1808: The Flight of the Emperor (2 page)

I
NTRODUCTION

In 1784, five scant years before the French Revolution began, Bernardino da Motta Botelho had put his cattle to graze in Monte Santo, one of the most arid regions in the backlands of the state of Bahia, Brazil, when a rock different from any other in the middle of the pasture attracted the boy's attention. It was smooth and dark and was a discovery that soon became famous. In 1810, scientists from the Royal Society of London concluded that it was a meteorite, a rock that, after traveling millions of miles through the darkness of the universe, had crashed into Earth's surface. At just over six feet in diameter and weighing five tons, the Bendegó meteorite—the largest ever found in South America—today stands proudly on display in the lobby of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

Situated in the Quinta da Boa Vista gardens a few hundred yards from Maracanã stadium, with a view of the Mangueira favela, it is one of the strangest museums in Brazil. In addition to the meteorite, its collection features stuffed birds and the traditional clothing of indigenous tribes, all housed in glass cases that resemble the storefront window displays of rural cities. The pieces appear randomly, without any apparent criteria for organization or identification. The National Museum is even stranger for what it hides than for what it displays, though. The building that houses it, the Palace of São Cristovão, supplied the setting for one of the most extraordinary events in Brazilian history.

There lived the only European sovereign ever to set foot in the New World in over four centuries. Dom João VI, king of Brazil and Portugal, received his subjects, ministers, diplomats, and foreign visitors in that building over the course of more than a decade. The transformation of Brazil into an independent nation also took place there. Despite its historical importance, however, virtually nothing in the São Cristovão Palace recalls the Portuguese court that thrived in Rio de Janeiro. This three-story rectangular building, which Dom João received as a present from one of the city's slave traffickers when he arrived in Brazil in 1808, stands today neglected and forgotten. No plaques indicate where the royal bedrooms,
kitchens, or stables once lay. It is as if history had vanished deliberately from the place.

The same negligence repeats itself in the center of Rio de Janeiro, where another building ought to serve as a place of remembrance for this period. In the Plaza 15th of November, in front of the docks where ferries cross the Bay of Guanabara toward the city of Niterói, lies the ancient Imperial Palace, a two-story seventeenth-century mansion. This was the official seat of the government of Dom João in Brazil from 1808 to 1821, but today you might pass in front of it without discovering any such information. An unidentified old-timey wooden carriage sits against the window to the right of the main entrance, but otherwise nothing makes reference to the building's past. On the wall next to the carriage, a map in high-relief shows the buildings and skyscrapers of modern Rio de Janeiro—an anachronistic curiosity. A map of the colonial city when the Portuguese court first arrived would be more in keeping. This is the Imperial Palace after all.

The otherwise empty rooms sporadically host events often either ignorant or devoid of context. On the upper floor in November 2005, the throne room where João VI once dispatched his ministers contained an art exhibition in which rosaries on the floor simulated male genitalia. It is the province of art to surprise and challenge common sense, but the exhibition of these objects in a place that for so many years housed one of the most pious courts in Europe amounted to little more than provocation for provocation's sake.

But then disdain for historical monuments was never a novelty in Brazil. In the case of João VI, however, an additional factor heightens the seemingly deliberate amnesia surrounding him. Modern caricatures represent the king and his court in books, theater, television, and film. Take for one example, among many, the film
Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil,
by Carla Camurati. The queen, who gives her name to the film, appears as a hysterical and treacherous nymphomaniac, and João as a bumbling, gluttonous ruler incapable of making a single decision.

The present book attempts to recapture the history of the Portuguese court in Brazil from the relative oblivion into which it has sunk and to develop its protagonists and the roles they played two centuries ago in the most accurate dimensions possible. As you will see, these people at times
behaved unbelievably cartoonishly, as have many of the rulers who have followed them—including many of the present day. The flight of the royal family to Rio de Janeiro occurred during one of the most passionate and revolutionary periods of world history, in which monarchists, republicans, federalists, separatists, abolitionists, traffickers, and slave-masters opposed each other in a power struggle that radically changed the history not only of Brazil and Portugal but eventually the world. These clashing interests explain in part the abandonment of the locales frequented by the royal family as much as the weight of prejudice that still accompanies the works depicting them.

