Aboard the Mearim this morning, the bell was rung for 9:00 A.M., the second hour of the forenoon watch. The Mearim was astern of the Belmonte but anchored so that her lookouts had a good view upriver. The notes of the Mearim’s bell had no sooner died than there was a call from aloft: “Ship ahead!” And very soon, as a second and third vessel were seen: “Enemy squadron in sight!”
Riding down with the three-knot current were fourteen Paraguayan vessels — eight steamers and six flat-bottomed barges towed by the ships and each mounting an eight-inch gun. The total firepower of the Paraguayans was forty-seven guns, and like the Brazilians, more than one thousand soldiers augmented their crews. The lead vessel was the Paraguarí, a modern iron-plated warship with eight guns. Rear guard was the Tacuari, flagship, with fleet commander Pedro Ignacio Meza. And just ahead of the Tacuari rode the Marquês de Olinda, her Brazilian colors struck months ago (and made into a floor rug for El Presidente’s office at Asunción), her old decks bristling with eight pieces ready to blast the ships of her former owners.
The Brazilians began to clear for action, their engineers and firemen hastening to get steam up, but they had less than fifteen minutes between the alarm given by the Mearim and the first cannonade from the Paraguayans as they passed their anchorage. The Paraguayans made their run down a channel close to the west bank. The range between their vessels and the Brazilian warships was too wide to permit an effective bombardment, but the sound and smoke of their guns was invitation enough to combat. On the Brazilians’ decks, drummer boys who but an hour ago had served at the altar in cassock and surplice stood boldly at their posts beating the rataplan. Whistles blew as men ran to quarters, with gun crews loading immediately, and soldiers were mustered on their decks in readiness to repel boarders.
Vice-Admiral Barroso had been on the Parnaíba and was rowed back to his flagship. Aboard the Amazonas, he and his officers soon saw the lead Paraguayan ship start to make her turn. Barroso, sixty-one years old this day, was Portuguese-born but had served in the navy of his country of adoption. He had thinning gray hair and a full white beard, but his eyebrows were dark, and beneath them were eyes as commanding as the rest of his features. To get a better view of the enemy, Barroso had climbed up onto one of the Amazonas’s paddle boxes. As he stood there, he passed on an order to a midshipman: “Make this signal to the squadron.”
Barroso glanced swiftly along the line of his ships. Then he addressed the midshipman with orders for signal flags to be flown with two commands: “Bater o inimigo que estiver mais próximo!” and “O Brasil espera que cada um cumpra o seu dever!”
The first command was for the ships to engage the enemy at close quarters. The second was inspired by the glory of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s triumph at Trafalgar sixty years ago: “Brazil expects that every man will do his duty!”
As the Paraguayan fleet completed its turn and started back upriver, the Brazilian ships maneuvered into position in the channels between the sandbanks and islands and opened fire: One of the Paraguayan steamers, the Jejuí, took a shot through her boiler and drifted out of action; the remaining seven and the six barges closed for battle, breaking their squadron line, with groups of ships and gun barges making for specific targets. The Brazilian corvette Jequitinhonha was battered by three Paraguayans firing ball and grapeshot and by their musketeers raking the corvette’s decks. The gunboat Parnaíba also found herself under attack by three ships, including the iron-plated Tacuari and Paraguarí, which fired round after round as they steamed up to the Brazilian with the intention of boarding her.
Within the great bend of the river, as the twenty-one ships and gun barges blazed away at one another, the air rapidly grew thick with the acrid yellow smoke of battle drifting past the fiery mouths of cannon and mingling with the soot and ashes spewed from ships’ funnels. The opening stages of the Battle of the Riachuelo went badly for the Brazilians, for no sooner had they given challenge to the Paraguayans than they faced an additional threat: The twenty-two guns and Congreve rockets of the Paraguayan shore battery just north of the mouth of the Riachuelo opened up in support of their squadron.
The small crews of the chatas, one-gun barges eighteen feet long, concentrated their fire on the wooden hulls of the Brazilian ships, seeking to blast through planking to pierce a boiler or detonate a magazine. For the crew of one chata, the fervor was short-lived when a shot from a 68-pounder on the Amazonas struck the barge, igniting its explosives and blowing it to bits. This did not daunt the Paraguayans as they prepared to board their adversaries.
