1808: The Flight of the Emperor (6 page)

Two days of strong winds blew toward the continent, but on the morning of November 29 the wind finally changed direction, the rain stopped, and the sun emerged. At 7 a.m., the order to depart was issued.
26
Lord Strangford withdrew to board the
Hibernia
, writing to Lord Canning, prime minister of Britain:

I have the honor of communicating that the Prince Regent of Portugal has decided on the noble and magnanimous plan of withdrawing from a kingdom that no longer can maintain itself as anything but a vassal of France, and that His Royal Highness and family, accompanied by the majority of warships and by a throng of loyal defenders and supportive subjects, departed Lisbon today, and are on their way to Brazil under the guard of the English navy.
27

The commander of the British fleet, Admiral Sidney Smith, described the moment of departure as follows:

At 7am on this memorable day, the morning was marvelous, as a light breeze propelled the Portuguese ships towards the mouth of the Tagus river. The signal was made by two sailors, and then repeated by three ships, as the Portuguese colors were flown. The spectacle was impressive for all onlookers (except the French, in the mountains), held by the most vivid gratitude to Providence for having witnessed that there was still a power on earth capable of protecting the oppressed.
28

Commanding the fleet stationed in Lisbon, Smith's presence gives an idea of the importance that the British conferred on the operation. He had
participated in some of the most decisive events in modern Western history: He fought in the American Revolution, faced Napoleon, and battled the tsar of Russia. He also had worked with one of the most important inventors of all time, Robert Fulton, father of the submarine and the steamboat. He had retired to Bath, in the English countryside, when in the autumn of 1807 he was called to return as admiral specifically to take part in the events in Portugal.
29

At around three in the afternoon, young José Trazimundo was dining in the company of his father and two brothers when he heard the distant rumble of cannons. A volley of twenty-one shots by the English fleet saluted the Royal Pavilion of the ship carrying the prince regent, who at that moment was leaving the shoals of the Tagus for the Atlantic Ocean. Portuguese ships were still visible on the horizon when French troops entered Lisbon. Only sadness and desolation remained behind. “Even though at my young age, I could not give due importance to the crisis that the country was in, and especially the capital, which had the French army two leagues from its borders, nonetheless I remember being amazed by my relatives' expressions, and those of the people around us,” wrote Trazimundo.
30

The logbooks of the British ships, collected by historian Kenneth Light, reveal that as they accompanied the flight from Lisbon, the English weren't as friendly as many contemporaneous reports would have us believe. Tension and anticipation hung in the air. Without exception, all the English commanders recorded in their diaries that, upon catching sight of the Portuguese ships leaving the port of Lisbon between 8 and 9 in the morning on November 29, they ordered their ships to prepare for action and form a line of combat.
31

Apparently, all of them were operating under the supposition that the Portuguese in fact had surrendered to the demands of Napoleon and at that instant might try to break the stronghold of the British naval blockade. This brief moment of uncertainty dissipated when the Portuguese fleet crossed the shoals of the Tagus. In an open and friendly move, the
Royal Prince
approached the HMS
Hibernia,
the captain's ship of the British fleet. To reaffirm peaceful intentions, the two exchanged salutes conforming to protocol: twenty-one cannon shots on each side, first the English, then the
Portuguese. “Until recently, Portugal and England had been at war, and Sidney Smith did not want to run any risks,” wrote Light. “Only after friendly dialogue was there an exchange of volleys.”
32

Left to its own devices, Portugal was about to live through the worst years of its history. In the next seven years, more than half a million citizens left the country, perished of hunger, or fell on the battlefield during a series of confrontations that became known as the Peninsular War.
33
On that bright morning in November 1807, hundreds of trunks remained scattered on the wharf in Lisbon, forgotten in the commotion of the departure. Among them were crates of the Church's silver and the books of the Royal Library. The French invaders confiscated and melted the silver. The books of the Royal Library—which included a first edition of Camões's
Os Lusíadas
,
Portugal's national epic poem; ancient manuscript copies of the Bible; and maps drawn on parchment—arrived in Brazil later, in three consecutive voyages: the first in 1810 and the other two in 1811.

On one of these voyages came the royal archivist, Luiz dos Santos Marrocos. The events of 1807 were about to change his life radically.

VI

The Royal Archivist

A
t the end of October 1807, while Emperor Napoleon's troops approached the Portuguese border, the life of archivist Luiz dos Santos Marrocos hung suspended between two cities, one from the past and the other in the future. A twenty-six-year-old bachelor, he lived with his family in the Belém neighborhood in Lisbon, the capital of the vast colonial Portuguese empire, an exotic, thriving place replete with traders from China, India, Arabia, and Africa. In three years, he would be in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of colonial Brazil, a city teeming with novelties, a port of replenishment, and an obligatory stop for ships bearing toward distant lands, including the recently discovered Oceania.

