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.14 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.”15
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.”16
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.”17
The painter Jean-Baptiste Debret, who arrived at the French Artistic Mission in Brazil in 1816, also found shocking the lack of good table manners among the rich:
The man of the house eats with his elbows jutting on the table; the lady with the plate on her knees, seated on her settee, in oriental fashion; the children, lying or squatting on mats, gladly smearing themselves with the food in their hands. If they are wealthier, the merchant might add a loin of grilled or boiled fish with a spring of parsley, a quarter of an onion, and three or four tomatoes. But to make it more appetizing, they would dip every mouthful in spicy sauce. Bananas and oranges would complete the meal. Only water was drunk. Women and children used neither fork nor knife—they all ate with their hands.18
Fresh meat was a rarity. It came from afar, sometimes six hundred miles away. Many of the oxen driven along substandard roads from Minas Gerais or the Paraíba Valley died along the way from hunger or exhaustion. “Those of which held out to the end arrived in a most miserable condition, at a public Slaughter-house,” recounts Luccock. Situated near the center of Rio, the slaughterhouse was “highly distressing, and always of the filthiest description.” The condition of the animals, including how they had been slaughtered and transported, turned the meat so bad that “nothing but dire necessity, or the perpetual sight of it in the same wretched condition, could induce a person of the least delicacy to taste it.” Pork also was sold “in a very diseased state.” For these reasons, dried meat from far away—salted and cured in the sun—was more widely consumed.19
Despite the rarity of freshly slaughtered meat, the population of Rio de Janeiro had a rich and varied diet. It consisted of many fruits, such as bananas, oranges, passion fruits, pineapples, and guava, as well as fish, fowl, vegetables, and legumes. Bread baked from wheat flour proved rare and very expensive. Flour made from cassava root or corn flour was used throughout the colony. Together with dried meat and beans it completed the basic pyramid of the Brazilian diet.
In 1808, Rio de Janeiro had only seventy-five public spaces or areas of usage, composed of forty-six roads, four alleyways, six backstreets, and nineteen fields or plazas.20 The names of the roads help explain their purpose: Praia do Sapateiro: Shoemaker’s Beach, today Flamengo Beach; Rua dos Ferradores: Blacksmiths’ Street, today Alfandega; Rua dos Pescadores: Fishermen’s Street, today Visconde de Inhaúma; and Rua dos Latoeiros: Tinsmiths’ Street, today Gonçalves Dias. The main street was Rua Direita, today 1st of May Avenue, featuring the house of the governor, the customs house, and later the Carmo Convent, the mint, and the Royal Palace itself.
During the week, the bustling, noisy streets of the city teemed with mules and four-oxen carriages carrying construction materials, the friction of their wheels and axles making a noise like iron-cutting. Historian Jurandir Malerba recounts that the largely forgotten language of church bells measured and announced the rhythms of life. Nine clangings announced the birth of a boy, seven the birth of a girl. The incessant roar of cannons on the numerous ships and forts protecting the city shocked visitors. “In homage to the King, every ship entering the port would fire off 21 shots, responded in turn by the forts on shore—a custom unknown to any other part of the world,” writes Malerba.21 In 1808, 855 ships entered the port of Rio de Janeiro, an average of three per day.22 If each fired 21 shots, followed by a response of equal number from the forts, then each day by nightfall each carioca heard no fewer than 126 rounds of cannon fire.
In fact, depending on the ship, this number could reach much higher. In 1818, Henry Brackenridge, a naval official from America, entered Guanabara aboard the frigate Congress on an official mission. The protocol of salute involved an exchange of no fewer than seventy-two cannon shots. First, the American frigate discharged twenty-one shots saluting the king, immediately echoed by twenty-one more from one of the forts guarding the bay, followed by fifteen more shots in salute of the admiral, who responded in equal proportion. Only thereafter could the Congress dock in port. “The Portuguese appear to
be extremely fond of expending their powder,” remarked a surprised Brackenridge. “Hardly an hour of the day passed without the sound of cannon in some direction or other.”23
Slaves and freed black merchants selling coal, corn, hay, and milk.
