Cabral Discovers Brazil: Portugal Claims New World

Pedro Alvares Cabral's fleet of thirteen ships departed Lisbon on March 9, 1500, bound for India following Vasco da Gama's pioneering route around Africa. Cabral swung wide to the southwest to catch favorable winds and currents, a standard navigational technique, but traveled so far west that he sighted land on April 22. He named it the Island of the True Cross and claimed it for Portugal. Whether the 'discovery' was accidental or deliberate remains debated: some historians argue that Portuguese navigators already knew land existed to the west based on earlier voyages. Cabral stayed only nine days before continuing to India, where his expedition met with hostility and eventually returned to Lisbon with only four of its thirteen ships. The Brazilian landfall fell within Portugal's sphere under the Treaty of Tordesillas, giving Lisbon a legal claim to territory that would eventually become its largest and most valuable colony, supplying sugar, gold, diamonds, and coffee for three centuries.