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The bills of lading, and some notes and letters which lay upon the desk, sufficed to inform me that the Brazilian brig Nossa Sehnora da Vittoria had cleared from Bahia a month before. The name of the captain was Texeira, but there was no record as to the number of the crew.
Who this man Gama, supposed to have seen the unknown continent of Gamaland, was, no one knew. The Portuguese followed the myth blindly; and the other geographers followed the Portuguese. Texeira, court geographer in Portugal, in 1649 issued a map with a vague coast marked at latitude 45 degrees north, with the words "Land seen by John de Gama, Indian, going from China to New Spain."
Stately Spanish Jews, grave blue-blooded Portuguese, hitherto smacking of the Castilian hidalgo, noble seigniors like Manuel Texeira, the friend of a Queen of Sweden, erudite physicians like Bendito de Castro, president of the congregation, shed their occidental veneer and might have been seen in the synagogue skipping like harts upon the mountains, dancing wild dances with the Holy Scroll clasped to their bosoms.
In 1636 and 1637 the Portuguese Pedro Texeira ascended the Amazon to Napo, with a fleet of forty-seven pirogues.
In the course of their navigation towards Kamtschatka, they traversed that part of the Northern Pacific, in which some islands and lands were laid down in the charts, such as the island of Reia de Plata in De l'Isle's chart, and the land said to have been seen by John de Gama, in a voyage from China to New Spain, first delineated in a chart published by Texeira, a Portuguese geographer, in 1649; but though at sundry times they had various indications of land, they discovered none, and those islands and lands must therefore either be of trifling extent, or wholly imaginary.
Accordingly, about the year 1418, a new expedition of discovery was fitted out for the express purpose of attempting to surmount the perils of Cape Bojador. In this expedition Juan Gonzales Zarco and Tristan Vaz Texeira, two naval officers of the household of Don Henry, volunteered their services; and, embarking in a vessel called a barcha , steered for the tremendous cape.
From the foundation of Para by Caldeira, in 1615, to the settlement of the boundary line between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, Peru and Brazil, in 1781-91, numbers of these expeditions were undertaken in succession . The largest was the one commanded by Pedro Texeira in 1637-9, who ascended the river to Quito by way of the Napo, a distance of about 2800 miles, with 45 canoes and 900 men, and returned to Para without any great misadventure by the same route.
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