Who discovered Brazil?

The textbook answer

Pedro Álvares Cabral was a Portuguese nobleman leading thirteen ships to India. Late in the afternoon of April 22, 1500, his fleet sighted a tall round mountain in what is now southern Bahia, in eastern Brazil, and named it Monte Pascoal, the Easter Mount. The fleet stayed ten days. On May 1, the Portuguese planted a great wooden cross bearing the arms of King Manuel I on the mainland. That was the mark of possession: in European eyes, the land now belonged to Portugal. This is why Brazilian schoolbooks give Cabral the credit.

A Spaniard, three months earlier

Cabral was not the first European to see that coast. On January 26, 1500, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a navigator from Palos, in Andalusia, sighted a cape in the Northeast and named it Santa María de la Consolación. He was no ordinary sailor: in 1492 he had captained the Niña, the smallest of Christopher Columbus’s three ships.

Which cape it was is still argued. Some historians point to Cabo de Santo Agostinho, in Pernambuco. Others choose the Mucuripe point, in Ceará, farther north. Pinzón then sailed up the coast to the mouth of the Amazon, where the river pushes fresh water so far out to sea that he called it the Mar Dulce, the “sweet sea.”

Why didn’t Spain keep it? Because that coast lay on Portugal’s side of the line drawn in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas. Spain never claimed it.

The people already there

There is a third answer, and it is the plainest. On the morning of April 23, when the veteran captain Nicolau Coelho rowed a ship’s boat to the mouth of a river, some twenty men stood waiting on the beach with bows and arrows. He signaled them to lay their bows down, and they did. They were Tupiniquim, a Tupi-speaking people, and they were at home. Across what is now Brazil lived millions of people in hundreds of peoples. The estimates are in How many Indigenous people lived in Brazil in 1500?

One event, three words

The fleet’s own scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha, never wrote “discovery.” He called it an achamento, a finding. In Brazil today, each word for 1500 has its own camp. “Discovery” (descobrimento) is the word of the old textbooks, “arrival” (chegada) that of many teachers, “invasion” (invasão) that of many Indigenous movements. On April 22, 2000, the 500th anniversary, an Indigenous march set out from Coroa Vermelha toward the official celebration in Porto Seguro. Police broke it up with tear gas.

So the full answer has three parts: Pinzón saw it first, Cabral claimed it, and the Tupiniquim already lived there. Whether Portugal suspected land in the west before 1500 is a separate debate, in Was the discovery of Brazil an accident?