This is the generally accepted story, at any rate, though there are suggestions that Portuguese voyagers had secretly reached the South American coast earlier and that Cabral’s landfall was no accident. Apparently carried further west than intended, Cabral’s ships crossed the Atlantic at its narrowest point and bumped accidentally into Brazil. With da Gama pleading exhaustion, the command was given to a trusted courtier named Pedro Álvares Cabral, still only in his thirties.Īfter a solemn Mass attended by the king in Lisbon, the fleet left the mouth of the Tagus early in March and sailed south-west past the African coast before turning out into the Atlantic to get the benefit of the prevailing winds and currents. In the following year, King Manuel I sent a fresh expedition to India, of thirteen ships and 1,200 men. In 1499 Vasco da Gama returned in triumph to Lisbon from his epoch-making voyage to India round the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese established West African coastal stations from early in the fifteenth century. The discovery of Brazil was an episode in the creation of a Portuguese commercial empire which in less than a hundred years extended to four continents.
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