Pereira had been one of the cosmographers tasked with hammering out the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494; a man who may have secretly been to Brazil before it was officially discovered; who produced the first written account of the chimpanzee’s ability to use tools; who calculated the degree of the meridian arc to a level of accuracy unrivalled at the time; who recorded the tides of the Indian Ocean and was able to put this knowledge to good use; a man whom the epic poet Camões later came to laud as the Portuguese Achilles – ‘with a pen in one hand, a sword in the other’.
