Location: 354 km (220 miles) Northeast of the Brazil shore Map
Area: 26 km2 (10 sq mi)
Fernando de Noronha is a Brazilian archipelago
from the state of Pernambuco. Made up of 21 islands, islets and
cliffs of volcanic origin, it occupies a total area of 26 km² - 17
km² of which is the main island - and is located in the Atlantic
Ocean northeast of mainland Brazil, 545 km from the Pernambuco
capital Recife, and 360 km from Natal in Rio Grande do Norte. The
commercial center of the island is the urban core of Vila dos
Remédios. The administration of the National Park is currently in
charge of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation
(ICMBio).
First sighted between 1500 and 1502, its discovery
is attributed to an expedition led by the explorer Fernão de
Loronha, although there is controversy; however it is certain that
the first to describe it was Américo Vespucci, in an expedition
carried out between 1503 and 1504. The first hereditary captaincy of
Brazil, the archipelago suffered constant invasions of English,
French and Dutch between the 16th and 18th centuries. On September
24, 1700, Fernando de Noronha became, by royal letter, a dependency
of Pernambuco, the captaincy with which he already had a historical
connection. In 1736, the island was invaded by the French East India
Company, renamed Isle Dauphine, but the following year an expedition
sent by Recife expelled the French.
In 1942, with the Second
World War, the archipelago became federal territory, whose acronym
was FN, to serve as an advanced base of war; but returned to the
Pernambuco administration four and a half decades later, in 1988.
Currently Fernando de Noronha is a state district of Pernambuco, and
is managed by a general administrator appointed by the state
government.
Following a campaign led by environmentalist José
Truda Palazzo Júnior, on October 14, 1988 most of the archipelago
was declared a National Park, with about 11 270 ha, for the
protection of endemic species there and the spinner dolphins
concentration area. (Stenella longirostris), which meet daily at
Dolphin Bay - the most regular observation site of the species on
the entire planet. In 2001 UNESCO declared Fernando de Noronha a
World Heritage Site.
Discovery
Many controversies mark the discovery of the
archipelago by Europeans. At least three names - St. Lawrence, St.
John and Lent - have been associated with the island at the time of
its discovery. What is known for certain is that several expeditions
reached the Brazilian coast between 1500 and 1503 and that the
existence of the archipelago was known in Lisbon at least before
January 16, 1504, when King Manuel I of Portugal made mercy. from
"São João Island" to Fernão de Loronha - knight of His House, young
Christian, great merchant and shipowner - as a hereditary captaincy,
citing the beneficiary as discoverer of the island.
The
island had undoubtedly been discovered some time before that, but
for over a century the author, the precise date, and the
circumstances of the find have given rise to much debate. One of the
proposals is that it was discovered by a Portuguese mapping
expedition that was sent in May 1501. The 1501 expedition is also
known as Américo Vespucci's "third voyage" (and his first under the
Portuguese flag). Vespucci relates this expedition twice - first in
a letter to Lorenzo Pietro Francesco de Medici, written in early
1503, and again in his letters to Piero Soderini, written in
1504-1505. In his letter Vespucci does not mention the name of the
captain of this 1501 expedition and his identity has been
speculated. The 16th century chronicler Gaspar Correia suggested
that it was André Gonçalves. Greenlee (1945) analyzed several
possible names - and settled on the conjecture that it could be
Fernão de Loronha himself, a hypothesis also suggested by Duarte
Leite (1923). Loronha may have been credited with the discovery as
the principal financier of a consortium of traders that aimed to
exploit the rich redwood forests, which had been in business by
royal mercy since 1501, and which maintained active trade until
about the 1990s. 1540. Undoubtedly Loronha was one of the financiers
of the expedition of 1503-1504, under the command of Captain Gonçalo
Coelho, who took Vespucci aboard, and Loronha may have been aboard
one of the ships that on July 24, 1503 sighted. the island then
called Lent, later renamed St. John's Island, which would later bear
its name. However, recent historiography considers it unlikely that
Loronha personally participated in any of the trips.
Rabbit's
expedition is also known as Vespucci's "Fourth Voyage" and is
reported in the letter to Soderini. The expedition's flagship struck
a reef and sank near the island and the crew and cargo had to be
rescued. On Rabbit's orders, Vespucci anchored on the island and
spent a week there, while the rest of Rabbit's fleet lay south. In
his letter to Soderini, Vespucci describes an uninhabited island and
recounts its name as "São Lourenço Island" (August 10 is the feast
day of St. Lawrence, it was a custom of Portuguese explorations to
name places according to the liturgical calendar). Historians have
also hypothesized that a lost ship from the Rabbit fleet, under the
command of an unknown captain, may have returned to the island
(probably on August 29, 1503, the day of the feast of the
decapitation of St. John the Baptist). to catch Vespucci, but did
not find him or anyone else and returned to Lisbon with the news.
Vespucci, in his letter, states that he left the island on August
18, 1503 and on his arrival in Lisbon a year later, on September 7,
1504, the people of the city were surprised, since "had been told"
that the ship had been lost. Since Vespucci did not return to Lisbon
until September 1504, the discovery must have been earlier. The main
problem for the versions that rely on the famous Letter to Soderini
is that modern criticism regards the letter as a forgery.
