Brazil

Europeans, at the turn of the sixteenth century, began to explore territories now a part of modern Brazil. In mid-November 1499, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a former lieutenant of Christopher Columbus, sailed from Palos in southern Spain and proceeded southwest from the Cape Verde Islands. Late in January 1500 he made a landfall, presumed to be along the present state of Pernambuco, and sailed north and then northwestward along the littoral of South America until he returned to the Caribbean. A month later Diego de Lepe, a kinsman of Yáñez Pinzón, replicated his predecessor's voyage and is believed to have entered the Genipapo River (later called the Pará), which bounds the southern extremity of the island of Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon. Pinzón then traveled about sixty miles up the Amazon. Spain did not pursue the discovery claims of these two Andalusians because much of the coast they traversed belonged to Portugal by the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

EARLY EXPLORATION

The first Portuguese encounter with the Brazilian littoral occurred on 22 April 1500, when Pedro Álvarez Cabral, commander of the squadron sent from Lisbon to Calicut, India, to follow up the achievements of Vasco da Gama, made contact with some Tupi people near the future harbor of Porto Seguro. There the first mass was said on Brazilian soil. Cabral took possession of the unexpected land, thought to be an island, and his lieutenants wrote King Manuel I concerning Brazil's promise as a haven for distressed ships engaged in sailing to and from India and as an opportunity for evangelization.

The Portuguese crown gained a broader undertanding of Brazil's importance, through an expedition led by Gonçalo Coelho. In 1501 Coelho was sent to Brazil by the king to determine the extent of Cabral's discovery. With three ships he not only examined the coast of the new land between the future states of Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Sul but also named outstanding landmarks in accordance with prominent church days when headlands, bays, river estuaries, and other features were first observed (for example, Cape São Roque, Cape São Agostinho, the São Francisco River, All Saints Bay, Rio de Janeiro, and São Vicente). Gonçalo Coelho returned to Lisbon two years later. The earliest map to include the Brazilian littoral incorporated the findings of the Coelho expedition. Prepared by an unknown cartographer, that planisphere was sent secretly by an Italian diplomat stationed in Lisbon, Alberto Cantino, to his patron, the duke of Ferrara, in 1502.

As the full extent of the seacoast of the new land gradually became known, the names attached to it evolved. Originally called the Island of Vera Cruz (because Cabral, like all navigators of his time, was convinced by medieval geographers that apart from Europe, Asia, and Africa, the land masses of the world consisted exclusively of islands), Brazil was successively termed the Land of the Holy Cross, the Land of Parrots, and, by about 1510, the Land of Brazilwood, after the red dyestuff that became Brazil's first significant export to Europe. That commodity, together with parrots, monkeys, and other exotica, remained Brazil's principal attraction during the first three decades of the sixteenth century while Portugal was establishing its empire in the East. Meantime, a series of navigators in Spain's service, including Juan Díaz de Solís, discoverer of the Río de la Plata; the circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan; and Sebastian Cabot, seeker of the "city of the Caesars" in Paraguay, sailed along the Brazilian littoral but made no contribution to an understanding of Brazilian geography. It was the intrusions by French competitors, seeking brazilwood and Tupi alliances, that compelled the Portuguese crown to devise the captaincy system during the 1530s to promote the settlement and defense of Brazil.

COLONIZATION

When this approach failed to secure Portugal's hold upon Brazil, Portuguese officials established a royal government after 1549. Nevertheless it was not until the first decades of the seventeenth century that Portugal's control over Brazil's north coast as far as the Amazon was assured. As the early captaincies were being established, the full extent of the world's greatest river was revealed by a Spanish contingent led by Francisco de Orellana in 1541–1542. Orellana was a lieutenant of Gonzalo Pizarro, governor of Quito (Ecuador), who led a large expedition eastward from the city of Quito in February 1541, seeking what Indian informants assured him was the "land of cinnamon." As the expedition encountered increasing difficulties, he sent Orellana ahead with fifty to sixty men in two brigantines to forage for food and to seek verification of the land's existence. Instead of returning to the Pizarro camp, Orellana sailed the length of the Amazon (February to August 1542), which he named after a serious encounter with the Omagua led by female warriors whose fighting ability seemed to confirm the substance of a widely believed medieval legend.