Equally important as the first objective, this book also aims to make this central thread of Brazilian history more accessible to readers interested in the past but unaccustomed or disinclined to decipher the elaborate academic language that permeates many existing works on 1808 and its consequences. The most important book about this period is
D. João VI in Brazil
by diplomat and historian Manuel de Oliveira Lima. Published in 1908, it is both erudite and fundamental, a study unequalled in the depth of its content. De Oliveira Lima's dry style, however, makes it tiring even for readers familiar with the peculiar language of postgraduate dissertations. Curiously the two most recent and accessible books on the topic appeared in English:
Empire Adrift
by Australian journalist Patrick Wilcken and
Tropical Versailles
by historian Kirsten Schulz.
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Aside from their typically academic language, historians who examine this period often present a semantic question: Did the Portuguese court
move
or
flee
to Brazil? Which term more properly defines what happened between November 1807 and July 1821, the dates of Jõao VI's departure from and return to Portugal? They never have reached agreement on this point. De Oliveira Lima refers to the “translocation of the court.” Luiz Norton calls it a “voluntary transfer” and a “transposition of the Portuguese seat.” Ângelo Pereira speaks of “the removal of the royal family to Brazil.” Tobias Monteiro treats it as a “transplant.” Others use expressions like “transmigration” or “moving,” all of them either seeking to minimize—or doing so ­unknowingly—the military influence of a certain general from Corsica. I refer to the event as a
flight
in the wake of historians Pereira da Silva, Jurandir Malerba, and Lília Moritz Schwarcz, among others.
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Although transferring the court to Brazil was an old plan in Portugal, in 1807 the prince regent had little choice: Flee or be apprehended and deposed as happened a few months later with the Spanish monarchy. If no alternative presented itself, then no justification exists for the use of semantic acrobatics to downplay or disguise what happened: a pure and simple fugue, disorderly, rushed, and subject to improvisation and errors. So great was the commotion of departure that hundreds of crates of the Church's silver and thousands of precious volumes of the Royal Library, among other items, lay forgotten on the docks of Belém in Lisbon. The French invaders melted down the silver, which the English recovered some months later. The books arrived in Brazil only in 1811.

While the events of the past remain immutable, their interpretation depends on the tireless investigations of researchers and also on the judgment of future readers. In the case of João VI and the flight of the court, even if two centuries have elapsed, new facts have emerged. Among the important contributions recorded in recent years are the complete transcriptions of the onboard diaries of the British ships accompanying the royal family to Brazil, completed in 1995 by Kenneth H. Light. This work helps resolve some previously nebulous points regarding the crossing of the Atlantic. Equally relevant are the interpretations of historian Jurandir Malerba, author of
The Court in Exile
, which show how the pomp and ritual of the Portuguese court in Rio helped legitimize and consolidate their power in the tropics.

The work of historians such as Mary Karasch, Leila Mezan Algranti, Manolo Garcia Florentino, and João Luis Ribeiro Fragoso stand out for their decisive contributions to more specific themes such as slave trafficking and the accumulation of wealth in João VI's Brazil. In this same line, the research of architect Nireu Cavalcanti and historian Jean Marcel Carvalho França enrich our understanding of colonial Rio de Janeiro. All of these scholars have dedicated themselves to the patient, difficult work of investigating primary sources, such as official documents, diplomatic correspondences, post-mortem inventories, and letters and diaries stored in the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, the National Archive of the Torro do Tombo in Lisbon, and other institutions. This mining of the past has decisively improved our
knowledge of the facts of the time and corrected erroneous interpretations previously dominant.

This book, a journalistic endeavour, builds on the work of these and countless other researchers in order to describe what happened in Brazil two hundred years ago. All of the information contained here derives from historical documents and reports, exhaustively selected and verified. Even so, as with any book, it cannot be immune to potential errors of fact or interpretation that may and indeed should be corrected in the future. With the objective of facilitating reading and comprehension, the text of letters, documents, and personal registers from earlier historical periods has been adapted in the translation to contemporary language.

