1808: The Flight of the Emperor (11 page)

The very existence of this small intellectual elite represented a feat in a colony in which everything was either prohibited or censored. Books and newspapers were prohibited from free circulation. A letter in 1798 from Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho to Fernando de Portugal, governor of Bahia, recommended severe vigilance over the circulation of books, as there was evidence in the court that the prominent citizens of Salvador were found “infected with abominable French principles.”
43
Anyone heard publicly expressing opinions contrary to the mode of thought in the Portuguese court ran the risk of being arrested, put on trial, and eventually deported. Printing such opinions, therefore, was unthinkable.
44
Even meetings to discuss ideas were illegal.

Created in 1786 with the support of the viceroy, Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa, the Literary Society of Rio de Janeiro counted among its members important figures in the capital, including doctors, lawyers, writers, and poets. In weekly meetings, they discussed diverse topics such as astronomy, literature, philosophy, physics, and politics in Europe and America. It was
the era of the French Revolution, American Independence, and the
Conjuração Mineira
—the independence movement in Minas Gerais that transformed the ensign Joaquim da Silva Xavier, better known as Tiradentes, into a national hero. Out of fear that the Literary Society would incontrollably allow for the fermentation of such ideas, the next viceroy, the count of Rezende, successor to de Vasconcelos e Sousa, decided to shut it down in 1794. Eleven people suspected of an alleged conspiracy against the monarchy were imprisoned in the Conceição Fortress in Rio de Janeiro, where they remained until 1797.
45

To escape censorship, the
Correio Braziliense,
the first Brazilian newspaper, was published in London. Its founder, journalist Hipólito José da Costa, was born in Rio Grande do Sul and left Brazil at sixteen. He graduated from Coimbra and lived for two years in America. He returned to Lisbon and was arrested in 1803 for being a freemason. Put on trial by the Inquisition, he fled to England in 1805, where he had started the
Correio
three years earlier. “Hipólito José was no more and no less than an English whig,” wrote historian Roderick Barman, referring to the liberals of British parliament who defended individual rights and limited the power of the king. “He believed in a balanced constitution, a strong legislature, freedom of religion and the press, and liberty—respect for the rights of the individual.”
46

The same Hipólito José who defended freedom of expression and liberal ideas ended up inaugurating a system of promiscuous relations between the press and the government in Brazil, however. In a secret agreement, Prince João subsidized da Costa in England and guaranteed the purchase of a specified number of copies of the
Correio Braziliense
with the objective of preventing the radicalization of opinions expressed in the newspaper. According to Barman, through this agreement, negotiated by the Portuguese ambassador in London, Domingos de Sousa Coutinho, da Costa received an annual stipend in exchange for more temperate criticism of the prince regent, an assiduous reader of its articles and editorials.
47
“The public never learned of the arrangement,” affirms the historian. In any event, da Costa showed himself sympathetic to the crown even before negotiating this subsidy. “He always treated D. João with the utmost respect, never questioning his beneficence,” records Barman.
48

In the Portuguese Americas in 1808, an additional factor aggravated political tensions: slavery. For more than two hundred years, the ceaseless trafficking of Africans sustained the prosperity of the colonial economy. Slaves fueled the engine of the cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane plantations as well the gold and silver mines that siphoned riches to the metropolis. The number of slaves, along with the freed blacks, mulattos, and mestizos—their natural allies among the poor at the margins of colonial society—formed more than two-thirds of the population, leaving whites in the minority.
49

This at best tenuous situation yielded an unsustainable and potentially explosive situation. The dread of a slave revolt kept white, wealthy, educated families sleepless at night. In a letter of February 13, 1799, Fernando de Portugal affirmed:

 

What has always created fear in the colonies is slavery, because of its conditions, and because the majority of its inhabitants, not being as settled as employed and established men who have possessions and property, wish to participate in a conspiracy or attempt that would yield dire consequences, leaving men to be exposed to assassinations by their own slaves.
50

