But in 1807 nobody had time to prepare or organize a thing. Although the plan to flee to Brazil was old, the decision to enact it came at the last minute. Up to one week prior to the largely improvised departure, hope still circulated in Dom João’s court of a possible reconciliation with Napoleon that would thwart an invasion. But that hope fell flat on November 24, when the latest edition of the Parisian newspaper Le Moniteur, Napoleon’s official publishing arm, arrived in Lisbon, announcing that “the House of Bragança has ceased to reign in Europe.”8 The news caused an uproar in the court and finally prevailed over the prince regent’s chronic indecision. There was no alternative: Either the royal family fled to Brazil, or Bonaparte would dethrone them. It was time to go.
At midnight, a messenger awoke Joaquim de Azevedo, court official and the future viscount of Rio Seco, and summoned him to the Royal Palace. De Azevedo found the state advisors assembled there as he received personal orders from Dom João to organize the departure. Before heading to the port, Azevedo guaranteed a place onboard for himself and his family, and then he went to work. Azevedo had fewer than three days to handle all of the necessary preparations, and counter-winds and strong rains conspired to postpone the departure to the morning of the 29th.9
The royal palaces at Mafra and Queluz were evacuated with haste. Valets and pages worked through the night to remove carpets, paintings, and wall ornaments. Hundreds of trunks containing clothing, dishes, cutlery, jewels, and personal effects made their way to the docks. The caravan totaled more than seven hundred wagons.10 Pack mules drew the Church’s silver and the 60,000 volumes of the (reconstituted) Royal Library in fourteen carts. Gold, diamonds, and the currency of the royal treasury were packed in crates and escorted to the wharf, ready to make their ironic trip back across the Atlantic Ocean.
During those three days, the people of Lisbon watched the movements of horses, carriages, and government employees without exactly understanding what was happening. The official explanation asserted that the Portuguese fleet was undergoing repairs. The rich and well-informed, however, knew perfectly well what was happening. Pedro Gomes, a prosperous merchant, wrote to his mother-in-law: “We don’t yet have a vessel, and I’m not sure we will, as there are many who want to go, and few ships. What we will do is prepare ourselves to leave the capital, to wherever it must be, at the first indication of danger. . . . The ships continue to be prepared with great haste, and all of the patterns point towards boarding.”11 No surviving reports indicate whether Gomes and his family found a place aboard one of the ships.
When news of the royal departure finally spread, the populace reacted with understandable indignation. In the streets, tears flowed alongside demonstrations of despair and revolt. Stones pelted the carriage and injured the coachman of Antonio de Araújo, the count of Barca, when he tried to make his way through the multitudes to the frigate Medusa. Araújo, João’s minister of foreign relations, sympathized with the French and was viewed with suspicion in Portugal.12 “The highly noble and ever-loyal people of Lisbon could not become comfortable with the idea of their king departing for overseas territories,” wrote de Azevedo, himself called a traitor by the infuriated crowds. “Wandering through the plazas and streets, without believing their eyes, shedding tears and curses . . . everything to them was shock, heartbreak, and longing.”13 “The capital found itself in a state of gloom too somber to describe,” reported Lord Strangford, the British envoy to Lisbon in charge of negotiating the transfer of the royal family to Brazil. “Bands of unknown armed men were seen roaming the streets, in the most complete silence. . . . Everything seemed to indicate that the departure of the Prince, if not carried out immediately, would be delayed by public outbursts rendering it impossible to leave before the arrival of the French army.”14
Amid the confusion, a five-year-old boy looked on in fright. José Trazimundo, future marquis of Fronteira, stood in the company of his uncle, the count of Ega, who at the last minute attempted to board his family on one of the ships of the fleet. They couldn’t make their way through the mob quickly enough, so when finally he arrived at the quay the ships had already weighed anchor. Many years later, Trazimundo recorded his memories of that day: “I will never forget the tears that were shed, as many of them by the populace as by the servants of the royal residences and by the soldiers that were on the banks of Belém.” Unable to secure a place on a ship, the Trazimundo family took refuge in the house of the count of Ribeira in anticipation of the arrival of General Junot’s troops. “The halls were filled with relatives who had faced the same luck, not even having said their last goodbyes to the emigrés,” he wrote of those who managed to depart.15
