10-6-2005
Empire Adrift: The Portuguese Court in Rio de
Janeiro
by Patrick Wilcken
PORTUGAL:
O Império à Deriva, Civilização Editora, Porto,
2005, ISBN: 9722622528, 328 págs.
BRASIL:
Império à Deriva, a Corte Portuguesa no Rio de
Janeiro,
Objetiva, Rio de Janeiro, 2005, 326 págs.
ISBN: 857302738X
A tropical Versailles
In
1807 the entire, ill-assorted Portuguese court fled to Rio and stayed for 13
years. John Ryle applauds Patrick Wilcken's Empire Adrift, a brilliant account
of a bizarre yet momentous event
Saturday October 23, 2004
The Guardian
Empire Adrift
by Patrick Wilcken
320pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99
|
In his novel The Stone Raft (1986), the Portuguese Nobel laureate José
Saramago imagines the entire Iberian peninsula breaking away from Europe and
drifting across the Atlantic towards the tropics. Saramago's allegory of
detachment reflects Portugal's role as the earliest of Europe's seaborne
empires and nostalgia for the wonder years of the 16th century, when this
tiny ear of land (as an earlier Portuguese writer referred to it)
established a colonial presence in India, China, Africa and the Americas, a
time that saw the beginning of Europe's long and violent romance with the
peoples of the south. |
|
|
|
Patrick Wilcken's Empire Adrift takes as its subject another remarkable episode
in Portuguese imperial history: a time of dislocation in the early 19th century,
when the royal family, the Braganças, confronting the prospect of invasion by
the French, fled to South America by sea, remaining there for more than a
decade. It is a story that also resonates with Saramago's dream of a vagrant
Iberia, drifting south.
The flight of the Braganças took place at a critical moment in western European
history, when the Peninsular war was hotting up. Eclipsed by Britain and France,
Portugal was in decline. Napoleon's army was advancing from the north. The
deposed kings of France and Holland had both gone into exile in England; the
British fleet was blockading the Tagus in an attempt to counter the French
advance. As the French army drew closer to Lisbon, the Portuguese prince regent,
Dom João, under pressure from the British envoy, took a decision that would be
fateful not just for the Portuguese crown, but also for Brazil, the new world
colony that was the mother-country's major source of revenue.
On November 29 1807, a day before the French army entered the city, Dom João and
his Spanish Borbón queen, Dona Carlota, fled by the only route available to
them: the sea. The scene rivalled the fall of Saigon. A convoy of three dozen
frigates, brigantines, sloops, corvettes and ships-of-the-line, with the entire
Portuguese court on board, 10,000-strong, set sail for Brazil with a British
escort vessel, braving the winter storms of the Atlantic. Religious dignitaries,
government ministers, military officers, their families and servants - and Dom
João's mad mother, Queen Maria - made up the complement of passengers on the
three dozen vessels. The ships also carried the imperial regalia, the royal
carriage, a piano and several tons of books and documents, the paperwork of
empire.
Two months later, lice-ridden and in rags, the Portuguese court arrived in
Brazil. After a brief sojourn in Salvador, the old capital, they proceeded to
Rio de Janeiro, then a noisome slave port with narrow streets filled with
rootling pigs and goats. And in Rio, to the bemusement of the colonial
population, the royal party proceeded to re-establish the European imperial
court in all its archaic magnificence, with the ritual trappings and hierarchies
of an absolutist state. On the shores of the Guanabara Bay, against a backdrop
of sheer rock for which the city is celebrated, the Portuguese created what a
Brazilian historian called a tropical Versailles or, to use Wilcken's phrase, a
sub-tropical Rome.
Wilcken tells this unfamiliar yet extraordinary story with élan. Empire Adrift
is a model of historical writing, erudite yet lively, maintaining narrative
vigour while accurately rendering complex events at different times in different
continents. Wilcken combines a sense of place with a keen eye for the grotesque.
