page_title: Fernando de Noronha
section_title: Discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Fernando de Noronha / History / Discovery
caption_attribution_description: This file was uploaded with Commonist. Hrvatski: Satelitska snimka otoka Fernando de Noronha English: Satellite picture of Fernando de Noronha
context_page_description: Fernando de Noronha is an archipelago of 21 islands and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, 354 km offshore from the Brazilian coast. The archipelago's name is a corruption of the name of the Portuguese merchant Fernão de Loronha, to whom it was given by the Portuguese crown for services rendered regarding wood imported from Brazil. Only the homonymous main island is inhabited; it has an area of 18.4 km² and a population estimated at 2,718 in 2012. The archipelago's total area is 26 km².
  The islands are administratively unique in Brazil. They form a "state district" that is not part of any municipality and is administered directly by the government of the state of Pernambuco. The state district's jurisdiction also includes the very remote Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago, located 625 kilometres northeast of Fernando de Noronha. 70% of the islands' area was established in 1988 as a national maritime park.
  In 2001, UNESCO designated it as a World Heritage Site because of the importance of its environment. Its time zone is UTC−02:00 all year round.
context_section_description: Many controversies mark the discovery of the archipelago by Europeans. At least three names – São Lourenço, São João, and Quaresma – have been associated with the island around the time of its discovery.
  Based on the written record, Fernando de Noronha island was discovered on August 10, 1503, by a Portuguese expedition, organized and financed by a private commercial consortium headed by the Lisbon merchant Fernão de Loronha.  The expedition was under the overall command of captain Gonçalo Coelho and carried the Italian adventurer Amerigo Vespucci aboard, who wrote an account of it. The flagship of the expedition hit a reef and foundered near the island, and the crew and contents had to be salvaged. On Coelho's orders, Vespucci anchored at the island, and spent a week there, while the rest of the Coelho fleet went on south.  In his letter to Soderini, Vespucci describes the uninhabited island and reports its name as the "island of St. Lawrence" (August 10 is the feast day of St. Lawrence; it was a custom of Portuguese explorations to name locations by the liturgical calendar).
  Its existence was reported to Lisbon sometime between then and January 16, 1504, when King Manuel I of Portugal issued a charter granting the "island of St. John" (São João) as a hereditary captaincy to Fernão de Loronha.  The date and new name in the charter has presented historians with a puzzle. As Vespucci did not return to Lisbon until September 1504, the discovery must have been earlier.  Historians have hypothesized that a stray ship of the Coelho fleet, under an unknown captain, may have returned to the island (prob. on August 29, 1503, feast day of the beheading of St. John the Baptist) to collect Vespucci, did not find him or anyone else there, and went back to Lisbon by itself with the news. (Vespucci in his letter, claims he left the island August 18, 1503, and upon his arrival in Lisbon a year later, on September 7, 1504, the people of Lisbon were surprised, as they "had been told" (presumably by the earlier captain?) that his ship had been lost.)  The captain who returned to Lisbon with the news (and the St. John name) is unknown. (Some have speculated this captain was Loronha himself, the chief financier of this expedition, but that is highly unlikely.)
  This account, reconstructed from the written record, is severely marred by the cartographic record.  An island, named Quaresma, looking very much like Fernando de Noronha island, appears in the Cantino planisphere. The Cantino map was composed by an anonymous Portuguese cartographer, and completed before November 1502, well before the Coelho expedition even set out.  This has led to speculation that the island was discovered by a previous expedition.  However, there is no consensus on which expedition that might have been.  The name "Quaresma" means Lent, suggesting it must have been discovered in March or early April, which does not correspond well with the known expeditions.  There is also a mysterious red island to the left of Quaresma in the Cantino map that does not fit with Fernando de Noronha island. Some have explained these anomalies away by reading quaresma as anaresma (meaning unknown, but sidesteps the Lent timing), and proposing that the red island is just an accidental inkblot.
  Assuming Quaresma is indeed Fernando de Noronha, then who discovered it?  One proposal is that it was discovered by a royal Portuguese mapping expedition that was sent out in May 1501, commanded by an unknown captain (possibly André Gonçalves) and also accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci.  According to Vespucci, this expedition returned to Lisbon in September 1502, just on time to influence the final composition of the Cantino map.  Unfortunately, Vespucci does not report discovering this island then – indeed he is quite clear that the first time he (and his fellow sailors) saw the island was on the 1503 Coelho expedition. However, there is a letter written by an Italian saying that a ship arrived "from the land of Parrots" in Lisbon on July 22, 1502 (three months before Vespucci).  This could be a st
caption: Satellite picture of Fernando de Noronha
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