw that
the country was fertile and the climate pleasant. This was not enough to
satisfy his greedy employers. A government whose coffers were beginning
to overflow with the profits of the Indian spice-trade and the African
mines was not inclined to pay much attention to a region without the
precious metals, and inhabited only by naked savages. The reports of the
abundance of brazil-wood, however, induced private adventurers to go and
cut that valuable commodity. The government declared it a Portuguese
monopoly, but the high price of the article made the trade so enormously
profitable, that ships of other nationalities, especially French, could
not be excluded.
The coast soon became well known, but the Portuguese government did not
extend its explorations to the south. It was left to the Spaniards to
find the passage into the Pacific Ocean and to explore the tributaries
of the Plate. The southern extension of the continent became and remains
Spanish. No exact records exist of the earliest Portuguese explorations
of the northern coast from Cape St. Roque to the mouth of the Amazon. We
only know that some Portuguese ships navigated those waters and that
Spain never seriously disputed Portugal's title to that region.
For thirty years Brazil remained unsettled, though the fleets going to
the East Indies often stopped in its admirable harbours to refit and
take water. Private adventurers came for brazil-wood and the French
poached more and more frequently. Soon the latter began to establish
little factories to which they returned year after year, and got on good
terms with the aborigines. It became evident that Portugal must
establish fortified, self-sustaining posts if she expected to retain the
territory.