In 1616, Portuguese forces asserted their claim to one of the major estuaries of the Amazon when they founded the fortress of Santa Maria de Belém do Grão Pará. From this base, a series of patrols eliminated groups of forest-dwelling European competitors in the lower Amazon during the next decade and a half.

During the 1630s the human and natural resources of the Amazon were more closely scrutinized by Portuguese based at Belém and Spaniards from Quito. In 1636 Luís Figueira, a veteran north-coast Jesuit missionary, traveled throughout the lower reaches of the Amazon as far as the Rio Xingu. Figueira's reflections on the Amazon's material and spiritual promise were published in Lisbon in 1637, four years before the appearance of an even more impressive assessment of the river by another Jesuit, the Spaniard Cristóbal de Acuña, author of Nuevo descubrimiento del gran río de las Amazonas (1641).

Although Madrid acted promptly to suppress Nuevo descubrimiento because it revealed weaknesses concerning Spanish defenses in the interior of South America, it could not undo the damage caused by the action of a Portuguese captain, Pedro Teixeira. Teixeira was directed by the Portuguese governor of the Captaincy of Pará to return to Spanish territory two Franciscan missionaries who had descended the river in 1637. His massive party, some 2,000 people, was clearly intended to send a message to Spanish authorities in the Viceroyalty of Peru. After delivering his charges to Quito, Teixeira headed back to Belém. When he reached the confluence of the Napo and Aguarico rivers (16 August 1639), Teixeira, apparently pursuant to his superior's secret instructions, formally asserted Portugal's possession of the entire Amazon Valley. Although that act was in clear violation of the Treaty of Tordesillas, it served as a basis for Portugal's and later Brazil's claims to legal possession of the Amazon region.

NATURAL HISTORY

While missionaries, traders, and Indian slavers were assessing the resources of the Amazon, other Portuguese, joined by Mamelucos and supported by indigeneous guides, bearers, foragers, and canoe paddlers, were exploiting the resources inland from the coastal captaincies of Pernambuco, Bahia, and especially São Vicente (the future state of São Paulo) and Spanish Paraguay. These roving teams, known as Bandeiras, began their quest in the 1590s and continued until the early decades of the eighteenth century to search the backlands for precious wealth, gems, and minerals, and to pay their expenses by the enslavement of indigenous peoples. Among their accomplishments were the destruction of two entire fields of missions planted by Paraguay-based Jesuits in what is today western São Paulo, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul, between 1628 and 1640, the discovery of labyrinthine river systems permitting passage between the seacoast and the remote interior, and the discovery of fluvial gold in a half dozen captaincies between the 1690s and the 1730s. The essential linkage between important southern rivers, such as the Tietê, Paraná, and Paraguay, and the northern rivers, including the Mamoré, Guaporé, Madeira, and Amazon, was demonstrated by the most famous of all of the bandeiras, that supposedly led by Antônio Rapôso Tavares, veteran bandeirante captain, between 1648 and 1651. His expedition traversed 8,000 miles between São Paulo, western Brazil (Mato Grosso), the Andes, and the length of the Amazon.

Three outstanding assessments of Brazil's human and natural resources were published between 1587 and 1711. Two were by Portuguese secular authors, the other by an Italian-born Jesuit. They include Gabriel Soares de Sousa's Tratado descritivo do Brasil (1587), Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão's Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil (1618), and Giovanni António Andreoni, S.J., Cultura e opulencia do Brasil por suas drogas e minas (1711). Although each is richly informative, none was composed by a scientist. The first scientists (and artists) to describe Brazil's physical and human resources appeared during the Dutch occupation of the Northeast (1630–1654). Most noteworthy was Georg Marcgraf, botanist, zoologist, mathematician, and astronomer, and coauthor with Willem Piso of the seminally important Historia naturalis brasiliae (1648), and two famous landscape painters, Frans Post and Albert Eckhout.

