The Brazilian natives help fill a ship with fine-grained timber, dye-wood, and presumably some of the buranhem wood or bark that gives the river its name.

Cabral sends the ship back to Lisbon with Caminha's oft-quoted letter to the king, the first report on Brazil to reach Europe.

As the rest of the fleet sets sail from what Cabral calls the Island of Vera Cruz for the Cape of Good Hope, two male convicts are left on the shore.

Rather than execute such degredados (outcasts), the Portuguese are instinctively creating an advance guard that will learn the local language and via intermarriage will give them in another generation the means to penetrate both the indigenous societies and the Brazilian land mass.