ABSTRACT

The establishment of a Portuguese colony in America was slow to take root. In 1500 Alvaro Cabral had set out in the footsteps of Vasco da Gama to lead the second Portuguese voyage down the Atlantic and around the Cape to India. To find the most favourable winds and currents, he had circled in a south-westerly direction and so had unexpectedly sighted land, the island of the True Cross, as he called it. This later turned out to be part of a southern continent, South America, named after the Italian chronicler and explorer ‘Amerigo’ Vespucci. Cabral’s successors in the much larger vessels that opened up the regular Atlantic route to Asia showed little interest in his accidental discovery. Brazil, as the land was later called, fell on the Portuguese side of the Tordesillas line of demarcation that had been agreed between Portugal and Castile in 1494 but the Portuguese had other priorities and it was the French who first visited Brazil regularly. The main colonial activity was logging, and the territory was named after the brazilwood dye that was extracted from tropical timbers. As in so many early Atlantic colonies it was the European textile industry that created a demand for exotic produce, purple orchilla dye from the Canaries, indigo from the Cape Verdes, cochineal from Mexico and redwood dyes from Brazil. For thirty years, however, Brazil remained the backwater of the Atlantic empires.