Other people of importance had to return home after unsuccessfully attempting to make it to the ships. Such was the case of the apostolic delegate Dom Lourenço de Caleppi. Days before, the sixty-seven-year-old showed up at the Palace of Ajuda, and João invited him on the voyage. Thereafter, he sought the minister of the Navy, the viscount of Anadia, who, to be on the safe side, had reserved him a place on both the ships Martim de Freitas and the Medusa. On one or the other, de Caleppi would travel with his private secretary, Camilo Luis Rossi. On the arranged day, however, the two arrived at the docks only to find both ships completely full. The apostolic delegate eventually arrived in Brazil in September 1808, almost a year after the departure of the royal family.16
Information about how Dom João boarded is imprecise. In one version, to avoid protests, he traveled to the port in a closed carriage, without a convoy, accompanied by only one servant and Dom Pedro Carlos, infante of both Portugal and Spain and his preferred nephew. Despite technically belonging to the Spanish House of Bourbon, the boy came to live in Lisbon after the death of his parents, both of whom had fallen victim to smallpox in 1788. On arriving at the port with no one to greet him, João waded over the mud atop badly positioned planks of wood supported by police cables.17 In the report of Portuguese historian Luiz Norton, the prince and his nephew crossed these planks “with the help of the people,” and had embarked “after a cold and funereal kiss upon the hand.”18 In the version of events by French general Maximilien Foy, Dom João, after descending from his carriage, had trouble walking. “His limbs trembled under him,” the general writes. “With his hand he put aside the people who clung round his knees. Tears trickled from his eyes, and his countenance told plainly enough how woe-begone and perplexed was his heart.”19
A farewell speech was impossible under the circumstances, so Dom João ordered a decree posted in the streets of Lisbon, explaining the reasons for his departure. It said that French troops were marching toward Lisbon and that resisting them would spill blood needlessly. In addition, despite all his efforts, he couldn’t uphold the peace for his beloved subjects. Therefore, he was moving to Rio de Janeiro until the situation calmed down. He also left instructions in writing for how the Portuguese should treat the invaders: The troops of General Junot would receive the welcome of the Royal Assembly, a council of governors appointed by the prince. The Assembly had guidelines for cooperating with the French general and for offering shelter to his soldiers.20
Princess Carlota Joaquina’s carriage arrived at the port shortly after the prince regent, along with three of her eight children: Pedro, future emperor of Brazil, eight years old; Miguel, six years old; and Ana de Jesus Maria, eleven months old. The rest of the family arrived in separate carriages: the adolescent Maria Teresa and her sisters Maria Isabel, ten years old; Maria Francisca, seven years old; Isabel Maria, six years old; and Maria da Assunção, two years old. Finally came Queen Maria I, now seventy-three years old. For the people gathered on the wharf watching the departure, the presence of the queen offered a great novelty. Because of her bouts of madness, the queen had lived for sixteen years as a recluse in the Palace of Queluz, not seen in the streets of Lisbon during all that time. As her coach darted toward the port, she shouted to the coachman, “Slow down! They’ll think we’re fleeing!”21 On arriv
ing, she refused to descend from the carriage, forcing the captain of the royal fleet to carry her to the ship in his arms. Dom João’s sister-in-law Maria Benedita, sixty-one years old, and her aunt Maria Ana, seventy-one years old, brought up the rear.22
To guarantee the future of the monarchy in the event of a disaster, planners considered it prudent to avoid putting all the heirs to the throne on the same ship. But in the haste of departing, this precaution was forgotten. Carlota Joaquina herself took charge of distributing the family across the ships. Their sons Pedro and Miguel, the two direct heirs to the throne, boarded the Royal Prince along with their father and their grandmother. It was a risky decision. In the event of a fatal shipwreck, this vessel could bring three generations of the Bragança dynasty to the bottom of the ocean. Carlota Joaquina and four daughters—Maria Teresa, Maria Isabel, Maria da Assunção, and Ana de Jesus—remained on the Afonso de Albuquerque, commanded by Inácio da Costa Quintela, along with the counts of Caparica and Cavalheiros, their families, and servants, yielding a total of around 1,058 people. The other two children traveled with the marquis of Lavradio on the Queen of Portugal.23
