PEREIRA, DUARTE PACHECO

(b. Santarém [?], Portugal, ca. 1460; d. Lisbon [?], Portugal, 1533)

navigation.

Although not all of the voyages that the Portuguese sailor and pilot Pereira made during his lifetime are known, it is known that he did not participate in several expeditions cited by historians. For example, he would have been very young in 1471 to have taken part in the assault on the north African fortress of Arzila. It is generally believed that he was entrusted by King Manuel I with an expedition in 1498 to America, where he supposedly sailed along the coast of Brazil for the first time. But this assertion, based solely on one obscure passage in his book, is doubtful. It is certain, however, that in 1488 Pereira was on Prince’s Island, southwest of the Cameroons, when Bartholomeu Dias was returning to Europe. Pereira was very ill, and the discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope brought him back to Lisbon. In 1503 Pereira was in India with Alfonso de Albuquerque. Remaining there to defend the weak king of Cochin against the Powerful King Samorim of Calicut, he succeeded in driving back the fierce and repeated attacks of the Samorim against a small band of Portuguese. Pereira thus became a national hero, and the fame of his exploit at Cochin spread throughout Europe.

In 1505 Pereira returned to Lisbon, where he began his Esmeraldo de situ orbis, a title that is still unexplained. He never completed the work and it is known only from incomplete copies. He subsequently undertook missions for the king along the coasts of Portugal and North Africa. In 1519 he became governor of the fortress and commercial entrepôt of São Jorge da Mina, in the Gulf of Guinea. Three years later he was arrested and imprisoned in Lisbon, presumably as the result of irregularities he had committed while in office. After regaining the king’s confidence, he was freed and was awarded a lifelong pension.

Pereira’s Esmeraldo may be considered a routier, or collection of sailing directions, with an introduction on contemporary seamanship. It has several novel aspects, and departs from the style of the medieval routiers, for example that by Pierre Garcie. The introduction contains such interesting elements as the “rules of the sun” for determining latitudes and information concerning tides.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The three published editions of the Esmeraldo de situ orbis are all based on surviving eighteenth-century copies. The 1st ed. (Lisbon, 1892) was published by Azevedo Bastos, in celebration of the fourth centenary of the discovery of America. The 2nd (Lisbon, 1905) contains philolgical comments by the editor A. E. Silva Dias. The 3rd ed. (Lisbon, 1954) was sponsored by the Academia Portuguesa de Historia and includes notes by Damial Peres.

II. Secondary Literature. J. Barradas de Carvalho has published a series of studies on Pereira and the significance of his book in University of São Paulo, Brazil, Revista de história (1966–1970).

Luís de Albuquerque