Duarte Pacheco Pereira
Duarte Pacheco Pereira (* around 1469 in Lisbon, † 1533 ) was a Portuguese explorer, astronomer and geographer.
As birth years 1460 and 1475 and also given as the birthplace of Santarém.
He came of an old Portuguese noble family, 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 confidant of Henry the Navigator and was considered one of the richest men in Lisbon.
The Duarte Pacheco Pereira highly educated was the first geographer, who succeeded in roughly correct to calculate the scale of the meridian arc with a margin of error of less than 4 %.
The Portuguese King John II, at whose court he lived as a royal geographer and astronomer and worked, Duarte Pacheco Pereira specific to one of the Portuguese negotiator in the negotiations with Spain to the Treaty of Tordesillas. In this capacity he was in 1494 also one of the signatories of the agreement.
In the nineties of the 15th century a series of voyages are ascribed in the Atlantic Ocean, to verify the geographical conditions of the Treaty of Tordesillas. On one of these trips, he shall on behalf of the Portuguese King Manuel I, the end of 1498, ie, before Pedro Álvares Cabral landed at what is now the Brazilian coast. He would thus have been the first known to us Europeans, who has traveled the coasts of today's Brazilian states of Pará and Maranhão and the estuary of the Amazon.
In 1500 he married Antónia de Albuquerque, the daughter of a high royal official, with whom he had seven children.
On 1503, he was a commander of the Espírito Santo Nau to the captains, which were under the wing commander and later governor of India, Afonso de Albuquerque on his trip to India. As a part of the Portuguese fleet sailed back to Portugal, Duarte Pacheco Pereira Reserve left Albuquerque at the request of the Portuguese allied with the ruler of Cochin as commander in chief of the Portuguese forces in India. Under him were about 100 Portuguese soldiers with a series of canons and about 50 Portuguese sailors on a Nau and two caravels. Supported by about 300 Confederate soldiers from Malabar and about 5,000 warriors from Cochin, of which deserted the majority, he fought against an overwhelming coalition of Indian Rajas under the leadership of Samorims of Calicut, which had more than 150 ships and 50,000 warriors. After several successful minor skirmishes Duarte Pacheco Pereira succeeded in mid March 1504 through the skillful use of his artillery and ships a decisive victory over the ruler of Calicut.
This victory secured the Portuguese presence in India and was a substantial basis for the structure of the Portuguese empire in Asia. It is therefore not surprising that Luís de Camões, the Portuguese national poet, in the 10th canto of his Lusiads as " Aquiles Lusitano" ( the Portuguese Achilles ) called him.
1505 a triumphant reception, he was preparing for his return to Portugal. Because of his great military achievements gave him the king with great honors and income. As a result, Duarte Pacheco Pereira was one of the closest confidants of King Emanuel I.
In the years 1505-1508 he worked in his work De Situ Orbis Esmeraldo. In this work he is also vague one that King Emmanuel I have sent him to discover land to the west of the Atlantic ( Brazil? ). Ostensibly it is an incomplete account of his travels and remaining annotated Roteiros the east and west coasts of Africa, he sent him a handwritten manuscript to the King. His chief biographer, Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho, sees still more. For him, it is the processing and summary of the whole, gained up to that geographical and nautical knowledge of Portuguese navigator and explorer.
This work was subject to strict confidentiality and existed only in a few copies. Its content, however, had his contemporaries seemed so interesting that even in 1573 Philip II of Spain one of his spies in Lisbon, Giovanni Gesio, gave the order to procure a copy in secret.
1508 commissioned by the King to hunt down the French corsair Mondragon, he could hit in 1509 at Cape Finisterre and bringing into captivity.
Duarte Pacheco Pereira in 1511 commanded a fleet support in the fight against the Moors at Tangier.
From 1519 to 1522 he was governor ( " capitão - mór " ) of Elmina, one of the highest offices, the king had to forgive.
Under the new King John III. he fell out of favor due to slander and was imprisoned for several months, but without losing his annuity.
After 1524 Duarte Pacheco Pereira was released and rehabilitated and regained its confiscated income. These processes and the fact that his eldest son, João Fernandes Pacheco, the court Johann III. also lived and moved into a royal annuity, raises doubts that Duarte Pacheco Pereira " lonely and in poverty " had died, as some authors claim.
Place of death and year of death of Duarte Pacheco Pereira are not clearly understood. In particular, the years 1530 and 1533 are called. What is certain is that in 1526 he still alive, but in 1534 had already died.