These men – as well as the Spanish troops who arrived in the following days – fanned out across the city, ‘not even sparing the churches and chapels whose saints and altars were used as hat-racks for hanging their weapons and backpacks’.89 A large contingent of troops was quartered in the Palace of Mafra. Junot established his headquarters in the town house of the Baron of Quintela, from where he gave orders for the confiscation of the property of the royal household and the nobility, seizing the entire fleet of royal horses and carriages as well as the goods and property of those who had fled. The French general immediately issued his first proclamation affirming that the occupation was an act of support for Dom João, who had declared war on England. He had come to save the kingdom from their mutual enemy: ‘Fear not, peaceful inhabitants. My powerful army has both valour and discipline …’ As paradoxical as it may seem, the general was corroborating the words of the Prince Regent himself who, on the eve of his flight, had instructed his representatives in Lisbon to receive the troops ‘as if they were guests whom one wishes to please by acts of respect and kindness’.90
The pretence of friendship did not last for long. By December, Napoleon’s agent was implementing a policy of increasing repression. Weapons were banned and all fishing was strictly controlled to prevent the inhabitants from escaping and making contact with the British fleet stationed off the coast at the mouth of the Tagus. A new tax was created, officially termed a ‘contribution’, which imposed a total payment of 40 million cruzados on the city’s inhabitants. All gatherings that could lead to disorder – including playing music and ringing the Angelus – were banned. Cannon were fired every morning to signal when people could leave their homes, and at night to signal when they must return. Christmas 1807 was a sad time in Lisbon: there were no services since all the churches were closed. But worse was yet to come. On 1 February, while on the other side of the ocean Dom João was ceremoniously welcomed by the government of Bahia, in Portugal he was being formally dethroned by the French. Napoleon had finally received confirmation of the royal family’s flight and angrily informed his new subjects: ‘By abandoning Portugal, the Prince of Brazil has renounced all his rights to the Sovereignty of this Kingdom. The House of Bragança no longer reigns in Portugal …’91
Although popular discontent was evident, the time was not ripe for an organized reaction. The royal servants who had stayed behind found themselves in a delicate situation. In the absence of the sovereign, conflicts arose, some of which ended in bloodshed. This was the case of the friars at Mafra. Before he left, Dom João had limited the number of monks who could remain there. This led to fights breaking out; in one such skirmish several of the friars were stabbed.92 The servants who remained in the royal palaces were left with neither food nor remuneration. On 7 December 1807 the warden of the Paço de Queluz93 requested that urgent measures be taken as provisions for the forty-one servants at the palace had almost run out. The stocks in the larder had been reduced to ‘thirty arrobas of bacon, 120 arrobas of codfish, fifty arrobas of garlic, 48 pitchers of olive oil, 25 crocks of vinegar, eight arrobas of sugar, eight barrels of butter and three barrels of lard’. On 30 December his tone became more desperate: he requested instructions about what to do next, as the pantry at the palace was now empty.94
Many managed to escape from Portugal, normally by evading French restrictions on movement and managing to board one of the ships in the British squadron. In May 1808 the diplomat Domingos de Sousa Coutinho, who had remained in London, wrote to the Prince Regent about the large number of Portuguese refugees who had come to England and wanted to embark for Brazil: ‘People from every rank have come, and in such numbers that I know not how to help them. Indeed most of them have arrived with nothing, virtually naked.’95
For those who had remained in the country, the time for reaction soon came. In June 1808, after an uprising in Porto, the French were routed during the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy. The French tried to invade on two further occasions, in March 1809 and in the summer of 1810, before leaving the country for good in 1811. On both occasions the Portuguese with the British fought tooth and nail against the aggressors, forcing them back across the border. By this time, with Portuguese society torn asunder by years of war and foreign domination, their determination to fight back was indomitable. It was a fight between good and evil. The innumerable pamphlets that circulated at the time were apolitical in tone, but all shared a single vision: the sacred homeland that had been defiled must be returned to its people. History was crossed with myth, and reality with metaphor. France and Portugal created conflicting legends. For the French, Junot was the ingenious conquering hero; for the Portuguese, after years of humiliation, he was the mediocre usurper. In the eyes of the Portuguese, France and its Revolution stood for nothing but plots, betrayals and unfulfilled promises. But there was a second legend. Napoleon was the Antichrist ruling over an Empire of Shadows; freemasons and Jacobins alike were his agents of sedition, manifestations of the evil of all that was French. That was the Portuguese version of the Revolution.96
The departure of the royal court, the essential instrument for the operation of the ancien régime, deprived Portugal of its political stability and created a positive environment for the creation of ambivalent myths. An alchemical process was set in motion, in which feelings of abandonment and a mystical vision of salvation were transmuted into a new form of national consciousness. The ordinary people of Portugal clung to the symbolic image of the monarchy; when they rose up against their oppressors the conflict became a new crusade. The French had become the archetype of the infidel Moor whilst the banner of the Holy Cross had traversed Atlantic and been re-erected in Brazil.
In this context, religious feeling dominated, rather than any rational discussion of citizenship that the French Revolution had introduced years before. Even so, from this stalemate, the Portuguese monarchy was to emerge even stronger, albeit symbolically. The Prince Regent was no longer the monarch who had absented himself; he was the monarch who was present but ‘hidden’, like Dom Sebastian,97 who had disappeared in the sands of the desert while fighting in the Crusades, but whose mythical presence remained. His departure had created a void (which included the period of the Iberian Union) but it also created hope: a mythological belief in a future king who would protect the future of this kingdom so cruelly humiliated and belittled.
This then was how Portugal first teetered onto the path towards modernity. It was a tortuous process, shaped by religious feeling and lingering traditional beliefs in every way shape and form. People began to await the great return of the monarch, who was to redeem the kingdom. The only problem was, the myth did not really fit the person, Dom João. In this romanticized version, although he still occupied the throne, he could not occupy the myth.
Meanwhile, after fifty-four days at sea, the Príncipe Real, with the Prince Regent and his retinue on-board, docked in Salvador on 22 January 1808. After spending a month in the capital of the colony, Dom João sailed on to Rio de Janeiro where he arrived on 8 March. The rest of the ships came behind him and arrived at the docks one by one. To commemorate this momentous arrival, his subjects greeted their prince with a special gift: the brig Três Corações sailed out to meet the Príncipe Real loaded with supplies of food and tropical fruit. Amid cashews and coconuts the American colony opened its doors to receive its Portuguese Prince. For the first time in history an empire would be governed from its colony below the equator. The world had turned upside down and its politics inside out.
7
Dom João and his Court in the Tropics1
On 22 January 1808, Dom João and part of his court arrived at his overseas colony. Coincidence or not, the Prince Regent was forced to make a transitory stop in Salvador, which had been the capital and largest city in the colony until 1763. The city could not have been more beautiful. As seen from the ocean, it stood out on top of a tall steep cliff that emerged dramatically from the bay. The ‘City of Salvador’ as it was known
at the time – or the ‘City of Bahia’, as it was called in official correspondence, but also by its citizens – was lush with tropical vegetation and red soil that matched the colour of the tiles on the roofs. Against this backdrop was the incessant coming and going of ships in the bay.2 Luís dos Santos Vilhena, a visitor to the city at the beginning of the nineteenth century, noted in 1802, that ‘[…] at its broadest […] the city measured between 400 and 500 braços3 across’.4 A century earlier the British explorer William Dampier had reported the existence of two thousand houses, with paved streets and public promenades and gardens. He also described the superb churches and beautiful two- to three-storey town houses, like those in the Alfama district of Lisbon.5
The initial enthusiasm, however, may have cooled a little at the timid reception awaiting the travellers. As soon as the governor of Bahia, Saldanha da Gama, received the news that for the first time in history a European royal family would set foot on American soil, he did what he could in the limited time he had. Planning a royal reception with no prior warning was an enormous challenge, and along with the Prince Regent’s ship there were three others, one of which was from the British fleet.