Another aspect of the city that piqued visitors’ curiosity was the number of blacks, mulattos, and mestizos in the streets. Slaves undertook every type of manual labor. Among other activities, they were barbers, shoemakers, couriers, basket makers, and merchants selling hay, refreshments, sweets, cornmeal, and coffee. They also carried around people and goods.24 In the morning, hundreds of them fetched water from the fountain in the Carioca aqueduct, transporting it in barrels similar to those used to carry sewage to the beach in the afternoons.25
Negros vendedores de carvão e vendedorias de milho and Vendedores de leite e capim, engravings by Jean-Baptiste Debret from Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, Paris, 1834–1839, as in Rio de Janeiro, cidade mestiça, Companhia das Letras, 2001
“The racket is incessant,” complained Ernst Ebel, a German visitor describing the noise of slaves in the streets transporting merchandise.
A mob of half-naked slaves carrying sacks of coffee on their heads, led forward by one who sings and dances to the rhythm of a cowbell or beating two shackles in the lilt of a droning stanza which the rest of them repeat, two more carrying on their shoulders a heavy barrel of wine, suspended on a long pole, intoning a melancholy ditty at every step; further ahead, a second group carrying bales of salt, wearing nothing more than a loincloth, indifferent to their burden and to the heat, race around shouting at the top of their lungs. Chained to one another, six more appear yonder with buckets of water on their heads. They are criminals employed as public servants.26
Slaves dominated the landscape on holidays and weekends as well. Wearing colorful clothes, ornaments, and turbans, they gathered in the Santana Fields, in the suburbs of the city, where they sang and danced, clapping in large circles. “On every Saturday and holiday, which are called festival days, masses of negroes travel there, reaching a total of ten or fifteen thousand,” described two visitors. “It is quite curious recreation, and offers a unique spectacle of happiness, tumult, and confusion, which is probably not possible to see on the same scale anywhere besides Africa itself.”27
In addition to discomfort, the combination of heat and lack of hygiene generated massive health problems. “The people are very subject to fevers, to bilious complaints, and what are called diseases of the liver, to dysentery, and elephantiasis, and to other disorders of a similar, and probably connected, kind, which are often violent and fatal,” observed John Luccock. “The small pox, too, when it makes its appearance, carries off multitudes; but lately its ravages have been checked by vaccination.”28 In 1798, the Chamber of Rio de Janeiro proposed to a group of doctors a program to combat epidemics and eradicate the endemic maladies of the city. The plan included a survey of these illnesses. The report, completed by Army doctor Bernardino Antonio Gomes, is frightening:
According to an observation of nearly two years in Rio de Janeiro, I have counted that the endemic maladies of the city include scabies, erysipelas, mycoses, yaws, morphea, elephantiasis, pruritus, tungiasis, leg oedema, hydrocoeles, sarcoceles, roundworms, hernias, leuchorrea, dysmenorrhea, haemorrhoids, dyspepsia, various convulsions, hepatitis, and different types of intermittent and recurring fever.29
Aided by the medical report, the aldermen raised the suspicion that the primary source of these epidemic illnesses—especially scabies, erysipelas, pox, and tuberculosis—lay with the recently arrived blacks from Africa. The councilmen suggested transferring the slave market from the Plaza 15th of November to some location further away. Seeing their business interests threatened, slave traffickers sued the Municipal Chamber. A legal dispute dragged on, ending only when the viceroy, the marquis of Lavradio, sided with the aldermen and ordered the transfer of the slave market to the Valongo region, where it remained when Prince João arrived in Brazil.30
But even more difficult than diagnosing the cause of various diseases was fighting them. As was the case everywhere in the colony, no university-trained doctors lived in Rio de Janeiro. Hearkening back to the Middle Ages, barbers practiced a rudimentary form of medicine. Thomas O’Neill, a lieutenant of the British Navy who accompanied the prince regent, noted with intrigue the number of barbers and the purposes that they fulfilled: “The barbers shops are singular, as they are designated by the sign of a basin; and the barber unites in himself the three professions of a surgeon, dentist, and shaver.”31
Carioca researcher Nireu Cavalcanti found documents in the Brazilian National Archives that give a sense of the state of health and medical care in Rio in the time of King João VI. The post-mortem inventories of doctors, they record possessions left behind. One of them, of the head surgeon Antonio José Pinto, who died in 1709, includes the following startling list of “surgical instruments”: a large hand-saw, a small hand-saw, a ratchet, two straight knives, two pairs of pliers, an eagle’s claw, two tourniquets, a spanner wrench, and a large pair of scissors. An inventory of Antonio Pereira Ferreira, a pharmacist who died in the same year, gives an idea of the assortment of drugs available at the time. The list includes compresses, fungus, minerals, oils, peels, roots, seeds, and a curious item listed as “animals and their parts” with “human oil,” “lizard sandpaper,” “raw salamander eyes,” “deer antler shavings,” and “wild boar teeth.”32
The arrival of the royal family in Rio de Janeiro soon effected a revolution in architecture, the arts, culture, customs, health, and sanitation, everything changing for the better—at least for the white elite who frequented the court. Between 1808 and 1822 the city tripled in size with the creation of new neighborhoods and parishes.33 The population grew 30 percent, while the number of slaves tripled from 12,000 to 36,182.34 Animal and coach traffic grew so intense that laws and regulations had to restrain it. Rua Direita became, starting in 1824, the first road in the city with numbered addresses and traffic organized in a two-way street with separate lanes.
