1808: The Flight of the Emperor

by Laurentino Gomes

  Vila Velha (interior of Bahia), engraving from Travels in Brazil by Johann Baptist von Spix and C. Philipp von Martius, London, 1824, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin

  In its immense virgin territory, Brazil had slightly more than 3 million inhabitants—less than 2 percent of its present-day population.8 One in three inhabitants was a slave. The indigenous population was estimated at 800,000. The splotch of settlements was concentrated on the shore, with some cities in the interior of the regions of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso, and along the Amazon River. The village of Itu, sixty miles from São Paulo, the last urban agglomeration offering comfort and regular communication with other regions, represented “the gateway to the backlands,” an early point of departure for Paulista trailblazers heading toward the deserted interior of the country. From there inward, the country offered little more than a green desert inhabited by natives, diamond prospectors, and scant cattle ranches, a territory of contraband activity, its goods typically sold in Buenos Aires. Minas Gerais was the most populous province with more than 600,000 inhabitants. Next came Rio de Janeiro with a population of half a million, then Bahia and Pernambuco in third and fourth place respectively.9

  When the court arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the colony had just experienced a population boom. In little more than a century, the number of inhabitants had increased tenfold. Prospectors had discovered gold and diamond deposits at the end of the seventeenth century. The rush for new mining areas, including Vila Rica (modern-day Ouro Preto), Tijuco in Minas Gerais, and Cuiabá in Mato Grosso led to the first great wave of migration from Europe to the interior. From Portugal alone, between 500,000 and 800,000 people moved to Brazil between 1700 and 1800. At the same time, slave traffic accelerated heavily. Nearly two million captive blacks were forced to work the mines and plantations in Brazil during the seventeenth century in one of the largest forced migrations in all of human history. As a result, the population of the colony, estimated at around 300,000 people in the last decade of the seventeenth century, shot up to more than 3 million by 1800.10

  This population was largely illiterate, poor, and needy, though. In the city of São Paulo in 1818, during King João VI’s reign, only 2.5 percent of school-aged free males knew how to read and write.11 Health conditions were precarious at best. “Even in the most important centers along the coast it was impossible to find a doctor who had completed regular training,” recounts de Oliveira Lima, based on the reports of English merchant John Luccock, who lived for ten years in Rio de Janeiro, beginning in 1808. “The simplest procedures were practiced by bloodletting barbers, and for the more difficult procedures one resorted to boastful individuals who were nonetheless generally equally ignorant of anatomy and pathology.”12 Authorization to perform surgery and clinical work was granted only in audience of a judge, himself ignorant of medicine. Candidates could do so only if they could prove a minimum of four years experience in a pharmacy or hospital. Put simply, first you practiced medicine, then you obtained authorization to perform it.

  Due to the fragility of communication with the interior of the colony, news of the death of King José I in 1777 took three and a half months to reach São Paulo.13 Two and a half decades later, the province of São Pedro do Rio Grande (the present-day state of Rio Grande do Sul) waited three months and thirteen days to learn that Portugal and Spain were at war. When the news arrived on June 15, 1801, it had already been nine days since the conflict ended with the defeat of Portugal. Without knowing of the truce, the captain at arms of Rio Grande, Sebastião da Veiga Cabral da Camara, immediately declared war on his Spanish neighbors and, commanding Portuguese troops, conquered a vast area from the territory of Missões in the west of the captaincy to Rio Jaguarão in the south. This failure of communication ended up winning the Portuguese crown a dispute in Brazil that it had lost in Europe, as told by Jorge Caldeira in Mauá: Entrepreneur of the Empire, which recounts the story of the Viscount of Mauá in the Second Empire.14