Before embarking, João scraped clean the royal coffers, a measure he repeated when leaving Rio de Janeiro to return to Lisbon. In 1807, they departed with a royal treasury of 80 million cruzados, nearly half of the currency in circulation in Portugal, along with a huge quantity of diamonds extracted from Minas Gerais that rather unexpectedly were returning to Brazil.24 The royal baggage also included all of the archives of the Portuguese monarchy. A new printing press, recently purchased in London, was loaded onboard the Medusa just as it had arrived from England, its original packing still intact.25 It was yet another instance of ironic cargo: To prevent the spread of potentially revolutionary ideas in the colony, the Portuguese government expressly had prohibited printing presses in Brazil. (To escape censorship, Brazilian journalist Hipólito da Costa published the Correio Braziliense, Brazil’s first newspaper, in London in 1808.)
Two days of strong winds blew toward the continent, but on the morning of November 29 the wind finally changed direction, the rain stopped, and the sun emerged. At 7 a.m., the order to depart was issued.26 Lord Strangford withdrew to board the Hibernia, writing to Lord Canning, prime minister of Britain:
I have the honor of communicating that the Prince Regent of Portugal has decided on the noble and magnanimous plan of withdrawing from a kingdom that no longer can maintain itself as anything but a vassal of France, and that His Royal Highness and family, accompanied by the majority of warships and by a throng of loyal defenders and supportive subjects, departed Lisbon today, and are on their way to Brazil under the guard of the English navy.27
The commander of the British fleet, Admiral Sidney Smith, described the moment of departure as follows:
At 7am on this memorable day, the morning was marvelous, as a light breeze propelled the Portuguese ships towards the mouth of the Tagus river. The signal was made by two sailors, and then repeated by three ships, as the Portuguese colors were flown. The spectacle was impressive for all onlookers (except the French, in the mountains), held by the most vivid gratitude to Providence for having witnessed that there was still a power on earth capable of protecting the oppressed.28
Commanding the fleet stationed in Lisbon, Smith’s presence gives an idea of the importance that the British conferred on the operation. He had participated in some of the most decisive events in modern Western history: He fought in the American Revolution, faced Napoleon, and battled the tsar of Russia. He also had worked with one of the most important inventors of all time, Robert Fulton, father of the submarine and the steamboat. He had retired to Bath, in the English countryside, when in the autumn of 1807 he was called to return as admiral specifically to take part in the events in Portugal.29
At around three in the afternoon, young José Trazimundo was dining in the company of his father and two brothers when he heard the distant rumble of cannons. A volley of twenty-one shots by the English fleet saluted the Royal Pavilion of the ship carrying the prince regent, who at that moment was leaving the shoals of the Tagus for the Atlantic Ocean. Portuguese ships were still visible on the horizon when French troops entered Lisbon. Only sadness and desolation remained behind. “Even though at my young age, I could not give due importance to the crisis that the country was in, and especially the capital, which had the French army two leagues from its borders, nonetheless I remember being amazed by my relatives’ expressions, and those of the people around us,” wrote Trazimundo.30
The logbooks of the British ships, collected by historian Kenneth Light, reveal that as they accompanied the flight from Lisbon, the English weren’t as friendly as many contemporaneous reports would have us believe. Tension and anticipation hung in the air. Without exception, all the English commanders recorded in their diaries that, upon catching sight of the Portuguese ships leaving the port of Lisbon between 8 and 9 in the morning on November 29, they ordered their ships to prepare for action and form a line of combat.31
