Biography
Pero Vaz de Caminha was born around 1450, probably in Porto, the city where most of his life unfolded; the year remains approximate. His father, Vasco Fernandes de Caminha, was a knight in the service of a great lord of the realm, and the family was linked to the first settlers of Neiva. Nothing certain is known of his education, but he was a man of letters, at ease with the pen and with accounts, and he belonged to the household of several kings, from Afonso V to Manuel I.
His career was that of a municipal and royal officer. On 8 March 1476, he was appointed master of the scales at the Porto Mint, an office said to have been inherited from his father. The letter of appointment suggests that he had served in Afonso V's campaign against Castile, perhaps as far as the battle of Toro, but this is not certain. In 1497, as city councillor (vereador), he drafted the chapters that the Porto council intended for the Cortes of Lisbon. He was by then nearly fifty, with a family and a well-established position.
In 1500, King Manuel I appointed him scribe of the royal trading post that Portugal wished to found at Calicut, under the authority of the factor Aires Correia. He sailed with the second fleet to the Indies, commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral. On 22 April, the fleet sighted an unknown land, which would become Brazil. From Porto Seguro, Caminha wrote, dated 1 May 1500, the Carta a El-Rei D. Manuel: an account to the sovereign of what he had seen, from the first contacts with the inhabitants to the Mass and the cross. A ship of the fleet carried the letter back to Lisbon. In closing, he also pleads for his son-in-law Jorge de Osório, exiled on São Tomé.
Caminha continued toward India. According to tradition, he died at Calicut at the end of 1500, in the attack on the Portuguese trading post. The exact date is debated: one finds 15 December, 16 or 17 December, or simply the end of the month, and his death in the fighting is only presumed. A royal letter of 3 December 1501 calls him "dead in the Indies." He had at least one daughter, Isabel, and a grandson received his former office at the Porto Mint in 1501.
Because Portugal kept the accounts of its discoveries secret, the letter long remained unknown to the public. The manuscript, found in 1773 in the archives of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, was printed only in 1817, in Rio de Janeiro, by Father Manuel Aires de Casal in his Corografia Brasílica. It has since been regarded as the birth certificate of Brazil and ranks among the three great testimonies of the discovery, with the account of the anonymous pilot and the letter of Master João. It has had many editions, including those of Douglas Tufano (1999) and Sílvio Castro (2009).
