The English government recognized the fragility of the Portuguese monarchy and how to take advantage of the situation. After coordinating João’s departure for Brazil in 1807, Lord Strangford returned to England, where he remained for four months. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro on April 17, 1808, with very precise instructions with respect to the treaty to be negotiated with the exiled court. These instructions, discovered by Alan Manchester while researching the correspondence between Strangford and Lord Canning, the British minister of Foreign Affairs, show that while the Portuguese court was trying to save its neck by fleeing to Rio de Janeiro, Britain maintained complete control of the situation and knew exactly how to negotiate in order to secure its political and commercial interests in the region. One of the instructions from Canning to Strangford orders the negotiation of an agreement to “induce the British merchants to make the Brazils an emporium for the British Manufactures destined for consumption of the whole of South America.” In other words, Brazil was becoming part of a larger commercial strategy, in which English interests extended throughout the entire continent.12
The plan worked perfectly. In the commercial sphere, the privileges conceded to Britain were greater than even those that Lisbon would have enjoyed there. The opening of Brazilian ports, decreed during the Bahia interlude, was just the beginning. Two years later, a treaty making Britain the preferential trading partner of this colony-turned-nation further amplified the benefits of the arrangement. By 1810, not even the Portuguese could compete with English products in the Brazilian market. In the new treaty, customs duties on British goods in Brazilian ports shrank to 15 percent of the import value, as opposed to the 16 percent paid for Portuguese goods.13
Aside from commercial advantages, the treaty of 1808 gave the British special prerogatives, including the right to enter and exit the country as they pleased, set up residences, acquire property, and maintain a system of parallel justice. By Article 10, the most controversial of all, Britain reaffirmed in Brazil a privilege that it had held in Portugal since 1564: to appoint special magistrates to judge cases involving British citizens. The English residents in Brazil elected these judges themselves, and the Portuguese government could remove them only with the approval of the English representative in Brazil. In practice, two judicial systems came to exist in Brazil: one for Portuguese and all foreigners, and another only for the English, untouchable by local laws.14
The English also received the guaranteed right to religious freedom. In a decision without precedent in the Portuguese Americas, English Protestants gained authorization to construct religious meeting houses—as long as these churches and chapels resembled private homes and didn’t signal services with bells.15 This article of the treaty naturally encountered ferocious opposition from the apostolic delegate of Rio de Janeiro, Lourenço Caleppi, who threatened Prince João with excommunication if he accepted the English demands, which of course ultimately prevailed.
As repayment for the protection of the English fleet during the voyage to Brazil, João conceded to the British the privilege of cutting timber in the Brazilian forests for the construction of warships. Moreover, British warships could enter any port of Portuguese dominion, without limits, in times of war or peace. The final articles stipulated that the treaty would have an unlimited duration and that the express conditions and obligations would be “perpetual and immutable.”16 Twelve years later, when Pedro I sought Britain’s recognition of Brazilian independence, part of the price he paid was Brazilian ratification of the clauses of the treaty of 1810.17
The agreement was signed under the false appearances of reciprocity. In reality, the situation was quite different. In Brazil, the English had the right to elect judges and hold special trials, but this right didn’t extend to the Portuguese in England, for whom the contract guaranteed only the benefits of “the acknowledged excellence of the British jurisprudence.” The treaty represented no more than a concession of power, pure and simple, to England, which guaranteed the Portuguese monarchy’s survival with its troops, arms, munitions, and ships. “These benefits were so great and essential that in the actual state of affairs, without them, the Portuguese would cease to be even nominally a nation,” wrote Alan Manchester.18
The consequences of the opening of Brazilian ports and of the treaty of 1810 can be quantified. In 1808, 90 foreign ships entered the port, constituting 10 percent of the overall total; the other 90 percent were Portuguese shipments. Two years later, the number of foreign ships grew five times, to 422, nearly all English, while the Portuguese numbers diminished.19 In 1809, one year after the ports opened, more than 100 British commercial enterprises existed in Rio de Janeiro.20 In 1812, Brazil sold £700,000 of merchandise, while in the other direction five years later the English exported to Brazil nearly double that amount. British exports to Brazil were 25 percent greater than all of its sales to Asia and half of what it exported to America, a former colony. Three quarters of the pounds sterling exported to South America came through Brazil.21
More impressive than the number of shipments and vessels was the variety of products entering Brazil. “It is natural to suppose that the market would be almost instantly overstocked,” recorded the English mineralogist John Mawe.
So great and so unexpected was the influx of manufactures into Rio de Janeiro, within a few days after the arrival of the Prince, that the rent of houses to put them into became enormously dear. The bay was covered with ships, and the custom-house soon overflowed with goods: even salt, casks of ironmongery, and nails, salt-fish, hogsheads of cheese, hats, together with an immense quantity of crates and hogsheads of earthen and glass ware, cordage, bottled and barrelled porter, paints, gums, resin, tar, etc. were exposed, not only to the sun and rain, but to general depredation . . . one speculator, of wonderful foresight, sent large invoices of stays for ladies, who had never heard of such armour; another sent skates, for the use of a people who are totally uninformed that water can be ice; a third sent out a considerable assortment of the most elegant coffin furniture, not knowing that coffins are never used by the Brazilians.22
Another witness of the era, a French visitor, confirmed having seen the unloading of ice skates in Rio de Janeiro, aside from other “strange merchandise,” including heavy wool shawls and copper warming-pans to heat beds.23
These products had nothing to do with the climate and local necessities of course, but they arrived in Brazil practically without import taxes and ended up fulfilling uses never envisioned for them. The same French traveler recounts that the wool shawls were used more effectively in place of ox leather and to pan gravel in gold mines. The perforated copper basins became giant skimmers in the sugarcane mills. The ice skates transformed into knives, horseshoes, and other metallic objects. The traveler even saw a doorknob in Minas Gerais made of ice skates.
But lest we mistakenly think that only the English benefited from this arrangement, many Brazilians and Portuguese also became rich—some through dishonest means. Travelers’ reports brim with stories of foreigners tricked by local merchants who foisted off goods and products of low quality as if they were something else. “Tourmalines were sold for emeralds, crystals for topazes, and both common stones and vitreous paste have been bought as diamonds to a considerable amount,” recounts John Mawe. “The brass pans purchased of the English were filed, and mixed with the gold in the proportion of from five to ten percent.”24 Cheap wood from the forests of Rio de Janeiro was dyed red and sold as Brazilwood, an extremely valuable hardwood the trade of which was rigorously controlled in Pernambuco. Brazilian trickery was in the midst of performing yet another spectacle on the pages of history.
XVIII
Transformation
With the hubbub of the royal arrival over, it was time to get to work. The plans were grandiose, and there was everything to be done. Among other lacunae, the colony lacked banks, commerce, courts, currency, factories, hospitals, libraries, roads, schools, a press, and efficien
t communication. Most importantly, it needed an organized government that could take charge of all of these deficiencies. “It was a vast virgin territory in which the new extrinsic and impoverished government had to create everything from scratch and improvise,” wrote historian Pedro Calmon, and Prince João lost no time.1 On March 10, 1808, just forty-eight hours after disembarking in Rio de Janeiro, he organized his new cabinet as follows:
•Minister of Foreign Affairs and War: Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, future count of Linhares
•Minister of Royal Affairs: Fernando José de Portugal, future marquis of Aguiar
•Minister of Naval and Overseas Affairs: João Rodrigues de Sá e Menezes, viscount of Anadia.
This cabinet had to create a country from nothing on two fronts of action. The first, internal, included the numerous administrative decisions João made shortly after arriving: to improve communications between provinces, to encourage settlement, and to profit from the wealth of the colony. The second front, external, aimed at widening Brazil’s borders in an effort to increase Portuguese influence in the Americas. It also took aim at Portugal’s European adversaries by occupying their territories and threatening their colonial American interests.