  This mutual isolation and ignorance resulted from a deliberate policy of the Portuguese government, which maintained Brazil as the jewel in the crown of an extractive economy, without its own will, out of sight, and far from the avarice of foreigners. It was a policy as old as the colony itself. In 1548, on assuming the post of governor general, the first in that position, Tomé de Sousa received twelve orders from the Portuguese crown on how to conduct business in Brazil. One of them, the ninth, determined that the governor should “Impede communication from one captaincy to another through the backlands, unless it is duly authorized.”15 A law in 1733 prohibited the opening of roads in order to block the contraband trade of gold and diamonds and enable surveillance by Portuguese employees charged with collecting the tax called the royal fifth on production of precious metals and minerals from the colony. The few roads that did exist ran over paths already cut by natives before the European discovery of Brazil, which the first colonists reused.16

  Portugal’s intention to keep Brazil closed to the world became manifest in its July 1808 order to imprison German baron, naturalist, and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who had traversed the Amazon region in search of new flora and fauna. Ignoring the scientific merit of the expedition, the Portuguese government considered his presence detrimental to the interests of the crown because of the dangerous ideas that he could disseminate in the colony.17 A letter from the minister Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho to his brother Francisco, then governor of Grão-Pará province, alerted him that Humboldt’s voyage was “suspect” because he could, “under specious pretexts . . . tempt the souls of the populace with new ideas based on false and wily principles.” Similar orders went out to the governors of Maranhão and Paraíba.18 Kept isolated in backwardness and ignorance for three centuries, the colony consisted of administrative islands, sparsely inhabited and cultivated, distant and unfamiliar each to one another.

  A cassava flour plantation, part of Brazil’s rudimentary economy later transformed by the opening of the ports.

  Mandioca, the farm of Mr. Langsdorff (at the foot of the Serra de Estrela, an extension of the Órgãos Mountains, Rio de Janeiro, on the way to Villa Rica), engraving from Travels in Brazil by Johann Baptist von Spix and C. Philipp von Martius, London, 1824, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin

  Rio Grande do Sul produced wheat and cattle, the latter used also in the production of leather, jerky, tallow, and horns. Its farms were enormous. One of the greatest cattlemen of the region, José dos Anjos, slaughtered 50,000 cattle per year. In 1808, the port of Rio Grande—which contained some 500 homes of 2,000 inhabitants—received 150 ships per year, triple that of neighboring Montevideo.19 They exported goods to the rest of the country as well as Portugal, Africa, and the Portuguese dominions in the Indies. In turn, they imported cassava, cotton, rice, rum, sugar, sweets, and tobacco from other regions in the colony, while from Portugal they imported glass, ink, machetes, munitions, oil, olives, rifles, rope, wine, and English goods such as iron, textiles, and hats.20 Porto Alegre, promoted to capital of the province in 1773, had been until then a tranquil village of 6,035 inhabitants.21

  With nearly 3,000 inhabitants, the island of Santa Catarina—where the modern-day city of Florianopolis lies—dazzled visitors at the time with its beauty and organization.22 “These houses are well built, have two or three stories, with boarded floors, and are provided with neat gardens, well stocked with excellent vegetables and flowers,” noted John Mawe in 1807 during a trip through the south of Brazil. “It affords an agreeable retirement to merchants who have discontinued business, masters of ships who have left off going to sea, and other persons who, having secured an independence, seek only leisure to enjoy it.”23 Florianopolis maintains this role even today as a favored destination for executives and retired professionals. Mawe also passed through Curitiba, at that time a pastoral region with few residents, dedicated to raising oxen and mules to supply the markets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
. “More to the Westward it is dangerous to travel, since in that direction live the Anthropophagi [cannibals], who were driven from these boundaries a few years ago,” he advises. “The country to the North is very full of wood.”24

