CLAIMING amazonia.

• Author: McIntyre, Loren

Travelling over six thousand miles by foot and canoe, Pedro Teixeira won this immense territory for Portugal, changing the course of Brazil's history

When travelling in Brazil I sometimes wear a navy blue cap with "P20 Pedro Teixeira" printed in yellow above the bill. To my surprise, many Brazilians fail to recognize the name that should be honored above almost all others in the early history of their country. Were it not for Pedro Teixeira, most denizens of Amazonia today might be speaking Spanish, English, French, Dutch, or even Irish, instead of the noble tongue of the Lusiadas.

The cap was given to me over twenty years ago by the skipper of a river gunboat based in Manaus, in remembrance of my joining a voyage that promoted "civic action" along the Solimoes, helping settlers cope with illness, fixing broken-down generators, and repairing radios. "Although Pedro Teixeira won this region for Portugal," the skipper told me, "not a single river or town in all Brazil bears his name. We have only this ship to carry Teixeira's memory up and down the river and into distant tributaries."

There is no record of how tall Teixeira stood, but he was a giant of Brazilian history. Born in 1570 in Coimbra, Portugal, he was nearly seventy when he led an expedition across South America, over six thousand miles by canoe and foot from the mouth of the Amazon River to the crest of the high Andes. On the return trip, he laid claim to the Amazon Basin for Portugal.

Teixeira ranged nearly two thousand miles beyond Portugal's territorial limits under the Treaty of Tordesillas. In 1494, after Columbus's first voyage--yet long before anyone recognized the existence of the New World--Pope Alexander VI settled a territorial squabble between Spain and Portugal by drawing a line from pole to pole at about fifty degrees west longitude, a meridian that cut through the mouth of the as-yet-undiscovered Amazon River. The treaty allowed Spain to venture west of that meridian--a territory including most of the Americas, while Portugal could spread into lands east of the line: India, Africa, and--as it turned out--the entire bulge of eastern Brazil and its coastline. Although the Amazon Basin lay in the Spanish zone west of the line, by 1620 the Portuguese had gone slave-raiding five hundred miles upstream to replace natives of the huge Tupinamba nation of coastal Brazil, which had been devastated by one hundred years of slavery and warfare.

Meanwhile French, Dutch, English, and Irish colonists, ignoring the Treaty of Tordesillas, founded settlements around the mouth of the great river. They were quickly challenged by Portugal. Teixeira, cofounder of Para, whipped the French in 1614 at the battle of Guaxenduba. In 1616, with twenty soldiers and a canoe full of Tupinamba archers, he boarded a large Dutch ship one night at the mouth of the Xingu River. Driven off with losses and with Teixeira thrice wounded, Tupinamba bowmen destroyed the Dutch ship with flaming arrows. Later, Teixeira had a hand in putting an end to the colonization plans of Irishmen James Purcell and Bernard O'Brien.

In 1636 a canoe came down the Amazon and sparked events that transformed the fortunes of Teixeira and Brazil. The canoe carried two Franciscan friars from Ecuador, Domingo de Brieba and Andres de Toledo, with six Spanish soldiers and six Indians. They had escaped the massacre of their mission comrades by Encabellados Indians, three thousand miles upstream in the forested foothills of the Andes.

Startled by the arrival of Spaniards at his back door--one of whom, Brieba, was eager to return to Quito and might point the way--Para's governor, Jacome Raimundo de Noronha, seized the chance to carry out longstanding orders from...