Pedro Alvares Cabral led the first documented European landfall in Brazil
On this day · 22 April 1500
On April 22, 1500, a Portuguese fleet bound for India drifted west and stumbled onto the coast of what would become Brazil.
On April 22, 1500, the fleet of Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral sighted land in the South Atlantic, near present-day Monte Pascoal, while sailing for India and the spice ports of the Malabar Coast. He named it Terra da Vera Cruz, the Land of the True Cross.
The landfall may have been less an accident than it looked. Cabral’s wide westward arc across the Atlantic was a known sailing tactic to catch favorable winds, and some historians suspect Portugal already suspected land lay to the west.
A scribe on the voyage, Pero Vaz de Caminha, wrote a famous letter to King Manuel I describing the coast and its people, one of the earliest European accounts of Brazil.
A fleet aiming for India instead charted the future of a continent.
Cabral pressed on toward India days later, but his brief stop opened the way for Portuguese claims that would shape the largest nation in South America.
Sources & references
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