No significant advances were made toward the classification of Brazil's flora and fauna and the exploration and mapping of the seacoast and interior between the departure of the Dutch and the mid-eighteenth century. The signing of the Luso-Spanish boundary treaties of 1750 and 1778 led to the dispatch to Brazil of small groups of artists, architects, astronomers, cartographers, engineers, and naturalists. Among them were António Giuseppe Landi, architect and naturalist who labored in the Amazon, and Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, who with António Pires da Silva Pontes confirmed the connection between the Branco, Rupununi, and Essequibo rivers. They were followed by the so-called Portuguese Humboldt, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, a Bahian-born naturalist who spent nearly a decade in the Amazon and in Mato Grosso (1782–1792) collecting flora and fauna specimens and recording observations that unfortunately never were published. More successful was Fr. José Mariano da Conceição Velloso, a Minas Gerais-born Franciscan friar who compiled the eleven-volume Flora fluminense and found a publisher in Paris (1790).

Oddly, when the French-born naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire accompanied Marshal Andoche Junot, the commander of the French army of occupation, to Lisbon in 1808 and encountered the prints of Conceição Velloso's work, he resolved to proceed to Brazil to undertake his own botanical investigations. Between 1816 and 1821, Saint-Hilaire traveled extensively throughout central and southern Brazil. Beginning in 1830, he published nine volumes of his botanical observations.

Saint-Hilaire was only one of a group of foreign scientists and travelers to examine the Brazilian landscape during the period when João VI resided in Brazil (1807–1821). Others included the mineralogist John Mawe, the first foreigner to see and write about the remains of the gold diggings in Minas Gerais. In 1817 a group of Austrian scientists arrived in honor of Brazil's new queen, Maria Leopoldina. Among them were Johann Emanuel Pohl, a botanist and mineralogist; and Johann Natterer, a zoologist at the Imperial Zoological Gardens and a horticulturist, specialist in flower painting, and taxidermist. Natterer spent nineteen years collecting specimens and returned to Vienna only in 1835 to found a special museum dedicated to Brasiliana. By then Pohl had already published his encyclopedic Plantarum Brasiliae (Vienna, 1827–1831). Two other scientists were sent by the queen's grandfather, the king of Bavaria, to identify Brazilian resources. They were Johann Baptist von Spix and Karl Friedrich Philip von Martius. Spix was the curator of the Munich Museum, and the youthful Martius already had an enviable reputation as one of Europe's leading young botanists. Together they traveled overland from central Brazil to the Amazon gathering specimens and providing some of the best quality ethnographic observations on Brazil since the early seventeenth century. Apart from their popular travel account, their Flora Brasiliensis (37 folio vols. 1840–1906) was one of the towering descriptions of the uniqueness and richness of Brazil.

An avid naturalist, Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff originally went to Brazil as its first Russian consul general from 1813 to 1820. He returned to the country in 1822 as head of a scientific expedition that included artists Moritz Rugendas and Adrien Taunay. The group went to Minas Gerais in 1824, traveled from São Paulo down the Tietê River in 1825, and in 1827–1828 visited various Bororo peoples. Next, they descended the Arinos and Tapajós, but Langsdorff contracted malaria and purportedly went insane.

Englishman Henry W. Bates explored Brazil from 26 May 1848 to June 1859, collecting over 3,000 new species of insects and other specimens. He began on the lower Amazon and Tocantins rivers and then went up the Solimões. He returned to Belém and settled for three years at Santarém. Sailing up the Amazon again, he spent four and a half years based in Ega (present-day Tefé) before returning home, publishing The Naturalist on the River Amazon (1863), and becoming the first paid secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (1864). In 1865, Swiss-born Harvard University professor Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz headed an expedition up the Amazon, traveling from Manaus to the Solimões River. Members of the party measured indigeneous peoples on the Amazon, Tapajós, Içá, Jataí, and Branco rivers, while a team of geologists worked in Minas Gerais. In 1867, Sir Richard Burton, then serving as British consul in Santos, ventured to northern Minas Gerais and descended the São Francisco River, encountering Xavange, Xikriabá, and Karirí peoples at São João dos Indios.

