1808: The Flight of the Emperor (12 page)

Before the pageant went the authorities of Rio de Janeiro: military officials and judges, together with priests, monks, and seminarians from the numerous convents. Immediately behind them “followed the banner of the Chamber, carried by a citizen dressed in black silk, a cape of the same color, a vest and stockings of white silk, a large-brimmed hat with white feathers, and suspenders decorated with precious stones and richly embroidered silk.”
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He was flanked by two long rows of men dressed in the same manner, who formed the “banner guard.”
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At the rear of the pageant procession went the canopy under which the royal family marched. Eight men bore the poles of this canopy, among them Amaro Velho da Silva, one of Brazil's major slave-traffickers at the time.
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The
Te Deum
was observed in the cathedral, a celebration of gratitude for the success of the voyage. Thereafter followed a hand-kissing ceremony, in which the participants of the pageant prostrated themselves before Prince João to kiss his hand in a gesture that simultaneously represented obedience and submission by the subjects of the colony to the prince regent. This curious ritual of the Portuguese monarchy, already practiced by the viceroys of the colony, marked the entire period in which the court stayed in Brazil. It was already dark when the royal family proceeded by carriage to the viceroy's palace, now the Royal Palace. Exhausted, everyone went to bed. In the streets nearby, however, festivities continued all night, with fireworks, music, and poetry recitations in honor of the occasion.

Queen Maria I, the mad queen, disembarked on March 10. An armchair carried by royal servants transported the seventy-four-year-old queen, demented and debilitated by the voyage, to the palace. “The poor queen proceeded all the way to her room carried in an armchair, with an uncertain look of idiocy and senility, surrounded by the infanta D. Mariana and by all of her granddaughters and servants, who came to receive her with tenderness and love,” describes chronicler Luiz Norton, based on the reports of Father Gonçalves dos Santos.
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The festivities lasted until March 15, officially closing with yet another ceremony of gratitude in the Rosario Church and a hand-kissing ceremony in the Royal Palace.

In these first days, João, Carlota Joaquina, and their children lived in the Royal Palace, the converted residence of the viceroy—but it was only a temporary arrangement. Within a short time, the prince regent would move to a much more spacious and agreeable palace in the present-day neighborhood of São Cristovão, near the Mangueira favela and Maracanã Stadium. Princess Carlota Joaquina moved to an estate near Botafogo beach. Queen Maria I stayed in a Carmelite convent, connected to the Royal Palace by an improvised passageway over the Rua Direita, today's 1st of May Avenue. The devout who had lived in this convent hastily moved to the seminary in the neighborhood of Lapa. The convent also housed the kitchen, workshops, and Royal Pantry, where the court's victuals were stored. To the side of the convent lay the Church of Carmo, soon transformed into the Royal Chapel. The neighboring Chamber Headquarters and public jail were also annexed to the Royal Palace by a passageway and provided accommodations for the royal servants.
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It was understandably complicated finding housing for the thousands of courtiers and their attendants newly arrived in a still relatively small city of just 60,000 inhabitants. By order of the count of Arcos, a notorious system of “pensions” began, under which houses were solicited for the use of nobility. The addresses that were selected were marked on the door with the initials PR, for
príncipe regente,
which the population immediately recast as
Ponha-se na Rua
—Put yourself in the Street. Hipólito da Costa, editor of
Correio Braziliense,
described the system of pensions as a “medieval” ordinance, which “could not but make the new government in Brazil odious
to its people.”
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The new residents of the pensions, however, not only complained of the price of rent but also complained that the homes were badly constructed and uncomfortable.