  São Paulo, today the largest metropolis in South America, then was a small town of 20,000 inhabitants, including slaves.25 At the junction of various commercial routes between the coast and the interior and between the south and the rest of the country, it can also be considered the most indigenous and most Brazilian of all of the great colonial cities, according to journalist Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, author of The Capital of Solitude, an excellent book about the history of the paulista capital. Tupi, a native language, was the most widely spoken language in São Paulo, even by Europeans, until the eighteenth century, when Portuguese became the dominant language. The majority of the population slept in hammocks, a tradition inherited from the natives, until the middle of the nineteenth century, when beds finally replaced them. Homes were little more than adaptations of ocas, traditional indigenous dwellings. During the first two centuries of the colony, “the diet of the Indians was followed, weapons of the Indian were used, and Nheengatu, the lingua-geral, or indigenous-based lingua franca, was spoken as much as or even more than Portuguese,” recounts Pompeu de Toledo.26

  The drawings of Austrian artist Thomas Ender, who reached Brazil in 1817 with Princess Leopoldina (recently married by proxy in Vienna to the future emperor Pedro I), show paulista men and women wearing dark cotton jackets and trousers and gray felt hats with wide brims tied with cords below the chin. They secured their loose boots of raw leather, dyed black, below the knee with straps and buckles. Men kept long knives with silver handles in their belts or upright in their boots, to use as weapons or as cutlery during meals. During trips to the interior by horse or by caravan of mules, they protected themselves against the cold using long, wide, blue ponchos. This apparel was so common in São Paulo that for many years it was called paulista, until falling into disuse with the disappearance of the troopers, and became typical of the gaúchos of Rio Grande do Sul.27

  One peculiarity caught the attention of almost all visitors from abroad passing through São Paulo at the time: the large number of prostitutes in the streets at night on the heels of troopers. They used wide wool mantles to cover their shoulders and part of their faces. Governors of the captaincy at various times had prohibited these cloaks, called baetas, in vain attempts to contain prostitution. In 1775, Martim Lopes Lobo instituted fines and threats of jail for whoever used them. In August 1810, Captain General Franca e Horta ruled that slaves caught with baetas must not only pay a fine but be beaten with a paddle. The fines went toward the lepers’ hospital, but none of these measures had any lasting effect. Thomas Ender and his botanical colleague Karl von Martius described the very same scenes in the streets of São Paulo a decade later.28

  The economic heart of the colony beat in the triangle formed by São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais. The axis of development moved to this region in the beginning of the eighteenth century after the end of the sugarcane boom in the Northeast and the discovery of gold and diamonds in Minas.29 In his travel notebooks, the botanist von Martius, who also arrived in Princess Leopoldina’s retinue, described the incessant movement of mule troopers between São Paulo and Minas Gerais in 1817:

  Each troop consists of 20-50 mules, conducted by a muleteer on horseback, in charge of the general direction of the convoy. It is he who gives the orders to depart, rest, spend the night, rebalance the cargo, assesses the state of the yokes and the conditions of the animals, whether they are injured or unshod. Under his orders the carters travel by foot, each one of them in charge of seven mules, who they have to load and unload with cargo, lead to pasture, and cook for themselves and the other travelers. The muleteer, generally a freed mulatto, also takes care of buying and selling goods in the city, representing the commission of the owner of the troop. The carters are mostly black, and who seek such work as they find the wandering and adventurous life preferable to laboring in the mines or on the farms.30

  Muleteers supplied a colony awash in ignorance and isolation.

  Troperos or Muleteers, 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

  On the troops’ route lay waystations and outposts that served as shelter and restocking points for the men and their animals. “It is a custom of these travelers not to carry food,” noted von Martius. “As in every place they find shops providing rations and ingredients ready to be prepared.” These meals generally consisted of beans cooked with lard, accompanied by dried meat and a dessert of cheese and banana. At night they slept under a mantle made of ox hide, extended over a grating supported by small pieces of wood stuck into the soil.31

  A sugarcane mill.

