The etymology of "Brazil" stems from brazilwood, its earliest commercially exploited product.
In Portuguese brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology "red like an ember", formed from Latin brasa ("ember") and the suffix -il (from -iculum or -ilium).[1][2][3] In Tupi it is called ibirapitanga (literally "red wood").
The land of what became Brazil was first called Ilha de Vera Cruz ("Island of the True Cross") by the Portuguese captain Pedro Álvares Cabral, upon the Portuguese discovery of the land in 1500, for the Feast of the Cross (May 3 on the liturgical calendar). It was quickly renamed Terra de Santa Cruz ("Land of the Holy Cross"), when it was realized it was not an island. Curiously, Italian merchants in Lisbon, who interviewed the returning crews in 1501, recorded its name as the "Land of Parrots" (Terra di Papaga).[4]
From 1502 to 1512, the Portuguese claim on Brazil was leased by the crown to a Lisbon merchant consortium led by Fernão de Loronha for commercial exploitation. Loronha set up an extensive enterprise along the coast focusing on the harvesting of brazilwood. A dyewood that produces a deep red dye, reminiscent of the color of glowing embers, brazilwood was much in demand by the European cloth industry and previously had to be imported from India at great expense. Loronha is estimated to have harvested some 20,000 quintals of brazilwood on the Brazilian coast by 1506. By the 1510s, French interlopers from the Atlantic clothmaking ports of Normandy and Brittany, began to also routinely visit the Brazilian coast to do their own (illegal) brazilwood harvesting.
It was during Loronha's tenure that the name began to transition to Terra do Brasil ("Land of Brazil") and its inhabitants to Brasileiros. Although some commentators suspect Loronha, as a New Christian (a converted Jew), might have been reluctant to refer to it after the True Cross, the truth is probably more mundane. It was rather common for 15th- and 16th-century Portuguese to refer to distant lands by their commercial product rather than their proper name, e.g. Madeira island and the series of coasts of West Africa (Melegueta Coast, Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, Slave Coast), etc. Brazil simply followed that pattern. Brazilwood harvesting was doubtlessly the principal and often sole objective of European visitors to Brazil in the early part of the 16th C.
First suggestion of the new name is found in the Cantino planisphere (1502), where the label Rio D Brasil ("river of brazil") is given near Porto Seguro, just below the São Francisco River, almost certainly an indicator of a river where ample brazilwood could be found on its shores.[5]. That label is repeated on subsequent maps (e.g. Caneiro map). The generalization from that river to the land as a whole followed soon enough. Already Duarte Pacheco Pereira, in his Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (c.1506-09), refers to the entire coast as the terra do Brasil daleem do mar Ociano ("land of Brazil beyond the Ocean sea").[6] The term is also found in a letter, dated April 1, 1512, from Afonso de Albuquerque to the king, referring to a map of a Javanese pilot, which contained a depiction of the terra do brasyll.[7]. The 1516 map of Martin Waldseemüller refers to it as Brasilia sive Terra Papagalli ("Brasilia, or the Land of Parrots").[8] (in his earlier and more celebrated 1507 map, Waldseemüller famously called it simply "America", after Amerigo Vespucci, who had documented the 1501 mapping expedition). The first "official" use of the term appears in 1516, when King Manuel I of Portugal invested the Portuguese captain Cristóvão Jacques as governador das partes do Brasil ("governor of the parts of Brazil"), and again in 1530, when King John III designated Martim Afonso de Sousa as captain of the armada "which I send to the land of Brazil"[9]
The "Santa Cruz" (Holy Cross) name did not disappear altogether. In the 1527 map of the Visconte Maggiolo it re-appears in the dual label, "Terre Sante Crusis de lo Brasil e del Portugal" (Land of the Holy Cross of Brazil and of Portugal"). Years later, in 1552, the chronicler João de Barros grumbled at the change in name. He noted that, before leaving, Pedro Álvares Cabral erected a huge wooden cross with great solemnity as the marker of the land, but later, because brazilwood was brought from this land, "this name (Brazil) became stuck in the mouth of the people, and the name Santa Cruz was lost, as if the name of some wood which tinctured cloths was more important than that wood which has tinctured all the Sacraments by which we were saved, by the blood of the Christ Jesus, which was spilled upon it.". Barros goes on to moan that he can do little but remind his readers of the solemnity of the original name, and urge them to use it lest, on Judgment Day, "they be accused of being worshippers of brazilwood" rather than worshippers of the True Cross. "For the honor of such a great land let us call it a province, and say the 'Province of Holy Cross', which sounds better among the prudent than 'Brazil', which was placed vulgarly without consideration and is an unfit name for these properties of the royal crown" [10] This sentiment is also expressed by other chroniclers, e.g. Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (c.1554) notes that Cabral "named it the land of Holy Cross, and that later this name was lost and remained that of Brasil, for love of brazilwood"[11] and Damião de Góis (1566) notes Cabral erected a stone cross and "placed the name Holy Cross, which is now, (erroneously) called Brazil, because of the red wood that comes from it, which they call Brazil."[12]
The connection to the brazilwood harvest is also found in the demonym for the country. In the Portuguese language, an inhabitant of Brazil is referred to as a Brasileiro. But the common rules of the language reserves the suffix -eiro to denote occupations, rather than inhabitants (which are usually given the suffix -ano). The English equivalent is the suffix -er for occupations (e.g. baker, shoemaker) and the suffix "-an" for demonyms (e.g. Indian, American). If this rule was followed, an inhabitant of Brazil should have been known (in Portuguese) as a Brasiliano. But uniquely among Portuguese demonyms, they are instead referred to as a Brasileiro, an occupation. That too stemmed from Loronha's time, when a brasileiro was a reference to a "brazilwood cutter", a job invariably undertaken by the Tupí Indians on the coast. The name of the occupation was simply extended to refer to all the inhabitants of the country.
While the brazilwood root of Brazil is generally accepted, it has been occasionally challenged. Among the alternative hypotheses is that it is named after the legendary island of "Brasil".[13] Many 14th C. nautical maps often denoted a phantom island called insula brasil in the north Atlantic Ocean, usually circular in shape and located just southwest of Ireland. Although its source is uncertain, it is sometimes believed this "brasil" stems from Celtic word bress, which means 'to bless', and that the island was named "Hy-Brasil", or "Island of the Blessed".[13] Such an island might have been spoken of in legendary old Irish immrama, that filtered into seafarer's tales and was incorporated by Italian cartographers, beginning with the 1325-30 portolan chart of Angelino Dalorto.[14]
It is not, however, the only use of "brasil" to denote an Atlantic island. e.g. the 1351 Medici Atlas denotes two islands of "brasil", one traditionally placed off Ireland, the other in the Azores archipelago, in the location of Terceira Island. The 'brasil' in this case could be a reference either to the island's volcanic complex, or a reference to dragon's blood, a valuable red resin dye found on that island. The island of "brasil" is also used to designate Aruba in the Cantino planisphere.
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