Cabral Discovers Brazil: Portugal Claims New World

Pedro Alvares Cabral's fleet of thirteen ships departed Lisbon on March 9, 1500, bound for India following Vasco da Gama's pioneering route around the Cape of Good Hope. Six weeks later, Cabral's ships swung so far west across the Atlantic that they sighted land — the coast of Brazil. Whether the detour was accidental or deliberate remains one of the great arguments of maritime history, but the result was the same: Portugal claimed the largest territory in South America, and the world's political map changed permanently. The fleet was the largest Portugal had assembled for an Indian Ocean expedition: thirteen ships carrying approximately 1,500 men, including soldiers, sailors, merchants, and Franciscan friars. King Manuel I intended it as a commercial and diplomatic follow-up to da Gama's 1498 voyage, which had proven that a sea route to the spice markets of Asia existed but had returned with only modest cargo. Cabral's mission was to establish permanent trading posts and, if necessary, use force. After rounding the Cape Verde Islands, Cabral steered his fleet to the southwest, far from the African coast. On April 22, 1500, lookouts sighted a tall mountain on the western horizon, which Cabral named Monte Pascoal. He landed at what is now Porto Seguro in the state of Bahia, spent ten days exploring the coast, and claimed the territory for Portugal. The western detour may have been navigational — sailors of the era knew that a wide arc through the South Atlantic caught favorable winds and currents for rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Da Gama had swung west on his voyage as well, though not far enough to sight land. Others have argued that Portuguese explorers already knew of the South American coast from earlier, secret voyages, and that Cabral's "discovery" was a staged claim to formalize Portuguese sovereignty under the Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1494 agreement that divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal. After leaving Brazil, the fleet continued toward India but met disaster rounding the Cape. A sudden storm sank four ships, killing all aboard, including the renowned explorer Bartolomeu Dias, who had been the first European to round the Cape in 1488. Cabral reached Calicut in September 1500, established a trading post, fought a brief war with local merchants, and returned to Lisbon in 1501 with a cargo of spices that more than paid for the expedition's losses. The accidental or deliberate discovery of Brazil gave Portugal a colonial territory sixty-four times the size of the mother country.