Cabral’s Armada to India and Brazil (1500–1501)

Fleet

The first India Armada, commanded by Vasco da Gama, arrived in Portugal in the summer of 1499, in rather sorry shape. Half of his ships and men had been lost thanks to battles, disease, and storms. Although Gama came back with a hefty cargo of spices that would be sold at enormous profit, he had failed in the principal objective of his mission: to negotiate a treaty with Calicut, the spice entrepôt on the Malabar Coast of India. Gama managed, however, to open the sea route to India via the Cape of Good Hope and secured good relations with the African city-state of Malindi, a critical staging post along the way.

On King Manuel I's orders, arrangements were immediately made to begin the assembly of a second armada in Cascais. Determined not to repeat Gama's mistakes, this one was to be a large and well-armed fleet of 13 ships and 1500 men, laden with valuable gifts and diplomatic letters to win over the potentates of the east.

Many details of the composition of the fleet are missing. Only three ship names are known, and there is some conflict among the sources on the captains. The following list of ships should not be regarded as authoritative, but as a tentative list compiled from various conflicting accounts.

Mission

The priority of the mission was to secure a treaty with Zamorin's Calicut (Calecute, Kozhikode), the principal commercial entrepôt of the Kerala spice trade and dominant feudal city-state on the Malabar coast of India. Vasco da Gama's first armada had visited Calicut in 1498, but had failed to impress the elderly ruling Manivikraman Raja ('Samoothiri Raja'), the Zamorin of Calicut. As such, no agreements had been signed. Cabral's instructions were to succeed where da Gama had not, and to this end was entrusted with magnificent gifts to present to the Zamorin. Cabral was under orders to establish a feitoria (factory) in Calicut, which would be placed under Aires Correia.

The second priority, assigned to Bartolomeu and Diogo Dias, was to search out the East African port of Sofala, near the mouth of the Zambezi river. Sofala had been secretly visited and described by the explorer Pero da Covilhã during his overland expedition a decade earlier (c. 1487), and he identified it as the endpoint of the Monomatapa gold trade. The Portuguese crown was eager to tap into that gold source, but da Gama's armada had failed to find it. The Dias brothers were instructed to find and establish a factory at Sofala under designated factor Afonso Furtado.

Outward journey

On March 9, Cabral's expedition set out from the Tagus. Thirteen days later, on March 22, Cabral's armada reached the island of São Nicolau in the middle of a storm. The privately outfitted ship of Luís Pires was too damaged by the tempest to continue, and returned to Lisbon.

From Cape Verde, Cabral went southwest.

Cabral took the same path as Gama had, but made a slightly wider arc and went further west than Gama had. As a result, he hit upon the hitherto unknown landmass of Brazil. After nearly 30 days of sailing (44 since departure), on April 21, Cabral's fleet found the first indications of nearby land. The next day, the armada caught sight of the Brazilian coast, seeing the outlines of a hill they named Monte Pascoal.

After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, Cabral's armada reached the Cape of Good Hope in late May. The fleet faced headlong winds for six straight days and four ships—Bartolomeu Dias's, Aires Gomes da Silva's, Simão de Pina's, and Vasco de Ataíde's—were lost at sea in the process. In this way, the fleet was reduced to seven ships. Facing strong winds, the armada split into smaller groups to meet again on the other side. Cabral's ship went with two others.

Cabral in India

After an uneventful ocean crossing, Cabral's six ships landed on Anjediva Island (Angediva, Anjadip) on August 22, where they rested and repaired and repainted the ships.

Sailing down the Indian coast, Cabral's expedition finally reached Calicut on September 13.

By December 1500, factor Aires Correia was still only able to buy enough spices to load two of the ships. He complained to Cabral his suspicions that the guild of Arab merchants in Calicut had been colluding to shut out Portuguese purchasing agents from the city's spice markets.