The arrogance and presumptuousness of those who arrived from overseas resulted in various abuses of the pension system. The count of Belmont seized a recently constructed but not yet occupied house belonging to the chief overseer of the port. The count lived there for a decade, rent-free, while the owner and his large family stayed in a small dwelling erected next to the count's new mansion. The count even commandeered the port overseer's slaves without explanation. The duchess of Cadaval, whose husband had died during the interlude in Salvador, took over a country house belonging to the colonel of the militia, Manoel Alvas da Costa, and lived there without paying a penny. When Alvas da Costa decided to take back the house, his noble tenant responded that she had no other place to live and offered an annual rent of 600,000 reís, equivalent today to $20,000. Alvas da Costa thought this too little and refused. The duchess pretended not to hear him and remained until 1821, when she returned to Portugal in the company of the king, dispatching a bank deposit of 600,000 reís for each year that she stayed—but without thanks or even a word of explanation to the colonel.
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Rents in the city at large doubled according to a residents' petition kept in the National Archives. For a ground-level house outside the city, the diplomat Colonel Maler, consul from France, paid 800,000 reís (today $28,000). An excursion in a mule-drawn carriage to the Santa Cruz plantation, fewer than sixty miles from the capital, cost almost 400 francs, equivalent to $2,400. On this plantation the prince regent spent his summers. But on one occasion, because he hadn't yet received his salary, the French consul had to decline the prince's invitation to accompany him there because he couldn't afford to hire a coach. “There is no corner of the universe with worse food and worse accommodation for such excessive prices,” wrote Maler.
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All of these aggravations contributed to the quick dissipation of the enthusiasm of those first days of the court's arrival. The Brazilian colony gained much from the prince's presence, including its eventual independence, but the royal family's early years in Rio de Janeiro brought enormous
problems and costs. They needed to feed and pay the expenses of an idle, corrupt, and wasteful court, which they did in two ways. The first was by lists of voluntary donations, for which the rich and powerful in the colony signed up quite willingly with the certainty of obtaining favors and generous advantages in exchange. The second was the indiscriminate raising of taxes and duties, which the entire populace paid with no ability to evaluate the immediacy or efficacy of the benefits they received in exchange. Their resulting dissatisfaction would eventually prove ungovernable.

XI

A Letter

P
lunged into darkness in the Atlantic Ocean, on April 12, 1811, a Good Friday, at 10 p.m. the frigate
Princess Carlota
prevailed over the waves near Cape Verde, off the coast of Africa, en route to Rio de Janeiro. In its cellars lay the final shipment of books from the precious Royal Library, abandoned on the docks of Belém three and a half years earlier during the flight of the royal family to Brazil.
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Alone in his cabin with the faltering flame of an oil lamp, archivist Luiz dos Santos Marrocos wrote the following letter to his father, Francisco, in Lisbon:

My father and master of my heart,

This [letter] is composed between sky and sea, over thousands of anguishes, discontents and labors that I never thought I would suffer; but having left the shoals of Lisbon with favorable winds, we barely arrived at high seas when a cross-wind hit us, impelling us toward the coast of Africa. I have suffered great discomfort in my throat, mouth, and eyes, to the point of taking medication. I had no seasickness when we left Lisbon, but nevertheless felt great compassion for the widespread number of people vomiting aboard the frigate, as among 550 people here, few have been spared from nausea. At night I cannot sleep for more than an hour, as I spend the rest thinking of the present and future
risks of my life. On the eighth day of the voyage, our water rations were already spoiled and rotten, and we had to cast off the bugs in order to drink it. We have had to dump many barrels of rotten salted-meat into the sea. In sum, everything here is in disarray, due to the general lack of preparations. All of the ropes of the frigate are rotting. . . . All of the sailings are rotting, and they are torn with any breeze. The crew is inadequate. In a similar manner, we will be lost if, through some misfortune, we are stricken by any intense weather. There is not enough apothecary for the sick, as there are not more than a half-dozen herbs here, and the maladies are in abundance. There are neither chickens or fresh meat. To conclude, and say it all at once, if I knew of the state that the Frigate Princess Carlota was in, I would have been repulsed to place myself and the Library aboard.

P.S.: I long for Mana and Ignez, and still have so much to say, and with such haste that I must lift my pen now, reserving this for the calm of Rio, if God allows me to reach there.
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PART TWO