As a final disclaimer, it's worth saying that I have attempted in a few places to provide contemporary equivalents for some of the prices and monetary amounts from two hundred years ago. As every serious researcher knows, this can be a dangerous exercise. Attempting to update monetary amounts from a period so long ago and with a currency as unstable as Brazil's risks much imprecision. In this case, nonetheless, my objective is to give readers a sense, even if approximate, of the prices and amounts of the era—for example, what a slave or a house in Rio de Janeiro cost in 1807. For those interested in these pursuits, both the British Parliament and a joint project of the University of Illinois and Miami University offer Internet services with currency translators of reasonable precision. Both of these appear in the electronic sources section of the bibliography at the end of this work.
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PART ONE

T
HE
F
LIGHT OF THE
E
MPEROR

I

Flight from Lisbon

I
magine waking up one morning to the news that the president of the United States has fled to Guam under the protection of the Canadian Air Force. With him have departed all of the country's diplomats, senior judges, elected representatives, and leaders of industry. Furthermore, at this very moment, troops from Mexico are marching overland and in a matter of hours will reach Washington, D.C. Abandoned by the government and without any form of leadership, the nation lies at the mercy of invaders ready to plunder anything they encounter and poised to assume control over the country for an indefinite period.

Facing such unexpected news, one might feel overwhelming abandonment and betrayal, followed immediately by fear and revolt. This was how the Portuguese reacted on the morning of November 29, 1807, when information circulated that the queen, the prince regent, and the entire court were fleeing to Brazil under the protection of the British navy. Nothing like it had ever happened in Europe. In times of war, kings and queens had perished or taken refuge in foreign territories, but none had ever gone so far as crossing an ocean to rule from the other side of the world. Although the kingdoms of Europe maintained immense colonies on widespread continents, until that moment no monarch had ever set foot in an overseas colony even for a simple visit—much less to live and govern. It was, therefore, an event
without precedent as much for the Portuguese, orphaned by their monarchy overnight, as for the Brazilians, until then little more than an export colony.

In the case of the Portuguese, another factor aggravated their sense of abandonment. The political idea that power emanates from the people to be exercised in their name, the fundamental principle of democracy, didn't yet exist. Remember, the French Revolution—toppling the House of Bourbon, which ruled by the divine right of kings—had begun fewer than twenty years earlier. In our time, if, through unexpected circumstances, all our political leaders fled the country, the people would gather to elect a new president, senators, and representatives to reconstitute the state and its government. Businesses, too, after a period of uncertainty, given the absence of owners and directors, would likewise reorganize and carry on.

But Portugal in 1807 offered a different story. Without a monarch, the country entered an aimless void. Everything depended on that central ruler: all of the country's economic activity, the survival of its citizens, national autonomy, and the very reason for the existence of a Portuguese state. Complicating this situation even more, Portugal was one of the more backward countries in Europe in terms of political reform. Unlike Great Britain and Holland, where royalty had been giving way gradually to popular representation in parliaments, the regime of absolute monarchy held steadfast in Portugal. The monarch had complete power.
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It fell upon the central ruler not only to create laws but also to execute and interpret them in the most adequate form. Judges and municipal councils functioned merely as helping hands to the monarch, who could negate their opinions and decisions at any moment.

This context frames the sense of abandonment and irreparable loss that the Portuguese felt in the streets of Lisbon that cold morning at the end of autumn. With the flight of the monarchy, Portugal itself, an independent country with its own government, ceased to exist as all had known it. It had become an empty territory, without identity, its inhabitants unwittingly delivered to the interests and greed of any adventurer who could invade its cities and seize the throne.

So why then did the monarchy flee?

First things first: The throne of Portugal was occupied not by a king but by a prince regent. Dom João reigned in the name of his mother, Dona
Maria I, the nation's first sovereign queen. But having been declared insane and incapable of governing in 1792, she lived in virtual imprisonment in the Palace of Queluz, outside Lisbon. Furthermore, as the second son of this mad queen, Dom João hadn't grown up to direct the destiny of the country. His older brother, Dom José, heir apparent, had died unexpectedly of smallpox in 1788 at the age of twenty-seven.
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Besides being unprepared to reign, Dom João, a naturally solitary person, was enduring serious marital problems. By 1807 he and his wife—Princess Carlota Joaquina, an ill-tempered and bossy Spaniard, with whom he had had nine children—already had been separated for three years. The couple hated each other intensely. Not only did they sleep in separate beds, but they lived in separate palaces far away from each other. Carlota lived in Queluz with the mad queen while Dom João resided in Mafra in the company of hundreds of friars and monks who lived at the expense of the Portuguese court.

