Name of Brazil
The name was given in the early 16th century to the territories leased to the merchant consortium led by Fernão de Loronha, to exploit brazilwood for the production of wood dyes for the European textile industry.
Shortly upon his return to Lisbon, Vespucci authored a famous letter to his former employer Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici characterizing the Brazilian landmass as a continent and calling it a "New World".
In 1507, Vespucci's letters were reprinted in the volume Cosmographiae Introductio put out by a German academy, which contains the famous map by Martin Waldseemüller with the Brazilian landmass designated by the name America.
[7] 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.
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.
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.
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").
[9] 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 maritime pilot, which contained a depiction of the "terra do brasyll".
[11] 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"[12] The Santa Cruz ("Holy Cross") name did not disappear altogether.
"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".
[17] Many 14th-century nautical maps denoted a phantom island called insula brasil in the north Atlantic Ocean, usually circular in shape and located just southwest of Ireland.
[17] Such an island might have been spoken of in legendary old Irish immrama, then filtered into seafarer's tales, before being incorporated into maps by Italian cartographers, beginning with the 1325-30 portolan chart of Angelino Dalorto.