He has a striking cast of characters to work with. There is the dowager Queen
Maria, half-demented and permanently in mourning for her husband; the egregious
Lord Strangford, British envoy to Lisbon and Rio, a spin-doctor avant la lettre
, always eager to steal the credit for any diplomatic advantage gained. There is
Dom João himself, short, fat and indecisive, excessively fond of food but also
keen on conversation with men of learning. And Dona Carlota, his scheming wife,
a child bride who tried to bite her husband's ear off on their wedding night and
contrived, for the rest of her life, to spend as little time as possible in his
company. (As dysfunctional families go, the Braganças and their in-laws, the
Borbóns, make our Windsors and Bowes-Lyons look tame.)
Finally there is Dom Pedro, their son (probably - his paternity was disputed),
who grew up in Brazil an unrestrained philanderer, handsome, half-educated,
urinating and defecating without embarrassment in front of his troops, and
referring to his mother ungallantly as a "bitch", but who became, in the end,
the standard-bearer of Brazilian independence.
The Portuguese court remained in Rio for 13 years. Dona Carlota hated every
moment. She saw Brazil as the domain of "blacks and monkeys", and longed to
return to Europe. But Dom João, though terrified by the thunderstorms that swept
across the Guanabara Bay, quickly took to life in the new world, overseeing the
rebuilding of the capital and the establishment of Rio's botanical garden, the
latter, in Wilcken's phrase, a laboratory of empire that rivalled Kew. When the
time came to return to Portugal, with Napoleon defeated and the British
impatient to restore royal authority in Europe, Dom João - now King João VI of
the United Kingdoms of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve - found himself
reluctant to leave.
In the end he did return, but Dom Pedro stayed on in Brazil as his regent. Aged
nine at the time of the flight from Lisbon, Pedro had spent most of his life in
Brazil. And in 1822, with Dom João in Portugal beset by demands for
constitutional reform, and anti-colonial, republican movements gathering force
in the rest of Latin America, the young regent made a unilateral declaration of
independence from Portugal. Thus, as Emperor Pedro I of Brazil, he established
the first European monarchy of the new world.
It was an act that appeared to go against the tide of history, both in Europe
and the Americas. As if George III and the entire British ruling class had
abandoned Great Britain for North America to escape the Napoleonic wars, and
George IV, rather than George Washington, had led the United States to
independence. Or as if Queen Victoria had moved the seat of government to India.
But it was Dom Pedro's action, arguably, that made it possible for Brazil to
remain a single country. Despite its huge size, Brazil survives today as a
stable, independent state while the multifarious republics of Latin America and
Central America reveal, by contrast, the fragmentation of the former Spanish
empire. The Brazilian monarchy was finally abolished only in 1889, and Braganças
still crop up in the social register. There is even a Brazilian royalist party -
and more than one claimant to the throne.
The British did well out of the relocation of the Portuguese court. They forced
Dom João to open Brazilian ports (previously confined to Portuguese shipping) to
"friendly nations", principally Britain. Rio was immediately flooded with
British manufactured goods that had been excluded from European markets by the
Napoleonic blockade. English glassware and textiles and Irish butter were on
sale. The first pub opened. A British fabric trader, Wilcken reports, found that
the textiles he was importing were not bright enough. The people of Rio, he told
his suppliers, wanted "no dismal colours suitable for an English November".
Brazil still bears the marks of this British invasion, with a telling pair of
expressions in general use: pontualidade britânica (to be on the dot), and para
inglês ver (to put up a front, to cultivate appearances).
One group that did not benefit from the royal sojourn were slaves. Slaves
comprised a third of the inhabitants of colonial Brazil, and tens of thousands
more arrived from Africa each year. They were a critical factor in the economy.
Like Rome, as Wilcken points out, the new imperial capital was built by slave
labour. But the privations the members of the Portuguese court had endured on
their voyage across the Atlantic did not, it seems, make them more sympathetic
to the sufferings of slaves, who had endured a hundred times worse in their
involuntary passage. British pressure may have opened the ports of Brazil to
free trade in goods, but it seemed it could not close them to the slave trade.
It was only in 1888 that the Princess-Regent, Dona Isabel, Pedro I's
grand-daughter, finally abolished slavery, an act that contributed, ironically,
to the abolition of the monarchy the following year. In Brazil, in this respect,
in the final years of their tenure, the royal family became a progressive force.