But here in the rising heat of battle as the Tacuari, Paraguarí, and the small Salto converged on the Parnaíba, and the boarding parties made ready to leap upon the foe with cutlass and machete, they made a terrible discovery: Those now waiting at the port of Asunción for news of a great victory had neglected to place aboard the war steamers the only indispensable items for the impending action: grappling irons.
“Damn them! Oh, damn them!” a sergeant aboard the Salto raged.
His soldier comrades near him, their breath fiery with shots of cana swigged before the battle, blazed forth with even greater curses.
“Damn the stupid bastards!” the sergeant screamed again, watching the Tacuari attempt to close with the Parnaíba. Two men made a desperate leap for the Brazilians’ bulwarks, jumping from the Tacuari’s paddle boxes; but, as the vessels were not grappled, the Tacuari could not keep beside the enemy long enough for others to follow. When the Tacuari stood off, the pair of boarders leapt back to her deck, lucky to escape the Brazilian rifle fire.
The Salto was screw-driven, and her helmsman was able to maneuver her into position and pass slowly alongside the enemy gunboat; in minutes the sergeant and twenty-nine others had boarded the Parnaíba, their battle cries drowning the screams of one Paraguayan who lost his footing and was crushed between the two ships.
The hail of bullets from Brazilian riflemen felled four Paraguayans, but the remaining twenty-five stormed across the Parnaíba’s decks. Supported by small-arms fire from marksmen aloft in the three vessels harassing the Parnaíba, the boarding party began to overwhelm those Brazilians on deck. Many Brazilians had already been driven to take refuge below during the repeated bombardments by the Paraguayans.
The Paraguayans won the fight on the decks: Within fifteen minutes they had control of the Parnaíba, the first prize taken for El Presidente this day.
The sergeant who had been in the thick of the fight was exultant. He spied the body of a drummer boy on the deck near the Parnaíba’s funnel, and with his cutlass, he slashed the straps holding the boy’s instrument. Jubilantly, he took up the drum and sticks he had pried loose from the boy’s fingers and strutted along the deck, raising cheers from his comrades as he beat a triumphant roll.
And then, steaming through the swirl of smoke, riding the swift current, the Amazonas came down upon this scene of battle. She held her fire until the last moment, when her starboard guns blazed at the two nearest Paraguayan vessels, Tacuari and Salto. The port guns of the Amazonas were loaded with grape: With a flash and a roar, they raked the deck of the Parnaíba with a merciless tornado of shot that instantly downed three out of every four Paraguayans.
For four and a half hours the battle raged along the bend of the Rio Paraná. With their towering size and greater firepower, the Brazilians slowly began to prevail: The Jejuí was sunk; the Salto was beached; the Marquês de Olinda, the very sight of which spurred the Brazilian gunners, also took a shot in her boiler house and ran aground on a sandbank.
The Paraguayans lost three ships and two chatas, but still the battle was undecided, for the Brazilians were also mauled: The Belmonte was holed at the waterline and aground; the Jequitinhonha was stuck fast on a sandbank; the Parnaíba, too, was effectively out of action.
After going to the rescue of the Parnaíba, the flagship Amazonas steamed slowly up the channel exchanging shots with the enemy, though these cannonades were secondary to another objective of Vice-Admiral Bar
roso and his men. About a mile upstream, the Amazonas turned. Then, full steam ahead, her great paddle wheels churning the water, the Amazonas came down before the three-knot current. On and on she rode, belching black smoke from her stack and red flame from the mouths of her cannon, steaming directly for the Paraguarí, the newest vessel in President López’s fleet.
She struck the Paraguarí amidships, her ram buckling iron plates, smashing through the enemy’s bulwarks. The Amazonas’s steam whistle shrieked, her decks vibrated violently, her engines raced at full power with a mighty force that shoved the Paraguayan steamer sideways through the water and onto a sandbank.
“Viva Dom Pedro Segundo! Viva Brasil!” the Amazonas’s men cheered, as the frigate backed away from the crippled vessel.