The day after their arrival, the royal family and the Portuguese nobles who accompanied them – with the exception of the queen, Dona Maria, who was in a ‘great state of nerves’ – disembarked beneath the scalding sun of the tropical summer. There were immediate impressions on both sides. Local people thought the royal party dressed for the oncoming winter in Europe was an extraordinary sight. The court, on the other hand, must have found the dirty, badly paved streets of Salvador equally strange. They were crowded with people selling everything from fruit and candies to smoked sausages and fried fish, all of whom threw their refuse into the open gutters where herds of domestic animals came to forage for food.6
Although the urban landscape was similar to Lisbon, everything else was strikingly different. The almond blossoms flowering in autumn in the streets of Portugal were replaced by an exuberant landscape of palm trees laden with fruit and a profusion of vibrant colours. The salty tang of the sea spray intermingled with the exotic aroma of palm oil as food was prepared in the streets.7 However, accounts of the time are unanimous that the slaves made by far the greatest impression on the new arrivals. The brutality of the treatment of the Africans shocked even people acquainted with the appalling conditions of captivity in Europe. Slaves were commonly seen being whipped in the streets or almost crushed beneath the weight of their burdens. Among their many tasks, they also carried the sedan chairs and litters wherein travelled white-skinned ladies seated behind fine linen curtains. The multitude of slaves, selling their wares, preparing food, performing their religious rites from Africa, dominated the streets of Salvador.
Since the sixteenth century Salvador had been the centre for imported merchandise and, above all, the lucrative commerce of slaves. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, although their entry into Portugal had been banned since 1767, African slaves continued to supply the workforce for the colony and arrived in vast numbers at the port. To a large extent Portugal’s trade with Africa was conducted via the ports of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Recife. ‘There were commercial exchanges between the regions, Africa received and Africanized the hammock, the manioc and the corn, while Brazil […] incorporated the use of dendê oil and chilli peppers and the custom of building granaries along the coast.’ In the words of ethnographer and photographer Pierre Verger, between ‘the Africans of Brazil and [the] Brazilians of Africa’ there was ‘an unforeseen consequence of the flux and return flow of the traffic of slaves’.8
There could be no doubt in the minds of the new arrivals that this was a distinctly New World. Anxious to rectify the initial bad impression, while the court remained in Salvador the government did its best to make up for lost time. Religious ceremonies were held for the royal party in the capital’s churches, with their splendid gilded interiors and jacaranda furnishings, and visits were organized to the city’s most eminent citizens.
It was in Salvador that, on 28 January 1808, without the presence of his most important ministers and counsellors, Dom João signed the law that opened Brazilian ports to friendly nations. It was the first measure to be adopted from the new seat of the Portuguese Empire. With the signing of that decree, ‘All agricultural and other colonial produce’ could then be transported not only by Portuguese ships, but also ‘by foreign ships from all countries friendly to the Empire’. Under the new decree the import tariff on wet goods (wine, aguardente and olive oil) was doubled, and dry goods (all other types of merchandise) were taxed at 24 per cent of their value. Foreigners could export all colonial goods and products with the exception of brazilwood and other Crown monopolies.9 The significance of the decree was enormous. It put an end to the Portuguese monopoly of trade with Brazil that had existed since the beginning of the colony. The transport of merchandise to and from Portuguese America was no longer restricted to Portuguese ships or to countries with whom commercial partnerships had been signed. Merchandise could now be imported directly from other countries; Brazilian ships could dock at foreign ports, except for in France and Spain, which were still at war with Portugal.