About twenty miles from Lisbon, the Palace of Mafra—iconic of the era of abundance and glory of the Portuguese empire—contained a mix of palace, church, and convent, with an 865-foot façade, 5,200 portals and windows, 114 bells, and a dining hall 330 feet long. Construction of the palace took thirty-four years and required the work of some 45,000 men. The marble came from Italy, the wood from Brazil, and it was completed in 1750 during the height of gold and diamond mining in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. In addition to serving as the residence of the court and its servants, it included three hundred monastic cells that housed hundreds of friars.
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In this gigantic, somber structure, Dom João passed his days, far from his family, dividing his time among government meetings and prayer, mass, and religious chants.

The principal trait of the timid, superstitious, and ugly prince regent's personality, reflected on all of his work, was his indecision. When squeezed between groups of conflicting opinions, he always hesitated to make decisions until the last minute. The most elementary measures of governance tormented and anguished him beyond limits. As a result, he delegated much to the ministers who surrounded him. But in November of 1807, Dom João, up against the wall, had to make the most important decision of his life. The flight to Brazil resulted from the irresistible pressure exercised by
the greatest military genius the Western world had seen since the age of the Caesars: Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1807, Napoleon, who had by now crowned himself emperor of the French, ruled as absolute lord of Europe. His armies had brought every king and queen on the continent to their knees in a succession of brilliant and surprising victories. Only Great Britain he hadn't succeeded in subjugating—yet—and not for lack of desire. Protected by the English Channel, the British had avoided direct confrontation with Napoleon's armies, having consolidated their role as masters of the seas in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 when Admiral Nelson destroyed the combined fleets of France and Spain.
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Napoleon reacted by decreeing a continental blockade, a measure that closed all European ports under either his control or influence to British goods. Every country immediately obeyed—with one exception: small, unprotected Portugal. Pressured by England, Portugal's traditional ally, Dom João remained reluctant to surrender to the emperor's demands. So in November 1807, French troops marched toward Portugual, ready to invade and dethrone the prince regent.

Suddenly corralled between the two greatest economic and military powers of the era, Dom João found himself confronted by two mutually exclusive and bitter alternatives. The first: Cede to Napoleon and conform to the blockade; the second: Accept the highly unorthodox offer of his British allies and embark to Brazil, taking with him the entire royal family, the nobility, treasures, and apparatus of the state. On the surface, it seemed a generous offer on the part of Britain, but in practice it was blackmail. If Dom João opted for the first alternative and caved to Napoleon's demands, Britain would repeat in Portugal what they had done months earlier in the similarly reluctant Denmark. On the morning of September 1, 1807, Copenhagen awoke to a barrage of cannon fire from British ships docked in their harbor. The bombardment lasted four days and four nights, during which some two thousand people perished. On September 7, Copenhagen surrendered. The British seized their ships, materials, and munitions, thereby leaving the city defenseless.
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In Portugal, the consequences could be even worse. If the prince regent yielded to Napoleon, the British not only would bombard Lisbon and
capture the Portuguese fleet, but they would quite likely seize their colonies as well, upon which Portugal depended for economic survival. With the support of Britain, Brazil—the largest and richest of these colonies—would no doubt declare its independence, following the example of the United States of America and its neighboring Spanish territories. Without Brazil, Portugal would falter.

But a third alternative remained, one that Dom João considered: Remain in Portugal, face Napoleon, and fight alongside the British in defense of his country. That move ran the considerable risk of losing the throne and the crown, but later analysis shows that there was a decent chance of success in this case. In 1807, however, the insecure and fearful prince regent, incapable of resisting and facing an enemy he and many others judged as far too powerful, decided to flee. “Preferring to abandon Europe, Dom João proceeded with precise self-knowledge,” writes historian Tobias Monteiro. “Knowing himself to be incapable of heroism, he chose the peaceful solution of spearheading an exodus, and searching within the dull torpor of the tropics that tranquility and inactivity for which he was born.”
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