In Lisbon, dos Santos Marrocos and his father, Francisco, worked for the prince regent in the Royal Library, one of the most extraordinary in Europe. Situated in a pavilion in the Palace of Ajuda, it housed 60,000 volumes. It was ten times larger than the collection of Thomas Jefferson's books that became the Library of Congress.
1
In the Royal Library, the two dos Santos Maroccos translated foreign works and catalogued and cared for rare books and documents.

This steady routine of silent dedication to books suffered an abrupt interruption in the final week of November, however, when dos Santos Marrocos received orders to pack the entire collection in crates as fast as possible
and to dispatch them to the docks of Belém, where the ships of the Portuguese fleet awaited the royal family to embark for Brazil. In these hours of uncertainty and anguish and with the assistance of colleagues and court officials, dos Santos Marrocos packed all 60,000 volumes and sent them to the port in carts drawn by mules and horses, tussling through the narrow streets of Lisbon, vying among hundreds of other carriages all headed for the same destination. The rush turned out to be futile, though. In the chaos of the departure, every single crate packed with books was forgotten on the docks, left amid the mud and sludge from the previous day's rain.

Two and a half years later, in March 1811, dos Santos Marrocos himself left for Brazil to oversee the second of three shipments of books. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro on June 17, a few days before his thirtieth birthday. In the ten years that followed, he maintained a regular correspondence with his father, Francisco, and his sister, Bernardina. These 186 unassuming letters, housed today in the archives of the Ajuda Library, transformed the archivist into an important character in the history of Brazil and Portugal. This one-way correspondence—we don't have the responses that Luiz received in Rio de Janeiro—has become one of the most cherished primary sources for researchers studying this period of Brazilian history. The simple reports by a common citizen tell of the enormous transformations that the Portuguese and Brazilians experienced during the thirteen years in which the royal family ruled from the New World. Court intrigues, petty bureaucracy, and the harsh reality of slavery appear in raw form in dos Santos Marrocos's letters, like an instant photograph, free from retouching and without the filtering of documents or official reports.

He penned the first letter while still on the high seas, aboard the frigate
Princess Carlota.
It is dated April 12, 1811 (Good Friday), 10 p.m., in the vicinity of Cape Verde, off the coast of Africa. The last letter bears the date March 26, 1821, one month before the return of King João VI to Lisbon.
2
Some of these letters discuss historical events, such as the death of Queen Maria I, the coronation of João VI, and the arrival and departure of ships in the port of Rio de Janeiro. Others slide into pure and simple gossip, as on May 19, 1812, when dos Santos Marrocos criticizes the sexual affairs of João de Almeida de Melo e Castro, count of Gâlvea and minister of naval
affairs and overseas territories. Without offering many details, the archivist suggests that the count maintained homosexual relations with vagabonds in the center of Rio de Janeiro, around the docklands. “It is frightening and disgusting, the age-old, filthy vice of this man,” he writes. “A married man, he completely ignores his wife, nourishing his frailty with rascals and shameful parasites.”
3

In Portugal, the dos Santos Marrocos family belonged to an elite class of bureaucrats affiliated with institutions of culture and knowledge. Francisco, strict, educated, and authoritarian, was a professor of philosophy in Belém. In 1797, he had ordered the reprinting, in the office of Simão Ferreiro in Lisbon, of a bibliographic jewel:
A History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Indians by the Portuguese,
written in 1559 by Fernão Lopez de Castanheda.
4
In 1811, the Royal Press published Francisco's own book,
An Alphabetized Map of the Settlements of Portugal.
Luiz, a graduate of the University of Coimbra, followed in his father's footsteps as a literary custodian, translator, and author. He worked as an assistant in the royal libraries in 1802. In 1807, he finished translating, by royal order, the five-volume, 2,500-page
Treatise on Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene
by French doctor F. E. Foderé.
5
He had also written his own book,
An
Inoculation of Understanding.
Neither of these two works saw publication, though. The originals of the former remained forgotten on the docks of Lisbon in the commotion preceding the court's departure to Brazil, never to be seen again. The latter is known only through the letters that Luiz wrote to his father.
6

The Lisbon of the dos Santos Marrocos family was a conservative city, profoundly religious and based on antiquated customs. Its homes featured Eastern tapestries, and quilts from India covered its verandas. Historian Oliveira Martins calls it the most oriental of European capitals.
7
Other chroniclers and travelers of the time describe it as a medieval city: dirty, dark, and dangerous. The burial of corpses in cemeteries became obligatory only in 1771. Until then, they had been abandoned, cremated, or laid to rest in improvised graves on the periphery of the city. Those who had wealth or power were buried in churches.

