Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha (Memory of the World)

The Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, written on 1 May 1500, is the first written document to describe the land and peoples of what would come to be called Brazil. Addressed to King Manuel I, it reports the discovery of the new land by the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral, sighted on 22 April of that year. The original is kept at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, and was inscribed on UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register in 2005, joining the body of Portuguese documents distinguished by this programme for the preservation of the documentary heritage of humankind.

A founding account

Pero Vaz de Caminha (c. 1450–1500) sailed in Cabral’s fleet as clerk of the trading post bound for Calicut. It fell to him to draw up the official account of the encounter with the Brazilian coast, in a text that combines the precision of a royal official with an attentive, almost literary curiosity. Caminha describes the landscape, the fauna, the abundance of water and, above all, the inhabitants of the land — their bodies, their adornments, the gestures of first contact and of the initial exchanges. He also records the celebration of the first Mass on Brazilian soil, an episode that became one of the founding moments of Luso-Brazilian memory.

The document closes with a personal request: that the king summon from the island of São Tomé the author’s son-in-law, exiled there. This human detail, set within an account of historical reach, lends the letter a rare vividness. By bringing together ethnographic, geographic and administrative observation, it is today considered the first text in the history of Brazil and an inaugural milestone of its literary production.

More than a document of state, Caminha’s letter is the first European gaze set down in writing on a world hitherto unknown — an inventory of wonder as much as a report of duty.

From the Torre do Tombo to worldwide recognition

Carried to Portugal by Gaspar de Lemos, commander of the supply ship that returned to bring the news, the letter was deposited in the royal archive. There it remained, unpublished, for more than two centuries, until it was rediscovered in 1773 by the chief keeper José de Seabra da Silva; its first publication came only in 1817. The manuscript, of several folios, today forms part of the vast holdings of the Torre do Tombo, one of the oldest Portuguese institutions in continuous operation.

Its inscription on the Memory of the World Register places the letter alongside other major testimonies of Portuguese maritime expansion, such as the Diary of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage and the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between the Iberian and Castilian crowns. Together, these documents form an essential nucleus for understanding the age of discovery and its impact on a global scale.

Context and significance

The letter is inseparable from the diplomacy and cartography of its time. The encounter of 1500 took place only a few years after the Atlantic lines of demarcation were fixed, and Caminha’s account would allow the crown to assess the extent of the new lands. For the same reason, the letter dialogues with the administrative documentation of the expansion gathered in other collections of the Torre do Tombo, such as the Corpo Cronológico, which preserves the correspondence and acts of the period of the discoveries.

Today, the Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha is one of the most studied and cited documents in Iberian history, the subject of constant critical editions and an indispensable reference for historians, linguists and anthropologists. Its place in the documentary World Heritage underscores the universal value of a text that, written by an official on a voyage, ended up inaugurating the writing of a new nation.