So Brazil changed the Braganças; and the Braganças changed Brazil. The story can
be seen as a case of what the Brazilian sociologist and historian Gilberto
Freyre called lusotropicalism, a special affinity for the tropics that the
Portuguese, according to Freyre, entertained to a greater extent than other
Europeans. Or it may be seen as an agile political response to the end of
absolutism. Saramago's stone raft, Freyrian lusotropicalism, or the material
opportunities and hard constraints of history - however these events are
interpreted, it was in Brazil that the extraordinary story of the Portuguese
seaborne empire - first into the southern hemisphere, and last to leave -
reached its most curious and spectacular conclusion.
John Ryle is chair of the Rift Valley Institute.
The TLS n.º 5311, Friday 14 January 2005
Scratcher and the
cheese man
Peter Burke
Patrick Wilcken
Empire Adrift
The Portuguese Court of Rio de Janeiro,
1808 – 1821
300 pp. Bloomsbury, £ 20
0 7475 5672 5
In some important ways, the history of
Brazil has been very different from that of all the other countries in Latin
America. The Spanish Americans won their independence from the mother country by
insurrection and war, but in Brazil the transition from colony to independent
state was a peaceful one. Surprisingly enough, the ultimate responsibility
for this rests with Napoleon. In 1807, faced with a French invasion, King
João VI and his ministers decided that the best thing to do was to take refuge
in the New World, in Rio de Janeiro. It was there, in 1815, that the King
declared Brazil to be a kingdom, on equal footing with Portugal itself. When
Dom João returned to Portugal in 1821, he left his son Dom Pedro behind as
Prince Regent, and the next year Pedro declared Brazil to be separated from
Portugal. The transfer of the Court also ended Brazil’s cultural isolation.
Printing presses had been prohibited until this time, but from 1808 there was a
regular newspaper.
The Portuguese Court’ s thirteen years
in the tropics, 1808—21, were a crucial period in Brazilian history, which,
understandably, has attracted a number of scholars. The distinguished diplomat
and intellectual Manuel de Oliveira Lima wrote a book about it that appeared in
1908, just in time for the centenary of Dom João’s arrival. Leading
Brazilianists such as Alan Manchester, Leslie Bethell and Kenneth Maxwell have
published essays on the transfer of the court and its consequences. An American
historian, Kirsten Schultz, published a book in 2001 under the engaging title —
taken from Oliveira Lima — Tropical Versailles (reviewed in the TLS,
September 6, 2002) analysing the significance for both Portuguese and
Brazilian history of the sojourn of the court in Rio. Patrick Wilcken is also
interested in the geopolitical consequences of the transfer of the court, but
his principal aim, in Empire Adrift, is to tell a good story. He writes
well, describing events or evoking characters. The narrative is fast-moving and
lucid, making pauses or digressions to place events in context, to explain how
the Portuguese Empire came into existence, for example, or why it was that
Brazil exerted such a strong attraction on scientists in the early nineteenth
century thanks to its exotic fauna and flora. Wilcken is concerned with what he
calls “descriptive immediacy” and he certainly achieves his aim, using his
imagination where documents are lacking in order to make his readers not only
see but also smell and feel the discomforts of the long voyage from Lisbon to
Rio: “Accommodations would have been primitive, privacy nonexistent, sleep
difficult if not impossible on the open deck, with sea spray regularly showering
over the rows of nobles stretched out on the timbers”. Again, the landing of the
Portuguese in Brazil is vividly described, marking the contrast between the
overdressed Europeans and “their colonial cousins” who wore clothes better
adapted to the climate, and the surprise of the visitors when they saw
“Afro-Brazilian women wearing jewellery and African men sporting top hats,
walking canes and snuff boxes”.
Rio is a constant and vivid presence in
this book, viewed not as a “tropical Versailles” so much as a “sub-tropical
Rome”, a mixture of period from 50,000 to 100,000 people, making it one of the
leading cities of the Americas. