The stated intent of this expedition was the same as the earlier one: to head for the southern tip of Africa, sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and head north toward India through the Indian Ocean. Almost as soon as the fleet had set out to sea, however, disaster appeared to strike. The lead ship, commanded by Cabral, swung off course into the Atlantic,sailing due west. Cabral and his crew eventually reached the coast of what is now the Brazilian state of Bahia, arriving on April 23,1500.
They had stumbled on what turned out to be a vast continent. Or was it more than stumbling? There has been considerable speculation over the years that the Portuguese navigators knew exactly what they were doing, that they had in fact planned this "accident" to outflank the Spanish, who had already claimed so much of the new world, and that they were really following the route of previous secret voyages to Brazil.
Historians have failed to uncover any evidence in the Portuguese archives or elsewhere to support this version of events. If there were, indeed, previous secret voyages to the new continent, they are still secret.
Nor, of course, was the continent new to the several million indigenous Indian people who already lived there.
There is no record of what the Indian residents thought as they were "discovered" by a band of strange sailors with odd clothes and a bad smell, but their reaction can well be imagined. The reaction of Cabral and his men is known: They were fascinated by what they saw. Their thoughts were captured in an official account written for King Manuel by Pero Vaz de Caminha, the fleet's scribe. His "Carta" (letter) demonstrated a typical late-Renaissance perception of the new land, naturally emphasizing what was exotic to European eyes. Vaz de Caminha depicted a realm where the resources—human and environmental—were there for the taking. The native women were described as comely naked, and without shame, and the soil as endlessly fertile. The image of endless fertility was to capture the imagination of the Portuguese and later the Brazilians, a romanticization that has led to a variety of overoptimistic estimates of Brazil's potential. This description of Brazil sounded seductively different from the hardscrabble life facing most Portuguese at home. It was also designed to encourage the monarch to send followup expeditions.
Cabral's feat, though dramatic, was in fact part of the continuing success of the Portuguese at overseas exploration. Despite their relatively meager resources (the Portuguese population was about 1 million, compared with England's 3 million, Spain's 7 million, and France's 15 million; Holland was closest with 1.5 million), the Portuguese were, during these years, in the process of creating a trading empire reaching all the way to Asia.
Vasco de Gama's arrival in India in 1498 marked the creation of the Estado de India, a network of coastal enclaves running along the Indian Ocean, from Mozambique, around the Malabar coast of India, and all the way to Macao on the coast of China. The resulting wealth had made their kingdom a major international power in fifteenth century Europe. Such success was made possible by a combination of factors: early consolidation of the monarchy, and a social structure that respected trade, along with leadership in navigational technology, long-standing involvement in oceanic trading networks, an instinct for trade rather than colonization, and a collective thirst for adventure.
Like Spain, Portugal had to fight a long war against the Muslims, who had occupied the Iberian peninsula since the eighth century. But the Portuguese had liberated their kingdom from its Arabic-speaking occupiers by the thirteenth century, two hundred years earlier than the Spanish. In addition, they were able to resist repeated attempts by the kingdom of Castile (the bureaucratic and military core of modern Spain), to manipulate the succession to the Portuguese throne. To strengthen its position against Castile, Portugal forged an alliance with the English crown in 1386. This alliance, which remained the bedrock of Portuguese foreign policy for the following five centuries, was to lay the basis for England's involvement—especially its economic involvement—in modern Brazil. The marriage of Portuguese King Joao I to the granddaughter of England's Edward III consolidated the Portuguese dynasty (known as the house of Avis, 1385-1578) and created the stable monarchical base that facilitated the country's foray into world exploration and trade.
In addition to early political stability, Portugal was helped by a social structure in which the merchant class played a major role. Portugal's economy in the fifteenth century combined commercial agriculture,
subsistence agriculture, and trade. The merchants were the key to trade and were respected by the crown. Thus, they had the support of their sovereign as they maneuvered on the world stage, pursuing exploration and trade and gaining the cooperation of foreign merchants, especially the Genoese in what is modern-day Italy. The power of the merchants and the interest of the crown combined to produce the resources necessary to make Portugal a leader in perfecting the technology necessary for traveling long distances by sea. One of her relative advantages in maritime skills was in ship-building, about which the Portuguese had learned much from their Basque neighbors in northern Spain. For example, they produced the caravel, the first sailing ship that was reliable on the high seas. Previous European ships were designed for coastal sailing or for use in the relatively calm inland sea of the Mediterranean. When sailed on the open ocean, they were apt to be swamped by ocean waves and often capsized.
The Portuguese also excelled at navigation. In particular, they pioneered development of the astrolabe, the first instrument capable of using the sun and stars to determine position at sea. Finally, the Portuguese were skilled at drawing maps, which were based on the increasingly detailed geographical knowledge accumulated on their voyages. Such maps made possible systematic repeat trips. (The astrolabe and the map-making skills give some credence to the speculation that Cabral "discovered" Brazil by design.)
Portugal had yet another asset: a long-standing involvement in the trade routes that linked the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Over the preceding centuries Lisbon had been a regular stop for Genoese traders traveling from the Mediterranean to European Atlantic ports. By 1450, as a consequence, Portugal was already integrated into the most advanced trading network of the time. Portugal's location on the Atlantic also stimulated a natural focus west, as compared with fleets that had set out from ports inside the Mediterranean. Portugal was also helped because its small population made it impossible to settle nationals in the colonies on the scale soon to be launched by the English and the Spanish. Rather than subjugate the indigenous population politically, the Portuguese established a network of trading posts—militarily fortified and minimally staffed—in order to exchange goods with the local population. They negotiated in order to obtain the local products (spices, gold, rare textiles, etc.), which would be produced for export by local labor, with minimal Portuguese involvement.
Such trading was established in Africa and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to obtain spices (black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg) and other foods. The Portuguese also hoped to find gold or other precious metals.
Between 1450 and 1600, the Portuguese established the most viable network of European trading forts. Greatest competition came from the English, the Dutch, the French, and especially the Spanish—competition that soon made soldiers and naval gunners as vital to the Portuguese kingdom as its navigators and traders.
The catalyst that brought all these factors together was a combination of individual characteristics that led the Portuguese people to excel in exploration and trade. First, they believed in the religious mission to convert the heathen. The sails of their ships bore a cross to announce their commitment to evangelize for the Holy Faith. But their zeal was more pragmatic than that of the Puritans who settled New England. Unlike the Puritans, for example, they did not stress their theological mission in the reports of success they sent back to their homeland. Second, they preferred to solidify trade rather than to impose formal political authority over the indigenous peoples they encountered. This contrasted with the Spanish, whose first order of business in the Valley of Mexico, for example, was to claim legal dominion over the millions of Indian inhabitants of the region. Finally, and perhaps most important, they had a collective thirst to discover the new and the exotic, which drove them to travel the high seas in spite of the obvious and frequently confirmed dangers. Of Cabral's original fleet of thirteen, for example, six went down at sea. This drive to succeed in spite of the odds was captured by the fifteenth century Portuguese poet Camoes in his epic poem The Lusiads, which remains the literary document of Portugal: "We must sail!" (Navegar é preciso!).
By Thomas E. Skidmore in "Brazil Five Centuries of Changes as 'How could the Portuguese do it' Oxford University Press - New York/Oxford, 1999- p. 5-8. Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
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