Pinzon Lands Brazil: First European on South America

Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who had captained the Niña during Columbus''s first voyage, made landfall on a coast that no European had seen before. On January 26, 1500, Pinzón''s expedition reached the northeastern coast of present-day Brazil, near what is now the state of Pernambuco—three months before Pedro Álvares Cabral''s more famous Portuguese arrival in April. The discovery was an accident: Pinzón had been sailing southwest looking for new territories to claim for Spain when currents carried his small fleet across the Atlantic. Pinzón commanded four caravels and a crew of seasoned sailors, many of whom had crossed the Atlantic before. The expedition had departed Palos de la Frontera in December 1499, following Columbus''s route to the Cape Verde Islands before turning west into uncharted waters. When they reached the coast, the crew encountered Indigenous Tupinambá people, dense tropical forest, and the mouth of an enormous river—likely the Amazon—which Pinzón named the "Mar Dulce" (Freshwater Sea) because its discharge turned the ocean fresh for miles offshore. The expedition explored roughly 300 miles of coastline, taking on fresh water and claiming the territory for the Spanish Crown. Relations with the Indigenous population were initially peaceful but turned violent; in one encounter, eight of Pinzón''s sailors were killed. The expedition captured approximately 36 Indigenous people to bring back to Spain as slaves. Pinzón then sailed north along the coast, crossed the equator, and explored the mouth of the Orinoco River before returning to Spain in September 1500. Pinzón''s discovery became legally irrelevant almost immediately. The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, had divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Brazil fell on Portugal''s side of that line. When Cabral arrived three months later, Portugal''s legal claim superseded Spain''s. Pinzón spent years in court arguing for rights to the lands he had found, but the treaty held. His voyage is remembered primarily as a footnote—the European discovery of South America''s largest country, by a man who got no credit for it.