T
HE
R
ISE OF
B
RAZIL

XII

Rio de Janeiro

T
he city that welcomed the Portuguese royal family in 1808 represented for transatlantic maritime routes what the Frankfurt airport does today for intercontinental flights. It was a world hub, at which practically every ship leaving from Europe or America would stop before proceeding to Asia, Africa, and the recently discovered lands of the South Pacific. Protected from wind and storms by the mountains, the calm waters of Guanabara Bay served as ideal shelter for repairing ships and restocking potable water, jerky, sugar, rum, tobacco, and firewood. “No colonial port in the World is so well situated for general commerce as Rio de Janeiro,” observed John Mawe. “It enjoys, beyond any other, an equal convenience of intercourse with Europe, America, Africa, the East Indies, and the South Sea islands, and seems formed by nature as a grand link to connect the trade of those great portions of the globe.”
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It offered a crucial stopover on long and drawn-out navigations around the world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a journey from London to Rio took between 55 and 80 days. Rio to Capetown took 30 to 50 days. To India, between 105 and 150 days. To China, 120 to 180 days. To Australia, between 70 and 90 days.
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The strategic importance of Rio de Janeiro on these routes ranked so high that, after the arrival of the royal family in Brazil, the city became the headquarters of the British Royal Navy
in South America, under the command of Vice-Admiral Sidney Smith, the same who escorted the Portuguese fleet during its departure from Lisbon in November 1807.
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For crews and passengers, arrival in Rio de Janeiro in the middle of a perilous and monotonous voyage always made for a pleasing and surprising event. All reports refer to the grand scenery, imposing mountains, and spectacular vegetation everywhere. Passing through Rio de Janeiro aboard the
Beagle
in April 1832, Charles Darwin used an unbelievable sequence of adjectives to describe what he saw before his eyes:

 

Sublime, picturesque, intense colors, blue prevailing tint, large plantations of sugar rustling and coffee, Mimosa natural veil, Forests like but more glorious than those in the engraving; gleams of sunshine; parasitical plants; bananas; large leaves; sun sultry. All still, but large and brilliant butterflies; Much water . . . the banks teeming with wood and beautiful flowers.
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The most detailed records of the landscape and customs of Rio de Janeiro during the court's presence come from an Englishman, John Luccock. A merchant from Yorkshire, he disembarked in Rio de Janeiro in June 1808, three months after the arrival of the royal family. “Churches and monasteries, forts and country-houses, glittering in whiteness, crown every hillock, and decorate the sides of its fanciful and symmetrical heights, backed by a screen of woods, which overshadow the whole,” he noted.
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He lived in Brazil for ten years, during which time he also traveled to São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and Bahia. He had an insatiable curiosity. Intelligent and discerning, he recorded everything he saw and did in Brazil. In addition to his travel reports, he compiled a dictionary of the Tupi-Guarani language. In 1820, he published a book in England that became famous in Brazil for the lively testimony it offered of a country in rapid transformation.
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In the introduction, Luccock says that he aims to give “the reader an impartial opinion of the practices and customs of the people, of the political events, and of the social landscape of an immense and unknown country.”

He relates that shortly after setting foot on solid ground, he learned that the population of Rio de Janeiro consisted of 80,000 inhabitants. He thought the figure inflated and recalculated it on his own. According to him, the city had 4,000 homes, with an average of 15 residents in each. This totaled 60,000 inhabitants, a figure that most historians consider quite precise. The detail-oriented Luccock divided the population as follows:

 

16,000 foreigners

1,000 people associated with the court

1,000 public servants

1,000 who reside in the city but make their living in neighboring regions or on ships

700 priests

500 lawyers

200 professionals practicing medicine

40 regular merchants

2,000 retailers

4,000 cashiers, apprentices, and store servants

1,250 mechanics

100 publicans, “vulgarly called grocers”

