João Faras

The celebrated 1500 letter of Mestre João Faras was discovered in the Portuguese royal archives by the historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, and published for the first time in 1843.

[2] In his 1500 letter, Mestre João identifies himself simply as a bacherel of arts and medicine ('bachelor' was a general term for someone with formal learning) and a personal physician and surgeon of the King Manuel I of Portugal.

Besides the 1500 letter, the only other concrete clue about Mestre João's existence is an (unpublished) manuscript translation of Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis from Latin into imperfect Castilian.

Mestre João Faras was probably specifically charged to find a way of determining the position of the ship by the stars in the Southern Hemisphere, a difficulty which had not yet been overcome.

Since the time of Prince Henry the Navigator, "compass error" (the exact deviation of the magnetic north from the true north) could be corrected in the northern hemisphere by recourse to the position of northern Pole Star (observed on board via the quadrant), thus allowing navigators to determine the correct position of the ship.

On 22 April 1500, Cabral's armada sighted the land coast of Brazil, and anchored a couple of days later at Cabrália Bay (just north of Porto Seguro, Bahia), where they were met by local Tupiniquim Indians.

In a curious passage in his letter (that has since produced much speculation), Mestre João advised the king to consult an old mapa mundi then in the possession of the Portuguese navigator Pêro Vaz da Cunha (nicknamed Bisagudo) in Lisbon, which depicted these very islands (modern historians speculate this might be a copy of the 1448 map of Andrea Bianco).

Mestre João Faras's conclusion that they were on an island was probably shared by Pedro Álvares Cabral and certainly by the secretary Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who wrote up the official report.

[12] On 1 May 1500, both Pêro Vaz de Caminha and Mestre João Faras wrote their separate letters to King Manuel I of Portugal, signed from the location of Vera Cruz (the name Cabral bestowed on the 'island').

He rounded off his letter on a pessimistic note, suggesting that it was probably better for ships to continue trying to navigate by the altitude of the sun (via the astrolabe), rather than hoping to find the Southern Pole Star with a quadrant.