Since the fifteenth century, Portuguese sailors had become excellent navigators, thanks to the impetus given to navigation by Henry the Navigator and his school of Sagres, Bartolomé Díaz had rounded the Cape of Storms (Good Hope) at the southern end of Africa and Vasco da Gama, following the same route, had reached India in 1498. However, when the court of Portugal heard of the Columbian discoveries in favor of the Crown of Castile, they set out to carry out their own explorations and colonizations, especially because by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), signed by the two discovering nations and arbitrated by Pope Alexander VI, Portugal belonged to all the lands east of an imaginary meridian that passed 160 miles west of Cape Verde and divided the globe in half. Very soon the Portuguese called the salient territory of South America that fell within their domain “Brazil” , due to the dyeing wood that was known as brazilwood and which at that time constituted the main wealth of the region.
Autochthonous Population
Before the conquest of Brazil, the area was inhabited by primitive Carib tribes belonging to the Arauaco group. and, further south, by the important linguistic group of the tupi-guaraní , although both groups were still in a very backward phase of their cultural development.
Discoveryofthenewlands
The territory was sighted for the first time in January 1500 by Vicente Yañez Pinzón , Columbus's companion on his first voyage. Yáñez approached the mouth of the Amazon River and, a little later, the Spanish sailor Diego de López did the same. The one who ultimately took possession of these lands in favor of the King of Portugal was the sailor and soldier Pedro Álvarez Cabral . The latter, following Vasco da Gama's advice to move away from the African coast to double the Cape of Good Hope, did so to such an extent that he sighted the Brazilian coasts, a circumstance that he took advantage of to take possession of a land that he had found by chance. This happened in April 1500, two months after the one Yáñez and López had sighted, although they corresponded to Portugal by virtue of the Tordesillas arbitration. An old document, not entirely reliable, credits its discovery to the Portuguese Juan Ramalho, who claimed to have explored Brazil two years before Columbus reached the Bahamas . In any case, this did not come to light, it was unknown at the time and the true exploration and conquest of Brazil by Portugal still took a decade to occur.
Portuguese Colonization in Brazil
In 1501, Américo Vespucci and Gonzalo Coelho, at the service of the Crown of Portugal They recognized these territories with their ships, but they did not set foot on them. However, the wealth of brazilwood had already reached Europe and French and Dutch sailors began to arrive in the area with the purpose of trading with the indigenous people to obtain the precious wood. Faced with this dangerous interest, the Crown of Portugal armed a large fleet under the command of Martín Afonso de Sousa with the purpose of colonizing the region and founding towns in the manner of Spain. For this he applied his experience and his feudal schemes, and in 1534 he divided the country into twelve captaincies. For more information click on Colonization of Brazil