What was the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha?

The man with the pen

Pero Vaz de Caminha came from a family of officials in Porto, in northern Portugal. He had been master of the scales at the city’s mint, and at about fifty he sailed with Cabral’s fleet to serve as clerk of the trading post Portugal planned to open at Calicut, in India. He was neither a navigator nor a priest. He wrote like an auditor, promising the king nothing more than “what I saw and what it seemed to me.” Brazilians often call the result the country’s birth certificate.

Ten days on a beach

The letter follows the fleet’s stay at Porto Seguro, in what is now the state of Bahia, almost day by day:

• April 22: at the hour of vespers, a tall round mountain on the horizon, Monte Pascoal.
• April 23: Nicolau Coelho swaps a red cap for a feather headdress on a beach where no one understands a word the other side says.
• April 26: Friar Henrique of Coimbra says the first Mass on the islet of Coroa Vermelha while the people of the land watch from the beach, play music and dance.
• May 1: the Portuguese raise a great wooden cross bearing the king’s arms, and the local men help lift it.

Caminha looks closely. The men of the land are “brown, somewhat reddish, with good faces and good noses.” They go naked, with no shame about it, and wear a bone through the lower lip. Two of them spend a night on Cabral’s ship. One eyes the captain’s gold collar and points toward the shore, and the Portuguese decide he means there is gold inland. Caminha catches himself: “this we took to be so, because we wished it.” Shown a hen, the two guests are almost afraid of it.

Gold and souls

The best fruit that can be had from it seems to me to be the saving of these people.

That is the report in one line: no gold in sight, many souls. The captains choose not to carry anyone off by force. Instead they leave two convicts ashore, reckoning they will bring back “better and much better information about the land.” Then, on the last page, Caminha turns to a private matter. He asks the king to bring his son-in-law, Jorge de Osório, home from exile on the island of São Tomé, off Africa. The first letter about Brazil ends with a family favor.

A letter nobody read

On May 2 the fleet sailed on for India, and one ship carried the letter back to Lisbon. Caminha died months later, probably in the attack on the Calicut trading post in December 1500. His fourteen sheets went into the Torre do Tombo, Portugal’s royal archive in Lisbon, where they still are. They were rediscovered in 1773 and first printed in 1817, in Rio de Janeiro, in Father Manuel Aires de Casal’s Corografia Brazilica, with the passages on nudity cut. Since 2005 the letter has been on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

The letter also became a picture. In 1860, in Paris, the Brazilian painter Victor Meirelles used it as his guide for The First Mass in Brazil, the image every Brazilian schoolchild knows. Art historians point out that it is a scene of the Brazilian Empire: the nation born in peace under the cross, with the Indigenous people watching quietly from the edges. How the Land of the True Cross, as Caminha called it, ended up as Brazil is in Why is Brazil called Brazil?