  A Sugar Mill, engraving from Travels in Brazil by Henry Koster, London, 1816, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin

  Arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, the Englishman John Luccock immediately identified the problem of a lack of currency. Simply put, no money circulated in Brazil. Under the Portuguese dominion, the colony essentially subsisted on bartering, which greatly restricted the opportunities that new merchants could exploit in a country recently opened to international trade. “The commerce between Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais consists principally in negroes, iron, salt, woollens, hats, printed cottons, hard-ware, arms, and some fancy articles, a little wine and oil, salt-fish, and butter,” related John Mawe. “Few luxuries enter these remote parts, the inhabitants seeking for little beyond mere necessities.”32 Mawe also speaks of the dietary habits in Minas Gerais:

  The master, his steward, and the overseers, sit down to a breakfast of kidney beans of a black colour, boiled, which they mix with the flour of Indian corn, and eat with a little dry pork fried or boiled. The dinner generally consists, also, of a bit of pork or bacon boiled, the water from which is poured upon a dish of the flour above-mentioned, thus forming a stiff pudding. A large quantity (about half a peck) of this food is poured in a heap on the table, and a great dish of boiled beans set upon it: each person helps himself in the readiest way, there being only one knife, which is very often dispensed with. A plate or two of colewort or cabbage-leaves complete the repast. The food is commonly served up in the earthen vessels used for cooking it; sometimes on pewter dishes. The general beverage is water. At supper nothing is seen but large quantities of boiled greens, with a little bit of poor bacon to flavour them. On any festive occasion, or when strangers appear, the dinner or supper is improved by the addition of a stewed fowl.33

  As a result of the gold and diamonds springing forth from the ground, the population of Minas exploded in the eighteenth century. At the height of its prosperity, Vila Rica was the largest city in Brazil with 100,000 inhabitants. Tijuco, modern-day Diamantina, had 40,000 people in the era of Chica da Silva, the famous slave who became rich after she won the heart of a rich Portuguese diamond mine owner.34 But when the royal court docked in Brazil, the cycle of gold already had reached its end. The German geologist Wilhelm von Eschwege calculates that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 555 gold and diamond mines still existed in the colony, directly employing 6,662 laborers, of which only 169 were free men; the remaining 6,493 being slaves of course.35 Prospecting and mining activity devastated vast swaths of land. “On all sides, we had before our eyes the afflicting vestiges of panning, vast regions of earth stirred up, and mountains of pebbles,” wrote botanist Augustin de Saint-Hilaire while traveling through the interior of Minas Gerais. “As far as the eye can see, there is earth overturned by human hands, from so many dreams of profit spurring the will to work.”36

  The control over mining was rigorous. By the laws of the Portuguese government, gold extracted from mines and alluvia had to be delivered to the foundry houses in each district, where the rights
of the crown were charged. One fifth of the mineral dust was reserved for the king. Another 18 percent went to the coining houses.37 The rest stayed with the prospectors and miners in the form of bars marked with weight, carat, number, and the king’s coat of arms, along with a certificate allowing them to enter into circulation. To facilitate commerce, the circulation of gold dust was also authorized in small quantities and used for day-to-day purchases. Aside from the severe control of foundry houses, surveillance posts dotted the roads, especially between the mines and the coast, where a military garrison composed of a lieutenant and fifty soldiers had the right to inspect anyone passing through. The punishment for smuggling was drastic: imprisonment, confiscation of all goods, and deportation to Africa.

  Still, smuggling dominated the majority of commercial activity in the colony despite all attempts to prevent it. Precious stones and metals flowed along the Rio da Prata in the direction of Buenos Aires. From there, they proceeded to Europe without paying tax to the Portuguese crown. Historian Francisco de Varnhagen calculates that 40 percent of the total gold was diverted illegally.38 Mawe describes the imprisonment of a smuggler in the village of Conceição, in the interior of Minas:

  About a week previous to my arrival, this village was the scene of a somewhat remarkable adventure. A tropeiro going to Rio de Janeiro with some loaded mules was overtaken by two cavalry soldiers who ordered him to surrender his fowling-piece; which being done, they bored the butt-end with a gimblet, and finding it hollow, took off the iron from the end, where they found a cavity containing about three hundred carats of diamonds, which they immediately seized.