Pedro Alvares Cabral's fleet, which is en…
1500 CE
Pedro Alvares Cabral's fleet, which is en route to India, lands at Porto Seguro in what is now the state of Bahia in 1500.
The territory that comprises modern Brazil has a native popu\lation in the millions, divided among hundreds of tribes and language groups.
Their ancestors have lived in this land for as long as thirty thousand years.
There is no way to be certain of the exact size of the population or its distribution.
Many areas that are inhabited in 1500 will later be stripped bare by epidemics or slave hunters, but scholars have attempted to make estimates based on contemporary reports and the supposed carrying capacity of the land.
For Brazil's Amazon Basin alone, demographer William M. Denevan has suggested three million six hundred and twenty-five thousand people, with another four million eight hundred thousand in other regions.
Other estimates place five million inhabitants in Amazonia alone.
More conservatively, British historian John Hemming estimates two million four hundred and thirty-one thousand people for Brazil as a whole.
These figures are based on known tribes, although many unknown ones probably died out in the devastating epidemics of the colonial era.
Certainly, the indigenous population exceeds that of Portugal itself.
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