Land of the King of Portugal
By Mark Reynolds

It  has been forty-five or fifty years since certain gentlemen of Viana associated themselves together, and according to what information they had of terra nova de Baccalaos they  determined  to go settle some part of it… And having lost their vessels there, we have no more news of them, except through the Biscayans, who are in the habit of going to that  coast for the purpose of procuring and exporting many things  that a are to be found there. These men give information that they had asked them to tell us at   home how they were situated there, and that they desired priests to be sent to them – that natives were mild, and the country fertile and good… And this is in Cape Breton, at the commencement of the coast which  runs to the north. 

Francesco de Souza Tratado das Ilhas Novas 1570

Commissioned by Alberto Cantino, the Duke of Ferrara’  envoy to the Portuguese  court (and also a spy),  this 1502 map accompanied and account of Gaspar Corte-Real’s second voyage to the New World sent to  the duke. To the west of Greenland  -- yet east of the Tordesillas line that divided the world between Portugal and Spain – is Terra Del Rey de Portugall – the “Land of the King of Portugal”. The indented seacoast resembles the coastline of Newfoundland, and the trees indicate the impression Newfoundland’s forest made on the Portuguese. This map has six Portuguese flags on the Atlantic!  

Please  note  that on the west of the Tordesillas line, on  the middle portion, there is a peninsula which is Florida, on this same  map with the date 1502. Ponce de Leon arrived there looking for the Fountain of Youth in 1511, and the American historians continue to be naïve stating that Ponce de Leon  discovered Florida!…

Sometime around the year 1521, a few dozen families from the  Azores Islands  landed on the  mysterious shores of the New World.  They came armed with charter from  King Manuel of Portugal to establish a colony that could serve  as a base for industry and trade. Led by  a gentleman who claimed to have  discovered and  therefore  gained title to these new lands, the settlers represented a last desperate attempt by  the Portuguese to assert their claim to North   America.

Their colony  predates the settlement of Port-Royal  — considered Canada’s first permanent  European  settlement – by  more than eight year. Today  it is forgotten, along with Portugal’s North American ambitions. 

At one point those ambitions were nearly without limit. Almost from the moment Prince Henry the Navigator took up residence at Sagres, Portugal, in 1420,  the Iberian country had been at the forefront of maritime exploration. In less than thir­ty years, Portuguese sailors and merchants had discovered and settled the Azores Islands, and established a ring of trading posts and forts that linked Lisbon to the riches of the Africa.

That Christopher Columbus first approached the Portuguese to fund his Atlantic voyage of discovery is well known. João lI’s dismissal of the Italian adventurer’s proposed trip forced him to go to the Spanish court of Isabella and Ferdinand—but the Portuguese hardly sat by to watch the Spanish pro¹ it from that initial error in judgment.

Pope Alexander VI’s Bull of 1493— modified by the Treaty of Tordesillas a year later — established a line of demar­cation between the two powers. The  lands to the west of this uncertain line of longitude were to be a Spanish mo­nopoly. Lands east of the line, includ­ing Newfoundland and possibly present-day Nova Scotia, were Por­tuguese territories. An agreement on paper was no good without some sort of concrete claim, and so Portugal sent out ships to discover what lands might be on its side of the line.

The best-known Portuguese voy­ages to Canadian waters are those of the Corte Reals. Gaspar Corte Real claimed to have seen Labrador in 1500, although it was more likely Greenland. In 1501 he coasted Labrador, New­foundland, and perhaps as far south as Cape Breton island. As was the practice of the Portuguese in Africa, one of his three ships took fifty natives (prob­ably Micmac) as slaves back to Portu­gal. Although these unfortunates made it to Lisbon, Corte Real did not. — his own ship disappeared and he was never heard from again. 

His mission of exploration—and title to any lands discovered—was inherited by his brother.  Miguel Corte Real had no better luck than his sib­ling; although one ship from his tiny fleet returned to Portugal at the con­clusion of his 1502 voyage, Miguel himself was lost. His ship disappeared while searching for Gaspar. Despite these tragedies, both voy­ages managed to map an extensive por­tion of the North American seaboard.

