Recreating Caminha: The Earnest Adaptation of Brazil's Letter of Discovery in Humberto Mauro's Descobrimento do Brasil (1937)

Coinciding with the quincentenary of the Portuguese arrival in America in 1500, three Brazilian directors bookended the turn of the millennium with reconsiderations of the nation's colonial past. Luis Alberto Pereira's Hans Staden (1999), Lúzia Murat's Brava Gente Brasileira (2000), and Guel Arraes's Caramuru: A Invenção do Brasil (2001) return to a long-standing tendency among Brazilian filmmakers to reevaluate national origins and present-day conceptions of identity by probing the symbolic potential of the colonial period.¹ Such retrospective efforts to spark examinations of Brazilianness were monumentally inaugurated in sound cinema in 1937 by one of the nation's most renowned directors, Humberto Mauro.² Mauro's film revives Pero Vaz de Caminha's Carta, which in 1500 announced the arrival of the Portuguese to the land that would become Brazil. In this article I examine the director's reading and "writing" strategies in order to evaluate how he mines Caminha's narrative and inscribes his inevitably different but strikingly collusive version of the tale onto his own context. I additionally look at the means by which Mauro strives to guarantee the success of his message, how he writes the rules for the game of persuasion and manipulation that he enacts. Finally, I address some of the possible motives and contextual factors that led to Mauro's calculated recreation of Caminha.

On the first of May, in the year 1500, Caminha signed the letter to the Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel announcing Cabral's "accidental" arrival at the land that would be christened Brazil. However, it is possible that the fleet did not happen upon the continent as a result of an unplanned, month-long diversion from its intended course around Africa, as Cabral's scribe Caminha claims (156-57). Some have alleged that the Portuguese intended the revised trajectory and acted in response to a concern that the Spanish would claim the entire New World.³ If this is the case, Caminha's Carta, the official voice of the "discovery," offers more than a merely innocent description of the voyage. Indeed, the scribe's writing reveals objectives beyond documenting the presumably unintentional nature of Cabral's voyage to the Americas. He describes a land that possesses in abundance good, if savage, people, and Caminha urges the king that Portugal, having discovered a population primed for conversion to Christianity, should return with missionary expeditions. Caminha's text assigns no other value to the newly discovered land, thus discouraging possible fortune seekers. Moreover, by attributing to the Portuguese strictly evangelical motives in the New World Caminha not only legitimizes their continued presence in the Americas but also succeeds in presenting his people as altruistic and devout.

After scant lines relating the progress and arrival of the Portuguese, Caminha immerses his readers in detailed descriptions of the natives and their initial interaction with the Europeans. The writer's focus shifts in the second half of the letter to a passionate preoccupation with evangelism. He explains that the indigenous population is predisposed to Christianity and advocates their conversion:

Parece-me gente de tal inocência que, se homem os entendesse e eles a nós, seriam logo cristãos, porque eles, segundo parece, não têm, nem entendem em nenhuma crença. [...] E pois Nosso Senhor, que lhes deu bons corpos e bons rostos, como a bons homens, por aqui nos touxe, creio que não foi sem causa. Portanto Vossa Alteza, que tanto deseja acrescentar a santa fé católica, deve cuidar da sua salvação. E prazerá a Deus que com pouco trabalho seja assim.

(170-71)

They seem to me people of such innocence that, if one could understand them and they us, they would soon be Christians, because they do not have or understand...