Neither of these expert pilots knew of the South Equatorial Current, which carried the fleet west of its intended heading. Rather than Rio de Janeiro, the fleet raised Cape Saint Augustine on November 29. Here, Pigafetta relates, the fleet paused to take on fresh food and water, and quickly resumed following the Brazilian coast in search of Rio de Janeiro, as the best navigational minds aboard the ships puzzled over why they had veered off course. Albo recorded, “We arose in the morning to the right of St. Thomas, on a great mountain, and south slopes along the coast in the S.W. direction; and on this coast, at four leagues to sea, we found bottom at twenty-five fathoms, free from shoals; and the mountains are separated from one another, and have many reefs around them.” Finally, two weeks later, on December 13, 1519, the fleet entered the lush and gorgeous Bay of Saint Lucy and approached the mouth of the River of January—Rio de Janeiro.
Trinidad went first, slipping past Sugar Loaf and coming quietly to anchor in the harbor. Magellan had arrived in the New World.
In the final days of 1499, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spanish mariner, first saw the coast of what would later be called Brazil. Pinzón explored the easternmost shores of Brazil and ventured into the mouth of the Amazon River, but Spain failed to maintain a settlement in the newly discovered wilderness. Months later, a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the entire region—whose contours were poorly mapped and poorly understood—for his king and country. For tiny Portugal, hemmed in by the Atlantic and by Spain, the newly discovered land contained great commercial and psychological promise, but it lacked quantities of gold and spices. Unsure about how to exploit their find, the Portuguese became lackadaisical in the administration of the distant realm.
For ten years, the newly discovered land went by various names; not until 1511 did “Brazil” first appear on a map, and its origins are something of a mystery. The name might have derived from the Portuguese word brasa, meaning glowing coal, thought to resemble the color of the dark red wood that came to be prized by the Portuguese. Or it might have derived from “bresel wood,” which had been imported to Europe from India since the Middle Ages. The bright red wood was used for cabinets, violin bows, and dyeing. The newly discovered South American variety resembled the traditional Indian tree, but was easier and cheaper to obtain. No matter what its derivation, the name “Brazil” was slow to catch on. In his diary, Pigafetta called the land “Verzin,” derived from the Italian word for brazilwood.
The Portuguese bestowed a valuable brazilwood monopoly lasting ten years on an influential businessman, Fernão de Noronha, in exchange for large fees, and for a while commerce flourished under his management. The coast abounded in the trees; the Portuguese cut them down, sawed the trunks and branches into a manageable size, and stored the wood in a feitoria, or factory, until a ship came to collect and transport the valuable cargo back to Lisbon. (This activity had first brought Concepción’s pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, to Brazil in 1512, aboard a commercial Portuguese ship called Bertoa. The ship soon departed, but Carvalho remained to oversee the factory, a sojourn that lasted four years.)
The Portuguese dealings in brazilwood served as a model of how that country planned to exploit the natural resources of distant lands they claimed for their own. The most unpredictable part of the enterprise proved to be the transatlantic crossings, and even they became increasingly manageable as Portuguese navigators learned the winds and currents affecting their route. In practice, though, the brazilwood trade was too far-flung to administer with any coherence. The French were already helping themselves to brazilwood without interference. The unchallenged presence of the five ships comprising the Armada de Molucca in Brazil showed how porous and vulnerable the Portuguese “monopoly” actually was. Despite Brazil’s importance, the Portuguese did not maintain a permanent settlement there. A small abandoned customshouse served as the sole evidence of the Portuguese occupation. No Portuguese ships occupied the harbor when Magellan arrived, and he felt safe enough to drop anchor.
Although this was his first visit to Brazil, Magellan was familiar with the brilliantly evocative descriptions of the land written by Amerigo Vespucci after his visit in 1502. In his words Brazil and its natural wonders were the closest approximation to Paradise that Magellan was likely to encounter during his entire voyage around the world. “This land is very delightful, and covered with an infinite number of green trees and very big ones which never lose their foliage, and through the year yield the sweetest aromatic perfumes and produce an infinite variety of fruit, gratifying to the taste and healthful to the body,” Vespucci reported. “And the fields produce herbs and flowers and many sweet and good roots, which are so marvelous . . . that I fancied myself to be near the terrestrial paradise.” Vespucci’s descriptions, for all their charm, were not the elaborately embellished creations of Sir John Mandeville; they were generally reliable accounts looking forward to the Age of Discovery rather than backward to the Age of Faith.
Discussing the region’s indigenous tribes, Vespucci wrote out of his own experience: “I tried very hard to understand their life and customs because for twenty-seven days I ate and slept with them.” He assembled a disturbing if tantalizing picture of the Indians whom Magellan and his crew would encounter in Rio de Janeiro: “They have no laws or faith, and live according to nature. They do not recognize the immortality of the soul, they have among them no private property, because everything is common; they have no boundaries of kingdoms and provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, each is lord unto himself; no justice, no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code.” Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians’ customs. “These men are accustomed to bore holes in their lips and cheeks, and in these holes they place bones and stones; and don’t believe that they are little. Most of them have at least three holes and some seven and some nine, in which they place stones of green and white alabaster, and which are as large as a Catalan plum, which seems unnatural; they say they do this to appear more ferocious, an infinitely brutal thing.” Even more repugnant—yet fascinating to Vespucci—were their marital and sexual customs. “Their marriages are not with one woman but with as many as they like, and without much ceremony, and we have known someone who had ten women; they are jealous of them, and if it happens that one of these women is unfaithful, he punishes her and beats her.”
More troubling, the Indians practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice in the course of their battles. “They are a warlike people, and among them is much cruelty,” he warned. “Nor do they follow any tactics in their wars, except that they take counsel of old men; and when they fight they do so very cruelly, and that side which is lord of the battlefield bury their own, but the enemy dead they cut up and eat. Those whom they capture they take home as slaves, and if [they are] women, they sleep with them; if [they are] men, they marry them to their girls, and at certain times when diabolic fury comes over them they sacrifice the mother with all the children she has had, and with certain ceremonies kill and eat them, and they did the same to the said slaves and the children who were born of them.” Vespucci concluded, “One of their men confessed to me that he had eaten of the flesh of more of than 200 bodies, and this I believe for certain.”