At the end of 1808, a troop of five hundred Brazilian and Portuguese soldiers escorted by a small naval force—in retaliation for the invasion of Portugal by Napoleon’s troops—invaded French Guiana and besieged the capital, Cayenne, which they vanquished without facing resistance on January 12 of the following year.2 A second offensive annexed the so-called Eastern Strip of the Rio de la Plata, forming modern-day Uruguay, in revenge for Spain’s alliance with Napoleonic France. Both were short-lived conquests. The Treaty of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe after the fall of Napoleon, returned French Guiana to France eight years later, and Uruguay, occupied by King João’s troops in 1817, gained its independence in 1828.
With plans of territorial expansion scuppered, it fell to João to concentrate on the first and more ambitious of his tasks: advancing Brazil so that the dream of a Portuguese Empire in America could rise from the tropics. To this end, new improvements occurred at a maddening pace, having a great impact on the future of the country. During the Salvador stopover, João opened Brazilian ports. On arriving in Rio de Janeiro, he granted the freedom of manufacturing and industrial commerce. This measure, announced on April 1, revoked a charter of 1785 that prohibited the manufacturing of any products in the colony. These two acts effectively ended the colonial system. The “weak” prince had freed Brazil from three centuries of Portuguese monopoly and integrated it into a system of international production and commerce as an autonomous entity.3
Free of prohibitions, countless industries sprang up on Brazilian soil. The first iron factory appeared in 1811 in the city of Congonhas do Campo, created by then-governor of Minas Gerais Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas. Three years later, now as governor of the province of São Paulo, de Assis Mascarenhas helped construct a steelworks factory in Sorocaba, the Royal Factory of São João de Ipanema.4 In other regions wheat mills sprouted as well as factories producing gunpowder, boats, fabric, and rope.
The opening of new roads, authorized by the prince regent while in Salvador, helped break the isolation that until then had prevailed among the provinces. Their construction officially had been prohibited since 1733, with the excuse of combating the smuggling of gold and precious stones. In 1809, a road of 121 leagues (nearly 500 miles) opened between Goiás and the Northern region of the country. Following a route similar to today’s Belém-Brasília highway, it facilitated communication with French Guiana after the Portuguese occupation of Cayenne. New roads also stretched among the provinces of Minas Gerais, Bahia, Espirito Santo, and north of the present-day state of Rio de Janeiro. The Commerce Road, linking the cities of the Valley of Paraíba, cut in half the distance that troopers had to traverse between São Paulo and the south of Minas.5
Explorers mapped Brazil’s most distant regions. Marine cartographers drew up new nautical charts of the provinces of Pará and Maranhão. Goiás saw the creation of its first navigation company. Expeditions traversed the tributaries of the Amazon all the way to their sources and established riverboat communication between Mato Grosso and São Paulo.6 Steam navigation came in 1818 by way of Felisberto Caldeira Brant, the future marquis of Barbacena and the future first Brazilian ambassador to Great Britain. João granted Brant the privilege of a monopoly for fourteen years, a decision that journalist Hipólito da Costa criticized for its lack of competition that inhibited the expansion of this valuable new means of transportation.7
Another novelty was the introduction of secular and higher education. Before the arrival of the court, religious institutions handled all education—limited to primary school—in colonial Brazil. Exams often took place inside churches, with an audience observing the students’ performance.8 In contrast to its colonial Spanish neighbors, who already had inaugurated their first universities, Brazil didn’t have a single facility of higher learning. João changed this, creating a medical college, an agricultural college, a laboratory for chemical analysis and studies, and the Royal Military Academy, which included among its functions teaching civil engineering and mining. He also established the Superior Military Court, the General Superintendence of the Court Police (a mixture of city hall and a department of public safety), the royal exchequer, the Finance Council, and the Corps of the Royal Guard. Later came the National Library, National Museum, Botanical Gardens, and Royal Theatre of São João.9