The opening of the ports was not so much an act of benevolence as a necessary and inevitable outcome of events in Europe. With Portugal under French occupation, the supplies needed in Brazil – where virtually everything was imported – were no longer arriving, nor was Brazil able to export anything produced there. Furthermore, one country was particularly interested in the decree – in fact, its greatest beneficiary and, at the time, Portugal’s greatest friend: Great Britain. With access to Britain’s traditional markets cut off since 1806 by Napoleon’s continental blockade, there could hardly be a more propitious moment for the Brazilian market to open up.
The immediate result was that Britain began to export vast quantities of merchandise to Brazil, far more than the country could absorb. Most of the products were hardly commensurate with the colony’s needs. Some, in fact, were virtually unusable. This last category included ice skates, ladies’ shark-fin corsets, copper (bed) warming pans, thick woollen blankets and mathematical instruments. The British also sent an ample supply of wallets to a country where there was no paper currency and where men of property never carried money, a duty that fell to their slaves.10 The Brazilians showed considerable creativity: the warming pans, once they had been punctured, were used for skimming boiled sugar in the mills; the blankets were used as sieves by the gold panners; and the ice skates were made into door latches. But this ingenuity was still not enough to exhaust the supply. The excess had to be disposed of at public auctions and special sales.
The immediate result of the royal decree was that trade relations between Britain and Brazil were consolidated; and even more so with the signing of a Commerce and Navigation Treaty in February 1810. This treaty reduced import tariffs on British products, making them more competitive than those from other countries, including Portugal. In sum, the treaty – which imposed a 15 per cent import duty on British goods entering the country, while Portuguese goods were taxed at 16 per cent and those from other countries at 24 per cent – was the price the colony paid for Britain’s assistance to the royal family during its flight. Its ‘reciprocity’ clauses did not alter the fact that products that came from Portugal were taxed at a higher rate than those that came from Britain; although the difference was only 1 per cent, it was highly symbolic. The 1810 commercial treaty was complemented by a further agreement, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which granted Britain special purchasing rights and permission to acquire and operate timber mills in Brazil. The treaty also banned the Inquisition from visiting the colony and stipulated the gradual abolition of the slave trade.11
While still in Salvador the Prince Regent began organizing the colony as the new seat of the imperial government. In addition to decorating prominent local figures and taking routine administrative measures, Dom João implemented groundbreaking ini
tiatives, previously unknown in a Portuguese colony. In 1808, for example, he granted the licences for a School of Surgery to be set up in Salvador’s São José hospital and for a Medical School of Anatomy and Surgery to be established in the Military and Naval Hospital of Rio de Janeiro. These were the forebears of Brazil’s medical schools. However, with the continuation of the Crown’s policy to restrict educational institutions to Portugal, there was a chronic shortage of specialists in the colony. The lack of doctors encouraged the activities of apothecaries, barber surgeons, shamans and ‘herbalists’, which often clashed with the scientific knowledge brought into the country by medical students, mainly from the university in Coimbra.
Lisbon had prohibited schools of higher education in its colonies, unlike Spain, whose cultural policies encouraged higher education institutions in its colonies. Until the arrival of the Prince Regent only artillery and military architecture had been taught in Brazil, apart from occasional courses in the ‘courtly sciences’ of philosophy, Latin, rhetoric and mathematics. All other education was conducted by the religious orders in convents and seminaries. The opening of the ports was the beginning of a radical about-turn in Portugal’s previous policy for the colony. As a further indication of this liberalization the Prince Regent licensed the production of glass and gunpowder in Bahia, as well as the installation of wheat mills.
Despite his hosts’ insistent efforts to persuade him to stay – above all those of the governor, who never lost hope that his city would be restored to its old status as the colony’s capital – on 26 February the royal squadron weighed anchor and sailed out of the bay. Promising that he would order a luxury palace to be built in the city, the Prince Regent kept to his plan and, resisting the now famous Bahia hospitality, set sail for the final port of call on his journey.
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