Duarte Pacheco Pereira

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Duarte Pacheco Pereira was a 15th century Portuguese sea captain, explorer and cartographer. He travelled particularly in the central Atlantic Ocean west of the Cape Verde islands, along the coast of West Africa and to India.

In 1488 he explored the west coast of Africa. His expedition fell ill with fever and lost their ship. Pacheco Pereira was rescued from the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea by Bartolomeu Dias when Dias was returning from rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

Recent research shows he discovered Brazil in 1498, two years before the 1500 voyage to Brazil by Pedro Álvares Cabral, who is generally regarded as the first European to discover Brazil. However, this fact was kept secret by the Portuguese Crown.

In 1504 Pacheco Pereira helped defend a Portuguese trading station at Kochi (Cochin) in India, from attacks by the ruler of Kozhikode (Calicut). With vastly outnumbered Portuguese troops, he successfully resisted attacks from Indians for five months. For this he was honoured by the king on his return to Portugal in 1505.

His diary (1506), preserved in the Portuguese National Archive (Torre do Tombo), is probably the first European document to acknowledge that chimpanzees built their own rudimentary tools. Between 1505 and 1508 he wrote a book, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, which was not published until the nineteenth century, probably due to Portugal's official censorship of documents about its discoveries.^[1]