An island called Quaresma, much like Fernando de Noronha Island,
appears in the Cantino Planisphere of 1502. Alberto Cantino's map
was composed by an anonymous Portuguese cartographer and completed
before November 1502, well before Coelho's expedition. be
established. This led to speculation that the island was discovered
by a previous expedition. However, there is no consensus on which
expedition could have pioneered. The name, "Lent", suggests that the
archipelago must have been discovered in March or early April, which
does not correspond well with known expeditions. There is also a
mysterious red island to the left of Quaresma on the Cantino map,
which does not fit the island of Fernando de Noronha. Some have
explained these anomalies by reading Lent as anaresma (of unknown
meaning, but avoiding the Lent period), and proposing that the red
island is just an accidental inkblot. Some modern historians have
proposed that the Fernando de Noronha archipelago is not represented
on the Cantino map. Instead, they proposed that Quaresma Island and
the accompanying red "inkblot" are actually Rocas Atoll, a bit out
of place on the map. Roukema concluded that the Rock Atoll was
discovered by the "lost ship", which returned on March 16, 1502,
well within the time of Lent.
According to Vespucci, the 1501
expedition returned to Lisbon in September 1502, still in time to
influence the final composition of the Cantino map. Unfortunately,
Vespucci does not report discovering this island; indeed, it is
quite clear that the first time he (and his fellow sailors) saw the
island was on the Rabbit expedition in 1503. However, a letter
written by the Venetian emissary Pascualigo on October 12, 1502, and
quoted in Marino Sanuto's diary reports that a ship arrived from
"parrotland" in Lisbon on July 22, 1502 (three months before
Vespucci). This could be a lost ship from the prematurely returned
mapping expedition for which there is no information yet. The moment
of his famous arrival (July 1502) makes it possible that he passed
the island sometime in March 1502 on his return trip, well into the
Lenten period.
Another theory is that the island was
discovered in 1500, shortly after the arrival of the Second Armada
of India, under the leadership of Pedro Alvares Cabral. After his
brief stop on land in Porto Seguro, Bahia, Cabral dispatched a
supply ship under the command of Gaspar de Lemos or André Gonçalves
back to Lisbon to report the discovery. This returning supply vessel
would have headed north along the Brazilian coast and may have
reached the island of Fernando de Noronha and reported its existence
to the Lisbon government in July 1500. However, this contradicts the
name Quaresma, since the supply ship departed well after the time of
Lent. A fourth (unlikely) possibility is that the island was
discovered by João da Nova's Third Indian Armada, which departed
from Lisbon in March or April 1501 and arrived back in September
1502, also in time to influence the Cantino Planisphere. .
Chronicler Gaspar Correia states that on the outward journey, the
Third Armada made a stop on the Brazilian coast around Cabo de Santo
Agostinho. Two other chroniclers (João de Barros and Damião de Góis)
do not mention the mainland, but they report the discovery of an
island (which they believe to be identified as Ascension Island, but
this is not certain). However, the schedule is very tight: Easter
was on April 11, 1501, while the expected departure date of the
Lisbon Third Armada varies from March 5 to April 15, leaving not
enough time to reach these locations within Lent
The
transition from the name of "St. John" to "Fernando de Noronha" was
probably only by natural use. The royal charter, dated May 20, 1559,
to descendants of the Noronha family, still refers to the island by
its official name, São João Island. However, in other places, for
example, Martim Afonso de Sousa's logbook in the 1530s he referred
to the archipelago as "Fernão de Noronha Island" ("Noronha" was a
common misspelling of "Loronha"). The informal name eventually
became the official name.
Colonization and modern era
The merchant Fernão de Loronha not only received the island as an
hereditary captaincy, but also from 1501 until 1512 held a monopoly
over trade in Brazil. Between 1503 and 1512, the agents of Loronha
set up a series of warehouses (trading posts) along the Brazilian
coast and engaged in the redwood trade (a native wood that served as
a red dye and was highly prized by European couturiers) with local
indigenous peoples. The island of Fernando de Noronha was the
central collection point of this network.
The redwood,
continually harvested by the coastal Indians and delivered to the
various coastal warehouses, was sent to the central warehouse on the
archipelago, which was visited by a larger transport vessel taking
the collected cargo back to Europe. Following the expiration of the
Loronha business license in 1512, the organization of the redwood
company was taken over by the Portuguese crown, but Loronha and its
descendants maintained private ownership of the island as hereditary
captaincy until at least the 1560s. Although valuable As a trading
post, the first grantee expressed no interest in populating the
island he baptized. Although the "sea captaincy" was extinct, his
possession remained in Loronha's offspring - nor did he care about
it - until September 24, 1700. According to the IBGE, "the grantee
never took possession of his abandoned lands which attracted the
attentions of many peoples, among which the Germans (who approached
it in 1534), the French (also in approaches in 1556, 1558 and 1612),
the English (in 1577), the Dutch (who settled there for 25 years,
between 1629 and 1654) and the French (who lived there a year,
between 1736 and 1737) ".
