April 22, 1500

Pedro Álvares Cabral

Cabral’s fleet sights Monte Pascoal and Terra da Vera Cruz

The first thing the fleet is recorded as seeing was not a beach but a high, round mountain rising over dense trees. Nobody is recorded going ashore that day.

Wednesday, 22 April 1500

Cabral's India-bound fleet sighted a high, rounded mountain and lower wooded land on the coast of present-day Bahia on Wednesday, 22 April 1500.

Cabral named the mountain Monte Pascoal and, in the eyewitness wording of the fleet secretary Pero Vaz de Caminha, named the land Terra da Vera Cruz.

A night at nineteen fathoms

The crews sounded 25 fathoms. At sunset they anchored about six leagues offshore in 19 fathoms and remained there overnight.

No Portuguese landing, Indigenous encounter or formal possession ceremony is recorded on 22 April; those occurred during the following days.

Seven or eight people were first observed on the beach the next morning, and Nicolau Coelho went ashore on 23 April.

Thirteen ships bound somewhere else

The fleet was primarily an expedition to establish diplomatic and commercial relations in India, not one organised principally to colonise Brazil. Whether its far westward course deliberately sought land or produced an unintended landfall remains debated.

Caminha wrote Terra da Vera Cruz, while other early accounts and later tradition used Ilha da Vera Cruz; the initial naming formula is not uniform across sources.

Calling the event a discovery reflects a European documentary and imperial perspective: the land was already inhabited, and possible earlier European sightings remain debated.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes

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What the sources leave uncertain

The 22 April date comes directly from Caminha’s dated sequence and is secure, although it is conventionally retained as a Julian-era historical date rather than converted to a proleptic Gregorian date.
Caminha wrote Terra da Vera Cruz, while other early accounts and subsequent tradition used Ilha da Vera Cruz; the initial naming formula is therefore not uniform across sources.
Calling the event a 'discovery' reflects a European documentary and imperial perspective; the land was already inhabited, and possible earlier European sightings remain debated.