Lack of hygiene was a chronic problem. “Dirty water, dishwater, urine, and excrement were tossed out of windows with no advance notice at any
hour of night or day,” wrote Frenchman J. B. F. Carrère, a resident of Lisbon at the end of the eighteenth century. “One who walked through the city streets was always at risk of being soaked and covered with filth.”
8

“This great city had no illumination at night, as a result of which it frequently occurred that a person would become lost at night, running the risk of being soiled in the squalor that was unloaded from windows onto the streets, as houses did not have latrines,” wrote French traveler Jácome Ratton.
9
“Everyone is supposed to bring their waste to the river, and there is a great quantity of blacks who perform this service, but this law is not exactly followed, especially by the masses.” Another traveler, William Beckford, spoke of the ravenous and stray dogs that wandered the street, scavenging in the garbage for scraps of food. “Of all the capitals in which I have lived, Lisbon is the most infested by packs of these famished animals, who at least provide the service of cleaning the streets of a bit of its aromatic waste.”
10

The absence of collective good hygiene brought on the spread of plague and disease, not limited to the common people of course. Such problems affected the royal family as well. We can gather some idea of the fragility of life in the court through a letter that Prince João wrote in 1786 to his sister Mariana Vitória, who had moved to Madrid after marrying the Spanish infante. In the letter, the prince conveys that Carlota Joaquina, his wife for just a year at this point, had to cut her hair due to an infestation by lice. “The Infanta is getting better, but her head still itches a lot,” he writes. “You know quite well that skin irritations don't give up easily. I cannot explain to you the lice she has. It's like a plague. After cutting her hair, her head became even drier. But she left a forelock, which seems to be the hiding-place of all the lice, and you can believe how she suffered, but nonetheless she took it all in stride, as if she were a thirty-year-old woman.”
11
At the time, Carlota Joaquina was just eleven years old.

As employees of the Royal Library, the dos Santos Marrocos had a close familiarity with the prince regent's court and with the palaces frequented by the nobility. The suffocating presence of the Church and its numerous religious rituals dominated the grim and depressing atmosphere. Travelers and diplomats found surprising the lack of parties, dinners, balls, or receptions in the Portuguese court, in marked contrast with the animated palaces of
Paris and Madrid, where music, dance, and the colors of culture predominated. In Lisbon, “a decadent court surrounded a half-insane queen and an obese prince royal who suffered from a chronic case of indecision,” writes historian Alan Manchester.
12
Another scholar, Pedro Calmon, described the Portuguese court as “one of the most frail and sickly in Europe” at the end of the eighteenth century. “The inbred marriages, the morbid legacy, the melancholy of its mystic, apathetic court, stunned by undefined fears, gave it the visage of an aged, crumbling lineage.”
13

In this repressive, holier-than-thou atmosphere, the effects of the French Revolution of 1789 reverberated and terrified the nobility. The superintendent of police, Diogo da Pina Manique, rigorously battled the revolution's influence. Combining the roles of magistrate, customs inspector, and administrator of pavements and public illumination, da Pina Manique blocked the entry of books considered dangerous and ordered the closure of Masonic lodges, suspected of promoting the spread of revolutionary ideas.
14
He ordered the arrest of subscribers to Diderot's and Voltaire's encyclopedias and deported writers sympathetic to the French Revolution.
15
Among his oppressed was Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, one of Portugal's greatest writers and poets.

On discovering the establishment of a Masonic lodge on the island of Madeira, some six hundred miles southwest of Lisbon, da Pina Manique sent a police magistrate there with the following instructions:

Whoever you see with pointed, shiny shoes, suspenders on their leggings, a necktie up to their beard, a collar up to their ears, hair cut close to the neck and coiffed up to their fontanel, and sideburns down to the corners of their mouth—apprehend him immediately and lock him up in an ironclad jail until a ship can take him to Limoeiro prison: he's either a follower of the Enlightenment or a freemason.
16

Manique's persecutions were so intolerable for the French and the followers of the ideas of the revolution that, under pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte, the prince regent fired him.

In this Lisbon, where culture and science had long since fallen into decline, the mere existence of the Royal Library represented a particular eccentricity. It showed that the Portuguese court pretended to be more learned that it actually was, according to historian Lília Schwarcz, author of the most authoritative book written about the library. Portuguese kings had cultivated its fabled collection since the fourteenth century.
17
It was there that dos Santos Marrocos, father and son, passed their days cataloguing, copying, filing, and preserving books and documents. The Royal Library wasn't just a means of livelihood for the family—it was their very reason for existing.

In the months following the departure of the royal family, thousands of Portuguese citizens raised arms to resist the French invasion. Luiz dos Santos Marrocos stood among them. Before embarking for Rio de Janeiro in 1811, he served on the battlefields and fought on the barricades erected around the entrance of the Portuguese capital. His good service raised him to the rank of captain in the Portuguese army.
18
Like all of the Portuguese in this period, though, his family went through great tribulations. With the departure of the court and the virtual paralysis of the Portuguese government, the salaries of public servants, including the dos Santos Marrocos family, remained overdue for more than a year. Prices tripled. Citizens lacked basic necessities and starved.

Involuntarily swept up in the gale of history, the royal archivist himself became a symbol of the great transformations that profoundly affected Brazilians and Portuguese on both sides of the Atlantic during the court's years in Rio de Janeiro. For Luiz, however, a journey of great changes was just beginning, as we will see in greater detail in the final chapters of this book.