The excerpt presented below describes the moment when the vessel that took Pedro Álvares Cabral back to metropolis leaves two men in the newly discovered land to stay there and learn the habits of the natives. The account is by the famous author of the letter to King Dom Manuel, Pero Vaz de Caminha:
“And from here he sent Captain Nicolau Coelho and Bartolomeu Dias to go ashore and take those two men and let them go with their bow and arrows, and this after he made them give each of them his new shirt, his red hood and a rosary of white bone beads, which they carried in their arms, their rattlesnakes and their companies. And he sent with them, to stay there, a young mandeported, created by D. João Telo, whom they call Afonso Ribeiro, to walk there with them and learn about their way of life and manners” (CAMINHA, Pero Vaz de. Letter to King D. Manuel about finding Brazil. 98 Mares Collection – Expo'98, nº42, Lisbon, 1997).
As can be seen, together with the two men, he followed a young man (young man) who had been exiled. This is, without a doubt, one of the oldest records of the punishment of exile in the universe of the former Portuguese Empire. The exile consisted of a kind of exile, like the ostracism in Ancient Greece. The exile was banned from his homeland (in this case, the Portuguese metropolis) for having committed some kind of crime. The crimes committed by the convicts ranged from common crimes, such as theft, to crimes of a religious order, condemned by the Holy Office, such as witchcraft, rituals of witchcraft, etc.
With the banishment, the degraded was sent to some region of the colonial domain, either to the west coast of Africa or to Brazil. This was because there was an imaginary among the Portuguese that associated the colonies, especially in the “New World”, with purgatory, if not with hell itself. The exiled criminal would have the opportunity to redeem himself and atone for his guilt. In this way, the penalty of exile was directly associated with the ecclesiastical conceptions of the time.
For this reason, Brazil was known for some time as “Atlantic hell”, an inhospitable place that it would serve to purge any evil, given the character of the difficulties that presented themselves to those who were here established. The paradisiacal imagery of the “new world” in the initial years of colonization faded in the decades following and mainly in the seventeenth century due to this infernal perspective that was gradually being built.
*Image credits: commons