300 fishermen

1,000 soldiers

1,000 sailors

1,000 freed blacks

12,000 slaves

4,000 housewives

29,000 children, almost half the city's total population
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After the occupation of Lisbon by the French, Rio de Janeiro became the most important naval and commercial center in the empire. More than a third of all exports and imports in the colony passed through its port, well ahead of Salvador, which, despite its importance in sugar production in the Northeast, at this time was responsible for only a fourth of external Brazilian commerce. Rio was also the largest slave market in the Americas. Slave ships that had crossed the Atlantic from Africa congested its port. According to the calculations of historian Manolo Garcia Florentino, no fewer than 850,000 African slaves had passed through the Port of Rio in the eighteenth century, slightly less than half the total number of captive blacks brought to Brazil in this period.
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Observed from the sea while ships approached the port, it was a tranquil little city, with a bucolic appearance, perfectly integrated with the splendor of nature encircling it. Up close, though, this impression changed rapidly. It suffered from excessive humidity, filth, and the lack of good hygiene among residents. On a visit in 1803, James Tuckey, a British navy official remarking on the houses, relates that from the outside they had “all the apparent neatness of our best English villages. But too soon we find, on entering them that this is the mere effect of white-wash, and that within they are the habitations of sloth and nastiness. . . . The streets, though straight and regular, are narrow and dirty, the projecting balconies sometimes nearly meeting each other.”
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“The cleaning of the city was entrusted to the vultures,” wrote historian de Oliveira Lima.
10
The number of rats infesting the city and its environs shocked Alexander Caldcleugh, who visited Brazil between 1819 and 1821: “Many of the first houses are so full of them that during dinner it is by no means an unusual circumstance to see them playing about the room.”
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Because of the height of the water table, constructing septic tanks was prohibited.
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Urine and feces were collected at night and transported and poured into the sea in the morning by slaves carrying barrels of sewage on their backs. En route, these barrels, full of ammonia and urea, sloshed on their skin, and, with the passage of time, left white streaks down their black backs. As a result, these slaves were known as tigers. In the absence of a system of sewage collection, these “tigers” worked in Rio de Janeiro until
1860 and in Recife until 1882. Sociologist Gilberto Freyre writes that the easy availability of these tigers and their low cost held back the creation of sanitation networks in coastal Brazilian cities for decades.
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A Market Stall,
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 habits of the residents themselves didn't improve this state of affairs. In the humid heat of the tropics, sluggishness reigned, as did a lack of elegance in the manner of dress and habits. Emanuel Pohl, a naturalist who accompanied Princess Leopoldina to Brazil, observed that men wore slippers, light trousers, and jackets of low-grade cotton. Women, wrapped in rosaries with little saints as pendants, spent the majority of the day in simple shirts and short skirts. “In a blissful state of
far niente
(do-nothing), they used to sit on a mat near the window, legs crossed, the whole day long,” noted Pohl.
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James Tuckey left a curious record about carioca women: “Their black eyes, large, full and sparkling, give a degree of brilliance to their dark complexion, and throw some expression into their countenances; but it is too generally the mere expression of animal vivacity untempered by the soft chastising power of
tender sensibility.” Tuckey, however, had one significant reservation: “Among other habits of the Brazilian ladies, which, separately considered, form a powerful opposition to the empire of female charms, is that of constantly spitting, without regard either to manner, time, or place.”
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A typical family in Rio de Janeiro—a rich and prosperous though unrefined city—during the time of João VI.

A Brazilian Family,
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

Luccock painted an amusing portrait of the habits of cariocas. According to him, families generally spent their time in rooms toward the back of the house. Women sat in a circle and sewed, making stockings, lace, embroidery, and other stitchwork. There they also all gathered to take their meals, using a board set upon an easel in the middle of the sitting room for a table. “The chief meal is a dinner at noon, at which the master, mistress, and children occasionally sit round the table; more frequently it is taken on the floor, in which case the lady's mat is sacred, and none approach it to sit down but acknowledged favourites,” recorded Luccock. “Knives are only used by the
men; women and children employ their fingers. The female slaves eat at the same time, in different parts of the room; and sometimes are favoured with a mess from the hands of their mistress. If there be a dessert, it consists of oranges, bananas, and a few other different kinds of fruit.”
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Life in Rio de Janeiro, as depicted in this carioca scene, remained provincial despite the presence of the court.
Uma História—Gossiping,
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

Invited to one of these dinners by a rich family, Luccock surprisingly found that everyone was supposed to show up with his own knife, “usually broad, sharp-pointed, and mounted in silver.” At the table he observed that “the fingers, too, are as often used as the fork.” Moreover, he notes, they often ate from the plate of someone sitting next to them with their own hands. “It is accounted a mark of strong attachment for a man to eat off his neighbour's plate: so that the hands of both are not unfrequently dipped into it at the same time.” The meal also featured “a weak sort of red wine” drunk from cups rather than glasses. Due to the effect of alcohol, toward the end of the
meal, all of the diners became noisy. “Their common gesticulation in talking is increased, and they throw their arms about, with their knives and forks, in such a way that a stranger feels no little surprise, how eyes, noses, and cheeks, escape from injury,” observed the Englishman. “When the knives and forks are at rest, one is grasped in either hand, and held upright on the table, resting on the end of its haft; and when they are no longer wanted the knife is deliberately wiped upon the cloth, and returned to its sheath, which is placed in the girdle behind the loins.”
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