ABSTRACT
The discovery of Brazil in 1500 is depicted in a well-known document, namely, Pero Vaz de Caminha’s Letter. This text illustrates how the desire to inscribe Brazilian natives within the past and future histories of Christianity grounded the Portuguese strategies for understanding and assimilating the natives of the New World. The commercial aspect of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India cannot be dissociated from this discourse, which calls for the restoration, by means of voyages that reproduce the model of apostolic peregrination, of a world that non-Christian sects had supposedly divided in two. By reintroducing the colonial context in which the Letter was written, one can understand how the Portuguese discourses that proposed the re-discovery of the familiar defined their project for the future of global Christianity. With Cabral’s return to Portugal, the king seems to have learned that Calicut was in fact not inhabited by Christians as he had previously believed.
