In one of the parks of Rio de Janeiro stands a fine, flamboyant example of Latin-American park-sculpture, a much-bigger-than-life-size man dressed in a costume-pageant costume with wide sleeves, fringes, and skirts, and holding onto a ton or so of undulated bronze banner. One side of the huge pedestal says “1900” and the other “1500” and it was set up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral — according to some authorities. As the city has grown, this statue has been shunted from one place to another, and in somewhat the same way historians have shuffled the problem of whether Cabral really did discover Brazil or not. But most of them now agree that he did, in 1500, shortly after Easter. He was supposedly on his way to India in command of a fleet of thirteen tiny ships; if so, he was off his course by some […] thousand miles to the west. Since the best astronomers, navigators, and mathematicians of the day were all employed at the court of King Manoel I of Portugal, it scarcely seems as though Cabral’s extended side-trip could have been accidental. Probably the Portugese were really trying to get ahead of the Spaniards, who were very busy exploring the lands further north.
Two years after Columbus’s first voyage, Portugal and Spain, then in the full flush of their age of discoveries, had grandly divided all the non-Christian world, known and as yet unknown, between them. The Treaty of Tordesillas, sanctioned by the pope, gave all lands east of a line drawn 370 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands to Portugal, and all lands west of it to Spain. The exact positon of this line was always vague, and the rivalry between the two countries was so strong that even after the treaty they tried to conceal their various voyages and discoveries from each other. (And thus made things harder for the historians.) But Portugal believed, or pretended to believe, that Brazil was within her rightful territories.
On Cabral’s flagship there was a nobleman-merchant, Pero Vaz de Caminha, signed on as a scribe. The wonderfully vivid letter he wrote to King Manoel, describing Brazil and the Indians, or the little he saw of them, has been called “the first page of Brazilian history” and also, with equal justice, “the first page of Brazilian literature.” After a brief account of the voyage west, Caminha calmly announces: “On this day at the vesper hours we caught sight of land, that is first of a large mountain, very high and round, and of other lower lands to the south of it, and flatland with great groves of trees. To this high mountain the captain gave the name of Monte Passoal [“pertaining to Easter”], and to the land, Terra da Vera Cruz.”
The mountain, in the present State of Bahia, still bears the same name. The King changed Vera Cruz to Santa Cruz, the official name until the middle of the century, when, over ecclesiastical protests, it became Brazil. But on the first maps it is either “Brazil” or the “Land of Parrots.” Along with dye-wood, macaws were sent back to Europe, and their brilliant colors, large size, and loud shrieks obviously made a deep impression. (In 1531 a French ship took back three thousand leopard-skins, three hundred monkeys, and “six hundred parrots that already knew a few words of French.”) On a mapus mundi published the year after Cabral’s voyage the coastline of Brazil is not much more than a guess, but Caminha’s “groves of trees” are there, lined up as formally as in a Portugese garden, and under them sits a group of giant macaws, to give explorers some idea of what to expect.
Even if not very original in the 16th century, the first name of Vera Cruz must have seemed appropriate. Cabral was a Knight of the Order of Christ and the fleet’s sails and banners bore its red cross. The men landed to celebrate Easter Sunday with Mass, and set up a large cross. And for weeks they had all been watching the brilliant stars of the Southern Cross overhead; the fleet’s astronomer also wrote to the King, just about this useful constellation. Ever since, Brazil has felt itself to be uniquely “The Land of the Southern Cross.” It is on the flag; the nation’s highest award is the Order of the Southern Cross; the present unit of money, the cruzeiro, is named for it, — and so are thousands of bars, restaurants, bus-lines, business firms, and manufactures. And with the frequent Brazilian abruptness of transition between the spiritual and the material, the 1,000 cruzeiro note, the highest denomination of money, shows a portrait of Cabral on one side and an engraving of that first Easter Mass on the other.
(In exactly the same way, the biggest church in Rio de Janeiro, Our Lady of Candelaria, where all official religious services took place until the change of capital in 1960, sits in a square completely surrounded by the country’s richest banks, as if illustrating a thesis on the relations between Church, State, and High Finance. Or in the same way Brazilian conversation can veer from the eternal verities of Thomas Aquinas to the eternal real estate deals, and back again.)
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Caminha was a good reporter; he describes the Indians’ looks and behaviour, their food and houses, the brand-new wild life. He grows almost lyrical, as all the early voyagers did, over these first few idyllic honeymoon days, — in the amazing century when countries and continents intermarried and new countries were conceived. In his unscientific way, he was also the first of a long line of naturalists and ethnologists, some of the world’s greatest, that has since been fascinated by South America and Brazil.
The Indians were friendly and docile, too docile for their own good, as was to be proved. Presents were exchanged, one of which was grimly prophetic: they gave the Portuguese head-dresses of their exquisite feather-work, and in return the Portuguese gave them one of the red woolen stocking caps worn by laborers. They attended the Easter Mass and mimicked the white men, kneeling, crossing themselves, and singing a hymn of their own. Afterwards, the Portuguese hung “tin crucifixes” that they had thriftily “saved from another voyage,” around their necks.
The Portuguese were mercifully lacking in the bloodthirsty missionary zeal of the Spaniards. However, perhaps because he felt it was expected of him, or had some dim inklings of Manifest Destiny, Caminha wrote: “Our Lord gave them fine bodies and good faces, as to good men, and He who brought us here I believe did not do so without purpose.” There is even a hint of envy, perhaps the earliest trace of the romantic, Noble-Savage, Indianismo that later colored the Brazilian imagination so strongly. The Indians were “clean and fat and beautiful,” and they appeared to be healthier and stronger than the Portuguese themselves. As for the women: “she was so well-built and so rounded and her lack of shame was so charming, that many women of our land seeing her attractions, would be ashamed that theirs were not like hers.” The Portuguese had always been romantically drawn to women of darker races; they had long taken Moorish wives and Negro concubines (there were already […] Negro slaves in Portugal). In Brazil it was only natural for them to become eager miscegenationists almost immediately.