Some Paraguayans had been hurled off the gunboat by the impact; some had abandoned her to swim to the west bank. But a dozen or so shouted back abuse at the macacos and hurried to clear the debris around a 12-pounder. It was a desperate defiance: They were enraged at the destruction of their ship, and afire with the knowledge that generations of Guarani before them had been called to stand fast against this enemy of enemies.
With the grounding of the Paraguarí and damage to a fifth gunboat, which was limping along with a hole in her boiler, the Paraguayan flagship, Tacuari, signaled: “Break off action!” Aboard the Tacuari, the squadron commander, Pedro Ignacio Meza, lay mortally wounded, one of a thousand Paraguayans killed or wounded this day, triple the number of Brazilian casualties. With the Tacuari holding their rear, the three remaining vessels steamed off and were pursued for a distance by two Brazilians, until they, too, dropped back, their crews so exhausted and equipment so damaged that they dared not risk a chase to the Rio Paraguay, where they would come under fire from the enemy’s river fortresses. For the Brazilians, it was enough to know that with the destruction of Paraguay’s fleet, Francisco Solano López was denied access to the Paraná.
But the guns at the Riachuelo were not yet silent, and for one Brazilian warship, the hell that had begun more than four hours ago was not over. The corvette Jequitinhonha had run aground on a sandbank within range of the twenty-two guns and the Congreve rockets of the Paraguayan shore battery. The corvette had come under so murderous a fire that of her crew of 138, fifty were killed or grievously wounded.
Twice during this brutal afternoon, two of the Jequitinhonha’s sister ships came in under the enemy’s barrage to attempt to tow her off the sandbank, but they had failed. Respite came almost seven hours after the commencement of battle when, bombarded by the Amazonas and other vessels, the Paraguayan shore batteries finally withdrew. With that ceasefire, some of the Jequitinhonha’s crew sat down on her splintered deck and wept.
Below deck, in a stern section of the Jequitinhonha, were two men who had remained at their posts these seven deadly hours with no thought for their own safety. There had been no need for them to go on deck to fix in their minds the awful scene, for it was all around them — the broken arms and legs, the mutilated trunks, the ripped-open faces.
The older of the two men was Manuel Batista Valadão, lieutenant-surgeon of the Jequitinhonha. His assistant, twenty-seven years old, was Second-Lieutenant Fábio Alves Cavalcanti, and this was his trial by fire. The suffering around him was beyond his imagination. Four lamps lighted the cabin, their yellow glare increasing the hellishness of the scene visible to men waiting their turn on the operating table; the deck stained darker with blood and the surgeons themselves besmeared. A pungent smell pervaded the cabin, but for this the wounded thanked Almighty God: it was ether, which had not been long in use and would spare them excruciating pain.
At times during those seven bloody hours, Fábio Alves Cavalcanti had been numbed by the horror: He would look at Manuel Valadão, who worked quietly, steadily, and gain the strength to ignore the battle beyond. Sometimes Fábio would be suturing a tear in a man’s flesh, part of him far away, at Engenho Santo Tomás, which had belonged to his family for generations. “O God, my Father, allow me to return there,” he once prayed aloud, unaware that surgeon Valadão overheard him.
For Fábio Alves Cavalcanti, a grandson of Carlos Maria, the child who had been left fatherless when Paulo Cavalcanti was murdered by Black Peter and his band of runaway slaves, the flashes of memory in this cabin where men looked at him with eyes that craved death were immensely soothing. He saw the Casa Grande where he had spent his childhood; a grand old house built more than a century ago and filled with mystery for him. He associated Santo Tomás with his youth, for he had not lived there permanently for a decade: His father, Guilherme Cavalcanti, spent most of the year at their town house at Olinda, and he himself had attended school there, later matriculating at the medical school at the Bahia, until he had entered the imperial navy eighteen months ago. Now, as he stood in this place steeped with blood and with suffering men all around him, Fábio wondered about that decision and felt a longing for that valley of the Cavalcantis so distant from this carnage.
Fábio Cavalcanti’s doubt was short-lived. When the shore battery’s bombardment ceased, Lieutenant Valadão told his assistant to go topside and find out if the battle had truly ended. Fábio started off slowly along a passageway, his shoulders bent with fatigue.
