1808: The Flight of the Emperor (16 page)

XVII

Empress of the Seas

O
n June 25, 1808, five months before the signature of the royal letter opening the Brazilian ports, 113 English merchants gathered in a London pub. The brother of a powerful man in Dom João's new ministry in Rio de Janeiro, Domingos de Sousa Coutinho, the Portuguese ambassador in England, had invited them there. Three weeks earlier, he had published in the London newspapers a notice urging the assembly of all businessmen interested in getting the first crack at the untapped Brazilian market.
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The opportunities, de Sousa Coutinho assured, were enormous. Brazil—for three centuries a mysterious land prohibited to outsiders—was opening to the world. Its ports, until then restricted to ships from Portugal alone, could finally receive shipments from and load them for other countries.

In practice, the outlook for the English promised to be even better than the ambassador assured. With all of Europe occupied by Napoleon's armies, at that moment no other European country had the means to conduct commerce with Brazil. Lord Nelson's fleet had trounced the combined forces of France and Spain during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, making Britain the only power with free transit on the seas. Britain therefore became the greatest beneficiary of the opening of Brazilian ports, as the months ahead attested. The businessmen gathered in the London pub had to seize this
once-in-a-lifetime chance immediately. During the meeting, reported in the pages of the
Correio Braziliense,
113 merchants founded the Society of English Merchants Trading in Brazil under the presidency of John Prinsep.
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From that point on, Brazilian ports grew cluttered with English products on a scale never before imagined.

Everything made its way to Brazil, much of it practical and useful, such as cotton fabric, rope, nails, hammers, saws, saddle buckles, and hardware. But eccentricities also crossed the seas, such as ice skates and heavy woollen shawls, objects of wonder in the humid and sweltering heat of the tropics. English factories dispatched some products in monumental quantities and at low prices, thanks to new production techniques developed during the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. Because of the Continental Blockade, Britain lacked access to the European market and sent these products to Brazil and other South American countries at bargain prices. The goods caused quite a sensation among inhabitants who were used to shortages and the low quality of the crude, handmade products that circulated in the colonies of the Americas.

In 1808, Britain was extending to the four corners of the Earth the second incarnation of its empire, the largest that world had ever known. At its apogee, a few decades after the sixty-year reign of Queen Victoria—the longest in the history of England—the British proudly said that the sun never set on their dominions. The empire began easternmost in recently discovered Oceania, passing through Asia, Africa, and the islands of the Caribbean, and finally terminating in the icy vastness of Canada, which remained loyal to the British crown after American independence. British cannons forcibly protecting British commerce had subjugated India, one of the most ancient civilizations, which regained its independence only in the middle of the twentieth century. Britain even stuck its elbows into millennial China; their enclave in Hong Kong finally returned to the Chinese only in 1997.

The power and influence of this new supremacy reverberated across the entire planet. With over a million inhabitants, London was the largest city on earth at the time.
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Its countless chimneys released endless clouds of soot that covered the roofs of the city, earning it the nickname of The Big Smoke. Thanks to revolutionizing inventions such as the steam engine, fortunes
multiplied. In this creative, dynamic atmosphere, ideas circulated freely—in contrast to the patriotic, even authoritarian ardor of Napoleonic France, where books and culture were subject to the whims of the emperor.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 278 newspapers circulated in London alone. This number included English periodicals, such as the venerable
Times,
as well as a plethora of foreign language newspapers, published there to evade censorship and persecution in their countries of origin, as was the case of the
Correio Braziliense.
The city hosted debate, research, and innovation, attracting scientists, thinkers, writers, and poets. Some of the masterpieces of the greatest names in English literature—Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Jane Austen—were published there. Throngs gathered to attend the lectures, expositions, and debates in countless societies dedicated to research in anthropology, astronomy, geography, and geology, among many other areas of science.
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As a result of the Industrial Revolution, combined with dominion over the oceans and commercial expansion, Britain's national wealth doubled between 1712 and 1792.
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In under a century, the volume of commerce in London's ports tripled. By 1800, the Thames, flowing through the capital, had become a thicket of ships' masts. Every day between two thousand and three thousand merchant boats lay at anchor, awaiting their turn to load or unload goods. Tea and silk arrived from China. Tobacco, corn, and wheat came from America. From Brazil ships carried sugar, wood, coffee, and minerals. From Africa, ivory and minerals arrived.
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Between 1800 and 1830, cotton consumption by the textile industries in the Liverpool region jumped from 5 million pounds to 220 million—a growth of 4,400 percent in just three decades.
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The 880 warships that the Royal British Navy maintained around the world protected this monumental volume of commerce. It comprised the most powerful and efficient naval force of its era, 147 times larger than that of the recently independent United States of America, which had a naval fleet of no more than six ships.
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Over a period of two centuries, the British had won every naval battle in which they engaged.
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The British Navy's ships were equipped and organized in exemplary form, its crews capable of rigging and lowering sails and loading and firing cannons in less time than any
other navy of the era. They also kept their ships extremely clean and orderly, thereby reducing the threat of disease and epidemics on board.

In 1808, the recently opened Brazilian market became a natural target for the interests of this flourishing world power. After escaping from Napoleon under the protection of the British Navy, João owed a huge debt of gratitude to Britain. His dependence on the British was so great that, during the stage of the voyage between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, he entrusted Captain James Walker, commander of the
Bedford
, with eighty-four safes of the Royal Treasury being transported from Lisbon.
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Later, in Rio de Janeiro, he presented Vice-Admiral Sidney Smith, commander of the British fleet, with a country estate on Santa Luzia beach, in appreciation for his services. The property included a country house, fields, and slaves to cultivate them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In 1809, one year after the ports opened, more than 100 British commercial enterprises existed in Rio de Janeiro.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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