In 1791, a slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture resulted in a bloodbath in the French Antilles, present-day Haiti. Could this potentially occur in Brazil? Definitely. In the so-called Tailors' Conspiracy, which took place in Salvador in the middle of 1798, the rebels promulgated manifestos in public places, demanding “the end of the detestable metropolitan yoke of Portugal,” the abolition of slavery, and equality for all citizens, “especially mulattos and negroes.”
51
The most radical called for the hanging of part of the white elite in Salvador. The repression by the Portuguese government came down harsh and immediate. Some forty-seven suspects were arrested, of which nine were slaves. Four of them, all free mulattos, were decapitated and quartered. Their limbs were impaled on stakes in the streets of the capital, where they remained until they had decomposed completely. Of the suspects, sixteen prisoners were released, the rest exiled to Africa.
52

Judicial penance, as this type of punishment was known, had the objective of serving as an example and as an affirmation of the power of the king over his subjects. This extreme form of atonement for serious crimes by means of bodily mutilation or even burning of the guilty had been used in Portugal since the Middle Ages, becoming gruesomely popular in the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition. An extreme case was the Tavora Affair, in which a noble family, accused of weaving a plot against King José in 1758, were executed, their corpses mutilated and burned in the public square in Lisbon. Their ashes were thrown into the sea.
53
Transported to the Brazilian colony, the judicial penance included mutilation, branding with hot irons, lashing, and quartering.
54
It was applied without pity or piety whenever there was a good reason—from the point of view of the Portuguese crown of course. It was used against Tiradentes in the Conjuração Mineira, against the leaders of the Tailors' Conspiracy in Bahia, and in countless other regional rebellions.

Instead of threats and coercion, however, Prince João used another attribute of the monarchy to govern: the image of a benign king who provided for, cared for, and protected all. The prince would pass into history as a good-natured monarch, relaxed and paternal, who patiently received his subjects each night at the Palace of São Cristovão for the hand-kissing ceremony, in which even the most humble people, including natives and slaves, had the right to make entreaties and pay homage. “The court and its power fascinated us like a veritable messianic attraction: it bore the hope of succor from a father who came to cure the wounds of his children,” noted historian Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias.
55

X

Tree Frog, the Reporter

P
rince João, the Portuguese royal family, and their fleet entered Guanabara Bay in the early afternoon of March 7, 1808. The sun shone bright in the cloudlessly blue sky. A strong wind blew off the ocean, alleviating the suffocating heat of the end of the
carioca
summer. After three months and one week of traveling—including the respite in Salvador—hundreds of noblemen and other illustrious passengers pressed themselves to the gunwales of the ships to contemplate the superb spectacle unfolding before their eyes: a small city of white houses along a strip of beach, extending around the margins of a bay of calm waters, itself framed by towering granite mountains covered with luxuriant, dark green forests. They had seen nothing like it before in Portugal.

Those on land enjoyed their own moment of celebration and rejoicing. Standing among the thousands of anxious people squeezed along the docks to watch the arrival of the Portuguese ships, a reporter recorded the scene:

 

It was two minutes to three o'clock in the afternoon, a refreshing, beautiful, and delightful hour. . . . Since sunrise we had been told of this most auspicious day for Brazil: not a single cloud obstructed the sun's radiance, whose heat was mitigated by the freshness of a strong and constant breeze. It seemed like a brilliant star, deviating from every
obstacle, as if rejoicing the triumphant entrance of the first sovereign of Europe in the most serendipitous city in the New World, and wanting to participate in the jubilation and applause of a people giddy with the most intense delight.
1

The author, Luis Gonçalves dos Santos, was not a journalist by trade but rather a chronicler by calling. At age forty, versed in Greek, Latin, and philosophy, he served as the canon of the Catholic Church in Rio de Janeiro.
2
He also had a funny nickname:
Padre Perereca
—Father Tree Frog—because of his short, scrawny frame and bulging eyes.
3
Even then, irreverence and humor formed part of the carioca personality, sparing no one. Father Gonçalves dos Santos recorded everything he saw and defended his ideas passionately. As such, he remains the best and most detailed reporter of events between 1808 and 1821. In 1825, he published two volumes of his book
Memoirs of the History of the Reign in Brazil, Divided in Three Eras of Happiness, Honor, and Glory, Written in the Court of Rio de Janeiro in 1821, and Offered to His Majesty the King D. João VI.
While laudatory and replete with flattery and wonder, the details of the work reflect the diligence of an attentive and curious observer.

