1 - The Amerindian Legacy, and the Literature of Discovery and Conquest

Summary

Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the Spanish monarchy, landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, and Pedro Álvares Cabral, on a charge from the Portuguese throne and with plans drawn up by Vasco da Gama, sighted the eastern coastline of mainland South America on 22 April 1500; thus began the discovery and conquest of the New World. While neither man was aware of the nature and extent of the land they had discovered – they were both seeking the spices of the East – their respective governments were quick to claim these territories. Since the land discovered by Álvares Cabral was well within the zone assigned to Portugal by the papal Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, it was claimed for Portugal and baptised Vera Cruz, a name which was soon abandoned in favour of Brazil, after the red dyewood (pau-brasil) which grew abundantly there. The first descriptions of these new lands appear in Columbus's famous letter of 1493 to Luis de Santangel and Vaz de Caminha's equally famous letter of 1500 (both of which are discussed in more detail below), and it is striking how similar their accounts are, particularly with regard to the notion of the primitiveness of the inhabitants of this newly discovered world. Both Columbus and Vaz de Caminha comment on their lack of clothing, their docility and the facility with which they might be Christianised (itself predicated on the notion of their cultural bereftness). While the suggestion that the Amerindians were somehow bereft of human culture would be revised substantially in the case of the later Spanish discoverers and conquistadors – particularly when they came into contact in the 1520s and 1530s with the Mayas, the Aztecs and the Incas whose cultures were highly developed (in terms of cultural memory, social organisation and scientific knowledge [i.e. of astronomy]) – it remained a hermeneutic benchmark in Brazil. Indeed there was one feature of Amerindian culture which appeared to many of the European observers who came to the New World to confirm its ‘primitive’ condition, and this was the prevalence within the New World – from the Tupi Indians of the east to the Incas of the west – of cannibalism.