Was the discovery of Brazil an accident?

Where Cabral was going

The thirteen ships that left Lisbon on March 9, 1500, under Pedro Álvares Cabral were bound for Calicut, on the southwest coast of India, for pepper, cinnamon and cloves. It was Portugal’s second voyage there. The first, Vasco da Gama’s, had reached Calicut in May 1498, and the journal of that voyage preserves the answer the Portuguese gave when asked what they had come so far to find:

And they asked him what we had come so far to seek, and he answered: “We have come to seek Christians and spices.”

Officially, nobody sailed from Lisbon in 1500 to look for a new coast. The stated mission was trade, and the route was Gama’s.

The detour that was the route

To round Africa, a ship could not simply hug the coast: near it, winds and currents push against anyone heading south. The trick, learned over decades of voyages, was the volta do mar, a great loop: swing south-west into the open Atlantic until you find the westerly winds, which then carry you east toward the Cape of Good Hope. In 1497 Gama went some three months without sighting land doing exactly that. Cabral’s surviving sailing instructions, with advice from Gama himself, call for the same maneuver.

After the Canaries and Cape Verde came weeks of open water. On April 21 the sailors saw long weeds floating, which they called botelho and rabo-de-asno, “donkey’s tail.” The next morning birds flew past. Late on April 22, a round mountain rose on the horizon: Monte Pascoal, in what is now Bahia. The fleet had swung so far west that it ran into a coast about 17 degrees south of the equator.

So the idea of a fleet blown off course does not hold up. The westward swing was the normal road to India.

Chance or plan

The real question is different: did Portugal know, or suspect, that land lay out there? The chroniclers of the sixteenth century, such as Castanheda, João de Barros and Damião de Góis, speak of chance. Since about 1850, many historians have argued for intention.

Their most cited evidence is a book. In the Esmeraldo de situ orbis, written between 1505 and 1508, the navigator Duarte Pacheco Pereira says the king sent him in 1498 to discover the western part. For one camp, that shows Portugal had already gone to look. For the other, it is a single sentence written years after the voyage it mentions, and no one has found hard proof.

Some also look back to 1494, when Portugal pushed Spain to move the pope’s dividing line from 100 to 370 leagues west of Cape Verde, in the Treaty of Tordesillas. One reading: Portugal wanted sea room for the volta do mar. Another: it already suspected land to the west. Both fit the documents. And a Spaniard, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, had already sighted the Northeast in January 1500, as Who discovered Brazil? explains.

What the evidence supports is this: the fleet was bound for India, the swing west was deliberate, and the land turned up on the way. Whether the king hoped for that meeting remains open.