1808: The Flight of the Emperor (19 page)

On retiring from his position in 1821, Viana recorded his deeds in a
res gestae
:

 

I filled the immense swamps of the city, through which they became more salutary. . . . I built sidewalks on Rua do Sabão and Rua de S. Pedro, in the new city: on the Rua dos Inválidos . . . I built the Valongo pier . . . as there was not an abundance of water for public use, I managed . . . to conduct drinking water to it from a distance of one league. . . . I created and continued increasing the system of illumination in the city.
26

As we can see, though, these projects—all easy to plan and execute—affected only the face of the city.
27
A quite different force was stirring changes among the habits and customs of the people.

XX

Slavery

W
hile Rio de Janeiro has many monuments and historic sites from João VI's epoch that have been abandoned or poorly maintained, nothing compares with what has happened with the Valongo Market. The largest slave warehouse in the Americas disappeared seemingly without a trace, as if it had never existed. Maps and tourist guides ignore its location. The old Rua do Valongo, situated among the neighborhoods of Gamboa, Saúde, and Santo Cristo, has even changed its name. Today it's the Rua do Camerino. At its end, toward Mauá beach, a slope called Valongo Hill—with no sign, monument, or explanation—remains the only geographic reference to the old warehouse. The city has tried to forget the old slave market and the stain that it made on Brazilian history. Such willful amnesia is futile, however, because nearby lies the Sambadrome, where each year at Carnaval one of the samba school performances persists in remembering slavery as part of the history of Brazil.

In 1996, the history of Valongo abruptly emerged from underground. A couple living at 36 Rua Pedro Ernesto in the Gamboa neighborhood was remodeling their house, built at the beginning of the eighteenth century. During the excavations, they found hundreds of bone fragments mixed with ceramic and glass shards in the rubble. These were the remnants of the
Pretos Novos
(New Blacks) Cemetery. On this spot, two hundred years earlier,
recently arrived slaves from Africa were buried if they died before being sold. As of the beginning of 2007, archaeologists had gathered 5,563 bone fragments belonging to twenty-eight corpses of young males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. All of them showed signs of cremation. It revealed a telling disparity: in the Rio de Janeiro of King João VI, only whites had the privilege of church burials—close to God and celestial paradise, according to the prevailing beliefs of the time. The bodies of slaves were thrown onto barren land or in ditches, set on fire, and afterward covered by a layer of quicklime.
1

When the Portuguese court arrived in Brazil, slave ships coming from the coast of Africa unloaded 18,000 to 22,000 men, women, and children each year at the Valongo Market.
2
They were held in quarantine, to be treated for disease and fattened. Once they acquired a healthier appearance, they went to market in the same way that livestock did at the hands of cattle drivers and ranchers negotiating the sale of animals for slaughter. But in 1808 this human “merchandise” fed not the people of Rio but rather the gold and diamond mines, sugarcane mills, and cotton, coffee, tobacco, and other plantations that sustained the Brazilian economy. Slavery had been abolished in Portugal in 1761, as a result of the decision of the marquis of Pombal, the all-powerful minister of King José I, but in Brazil the practice continued unabated until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, in 1888.

The unloading, selling, and buying of slaves comprised part of the normal routine of colonial Brazil for nearly three centuries. For the foreign visitors authorized for the first time to visit Brazil following the court's arrival, it made for a shocking sight. Visiting Valongo in 1823, Maria Graham, an English traveler and friend of Empress Leopoldina, recorded in her diary:

 

I have this day seen the Val Longo; it is the slave-market of Rio. Almost every house in this very long street is a depôt for slaves. On passing by the doors this evening, I saw in most of them long benches placed near the walls, on which rows of young creatures were sitting, their heads shaved, their bodies emaciated, and the marks of recent itch upon their skins. In some places the poor creatures were lying on mats, evidently too sick to sit up.
3

The Slave Market,
engraving from
Views and Costumes of the City and Neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro
by Henry Chamberlain, London, 1822, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin

English consul James Henderson, describing the disembarkation of slaves, observed that

 

The slave-ships arriving at the Brazil present a terrible picture of human wretchedness, the decks being crowded with beings as closely stowed as it is possible, whose melancholy black faces, and gaunt naked bodies, are of themselves sufficient to transfix with horror an individual unused to such scenes, independently of the painful reflections connected with a consideration of the debasing circumstances and condition of this portion of mankind. A great many of them, as they are seen proceeding from the ships to the warehouses where they are to be exposed for sale, actually appear like walking skeletons, particularly the children; and the skin, which scarcely seems adequate to keep the bones together, is covered with a loathsome disease, which the Portuguese call sarna, but may more properly be denominated the scurvy.
4

A third report comes from English diplomat Henry Chamberlain, who tells what it was like to buy a slave at Valongo:

 

When a person is desirous of making a purchase, he visits the different depots, going from one house to another, until he sees such as please him, who, upon being called out, undergo the operations of being felt and handled in various parts of the body and limbs, precisely in the manner of Cattle in a Market. They are made to walk, to run, to stretch their arms and legs violently, to speak and to show their tongue and teeth; which latter are considered as the surest marks whereby to discover their age and judge of their health.
5

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Americas absorbed approximately 10 million African slaves. Brazil, the largest importer on the southern continent, received nearly 40 percent of this total, somewhere between 3.6 and 4 million slaves, according to the estimates accepted by the majority of researchers.
6
Historian Manolo Garcia Florentino estimates that 850,000 slaves disembarked in Rio de Janeiro during the eighteenth century, about half the total number brought to all of Brazil during this period. With the arrival of the court and the acceleration of commerce in the colony, slave traffic increased exponentially. The number of slaves unloaded in Rio jumped from 9,689 in 1807 to 23,230 in 1811—more than a twofold increase in four years. The annual average of slave ships docked in the port also increased from twenty-one in the period before 1805 to fifty-one after 1809.
7
“By 1807 slave labor in Brazil had become an economic god with the slave trade as its strong right arm. To attempt to suppress the traffic, which was an essential adjunct to slavery itself, by simply passing statues and signing treaties was a futile performance,” writes Alan Manchester.
8

A gigantic business, slave trafficking mobilized hundreds of ships and thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic, including agents on the coast of Africa, exporters, arms suppliers, ship owners, transporters, insurers, and wholesalers who resold merchandise in Rio to hundreds of regional traffickers—known as conveyors—who in turn redistributed it to the cities, plantations, and mines in the interior of the country. In 1812, half of the
thirty largest enterprises in Rio de Janeiro were slave traffickers, and the profits of this business proved astronomical.
9
In 1810, a slave purchased in Luanda, Angola, for 70,000 réis was resold in the Diamond District of Minas Gerais for up to 240,000 réis, more than three times the price paid in Africa. An ideal buyer had another slave serve as collateral in case of non-payment of the debt.
10
In taxes alone, the state made the equivalent of £80,000 per year on the slave trade, the equivalent today of $11.3 million.
11

Despite its enormous profits, trafficking in slaves made for a very risky business. The mortality rate of the enterprise was extremely high. About 80 percent of the captives came from the Congo, Angola, or Mozambique. In Africa, slaves first arrived into the hands of a local merchant, generally as prisoners of war or offered as payment in tribute to a local chief. This merchant brought the slaves to the coast, where agents of the Portuguese traffickers bought them. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, these purchases were made with contraband gold bars. In 1703, the crown prohibited the use of precious metals in these transactions and punished offenders with confiscation of property and deportation for six years to São Tomé off the coast of Africa. From then on, slaves were bartered with products from the colony, in particular fabric, tobacco, sugar, cachaça, gunpowder, and firearms.
12