“Tenente . . .”
The call came from a gunner lying on the mess deck. The man had been one of the first to be injured. He had been brought to the surgeons with multiple lacerations and both legs broken by the blast when one of the Jequitinhonha’s 68-pounders had been put out of action by a Paraguayan shell.
“What is it, sailor?” Fábio asked, bending down toward the man.
The gunner reached out and with his unbandaged hand gripped the hand of the young surgeon. “Thank you, my friend.”
Fábio Alves Cavalcanti felt his own surge of gratitude for the privilege of being there — amid the hell that had raged at the Riachuelo, where men as brave as this broken gunner needed him.
XIX
April 1866 - March 1870
In late March 1866, the venerable Guarani general, Juan Bautista Noguera - Cacambo — seventy-nine years old now, small, shrunken, with his hatred of the Brazilians mightier than ever, took great pleasure in a war trophy delivered to Francisco Solano López at his headquarters across the Upper Paraná: a leather bag filled with the heads of nine Allied soldiers.
Cacambo waved his tiny hands and danced with glee at the sight of these enemies. Unsheathing his sword, Cacambo cut the air above the trophies and repeated his vow: “I, Cacambo, will slay the first macaco who dares to leap to our soil!”
An Allied invasion was imminent. The Paraguayan offensive in the Argentine province of Corrientes had been disastrous: Sixteen thousand Paraguayans perished in battles and through sickness before the last units crossed the Upper Paraná back into Paraguay at the end of October 1865.
Paraguayan conscripts had again brought their army up to 25,000 men, most of whom were deployed in camps above the Upper Paraná. Their main base was at Paso la Patria, ten miles east of Tres Bocas. Between these two locations, the carrizal — deep lagoons and mud flats that extended inland for one to three miles — broke the northern banks of the Upper Paraná. At Itapiru, between Tres Bocas and Paso la Patria, there was a battery revetted with brickwork and mounting seven cannon. At Paso la Patria, thirty feet above the carrizal, there were thirty field guns; elsewhere in the jungle along the riverbank, artillery companies were concealed in the woods at likely enemy landing places.
By March 1866 the Allied army of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay was assembled below the Upper Paraná. The Brazilians now had an effective strength of 67,000 men, including 35,000 voluntários da patria. President Bartolomé Mitre, who, in terms of the Triple Alliance Treaty, was commander-in-chief of the Allied army during operations on Argentinian territory, headed an Argentinian contingent of 15,000 men. The Uruguayans, led by the Colorado general Venancio Flores, contributed 1,500 men, all they could muster in the aftermath of the civil war with the Blancos.
Dom Pedro Segundo had made a brief journey to the seat of war with his two sons-in-law, Prince Louis Gaston, comte d’Eu, and Prince Louis Augustus, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Traveling by horseback through southern Brazil, the royal trio had been present when a column of 4,200 Paraguayans had surrendered at Uruguaiana in September 1865. The thirty-nine-year old Dom Pedro, imposing as ever with his six-foot-three-inch frame and luxurious golden-brown locks and beard, had been unimpressed by the captured Paraguayans. “An enemy not worthy of being defeated,” His Majesty had declared in a letter to a friend.
The ninety-two voluntários of Tiberica, led by Firmino Dantas da Silva, had left the town late February 1865, marching first to São Paulo and then down to Santos, where they had taken passage on a ship with other Paulista volunteers for Rio Grande do Sul. There they had been drilled for four months until July 1865, when they were posted to guard a crossing on the Uruguay River. For eight months they sat here without a glimpse of the enemy and with nothing to break the monotony but news of victories won by others, until they received orders to join the Brazilian First Corps at Corrientes.
In April 1866, the main body of the Brazilian army began to move to forward positions on the south bank of the Upper Paraná opposite the Paraguayan battery at Itapiru. On April 5, an advance group of eleven hundred men with La Hitte cannon and mortars occupied and entrenched themselves on a grassy sandbank separated from Itapiru by a narrow channel. Supporting their landing were eight Brazilian warships.
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