Despite the rapid growth, in 1817, nine years after the royal family’s arrival, Austrian naturalist Thomas Ender registered the presence of a group of natives in São Lourenço, one of the entrances to Guanabara Bay, not far from the Palace of São Cristovão, where King João VI lived. It was doubtless the last indigenous stronghold close to the capital of a Brazil still desolate and unexplored.
XIII
Dom João
João, prince regent and, after 1816, king of Portugal and Brazil, had a crippling fear of crustaceans and thunder. During the frequent tropical storms in Rio de Janeiro, he took refuge in his rooms in the company of his favorite valet, Matias Antonio Lobato. With a candle lit, the two prayed to Santa Barbara and San Jeronimo until the thunder ceased.1 On another occasion, a tick bit him while he visited the ranch at Santa Cruz where he spent his summers. The wound became inflamed, and he developed a fever. Doctors recommended a bath in the ocean. Terrified of being attacked by crustaceans, he ordered the construction of a wooden box in which he bathed in the waters of Caju Beach near the Palace of São Cristovão. Essentially a portable bathtub, the box had two crosswise poles and holes in the sides through which seawater entered. The king remained inside for a few minutes, the box submerged and held tight by slaves, as the marine salt helped the wound form a scab.2
These improvised washings on Caju Beach, under medical advice, remain the only evidence of any baths that the prince took during his thirteen years in Brazil. Almost all historians describe him as unkempt and averse to bathing. “He was very dirty, a bad habit he shared with the rest of the family and the rest of the nation,” affirms Oliveira Martins. “Neither he, nor D. Carlota, despite hating each other, differed on the rule of not bathing.”3 The reluctance of the Portuguese court to bathe contrasted sharply with the Brazilian colony, where attention to personal cleanliness caught the attenti
on of nearly every visitor. “Despite certain habits that come close to savagery among the Brazilians of lower classes, it must be remarked that whatever their race, every one of them is notably attentive to bodily cleanliness,” wrote Henry Koster, who lived in Recife from 1809 to 1820.4
Despite his defects of personality, King João VI, here with royal scepter, crown, and mantle, knew how to delegate power and weather geopolitical turbulence.
O rei D. João VI, engraving by Jean-Baptiste Debret from Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, Paris, 1834–1839, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin
João Maria José Francisco Xavier de Paula Luis Antonio Domingos Rafael de Bragança was the last absolute monarch of Portugal and both first and last ruler of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, which existed barely longer than five years. Born on May 13, 1767, he died on March 10, 1826, two months before his fifty-ninth birthday. Paintings of him reveal, in the words of historian ngelo Pereira:
A high forehead, disproportional to his face, sharply defined eyebrows, sagging cheeks and jowls, rather buggy eyes, a fine nose, thick lips, a half-opened mouth, short and fat legs, tiny feet, a protuberant belly, chubby hands with dimples at the knuckles, sagging shoulders, and a short neck. His eyes were small, dark, frightened, distrustful, and insecure, as if asking permission for his actions.5
Descriptions of him penned by historians usually disparage him.
According to Luiz Norton: “He was physically grotesque and his sickly obesity gave him the air of a peaceful dullard.”6 According to Pandiá Calógeras:
1808: The Flight of the Emperor Page 12