A few months after the keel of Pinzon had furrowed these unknown seas, another explorer, Cabral, close upon Easter in 1499 (O.S.), following the course of Vasco de Gama to the east, was drifted by an adverse gale so far from his proper track that he reached this same coast, and, anchoring in Porto Seguro, erected an altar there, celebrated Mass, set up a stone cross and took possession of the country for the King of Portugal. He, like Columbus, thought he had reached India, and sent a vessel to Lisbon with the news. Let us turn for a space to examine the great land thus brought to knowledge by these early voyagers. To-day, the traveller in Brazil will soon be impressed by the immensity of its spaces, will remark how broad are these wide tablelands, how interminable the _serras_ and mountain ranges, how boundless the forests. The territory of this great land is fifteen times that of France. It is larger than the United States (without Alaska); it is over 2,600 miles long upon the Atlantic, and 2,700 miles wide from its coast to where, across the heart of the continent, it touches the frontier of Peru. Its boundaries touch those of every South American nation except Chile. Persistent trespassers were the Portuguese in the early Colonial period, and their land-hunger carried them beyond those boundaries which the Pope, as we have seen in a former chapter, fixed between Portugal and Spain. What is the general nature of this great territory? Here is a coastline with many sandy beaches, mangrove swamps and lagoons, with inland channels following the coast for long distances, but giving place to rolling, fertile coastal plains terminating in headlands overlooking the Atlantic waves. The coast is indented with many land-locked bays, forming large and easily accessible harbours, with others smaller and difficult of approach. Back from this characteristic littoral, from Cape San Roque--nearly the easternmost point of South America, whose tropic headland here juts out far towards Europe--and southward to Rio de la Plata extends a vast tableland, covering half Brazil, and beyond this we reach immense undulating plains of sandy soil, forming the great depression of South America from the basin of the Amazon in the north to the basin of the Paraná River in the south.