1808: The Flight of the Emperor (17 page)

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

W
ith 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 efficient 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 which 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

On paper, the official principal objective of the French Artistic Mission was to create an academy of arts and sciences in Brazil.
17
In actuality, the French spent their time pampering the king and court, which guaranteed their livelihood in the tropics. It fell to the mission to organize and decorate the grand celebrations that the monarchy held in Brazil during the four years before their return to Lisbon, including the wedding of Prince Pedro and Princess Leopoldina, and João's birthday, accession, and coronation. For these occasions, the French erected monumental arches in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, organized plays and concerts, and commissioned famous paintings. Insomuch as the mission served this purpose it proved useful. After the celebrations, however, the project fell apart. The death in 1817 of its principal patron, Antonio de Araújo e Azevedo, the count of Barca, also dealt a severe blow to the mission. Joachim Lebreton fell into ostracism and retired to a house on Flamengo beach, where he died in 1819.
18
“The artists had the greatest disappointment,” observed historian Tobias Monteiro. “With the exception of music, the court was not interested in fine arts. Neither the fidalgos nor the wealthy owned paintings.”

Despite these difficulties, Debret stayed in Brazil for fifteen years. The most well known of all of these French artists and responsible for the best and widest range of imagery from this era, he created paintings, engravings, and notes that meticulously register the landscape, locals, and customs of Rio de Janeiro and its environs; the royal family, including the most famous portraits of João VI; the rituals of the court; and the coronation of Pedro I. His images lend a luster and sophistication to a European monarchy who were little more than a ragtag hodgepodge of regal hillbillies bereft of any real sense of culture. Debret also documented slavery in the Brazilian plantations and cities. In this case as well, he paints sterile, academic scenes that
portray black men and women with curvilinear Greek profiles, clean clothes, and uniformly good posture. At no moment do his works reflect on the cruelty and brutality of the mistreatment and beatings that the slaves endured.

Among the arts, the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro preferred music by far. Debret estimates that in 1815, Prince João spent 300,000 francs ($3 million today) per year on the maintenance of the Royal Chapel and its company of artists, which included “fifty singers, among them magnificent Italian
virtuosi,
some of which were famous
castrati,
and additionally 100 excellent performers, directed by two masters of the chapel.”
19
In 1811, the most famous Portuguese musician, Marcos Antonio Portugal, arrived in Rio de Janeiro. From his arrival until the court's departure in 1821, he composed numerous pieces of sacred music in homage to the crown and the grand events it hosted.