Why is Brazil called Brazil?

A holy name first

Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet, bound for India, sighted land on April 22, 1500, in what is now southern Bahia. It was Easter week. The fleet’s scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha, recorded the first names the Portuguese gave in a letter to King Manuel I.

On this day, at the hour of vespers, we had sight of land, that is, first of a great mountain, very high and round, and of other lower ranges to the south of it, and of flat land with great groves of trees, to which high mountain the captain gave the name Monte Pascoal, and to the land, the Land of the True Cross.

So the country began with a religious name, Vera Cruz, the True Cross. By the end of his letter Caminha calls it an island: no one on board imagined the size of what they had found. Within a few years the Island of the True Cross had become the Land of the Holy Cross, Terra de Santa Cruz.

A dye the color of embers

What the Portuguese found worth shipping home was a tree. Brazilwood has a deep red heartwood that yields a dye the color of glowing coals, brasa in Portuguese, prized in Europe for the clothes of the rich. The dye already had that name before 1500: Europe bought it from a similar wood that came from Asia. The new coast simply offered more of it.

Indigenous men did the work. The Atlas Miller, a Portuguese atlas from about 1519, shows them felling trees and carrying logs to the shore, with parrots in the branches. They traded the timber for axes, knives and cloth, a barter the Portuguese called escambo. King Manuel made the wood a Crown monopoly and in 1502 leased the trade to Lisbon merchants led by Fernão de Loronha, whose name survives in the island of Fernando de Noronha. French ships from Normandy and Brittany loaded brazilwood too, bartered from their Tupinambá allies.

The chronicler who blamed the devil

With so many logs coming and going, sailors and merchants stopped saying Santa Cruz. The historian João de Barros, writing in 1552, did not like it at all.

But since the devil, by the sign of the cross, lost the dominion he held over us, … as soon as the red wood called brasil began to come from that land, he worked to make this name stay in the mouths of the people, and the name of Holy Cross be lost.

To a devout man, swapping the name of the Cross for the name of a commodity was a defeat. To everyone else it was just what they called the place where the dye came from.

What about the legendary island?

Medieval sea charts sometimes showed a mythical island called Brasil or Hy-Brasil, out in the Atlantic west of Ireland. Some writers have linked the country’s name to it. The people who lived through the 1500s did not: like Barros, they tied it to the wood. Most historians treat the island as a coincidence of spelling.

The tree today

The tree that named a country is now endangered, after centuries of felling. Brazil declared it the national tree by law in 1978. Its wood is still the classic material for violin bows, which bow makers around the world call pernambuco, after the old Brazilian province. Before Brazil was a colony, a kingdom or a republic, it was a cargo, and the name stuck. The line that split the world between Portugal and Spain is in What was the Treaty of Tordesillas?.