Brazil today and tomorrowJoyce, L. E. Elliott (Lilian Elwyn Elliott)
History
Brazil today and tomorrow
Joyce, L. E. Elliott (Lilian Elwyn Elliott)
Brazil; Brazil -- Economic conditions
Brazil was discovered twice. First came a Spaniard, Vicente Pinzon, an
old companion of Columbus: he found and reconnoitred the mouth of the
Amazon, and sailed south to a point which he named Santa Maria de la
Consolación, but which is now known as Cape St. Augustine. On his return
to Spain his report roused no interest at a Court where new discoveries
of land only added to the _embarras de richesses_, and the attention of
the adventurous was already taken up with the West Indies; the second
discovery (if we ignore the tale of the sight of Brazilian shores by
Diogo de Lepe, whose wanderings were, in any case, unfruitful) was a
pure accident, but, occurring to a Portuguese, was immediately seized
upon as a basis of claim to part of the new lands in the West. This was
on May 3, 1500, three months after the voyage of Pinzon to the Amazon.
Spain, to whom the all-powerful Pope Alexander VI had allotted in the
famous bull of 1495 all the new lands discovered or to be discovered in
the West, while Portugal was given rights to discoveries in the East,
might have contested this claim but for two reasons: the first was that
the Treaty of Tordesillas had shifted the Pope’s dividing line westward
to a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands so that Portugal
could retain her Atlantic island discoveries; the second was that either
by accident or design the early cartographers drew Brazil’s easterly
outline about twenty-two degrees more to the east than it should have
been, so that the whole of the enormous tract of what is Brazil today
fell within the legitimate claims of Portugal. It was but a matter of
equity that Portugal should have a share in the lands of the West, for
to the work of that Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, the
initiative for sea adventure was due. Henry, inheritor of sea traditions
on both sides of his parentage, for his mother was an English princess,
daughter of John of Gaunt, spent his life in a long sea dream translated
into deeds; for forty years he lived on the lonely promontory of Sagres,
his observatory full of charts, the haunt of shipmasters and
geographers, with his shipyards below the windows ever busy with the
building of stout caravels: from 1420 until his death in 1460 the
Navigator urged and bullied his captains to go southward down the coast
of Africa, where no sailor had penetrated within Christian times,
whatever they had done in the days of the bold Phoenicians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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