There is news of sending to the
island of convicts, galleys and military condemned since the
seventeenth century. In 1612 the Capuchin missionary Claude
d'Abbeville was on the island for a few days, reporting the
existence of "a Portuguese in the company of seventeen or eighteen
Indians, men, women, and children, all slaves, and exiled here by
the inhabitants of Pernambuco." . During the period of Dutch
domination (1630-1654), the archipelago was leased to Michel de
Pavw, renamed Pavonia. He continued to receive outcasts, now Dutch.
Returning to the possession of the archipelago, at the end of the
seventeenth century the Portuguese understood that it was necessary
to fortify it. This only happened later, after a Royal Charter of
September 24, 1700 attached it to the Pernambuco Captaincy. In 1736
the island was invaded by the French East India Company, renamed
Isle Dauphine, but the following year an expedition sent by Recife
expelled the French.
In 1739 Pereira Freire organized the
island government, which was renamed Fernando de Noronha Prison.
With this, the fortifications project, carried out by the military
engineer Diogo de Silveira Veloso, was carried out, and the urban
centers of Vila dos Remédios and Quixaba were erected. At the end of
the eighteenth century the prison had five regular fortifications,
with 54 guns. The garrison had 213 squares, 190 officers, 144
soldiers, 20 gunners and 30 Indians. There were still 6 civil
servants, two chaplains, a bailiff, a warehouse clerk, a surgeon and
a bleeder.
In 1817 Captain José de Barros Falcão de Lacerda was appointed to
dismantle the fortifications and bring the military detachment and
the sentenced to Pernambuco, but on October 3, 1833 the island
became a destination for those sentenced to galleys for the crime of
counterfeiting and grades. In 1844 there were 187 prisoners,
including 4 women, 75 of whom were sentenced to galley, 28 to prison
with forced labor and 84 to simple prison. A decree of March 5, 1859
updated its prison vocation, making it the fate of those condemned
to imprisonment "when in the place where the sentence was to be
executed, there was no secure arrest, in this case preceding the
order of the Government." The decree specified that there would be
sentenced to galleys for counterfeiting, military sentenced to six
years or more of public works or fortifications, military sentenced
to galleys for more than two years, and the deposed. The conditions
were terrible. A mid-nineteenth-century report by war ministers
states that “it was repugnant to the feelings of humanity and the
most trivial precepts of decency that the barbaric practice of
depriving these unfortunate segregates from the rest of the world
until the indispensable to feed and cover their lives continues.
nudity. "In 1873 there were 1,414 prisoners, and at that time
thought to reform the prison and turn it into an agricultural penal
colony, but nothing changed. In 1885 the island housed 2,364
prisoners, and it was difficult to keep them under control,
exemplary punishments were imposed that caused scandal. Press
reports cite harassment and trunk punishments, and many were accused
of abuse and maladministration. After 1889 the Republican Government
recognized “the abuses and irregularities that have been widely
reported for many years are very serious. inspector committees
”during the imperial government, while recognizing that“ the
difficulties of repression and Decree No. 854 of October 13, 1890
created the Judge of Law with full civil and criminal jurisdiction,
the public prosecutor and registrar of Fernando de Noronha. In 1891
the archipelago was integrated to the State of Pernambuco,
maintaining a prison run by the State Secretariat of Justice, which
operated until 1910.
Scientific expeditions
Captain Henry
Foster stopped on the island during his scientific research
expedition as commander of the HMS Chantecler, which was established
in 1828. To survey the ocean's back and currents, Foster used a
Kater pendulum to make observations on gravity. He used the island
as the junction point of his double line of longitudes that
established his research. He was given considerable assistance by
the Governor of Fernando Noronha, who let Foster use part of his own
home for the pendulum experiments. Foster's Rio de Janeiro longitude
was among those on one side of a significant discrepancy, which
meant that the South American charts were in doubt.
To
address this, the Admiralty instructed Captain Robert FitzRoy to
command the HMS Beagle on a research expedition. One of his
essential tasks was a stop at Fernando Noronha to confirm his exact
longitude, using the 22 timers on board the ship to give accurate
observation time. They arrived on the island in the late evening of
February 19, 1832, anchoring at midnight. On February 20, FizRoy
landed on a small piece of land to take observations, despite the
difficulties caused by strong waves, and then sailed to Bahia later
that night.
During the day, the island was visited by
naturalist Charles Darwin, who was one of the passengers of the HMS
Beagle. He made notes for his book on geology. He wrote of his
admiration for the woods: "The whole island is a forest and is so
densely interconnected that it takes a lot of effort to get
through." "But I'm sure all the greatness of the tropics has not yet
been seen by me ..." "We have not seen showy birds, no hummingbirds.
No large flowers." His experiences in Fernando de Noronha were
recorded in his diary, later published as The Voyage of the Beagle.
He also included a brief description of the island in his 1844
Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands, based on
observations from HMS Beagle's voyage.
In the early twentieth century, the British even provided technical cooperation in telegraphy (The South American Company). Later, the French came with French Cable and the Italians with Italcable.