Duarte Pacheco Pereira

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Duarte Pacheco Pereira (* around 1469 in Lisbon ; † 1533 ibid) was a Portuguese navigator , general , mathematician , astronomer , natural scientist and geographer and, thanks to his many outstanding talents, was considered one of the most brilliant thinkers of his time, as well as a universal scholar .

Duarte Pacheco Pereira

The years of birth are also given as 1460 and 1475 and Santarém as the place of birth .

Life path

He came from an old Portuguese noble family and was the son of João Pacheco and Isabel Pereira. He came to the court of King John II , where he received extensive training in navigation, astronomy and geography. His paternal grandfather, Gonçalo Lopes Pacheco, was a confidante of Henry the Navigator and was considered one of the richest men in Lisbon.

The highly educated Duarte Pacheco Pereira was the first geographer who succeeded in calculating the graduation of the meridional arcs almost correctly with an error deviation of less than 4%. He also documented the tides in the Indian Ocean and used them for warfare.

As a scientist, he first described the use of tools in animals in 1506 . He wrote in his diary, which is now in Torre do Tombo , that chimpanzees have the ability to use tools. A theory that was only confirmed in 1921, around 400 years later.

The Portuguese King John II , at whose court he lived and worked as a royal geographer and astronomer, appointed Duarte Pacheco Pereira as one of the Portuguese negotiators in the negotiations with Spain on the Treaty of Tordesillas . In this capacity he was also one of the signatories of the contract in 1494.

In the 1490s, he is credited with a number of sea voyages in the Atlantic to review the geographic features of the Treaty of Tordesillas. On one of these trips he is said to have landed on what is now the Brazilian coast on behalf of the Portuguese King Emanuel I at the end of 1498, ie before Pedro Álvares Cabral . He would have been the first known European to sail the coasts of today's Brazilian states Pará and Maranhão as well as the mouth of the Amazon .

Around 1500 he married Antónia de Albuquerque, the daughter of a high royal official, with whom he had seven children.

In 1503 he was in command of the Nau Espírito Santo to the captains who were subordinate to the squadron commodore and later governor of India , Afonso de Albuquerque , on his journey to India. When part of the Portuguese fleet sailed back to Portugal, Albuquerque Duarte left Pacheco Pereira at the request of the ruler of Cochin, who was allied with the Portuguese, as commander in chief of the Portuguese troops in India and commander of the first colony of Fort Manuel . About 100 Portuguese soldiers with a number of cannons and about 50 Portuguese sailors on a Nau and two caravels were subordinate to him . Supported by around 300 allied warriors from Malabar and around 5,000 warriors from Cochin, the majority of whom deserted, he fought against an overpowering coalition of Indian Rajas under the leadership of the Samorim of Calicut , which had around 200 ships and around 50,000 warriors should. After a few successful smaller battles, Duarte Pacheco Pereira achieved a decisive victory over the ruler of Kalikut in mid-March 1504 through the skillful use of his artillery and ships . He is considered to be one of the first people to study the relationship between the phases of the moon and the tides in more detail. Fort Manuel , into which the Portuguese had withdrawn, was surrounded by numerous streams and canals at the end of a headland. This enabled Pereira to calculate where and when the Indians had to attack in order to pass the fords. This gave the Portuguese the opportunity with their grapeshot to position stocked artillery there and to massage where the Indian coalition had also then actually attack. He also constructed traps for the fords, such as sharpened tree stakes ( similar to the so-called Rommel asparagus used in World War II ), which were embedded in the fords just below the surface of the water and tore open the Indian landing craft. As a result of the measures, thousands of Samorin soldiers were killed, while the Portuguese suffered practically no losses.

This victory secured the Portuguese presence in India and was an essential foundation for building the Portuguese empire in Asia. It is therefore not surprising that Luís de Camões , the Portuguese national poet, called him " Aquiles Lusitano " (the Portuguese Achilles) " with a pen in one hand and a sword in the other " in Canto 10 of his Lusiads .

In 1505 he received a triumphant welcome on his return to Portugal. Because of his great military achievements, the king presented him with great honors and income. As a result, Duarte Pacheco Pereira became one of the closest confidante of King Emanuel I.

In the years 1505 to 1508 he worked on his work Esmeraldo De Situ Orbis . In this work he also vaguely mentions that King Emanuel I sent him to discover land in the west of the Atlantic (Brazil?). At first sight it is an incomplete report of his travels and commented Roteiros of the East and West African coasts, which he sent to the king as a handwritten manuscript. His most important biographer, Joaquím Barradas de Carvalho, sees it even more. For him it is about the processing and summary of the entire geographical and nautical knowledge of the Portuguese navigators and explorers that has been acquired up to that point.

This work was strictly confidential and existed only in a few copies. Its content must have seemed so interesting to contemporaries that in 1573 Philip II of Spain commissioned one of his spies in Lisbon, Giovanni Gesio, to secretly obtain a copy.

In 1508 the king commissioned him to hunt down the French corsair Mondragon, whom he defeated and captured at Cape Finisterre in 1509 .

In 1511 Duarte Pacheco Pereira commanded a support fleet in the fight against the Moors for Tangier .

From 1519 to 1522 he was governor (" capitão-mór ") of Elmina , one of the highest offices that the king had to assign.

Under the new King John III. he fell out of favor due to defamation and was incarcerated for several months without losing his annual pension.

After 1524, Duarte Pacheco Pereira was released and rehabilitated and received back his confiscated income. These events as well as the fact that his eldest son, João Fernandes Pacheco, at the court of John III. lived and also received a royal annual pension, raises doubts that Duarte Pacheco Pereira died "lonely and in poverty", as some authors claim.

The place and year of death of Duarte Pacheco Pereira are not clear. Especially the years 1530 and 1533 are mentioned. What is certain is that he was still alive in 1526 but died in 1534.

literature

  • Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho:
    • 1. O Renascimento Português. Em busca da sua especificidade, Lisboa, 1980;
    • 2. Portugal e as Origens do Pensamento Moderno, Lisboa, 1981;
    • 3. La Renaissance Portugaise. À la recherche de sa specificité, Paris, 1978.

On the problem of the discovery of Brazil, compare:

  • Jorge Couto, A construção do Brasil, Lisboa, 1998.

Web links

Commons : Duarte Pacheco Pereira  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roger Crowley : The Conquerors: Portugal's Struggle for a World Empire . Translation Norbert Juraschitz; Hans Freundl. Darmstadt: Theiss, 2016
  2. ↑ Elaine Sanceau: Indies Adventure: the Amazing Career of Afonso de Albuquerque , Captain-General and Governor of India (1509-1515). Blackie, 1936, p. 15
personal data
SURNAME Pereira, Duarte Pacheco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese navigator, astronomer and geographer
DATE OF BIRTH around 1469
PLACE OF BIRTH Lisbon
DATE OF DEATH 1533
Place of death Lisbon