AHChallenge: Portugal Discovers America First

Ignoring the Vikings and the Chinese, what if Portuguese expedition discovered the New World earlier than Colombus?
Which explorer can achieved this journey? Where they're likely to land?
And what would they call the new continent?

Thanks in advance!
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The Portuguese would have landed in Brazil. (For a POD, Columbus fleet is sunk by a hurricane/storm.) The fastest way for a sailing to get from Portugal to the Tip of Africa is to travel west on the trade winds until the ship crosses the equator, then take the trade winds east back to Africa. This faster path takes a ship far from the Africa Coast, and it was just a mater of time til a Portuguese ship bumped into Brazil.


http://www.enchantedlearning.com/explorers/samerica.shtml See below for text.

CABRAL, PEDRO ALVARES
Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467-1520) was a Portuguese nobleman, explorer, and navigator who discovered Brazil on April 22,1500. His patron was King Manuel I of Portugal, who sent him on an expedition to India. Cabral's 13 ships left on March 9, 1500, following the route of Vasco da Gama. On April 22,1500, he sighted land (Brazil), claiming it for Portugal and naming it the "Island of the True Cross." King Manuel later renamed this land Holy Cross; it was later renamed Brazil, after a kind of dyewood found there, called pau-brasil. Cabral stayed in Brazil for 10 days and then continued on his way to India, in a trip fraught with shipwrecks (at the Cape of Good Hope), and fighting (with Muslim traders in India). After trading for spices in India, Cabral returned to Portugal on June 23, 1501, with only four of the original 13 ships. After this journey, King Manuel appointed Vasco da Gama to head the next expedition, and Cabral retired.
 
The problem is that the Portuguese did not needed it ... do not forget that it was a "shortcut" to the Indies, and the Portuguese had the infrastructure to arrive from west to east.

... Maybe they do it by accident? A ( really tough ) storm makes a ship to cape verde off course?
 
In EUII, I used to play Portugal. They got a guy - Deigo De Seniel or something like that - who could go into terra incognito in 1425 or something. I used to have the whole East Coast settled by the time Columbus arrived.

Silly game, but fun.

Mike Turcotte
 
What is this, a DBWI? :p Never heard of Jaime Cortesão's theory of secrecy? He once said something like "Unless proved otherwise, every land that was not yet discovered should be assumed to have been discovered by the Portuguese in the 1400s and kept as a state secret." Does this guy rock or what? :) (That's the one crazy thing about him: he actually does rock, btw).

It's an exaggeration, of course, but there are circumstantial evidences that the Portuguese had prior knowledge of the existence of land westwards and there are rumors of earlier expeditions in Canada.
That route BlondieBC mentioned in particular has generated several speculations that Cabral didn't find Brazil by accident but he was just taking possession of what was already known.

Speculations aside, it's an easy challenge. Both South & North America are not that far from the scope of the Portuguese expeditions. Have any drift away (or explore a lil' bit more to the west) and there you have it.
 
Easy. Columbus went first to Portugal and offered his services. The King refused and then our favorite explorer tried Spain. Just have the Portuguese King finance Columbus' expedition.

Other than that, maybe have Bartolomeu Dias get lost in 1488 and land in Brazil.
 
Regarding what they call the Americas, that depends on where they land. It may take a while, depending on where they are, to realize that it is a new continent rather than a few islands in the Atlantic. This could mean that another European power (most likely Spain) would get the jump on the name.

IOTL, they named the continents after a cartographer, and ITTL probably would name the continent as a whole after the explorer or whichever writer/cartographer manages to capture Europe's imagination first after the continent is discovered.
 
Top