Gaspar Corte-Real: Lost at Sea in 1501, Then a Salazar-Era Statue

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Gaspar Corte-Real was born around 1450 into a noble family on Terceira in the Azores, where his father and brothers were also explorers. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas split undiscovered lands between Spain and Portugal, but John Cabot's 1497 voyage for England pushed King Manuel I to stake claims in the North Atlantic. In 1500 Corte-Real reached Greenland but could not land through the ice, believing he had found the edge of Asia. In 1501 he returned with three caravels, was again blocked by ice and diverted to a land of rivers, pines and berries that historians identify as Labrador. To offset the voyage's costs, his men seized 57 Indigenous people to sell as slaves in Portugal.

Two ships reached Portugal; Corte-Real's vanished without a trace, and in 1502 his brother Miguel was lost searching for him. Historian Jeff Webb calls him a minor figure about whom little is known. In 1963 Eduardo Brazão, Portugal's ambassador to Canada and former propaganda official under Salazar's Estado Novo, met Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood, and in 1965 a bronze statue by the regime-favored sculptor Joaquim Martins Correia was unveiled in front of the Confederation Building in St. John's, presented through the Portuguese fishing fleet amid disputes over Grand Banks fishing rights. Memorial University renamed its Corte-Real building in 2019, the statue was spray painted in 2020 and 2021, and as of 2026 it still stands.

• Spain's Francisco Franco promised Newfoundland a rival statue in 1968 that never arrived.
• Miguel was cut from the final design, leaving Gaspar to stand alone.
• A tourist's car smashed the pedestal in 1999, and restorers repaired it while the bronze was unharmed.
• NunatuKavut president Todd Russell said no further consultation was needed and the statue should come down.
• The 2020 graffiti read SLAVER and asked why the statue was still there.