🪵 1500 | The Portuguese in Brazil | Part I What you’re seeing: Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet, bound for India, reaching the coast of what is now Bahia in April 1500, and the days the Portuguese spent there, as told by the fleet’s scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha. Why did the fleet sail? Two years earlier, Vasco da Gama had reached India by sea, opening a direct route to spices that came to Europe via Arab and Venetian middlemen. King Manuel I sent 13 ships under Cabral to trade at Calicut and win Portugal a foothold in India. The king himself handed Cabral the royal banner at Belém, just outside Lisbon. Was Brazil found by accident? Historians still debate it. The fleet swung far into the Atlantic to catch the winds for the Cape of Good Hope. No eyewitness says whether the landfall was chance or a planned look west. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had already placed this coast on Portugal’s side of the line. Who were the people on the beach? Caminha never names them. Later sources plac...