Cabral lands, and the Indigenous world meets Portugal

On 22 April 1500 a Portuguese fleet bound for India under Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted land on the coast of what is now southern Bahia. The fleet’s scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha, wrote a long letter to King Manuel I describing the people who came down to the beach: unclothed, painted, curious and, he thought, ready to be converted. The Portuguese planted a cross, said Mass, and sailed on after about ten days. It is often called Brazil’s “birth certificate”.^•

The people who were already there

The land was far from empty. Along the coast lived Tupi-speaking peoples such as the Tupinambá and Tupiniquim, farmers of manioc who lived in large villages and waged ritual wars on one another; inland and across the Amazon lived hundreds of other peoples speaking languages of the Gê, Arawak, Carib and other families. How many people lived in what became Brazil is uncertain. The historian John Hemming estimated about 2.4 million; other scholars have proposed considerably more, and the full range of estimates runs from under one million to well over five million.^•

Brazilwood, then settlement

At first Portugal was more interested in Asia. Its main business in the new land was brazilwood, a tree that yielded a valuable red dye, and it gave the territory its name. Indigenous men cut and carried the logs in exchange for metal tools. When French traders began competing, the Crown divided the coast into hereditary “captaincies” in the 1530s and, in 1549, sent a governor-general, Tomé de Sousa, who founded Salvador as the capital. With him came the first Jesuits, led by Manuel da Nóbrega.^•

Catastrophe

What followed was devastating. European diseases, above all smallpox and measles, swept through communities with no immunity; a smallpox epidemic in the 1560s killed tens of thousands in the Bahia region alone. Settlers who needed labour for the new sugar plantations raided villages for slaves, and Portuguese-backed “just wars” turned whole peoples into captives. The Jesuits opposed the enslavement of Indigenous people and gathered converts into mission villages, the aldeias, but those villages also broke up older ways of life and became reservoirs of labour and disease.^•

By the end of the sixteenth century the coastal Tupi world had largely collapsed: killed, enslaved, absorbed or pushed inland. Indigenous slavery never disappeared entirely, especially in the Amazon and among the bandeirantes of São Paulo, who raided deep into the interior for captives in the seventeenth century, and who were long celebrated as heroic pioneers.^•

What survived

Yet Indigenous Brazil did not vanish. Tupi words fill Brazilian Portuguese, from mandioca and abacaxi (pineapple) to place names like Ipanema and Itaquera, and a Tupi-based língua geral was the everyday language of much of the colony into the eighteenth century. Manioc flour, the hammock and the habit of bathing every day all come from Indigenous life. The 2022 census counted about 1.7 million people who identify as Indigenous.^•

Why it matters today