Gonçalves dos Santos's texts capture the encounter of two worlds previously unfamiliar and distant to each other. On one side: a European nobility attired in powdered wigs, golden epaulets, velvet coats, silk socks, and buckled shoes, all of their clothes far too dark and heavy for the blistering sun of the tropics. On the other side: a colonial, almost African city, two-thirds of its population composed of blacks, mestizos, and mulattos, full of great adventurers,
4
slave traffickers, troopers, diamond and gold traders, sailors, and merchants from the Indies.

On January 14, having learned that the brig
Flyer
had arrived in Rio de Janeiro carrying news that Napoleon's troops had invaded Portugal and that the royal family was en route to Brazil, Father Gonçalves dos Santos recorded:

 

Never before has there been news more sad, and at the same time, more agreeable. I cannot explain the astonishment, the consternation, and the sentiments that we all have about the disgraceful events in our mother
country. Tears streak down the faces of everyone, and many cannot utter a single word or bear to hear more calamitous news. However great the motives of grief and sorrow, however, they are no greater than the causes for consolation and delight: a new order will take shape in this part of the southern hemisphere. The Empire of Brazil is already within sight, and we anxiously await for the mighty hand of our lord the Prince Regent to cast the first stone towards future grandeur, prosperity, and power in the new empire.
5

View of Rio de Janeiro from Guanabara Bay in 1822, an obligatory stop for ships crossing the oceans and the site of the largest slave market in the Americas.

View of the City of Rio de Janeiro, Taken from the
Anchorage
,
engraving from
Views and Costumes of the City and Neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro
by Henry Chamberlain, London, 1822, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin.

The news brought by the
Flyer
caused a frenzy in Rio de Janeiro. Not knowing of the prince regent's decision to stop in Bahia first, the capital city had few weeks to prepare. Charged with organizing the reception, the viceroy, the count of Arcos, moved out of his home, a modest two-story structure in front of the docks of the port, where today the Plaza 15th of November stands. This building, known as the Palace of Viceroys, also functioned as the Court of Relations with colonial Brazil. Here the prince regent and his family would live. There was no time for a proper
renovation, but the building was whitewashed on the outside. Its interior was repainted and lined with silks of many colors. Such decoration was all that the urgency of the moment would permit. The count also ordered the governors of the neighboring provinces, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, to send along bananas, beans, beef, cassava, corn, fowl, grapes, guava, lamb, peaches, pork, potatoes, and sweet-potatoes—provisions all crucial to satisfy the hunger and nutritional wants of a court arriving famished and weakened by the long ocean crossing.
6

Two days later, on January 16, the Senate of the Chamber—a kind of council of aldermen in the era of colonial Brazil, composed of esteemed
representatives of society—gathered to organize the reception of the royal family. The festivities would include civic and religious ceremonies, dances, and popular fanfare. Along the entire path, houses were to be lit up and their windows decorated. Music in grandstands would spread throughout the streets. Bells would toll in every church, and the roar of cannons on the shoals of Guanabara Bay would crown the grandiloquent event. Despite the haste, everything went as planned, according to the reports of Father Gonçalves dos Santos.

But these plans had barely come into being when, on the afternoon of January 17, seven Portuguese ships and three English ships entered the
Guanabara Bay. It was the part of the convoy that had separated from the royal entourage near Madeira and arrived in Rio de Janeiro after a stopover in Cape Verde. The ships carried the two sisters of Queen Maria I, the princesses Maria Benedita and Maria Ana, as well as the princesses Maria Francisca and Isabel Maria, daughters of Prince João and Carlota Joaquina. Invited to disembark by the count of Arcos, the princesses preferred to stay aboard until receiving confirmation that the rest of the family had arrived safely in Bahia. They received word a month later, on February 22; only then did they agree to disembark.
7
Two weeks later, on March 7, the rest of the fleet anchored in front of the Palace Square. As arranged by the viceroy, cannon fire from forts and warships stationed in the bay and bells in churches and monasteries saluted them.

