The Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha describes in some 27 manuscript pages the landing and brief stay of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet on the coast of what is now Brazil in April of 1500. Cabral’s voyage—like Columbus’s—was not one of “discovery,” but rather was destined for India in order to establish a feitoria or trading station and thus consolidate Portugal’s monopoly over this trade route (one that had already established by Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama, who made it all the way to India and returned to Portugal in 1499). There has been some discussion about whether Cabral had prior knowledge of Brazil’s existence and whether this is the reason why he steered so far westward as to land on the coast of South America rather than following the African shoreline south, but there is apparently no documentary evidence to support this view.
Caminha doesn’t use either of the words “Discovery” or “Invention” to characterize Cabral’s landing—the word he uses is “achamento” or finding—but his text has long animated discussions about the nature of the “discovery,” whether accidental or intentional, as well as about its participation in the “invention” or creation of a Brazilian nation. This is surely the sense used in a recent Brazilian TV miniseries entitled A Invenção do Brasil (The Invention of Brazil), which portrays a friendly and highly sexualized encounter between a Portuguese explorer and Brazilian native women. This is a foundational fiction whose fictiveness is rarely questioned, so prevalent is the mythology about the peaceful nature of Portuguese colonization and the origins of Brazil in the happy union of different races. Although the miniseries focuses on a different episode found in early chronicles of Brazil, its representation of the encounter is quite similar to the canonical readings of Caminha’s letter, according to which the document is not only Brazil’s “birth certificate,” but one that attests to a painless delivery.
While it is easy to criticize such retrospective idealizations of national origins, Caminha’s text does offer an account of a relatively peaceful encounter as well as some statements of admiration for the Brazilian natives whose appearance he quite elaborately describes. Caminha focuses on people, rather than nature, although when he does depict the natural setting it is with the imprecise, aggrandized, and instrumentalized vocabulary we are familiar with in Columbus: very beautiful shores, very extensive forests, endless waters, such that “if one cares to profit by it, everything will grow in it” (33).[1] More numerous and interesting are his descriptions of the natives and of the encounter itself. There are several scenes of “intermingling” between the Portuguese sailors and Brazilian natives, usually involving music, dancing, and other (unnamed) forms of “diversion” (21). These scenes, alongside Caminha’s affirmations that the natives’ “bodies are so clean and so fat and so beautiful that they could not be more so” (23), have been read as evidence of Caminha’s genuine respect for Amerindians. Taken together with his claim that “I shall not set down here anything more than I saw and thought, either to beautify or to make it less attractive” (5), most readings of Caminha praise—or at least take for granted—his objectivity and impartiality. Comparative readings of Caminha’s and Columbus’s letters, of which there are several, tend to offer Caminha’s objectivity, and admiration for or comprehension of Amerindians, as the most salient points of contrast between the two.[2]
Now, my goal is not to dismiss these contrastive readings but to show some of the traps that such a comparative approach could lead to (whether in the classroom or in academic research). It seems to me that these readings suffer from two levels of naiveté: first, by taking Caminha’s claims to objectivity at face value. The author’s minor role on the expedition, a scribe rather than the leader and thus with much less investment than Columbus in the account’s effect on its audience, is perhaps sufficient to explain the lack of conspicuous authorial presence and intervention that we find in Columbus. But it is also worth pointing out that Caminha’s letter ends with a personal petition to the Crown, similar to that of Columbus’s letter to the sovereigns (as Margarita Zamora has revealed, this the prior, unpublished version of the Carta a Santángel): to pardon his son-in-law and release him from exile.
Second, if the canonical and comparative readings have underplayed Caminha’s selective interpretation of events or the possibly interested nature of his representations, they have also offered their own rather selective interpretations of Caminha’s text. To return to the example I just gave of Caminha’s “difference” with respect to Columbus: the description of the scenes of peaceful “intermingling” and the context of the expressions of admiration for the Brazilian natives are rather revealing. With regard to the former, Caminha is careful to present the movements and interactions in the scenes of contact as orchestrated by the Portuguese: we told them to draw back and lay down there bows (usually pointing out that some did, but others didn’t) (9, 18, “they put them down, and did not draw back much. It is enough to say that they put down their bows,” 14); we showed them sheep, hens, food, wine (which they generally ignored or disliked) (12); “we made signs for them to leave, and they did so” (15). One of the most interesting scenes of “intermingling”—and the one that precipitates the passage I quoted with regard to the natives’ health and beauty—is when Diogo Dias, “an agreeable and pleasure-loving man,” crosses the river to amuse them with his bagpipe-playing and dancing: “they laughed and enjoyed themselves greatly,” we read, “And although he reassured and flattered them a great deal with this, they soon became sullen like wild men and went away upstream” (22, my emphasis). The natives’ departure—a moment in which their movements cease to coincide with Portuguese desires—is suddenly explained in terms of native barbarism. A few sentences later, Caminha reasserts this association in phrasing reminiscent of Columbus: “It suffices to say that up to this time, although they were somewhat tamed, a moment afterwards they became frightened like sparrows at a feeding place” (22).