Apparently, all of them were operating under the supposition that the Portuguese in fact had surrendered to the demands of Napoleon and at that instant might try to break the stronghold of the British naval blockade. This brief moment of uncertainty dissipated when the Portuguese fleet crossed the shoals of the Tagus. In an open and friendly move, the Royal Prince approached the HMS Hibernia, the captain’s ship of the British fleet. To reaffirm peaceful intentions, the two exchanged salutes conforming to protocol: twenty-one cannon shots on each side, first the English, then the Portuguese. “Until recently, Portugal and England had been at war, and Sidney Smith did not want to run any risks,” wrote Light. “Only after friendly dialogue was there an exchange of volleys.”32
Left to its own devices, Portugal was about to live through the worst years of its history. In the next seven years, more than half a million citizens left the country, perished of hunger, or fell on the battlefield during a series of confrontations that became known as the Peninsular War.33 On that bright morning in November 1807, hundreds of trunks remained scattered on the wharf in Lisbon, forgotten in the commotion of the departure. Among them were crates of the Church’s silver and the books of the Royal Library. The French invaders confiscated and melted the silver. The books of the Royal Library—which included a first edition of Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Portugal’s national epic poem; ancient manuscript copies of the Bible; and maps drawn on parchment—arrived in Brazil later, in three consecutive voyages: the first in 1810 and the other two in 1811.
On one of these voyages came the royal archivist, Luiz dos Santos Marrocos. The events of 1807 were about to change his life radically.
VI
The Royal Archivist
At the end of October 1807, while Emperor Napoleon’s troops approached the Portuguese border, the life of archivist Luiz dos Santos Marrocos hung suspended between two cities, one from the past and the other in the future. A twenty-six-year-old bachelor, he lived with his family in the Belém neighborhood in Lisbon, the capital of the vast colonial Portuguese empire, an exotic, thriving place replete with traders from China, India, Arabia, and Africa. In three years, he would be in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of colonial Brazil, a city teeming with novelties, a port of replenishment, and an obligatory stop for ships bearing toward distant lands, including the recently discovered Oceania.
In Lisbon, dos Santos Marrocos and his father, Francisco, worked for the prince regent in the Royal Library, one of the most extraordinary in Europe. Situated in a pavilion in the Palace of Ajuda, it housed 60,000 volumes. It was ten times larger than the collection of Thomas Jefferson’s books that became the Library of Congress.1 In the Royal Library, the two dos Santos Maroccos translated foreign works and catalogued and cared for rare books and documents.
This steady routine of silent dedication to books suffered an abrupt interruption in the final week of November, however, when dos Santos Marrocos recei
ved orders to pack the entire collection in crates as fast as possible and to dispatch them to the docks of Belém, where the ships of the Portuguese fleet awaited the royal family to embark for Brazil. In these hours of uncertainty and anguish and with the assistance of colleagues and court officials, dos Santos Marrocos packed all 60,000 volumes and sent them to the port in carts drawn by mules and horses, tussling through the narrow streets of Lisbon, vying among hundreds of other carriages all headed for the same destination. The rush turned out to be futile, though. In the chaos of the departure, every single crate packed with books was forgotten on the docks, left amid the mud and sludge from the previous day’s rain.
Two and a half years later, in March 1811, dos Santos Marrocos himself left for Brazil to oversee the second of three shipments of books. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro on June 17, a few days before his thirtieth birthday. In the ten years that followed, he maintained a regular correspondence with his father, Francisco, and his sister, Bernardina. These 186 unassuming letters, housed today in the archives of the Ajuda Library, transformed the archivist into an important character in the history of Brazil and Portugal. This one-way correspondence—we don’t have the responses that Luiz received in Rio de Janeiro—has become one of the most cherished primary sources for researchers studying this period of Brazilian history. The simple reports by a common citizen tell of the enormous transformations that the Portuguese and Brazilians experienced during the thirteen years in which the royal family ruled from the New World. Court intrigues, petty bureaucracy, and the harsh reality of slavery appear in raw form in dos Santos Marrocos’s letters, like an instant photograph, free from retouching and without the filtering of documents or official reports.
1808: The Flight of the Emperor Page 5