In his letter to Manuel I of Portugal , Pero Vaz de Caminha gives what is considered by many today as being one of the most accurate accounts of what Brazil used to look like in He describes in a diary from the first journey from Portugal to Brazil and their arrival in this country. Manuel I ascended the throne at a time when Portugal was discovering wealth in Africa and the East; he was keen on ensuring Portugal maintained dominance in trade with the East.
Many historians have debated on the authenticity of this discovery; some have reason to believe that Portugal had prior knowledge of Brazil's existence. Once Cabral had gathered basic facts and had encountered the native people, he took this information and Caminha's letter on a smaller ship back to Lisbon. The admiral of the ship that sailed to Brazil sent Nicolau Coelho out to interact with the natives. The people they encountered when they arrived in Brazil lived by a mix of hunting-gathering and agriculture.
They were brown and reddish-skinned and completely unclothed. Their languages were divided into four major families with many isolates, and even related languages and dialects were likely to not be mutually intelligible, so they had to communicate through actions and sign languages.
They tried to give the natives things to eat such as bread, fish, cakes, honey and even wine. The natives took one taste of the things then spit them all out. They also tried to give them just water but the natives only swashed the water in their mouths, then spit it out. The one thing they did consent to was a cloak they could use to cover themselves while they slept. Apart from being the first ever literary description of Brazil, what sets Caminha's letter apart from other documents like it was his style of writing.
Whilst writing this letter, Caminha was not trying to create a literary work but trying to report exactly what he found; it was a detailed commentary on the "customs, religion and physical characteristics of native people. He states things for what they are, not for what he thinks they represent. Other early accounts of the New World emphasized on the idea of prosperity and use adjectives and hyperbole to describe the quantity and quality of its bounty. He emphasizes on the "simplicity and good nature" of the indigenous people.
