Thirteen ships west—and Portugal claimed a continent
Pedro Álvares Cabral (c.1467/68–c.1520), Portuguese noble and navigator, is regarded as Brazil’s European discoverer. In April 1500 his thirteen-ship fleet landed on what he first took for an island, claimed it under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, and soon grasped it was probably a continent.
He was born, most likely in 1467, at Belmonte, some 30 kilometres from Covilhã, one of eleven children of Fernão Álvares Cabral and Isabel Gouveia. Christened Pedro Álvares de Gouveia, he seems to have taken his father’s surname only after an elder brother died in 1503. The family arms showed two purple goats on silver, a pun on the name, and family legend traced the line back to Hercules through a mythical Macedonian king. Sent to Afonso V’s court at about twelve, he studied the humanities and learned to fight; in 1497 Manuel I granted him a yearly allowance of 30,000 reais and a seat among the king’s noble councillors.
On 15 February 1500 he was named commander-in-chief of the next India fleet, following Vasco da Gama’s new route round Africa. The decree cites only his ‘merits and services’; historians point to his standing at court and two brothers on the royal council. Veteran seamen such as Bartolomeu Dias and Nicolau Coelho handled the navigation for 13 ships and 1,500 men, of whom 700 were soldiers, most of them untrained commoners. One small division was bound for Sofala in Mozambique.
Swinging far west, the fleet struck land in April 1500. Cabral explored the coast, sent a ship home to tell Manuel, and turned east. A South Atlantic storm sank several ships, and six regrouped in the Mozambique Channel. At Calicut, trade talks went well until Arab merchants, fearing for their monopoly, stirred Muslims and Hindus to wreck the Portuguese trading post. Cabral burned the Arab fleet, shelled the city, and loaded spices at friendlier Cochin.
That voyage made him the first person known to have stood on four continents. Passed over for the next India command, possibly after a quarrel with the king, he faded into private life. Brazil’s Emperor Pedro II later helped restore his reputation, though whether the landfall was accidental or planned is still argued.
Source: Pedro Álvares Cabral