The comparison of the natives to animals, specifically birds, continues in the passage that follows, which contains one of the affirmations supposedly evincing Caminha’s admiration for the Brazilian natives:
The other two [natives] whom the captain had on the ships, and to whom he gave what has already been mentioned, did not appear again, from which I infer that they are bestial people and of very little knowledge; and for this reason they are so timid. Yet withal they are well cared for and very clean, and in this it seems to me that they are rather like birds or wild animals, to which the air gives better feathers and better hair than to tame ones. And their bodies are so clean and so fat and so beautiful that they could not be more so; and this causes me to presume that they have no houses or dwellings in which to gather, and the air in which they are brought up in makes them so. (23)
This presumption is contradicted on the next page, when the convicts who are continually being sent among the natives, and who just as insistently are sent away, return with reports of the housing in the village. In any case, the passage serves as a good example of just what Caminha’s “admiration” of the natives’ “proximity to nature” implies.
I want to conclude, though, with one example of a difference from Columbus that I think is worth interrogating: that is, Caminha’s recognition of a language barrier, and in particular his recognition of the interested nature of Portuguese interpretations of native speech. This occurs two days after arrival, when the two natives were brought on board ship. After describing how they react to the objects shown to them, as well as those which they notice on their own (the captain’s collar and rosary beads), Caminha writes: “He made a sign towards the land and then to the beads and to the collar of the captain, as if to say that they would give gold for that. We interpreted this so because we wished to, but if he meant that he would take the beads and also the collar, we did not wish to understand because we did not intend to give it to him” (13). Such passages put Columbus’s manipulations of native speech in a new light. I usually teach Caminha before Columbus in order to avoid students’ assumptions that with Caminha they’re suddenly getting the “truth” about the encounter, as well as to make them more attuned to Columbus’s manipulations. I would like to conclude with two questions raised by this brief consideration of Caminha’s Letter: First, how can we read colonial texts about the encounter—or passages within those texts—in which authorial intervention and manipulation don’t seem to be present, as in the case I just cited? (i.e., do we have to read all representations of the encounter as only telling us about the prejudices, preconceptions and preoccupations of the European explorer and writer?) Second, how can we recognize the differences and local specificities of colonial texts—the differences that exist between Caminha’s and Columbus’s representations, for example—without essentializing these differences or using them to posit a broader contrast between cultural and national histories (such as Brazil’s peaceful conquest versus that of Mexico or Peru, or the Portuguese as “nicer” colonizers than the Spanish or the English)?
Selected Bibliography
Manuscript: Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, gaveta VIII, maço 2, n°8.
Editions in Portuguese
Casal, Manuel Aires de. Corografia brasílica, ou relação histórico-geográfica do reino do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Régia, 1817. This text contains the first published edition of Caminha’s letter. Facsimile of this edition: Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1945.
Cortesão, Jaime. A Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha. Rio de Janeiro: Livros de Portugal, 1943. Includes introductory study, facsimile of the manuscript, transcription, modernized adaptation, appendices of related documents, and bibliography.
Arroyo, Leonardo. A Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha. São Paulo: Ed. Melhoramentos, 1971. 2nd ed. Includes introductory study, facsimile of the manuscript, transcription, modernized adaptation, glossary, appendices of related documents, and bibliography.
Pereira, Paulo Roberto. Os três únicos testemunhos de descobrimento do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Aguilar, 1999. Includes reproductions of earliest maps of Brazil, and two other brief accounts of Cabral's voyage with references to Brazil (Carta de Mestre João Faras and Relação do Piloto Anônimo). Also offers a bibliography of editions and translations of Caminha’s letter.
Southey, Robert. History of Brazil. Vol. I. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822.
Greenlee, William Brooks. The Voyages of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India from Contemporary Documents and Narratives. London: Hakluyt Society, 1938. 3-33. Includes rather extensive footnotes and illustrations.
Ley, C. D. Portuguese Voyages 1498-1663: Tales from the Great Age of Discovery. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. 41-59. (First published in London by J. M. Dent & Sons, 1947.)
[1] All citations of Caminha’s Letter are from William Brooks Greenlee, The Voyages of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India from Contemporary Documents and Narratives (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938): 3-33.
[2] See, for example, Jerry M. Williams, “Early Images of America in Two Letters of Discovery,” Brasil/Brazil 5.4 (1991): 5-22 and Claude Hulet, “The Columbus Letter of February 15, 1493, and the Pero Vaz de Caminha Letter of May 1, 1500: A Comparison,” Mester 14.1 (1995): 107-124.