Who was Pedro Álvares Cabral?

A courtier, not a sailor

Pedro Álvares Cabral was born around 1467 at Belmonte, a town in the interior of Portugal, into a noble family. When King Manuel I picked him to lead the second Portuguese fleet to India, he was about 32 and had no known voyage to his name. That was less odd than it sounds. In the Portugal of 1500, commanding a fleet was a job for a nobleman the king trusted; navigating was the work of pilots and masters. And the king gave him two veterans: Bartolomeu Dias, who in 1488 had been the first to round the Cape of Good Hope, and Nicolau Coelho, just back from India with Vasco da Gama.

Thirteen ships for the spice trade

On March 9, 1500, thirteen ships left the beach of Restelo, at Belém, on the edge of Lisbon, carrying somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 men. It was a far bigger fleet than Gama’s, fitted out for business: on board was even the clerk for the trading post Portugal meant to open at Calicut, Pero Vaz de Caminha. Off Cape Verde, Vasco de Ataíde’s ship vanished without a storm or an explanation. Then came weeks of open sea toward the south-west.

On April 22, the fleet sighted Monte Pascoal in southern Bahia, on the coast of what is now Brazil. Cabral stayed ten days at Porto Seguro, claimed the land for the king and, on May 2, sent one ship back to Lisbon with the news and Caminha’s letter. Then he sailed on. India was still the goal.

The price of the voyage

The crossing was costly. A storm near the Cape of Good Hope sank four ships, Bartolomeu Dias’s among them: the man who had opened that route died on it. In India, the trading post at Calicut was attacked in December 1500, and Caminha probably died there. Cabral reached Lisbon again in 1501, after losing several ships.

Forgotten in Portugal, remembered in Brazil

The next India fleet, in 1502, went to Vasco da Gama. Cabral never commanded at sea again. He died almost forgotten at Santarém, around 1520, and was buried in the Igreja da Graça, the Church of Grace, in that town.

His fame came later, and it came from Brazil. In 1839 the Brazilian historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen rediscovered the tomb at Santarém. In 1903 an urn holding earth and fragments of bone crossed the Atlantic to the old cathedral of Rio de Janeiro, so the question of where Cabral is buried has two answers. Brazil even named a town after him: Santa Cruz Cabrália, in southern Bahia, the town around Coroa Vermelha, the islet where the fleet’s friar said the first Mass.

Whether he was really the first European there is in Who discovered Brazil?, and whether his course was chance or plan is in Was the discovery of Brazil an accident?.