In Africa, nearly 40 percent of slaves died on the way from the capture zones to the coast. Another 15 percent died crossing the Atlantic due to abominable sanitary conditions in the slave ships. Vessels coming from Mozambique and other regions on the east side of Africa lost even more. From the Atlantic coast, a voyage to Brazil took between thirty-three and forty-three days, while from Mozambique, in the Indian Ocean, up to seventy-six days.
13
On reaching Rio, between 10 and 12 percent of the slaves remained in warehouses like the Valongo Market before being sold. Of one hundred blacks captured in Africa, only forty-five arrived at their final destination alive. Which means that for the 10 million slaves transported to the Americas, another 10 million or more died along the way. It remains one of the largest and least documented genocides in human history.
14

Shipwreck and pirates in the South Atlantic also imperiled the enterprise. Of the forty-three ships that transported slaves to the Company of
Grão-Pará and Maranhão during the second half of the eighteenth century, fourteen—just over a third—were shipwrecked. In the 1820s, Rio de Janeiro newspapers recorded sixteen pirate attacks on slave ships, many by corsairs from North America. One of these ships, the
Star of the Sea,
was robbed while still in the port of Malembo, Angola, losing all 213 of the slaves aboard before even setting sail.
15

Slaves aboard these ships were considered and treated as a cargo like any other. On September 6, 1781, the English ship
Zong
, sailing from Liverpool, headed to Jamaica with an excess of slaves on board. On November 29, in the middle of the Atlantic, sixty blacks had already died from disease and lack of food and water. “Chained two by two, right leg and left leg, right hand and left hand, each slave had less room than a man in a coffin,” writes F. O. Shyllon, author of
Black Slaves in Britain.
16
Afraid of losing all of his cargo before arriving at his destination, Captain Luke Collingwood decided to throw all ill and malnourished slaves into the sea. Over the course of three days, 133 negroes were pitched from the gunwales alive. Only one managed to climb aboard again. The ship's owner, James Gregson, requested indemnity from his underwriters for the lost cargo. The insurance company in London appealed to the courts. According to English law, if a slave died onboard from maltreatment, hunger, or thirst, responsibility fell to the captain of the ship. If the slave fell in the sea, the insurer paid. In the case of the
Zong
, the courts decided in favor of the underwriters; that is, the captain was held responsible for their deaths. The case opened Britain's eyes to the cruelty of the slave trade and became a flashpoint for the abolitionist movement around the world.
17

In Rio de Janeiro, slave traders—prominent businessmen, respected and revered—had much influence in society and government affairs. In the Portuguese court, they took pride of place among the greatest donors, duly compensated with distinctions and titles of nobility. A native of Porto, Elias Antonio Lopes, a trafficker, arrived in Brazil at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1808 he already had received a knighthood in the Order of Christ and the title of notary and scribe of the village of Paraty in return for the “noteworthy generosity and demonstration of loyal subjecthood in tribute of my Royal Person.” That year he offered the prince regent a palace on the
São Cristovão ranch. Also that same year, the prince granted him the post of deputy of the Royal Council of Commerce. In 1810, he was consecrated a knight of the Royal House and graced as permanent captain-general and lord of the village of São José Del Rei, a district of Rio de Janeiro. He also became a broker and trustee of the House of Insurance of the Court Square, and in time he received responsibility for levying taxes in various locales. At his death in 1815, he owned 110 slaves and a fortune of 236 million réis ($7.5 million) in palaces, plantations, shares of the Bank of Brazil, and slave ships.
18

Unloaded by the thousands in Rio, slaves were a relatively affordable possession even for the middle class. James Tuckey, a British navy official, relates that in 1803 an adult slave sold for £40, the equivalent today of $6,300, less than half of the price of a mid-range car.
19
Women cost a bit less, around £32, and boys £20. Blacks who had survived smallpox cost more since they developed an immunity to the disease and therefore had a chance of living longer.
20
“I bought a negro for 93,600 réis,” wrote Luiz dos Santos Marrocos to his father on July 21, 1811, after his arrival in Rio de Janeiro.
21
This amount corresponds to a little more than 20 pounds sterling ($3,200) at the time, the price of an adolescent slave. In another letter, dos Santos Marrocos refers to the slave as “my little urchin.”
22