Brazilian explorers too made important contributions to the exploration and description of their country. Antônio Gonçalves Dias, head of the ethnographic section of the Imperial Scientific Commission, went to Ceará in 1858–1859 and wrote a Tupi dictionary after studying the Potiguar branch of those peoples. The next year he spent six months on the Amazon visiting the Mawé, Mundurukú, and Mura peoples. His romantic poems inspired the Indianist literary movement. In 1862 José Vieira Couto de Magalhães visited the Xavante, Karajá, and Tupi-speaking Anambé, collecting Tupi legends. He founded Isabel College on the upper Araguaia River for Amerindian children and established forts and steamship navigation on the Araguaia and Tocantins. His journal, Viagem ao Araguaya (1863), and his O selvagem (1876), discussed methods of acculturation for the descendents of Brazil's pre-Iberian peoples.

In 1871 João Barbosa Rodrigues went to Pará and Amazonas on behalf of the imperial government to conduct scientific studies. He identified many new species of palms and orchids, and published accounts of the Tembé in Pará, the Mundurukú, and Mawé of the Tapajós River, and the Tukâno of the Solimões in Alexandre Jose de Mello Moraes, ed., Revista da Exposição Anthropologica Brazileira, published as part of the Anthropological Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, organized by Ladislau Neto in 1882. In 1884 he founded the botanical gardens of Amazonas in Manaus, which also contained important ethnographic collections. In 1884 he and his wife Constança contacted the Crishana (present-day Waimiri) tribe of the Jauaperi tributary of the lower Rio Negro, described in Io Jauapery: Pacificaçao dos Crichanás (1885).

One of the greatest Brazilian explorers of the twentieth century, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, began his career by setting up telegraph lines throughout Amazonia from 1890 to 1915. In 1910 he was made head of the newly created Indian Protection Service and embarked on an exploration of the rivers in present-day Rondônia. In 1913–1914 he traveled with former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt down the Dúvida (now Roosevelt) River. From 1927 to 1930 he surveyed all of the frontiers and led a mixed boundary commission in 1934–1938 on the Brazilian-Colombian border.

According to John Hemming, the exploration of the Amazon and contact with the indigenous peoples there often brought diseases and devastation to those areas. Nevertheless, the exploration of the Amazon and other parts of Brazil has proceeded inexorably throughout the twentieth century, as its vast territory fascinates the adventurous and those looking for new sources of wealth.

See alsoDutch in Colonial Brazil; French Colonization in Brazil; Portuguese Empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albuquerque, Luís de, Max Justo Guedes, and Gerald Lombardi. Portugal-Brazil: The Age of Atlantic Discoveries. New York: Brazilian Cultural Foundation, 1990.

Bueno, Eduardo. Náufragos, traficantes e degredados: As primeiras expedições ao Brasil, 1500–1531. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 1998.

Diacon, Todd A. Stringing Together a Nation: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Espínola, Rodolfo. Vicente Pinzón e a descoberta do Brasil. Fortaleza: COELCE, 2001.

Galvani, Walter. Nau Capitânia: Pedro Álvares Cabral: como e com quem começamos. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1999.

Perrone-Moisés, Leyla. Vinte luas: Viagem de Paulmier de Gonneville ao Brasil, 1503–1505. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992.

Voigt, Lisa. "'Por andarmos todos casy mesturados': The Politics of Intermingling in Caminha's Carta and Colonial American Anthologies." Early American Literature 40.3 (2005): 407-39.

                                           Dauril Aldin