Incensed at the attack on the factory, Cabral waited one day for redress by the Zamorin. When this did not arrive, Cabral and the Portuguese seized around ten Arab merchant ships then in harbor between December 18 and 22. They confiscated the ships' cargoes, killed the crews, and burned their ships.

Diogo Dias's misadventures

While Cabral's main fleet was in India, Diogo Dias, captain of the missing seventh ship of the armada, was going through his own set of adventures.

Shortly after being separated from the main fleet at the Cape in June 1500, Dias had struck out too far east into the Indian Ocean and sighted the western coast of the island of Madagascar. Although the island was not unknown (its Arab name, "island of the Moon", was already reported by Pero de Covilha), Dias was the first Portuguese captain to have sighted it and is often credited with renaming it the island of São Lourenço, on account of it being found on St. Lawrence's day (August 10, 1500). However, a proper landing on Madagascar would not be undertaken until 1506 and it would only be extensively explored in 1508.

Likely thinking that he was on a South African island, Dias tried to find the African coast by sailing straight north from Madagascar, hoping to reconnect with Cabral's armada there, or to make it to Sofala, Dias's official destination. But he had struck too far east and was in fact in open ocean. Dias sighted the African coast only around Mogadishu (Magadoxo), by which point Cabral had already crossed the Indian Ocean. The change in the monsoon winds prevented Dias from undertaking his own crossing. Dias pushed up the coast, unexpectedly passing Cape Guardafui into the Gulf of Aden, waters previously unexplored by Portuguese ships.

Return journey

In late January 1501, Cabral took aboard an ambassador from Cannanore and started his ocean crossing back to East Africa. On the way, the Portuguese captured a Gujarati ship, replete with a magnificent cargo. They stole the cargo, but, upon realizing that the crewmen were not Arabs, spared them.

As Cabral's expedition approached Malindi in February, vice-admiral Sancho de Tovar, sailing at the front, ran his spice-laden ship, the El Rei, aground on the Malindi coast. The great ship was irreparable. Its crew and cargo were reallocated, then the ship burnt to recover the iron fittings Cabral authorized the king of Malindi to recover the cannons from the wreck and keep them for himself.

Cabral's fleet, reduced to just five ships, reached Mozambique Island in the spring. As there was no news from Diogo Dias, Cabral decided to take responsibility for the Sofala mission himself. Cabral ordered the private ship Anunciada of Nuno Leitão da Cunha, the fastest in the fleet, to be placed under the command of veteran hand Nicolau Coelho. He dispatched it ahead of the rest of the fleet to deliver the results of the voyage to Portugal. Tovar took command of the caravel São Pedro, previously commanded by Pêro de Ataíde, with the intent to seek out Sofala and proceed home alone from there. Ataíde was transferred to the command of Coelho's old nau.

Aftermath

On the surface, Pedro Álvares Cabral's 2nd Armada had been a failure and the reaction was conspicuously muted.

The armada sustained heavy ship and human losses. Of the thirteen ships sent out, only five returned with cargo (four crown, one private). Three returned without any cargo (Gaspar de Lemos, Luís Pires, and Diogo Dias) and five were lost entirely. The crews and captains of the four ships lost at the Cape, including the famous navigator Bartolomeu Dias, also perished in the journey. Another fifty-something Portuguese, including the factor Aires Correia, had been killed in the Calicut massacre.

However, the ship and human losses weighed heavily against Cabral being honored or rewarded. Allegations of "incompetence" flew in the circles that mattered. Although Cabral was initially offered the command of the 4th Armada, scheduled for 1502, it seemed more like a pro forma gesture than a sincere offer. The crown made it clear that Cabral's command would be limited and supervised—conditions humiliating enough to force Cabral to withdraw his name. The 4th Armada would ultimately be placed under the command of Vasco da Gama.

Although the reaction of Portuguese court opinion in 1501 upon Cabral's return was generally low, it ascended retrospectively. Cabral's discovery of Brazil, initially received as a minor discovery of little interest, turned out to be much more momentous.