section_path: Atlantic Ocean (1419–1507)/The Americas: The New World/The "True Indies" and Brazil
section_name: The "True Indies" and Brazil
paragraph_text: The "True Indies" and Brazil
  
  In 1497, newly crowned King Manuel I of Portugal sent an exploratory fleet eastwards, fulfilling his predecessor's project of finding a route to the Indies. In July 1499, news spread that the Portuguese had reached the "true Indies", as a letter was dispatched by the Portuguese king to the Spanish Catholic Monarchs.
  
  The third expedition by Columbus in 1498 was the beginning of the first successful Castilian (Spanish) colonization in the West Indies, on the island of Hispaniola. Despite growing doubts, Columbus refused to accept he had not reached the Indies. During the voyage he discovered the mouth of the Orinoco River on the north coast of South America (now Venezuela) and thought that the huge quantity of fresh water coming from it could only be from a continental land mass, which he was certain was the Asian mainland.
  
  As shipping between Seville and the West Indies grew, knowledge of the Caribbean islands, Central America and the northern coast of South America grew. One of these Spanish fleets, that of Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in 1499–1500, reached land at the coast of what is now Guyana, when the two explorers seem to have separated in opposite directions. Vespucci sailed southward, discovering the mouth of the Amazon River in July 1499, and reaching 6°S, in present-day north east Brazil, before turning around.
  
  In the beginning of 1500, Vicente Yáñez Pinzon was blown off course by a storm and reached what is now the northeast coast of Brazil on 26 January 1500, exploring as far south as the present-day state of Pernambuco. His fleet was the first to fully enter the Amazon River estuary which he named Río Santa María de la Mar Dulce (Saint Mary's River of the Freshwater Sea). The land was too far east for the Castilians to claim under the Treaty of Tordesillas, but the discovery created Castilian interest, with a second voyage by Pinzon in 1508 (the Pinzón–Solís voyage, an expedition that coasted the northern coast to the Central American coastal mainland, in search of a passage to the East) and a voyage in 1515–16 by a navigator of the 1508 expedition, Juan Díaz de Solís. The 1515–16 expedition was spurred on by reports of Portuguese exploration of the region (see below). It ended when de Solís and some of his crew disappeared when exploring the River Plata in a boat, but what they found reignited Spanish interest, and colonization began in 1531.
  
  In April 1500, the second Portuguese India Armada, headed by Pedro Álvares Cabral, with a crew of expert captains, encountered the Brazilian coast as it swung westward in the Atlantic while performing a large " volta do mar " to avoid becalming in the Gulf of Guinea. On 21 April 1500, a mountain was seen and named Monte Pascoal, and on 22 April Cabral landed on the coast. On 25 April, the entire fleet sailed into the harbour they named Porto Seguro (Port Secure). Cabral perceived that the new land lay east of the line of Tordesillas, and sent an envoy to Portugal with the discovery in letters, including the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha. Believing the land to be an island, he named it Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross). Some historians have suggested that the Portuguese may have encountered the South American bulge earlier while sailing the "volta do mar", hence the insistence of John II in moving the line west of Tordesillas in 1494—so his landing in Brazil may not have been an accident; although John's motivation may have just been to claiming new lands in the Atlantic easier. From the east coast, the fleet then turned eastward to resume the journey to the southern tip of Africa and India. Cabral was the first captain to touch four continents, leading the first expedition that connected and united Europe, Africa, the New World, and Asia.
  
  At the invitation of King Manuel I of Portugal, Amerigo Vespucci participated as observer in these exploratory voyages to the east coast of South America. The expeditions became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to him, published between 1502 and 1504, suggested the newly discovered lands were not the Indies but a "New World", the Mundus novus; this is also the Latin title of a contemporary document based on Vespucci letters to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, which had become popular in Europe. It was soon understood that Columbus had not reached Asia but found a new continent, the Americas. The Americas were named in 1507 by cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, after Amerigo Vespucci.
  
  From 1501 to 1502, one of these Portuguese expeditions, led by Gonçalo Coelho (and/or André Gonçalves or Gaspar de Lemos), sailed south along the coast of South America to the bay of present-day Rio de Janeiro. Vespucci's account states that the expedition reached the latitude "South Pole elevation 52° S", in the "cold" latitudes of what is now southern Patagonia, before turning back. Vespucci wrote that they headed toward the southwest and south, following "a long, unbending coastline", apparently coincident with the southern South American coast. This seems controversial, since he changed part of his description in the subsequent letter, stating a shift, from about 32° S (Southern Brazil), to south-southeast, to open sea, maintaining that they reached 50°/52° S.
  
  In 1503, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, challenging the Portuguese policy of mare clausum, led one of the earliest French Normand and Breton expeditions to Brazil. He intended to sail to the East Indies, but near the Cape of Good Hope his ship was diverted to west by a storm, and landed in the present day state of Santa Catarina (southern Brazil), on 5 January 1504.
  
  From 1511 to 1512, Portuguese captains João de Lisboa and Estevão de Fróis reached the River Plata estuary in present-day Uruguay and Argentina, and went as far south as the present-day Gulf of San Matias at 42°S. The expedition reached a cape extending north to south which they called Cape of "Santa Maria" (Punta del Este, keeping the name the Cape nearby); and after 40°S they found a "Cape" or "a point or place extending into the sea", and a "Gulf" (in June and July). After they had navigated for nearly 300 km (186 mi) to round the cape, they again sighted the continent on the other side, and steered towards the northwest, but a storm prevented them from making any headway. Driven away by the Tramontane or north wind, they retraced their course. Also gives the first news of the White King and the "people of the mountains" to the interior (the Inca Empire), and a gift, an ax of silver, obtained from the Charrúa natives on their return ("to the coast or side of Brazil "), and "to West" (along the coast and the River Plata estuary), and offered to King Manuel I. Christopher de Haro, a Flemish of Sephardic origin (one of the financiers of the expedition along with D. Nuno Manuel), who would serve the Spanish Crown after 1516, believed the navigators had discovered a southern strait to west and Asia.
  
  In 1519, an expedition sent by the Spanish Crown to find a way to Asia was led by the experienced Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan. The fleet explored the rivers and bays as it charted the South American coast until it found a way to the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Magellan.
  
  From 1524 to 1525, Aleixo Garcia, a Portuguese conquistador, led a private expedition of shipwrecked Castilian and Portuguese adventurers, who recruited about 2,000 Guaraní Indians. They explored the territories of present-day southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia, using the native trail network, the Peabiru. They were the first Europeans to cross the Chaco and reach the outer territories of the Inca Empire on the hills of the Andes.