European cartographers felt free to name what lands they encountered, and evidence of the Portuguese’s endeavors in this regard clot maps of Canada today. The Bay of Fundy (Portuguese for “deep bay’) retains its original designation despite centuries of French and English occupation, and the former’s attempt to rename it Baie Français. Labrador itself comes from lavrador— meaning “farmer’— probably named after the original occupation of the sailor who first spotted it. Other bays, rocks, reefs. and harhours bear dis­tinctly Portuguese names as  well.

Naming a land is a far cry from owning a land, and by the early 1500’s it was already clear that Por­tugal would have stiff competition in the scramble to assert sovereignty over these territories. England and France felt no need to abide by the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, an agreement to which neither had been a party. The decision by England’s Henry VII to back Cabot’s Atlantic adventures was a direct challenge to the Iberian powers. Cabot’s landing in what was clearly Portuguese territory in 1497—before the Corte Real voyages — established a better claim there for England. Indeed, a charter to Cabot ex­pressly forbade his company to enter lands already discovered by the Portuguese, but allowed him to exploit those theretofore unknown. This effectively meant that England had no intention of staying out of either Spain or Portugal’s sphere unless there were prior rights backed by some sort of occupation.

By 1506 the Portuguese were sharing the New­foundland fishery with English, French, Breton, and Spanish vessels. Only John and Sebastian Cabot’s voyages to these regions were  official voyages of exploration—the taxes on the catches brought back to Europe were profit enough for most monarchs.

Portugal had little interest in sending more of its resources west once the route to India around Africa had been established in 1499. That there was no easy westward passage to the Orient was becoming increasingly clear, and so the Portuguese turned their efforts elsewhere.

Nonetheless, on May 13, 1521, João Álvares Fagundes was given a charter from King Manuel, who granted him lands that   “he went to discover, and has now certified us by trustworthy testimony that he did discover ... to wit, the land which is called terra firma from the line of demarcation, which bounds the possessions of the crown of Castille from ours in the South, until it comes to the bounds of the land which the Corte Reals discovered in the north.”

Fagundes claimed to have made a voyage — at his own expense to the New World in 1519. The char­ter the Portuguese king granted him in I52I was for lands already discovered. His commission positions these lands in relation to a number of islands that include present-day  Sable Island (which was well known to navigators of the time), and others south of Newfoundland that could have been St. Pierre and Miquelon.

That the land is somewhere on Nova Scotia seems fairly likely the question then is where? At least one author believes the land to have been southern Nova Scotia, on the Fundy coast. Farmland even today, this is an  area that Francesco de Souza could  more credibly describe as “country fertile and good.”

However, most evidence seems to point to present-day Cape Breton Island. Samuel de Champlain wrote in his 1612 Voyages  that “the Portuguese at one time wished to inhabit this island, and spent one winter there [ Niganis, present-day Ingonish ], but the sever­ity of the season and the cold made them abandon the idea.”

What became of the colony? If the would-be set­tlers made it to Canadian shores, they left almost no trace of their presence. De Sousa, writing fifty years after Fagundes received his charter, seemed to believe it was still in existence. More likely  Champlain is correct in his assertion that the Portuguese only lasted one winter before returning back to the warm­er climes of Portugal.

The Nova Scotian minister and journalist George Patterson wrote on Portuguese voy­ages to the  Canadian East Coast in 1890. He claimed that a cannon found on Cape Breton Island in the vicinity of St. Peter’s and another in Louis­bourg Harbour were of a type that had fallen out of use long before the time of French colonization in the area. These armaments, according to Patterson, stand as proof of that area’s claim to be the site of the first European most likely Portuguese — attempt at colonization in North America.

Visitors to present-day Louisbourg can see a reconstruction of one of the original cannons. Ken Donovan, a Parks Canada historian at Fortress Louis­bourg, says that the guns are indeed of a type—called a petrerra—that were in use in the early sixteenth century. Commonly used as rear-mounted swivel guns on ships as late as the early eighteenth century, they were effective enough for use long after newer weapons had come into vogue.

“It’s something that’s really serviceable,” he said. “You can have a dime in your pocket that’s fifty years old that’s still good. I think it’s a goose chase to say it’s from the era of the Portuguese.”

Mark Reynolds is a Montreal writer and a frequent contributor to the Beaver, 

etcetera

• Sixteenth Century North America The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans by Carl Ortwin Sauer University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971.

• Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage’s website reviews

• Portuguese exploration at www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/portuguese.html