Gonçalves dos Santos reports:

 

Rio de Janeiro, O happiest of cities of the New World! Rio de Janeiro, you have your august Queen and eminent Prince with his royal family, the first majesty that the southern hemisphere has ever seen or known. These are your sovereigns and lords, descendents and heirs of those great rulers who discovered you, populated you, and aggrandized you, such that now you are the Princess of all America and are the court of the lord rulers of Portugal. Fill yourself with joy, let loose in delight, decorate yourselves with your richest clothes, go out to greet your sovereigns, and receive the auspicious Prince with respect, worship, and love, as he comes in the name of the Lord to visit his people.
8

The royal family again stayed aboard this first day, receiving innumerable courtesans who extended their welcome: a commission of the Chamber of Senate, magistrates, priests and bishops, and army officials, all accompanied by the viceroy. First they greeted João on the
Royal Prince
and then Princess Carlota Joaquina on the
Afonso de Albuquerque.
9
Father Gonçalves dos Santos recorded nightfall on March 7: “It has just barely gotten dark, and the entire city has lit up so much that the sun could be extinguished, as there is no house, not even of the poorest families, that does not demonstrate through its lights the interior happiness of its residents.”
10
The royal family
alighted the next day, on March 8, around four in the afternoon. A scarlet and gold brigantine covered by a purple canopy transported João from the
Royal Prince
to solid ground. Everyone disembarked except for Queen Maria I, who stayed aboard for two more days.

A certain air of disappointment inevitably descended upon the colonial Brazilians on seeing a court of fugitives suffering from the vagaries of a long journey. A European monarch had never before set foot on American soil. Until then,
brasileiros
had seen the prince regent only on the coins and engravings that arrived from the metropolis: a sovereign with a resolute look and a proud bearing, robed with purple mantle and noble scepter. The man who disembarked the red and gold brigantine differed quite drastically from the handsome prince of the official portraits. He was “a very fat man, very fatigued, very simple, with chestnut sideburns streaking down a red face, a lagging gait due to hereditary erysipelas, and wearing a brown coat smudged with stains,” according to the report of the historian Pedro Calmon.
11
In the description of another historian, Tobias Monteiro, “João wore a long jacket with a high collar, an embroidered white vest, satin stockings, short boots, epaulets, a giant bicorn hat decorated with ermine, and a sword tucked in his belt, hanging from gold threads and tassels.” At the Prince's side, “walking with difficulty,” came his wife. “Thin, bony, restless eyes, closed mouth, fine lips, a long, stern, and wilful chin, she did not hide her contempt at finding herself in a land of people that she would always detest,” writes Tobias Monteiro.
12

Carlota, her daughter, and the other ladies of the court had all arrived with shaved heads or short hair, protected by turbans, due to the infestation of lice that had attacked the ships during the voyage. Monteiro recounts that, on seeing the peculiar headdresses of the princesses, the women of Rio de Janeiro thought this the latest fashion in Europe. Within a short time, almost all began cutting their hair short and using turbans to imitate the Portuguese noblewomen.
13

Despite the disappointment of this first sight of the court's appearance, the people of Rio de Janeiro paid homage from their greatest depths. The crowd that gathered on the ramps of the dock included aldermen, canons, magistrates, nobles, priests, and troops bearing the Portuguese flag. Priests
blessed the royal family with holy water, amid copious prayers and burning incense. Prince João kissed the cross and received the blessings of the bishop. Afterward, they seated him under a canopy of red silk and golden posts to protect him from the sun. A pageant then formed, composed of the receiving party and the arriving party, slowly walking in the direction of the Rosario Church, then the city's cathedral. Hastily constructed triumphal arches marked their path. The streets were covered with “fine white sand, leaves, aromatic herbs, and flowers,” according to priest-reporter Gonçalves dos Santos. The facades of houses were draped with “curtains of carmine damask, and the windows, with rich and showy tapestries of various pretty colors; some of damask, others satin, and others even more precious silk.”
14
Music poured into the streets.