The Rio de Janeiro Gazette, the first newspaper published on Brazilian soil, began circulation on September 10, 1808, printed by machines brought over still packed in the crates originating from England. The paper had one restriction: to print only news favorable to the government. “To have judged of Brazil by its only journal, it must certainly have been deemed a terrestrial paradise, where no word of complaint had ever yet found utterance,” observed historian John Armitage.10 Hipólito da Costa, who launched the Correio Braziliense in London three months before the premiere of the Gazette in Rio de Janeiro, complained of their “wasting such high quality paper in printing such awful material” which “would be put to better use in wrapping butter.”11
The transformations reached their culmination on November 16, 1815. On this day, the eve of the eighty-first birthday of Queen Maria I, Prince João elevated Brazil to kingdom status and into a united kingdom with Portugal and the Algarves, raising Rio de Janeiro to the official seat of the court. This measure had two objectives. First, it paid homage to the Brazilians who had hosted him during the 1808 arrival. Second, it reinforced the role of the Portuguese monarchy during the negotiations of the Treaty of Vienna, in which the powers victorious over Napoleon discussed the future of Europe. With Brazil raised to the status of a kingdom in union with Portugal, the court in Rio de Janeiro gained a voice and the right to vote, despite lying thousands of miles from Lisbon, the only Portuguese seat that other European rulers recognized until then.
Alongside these grandiose initiatives, the prince also adopted parochial measures, including the order to change the facades of houses in Rio de Janeiro. When the court arrived, the majority of carioca residences had windows in the Moorish style, known as trellises or lattices. Wooden trellises—with a span in the lower part through which residents could observe activity in the streets without themselves being seen—protected openings in house walls. These wooden gratings blocked the sun, though, and kept interiors dark and suffocating. João detested this architectural feature and ordered the immediate removal of the trellises, to be replaced by windowpanes “within a term of eight days,” according to an announcement signed on June 11, 1809.12
In another quaint decision, he officially declared war on the Botocudo Indians, who made life hell for the ranchers and settlers in the province of Espirito Santo. According to the report of Englishman John Mawe,
A proclamation has been issued by the Prince Regent, in wh
ich they are invited to live in villages, and become Christians, under a promise that, if they come to terms of peace and amity with the Portugueze, their rights shall be acknowledged, and they shall enjoy, in common with other subjects, the protection of the state; but, if they persist in their barbarous and inhuman practices, the soldiers of his royal highness are ordered to carry on a war of extermination against them.13
From London, Hipólito da Costa ironically lampooned João’s measure in a Correio Braziliense editorial: “It is quite a while that I have not read such a celebrated document, and I will publish it when I receive the response of His Excellency, the Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs and War of the Botocudo Nation.”14
The effort to transform Brazil stretched beyond the administrative arena. While he ordered the opening of roads, the construction of schools and factories, and the organization of government infrastructure, Prince João also dedicated himself to what historian Jurandir Malerba called “civilizing projects.” In other words, he promoted the arts and culture, attempting to infuse a degree of refinement and good taste in the backward habits of the colony. The greatest such initiative involved contracting the famous French Artistic Mission from Paris. Headed by Joachim Lebreton, the permanent secretary of the fine arts section of the Institute of France, this mission arrived in Brazil in 1816, consisting of some of the most renowned artists of the era: Jean-Baptiste Debret, a disciple of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s favorite painter; Nicolas Taunay, landscape painter; his brother Auguste Taunay, sculptor; Grandjean de Montigny, architect; Simon Pradier, engraver and carver; Francisco Ovide, professor of applied mechanics; and Sigismund von Neukomm, musician and disciple of Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn. The mission also included two leather tanners, an ironsmith, three carriage mechanics, and a master of hardware.15 João paid their travel expenses and guaranteed all of them generous pensions on the condition that they remained in Brazil for at least six years.16
1808: The Flight of the Emperor Page 16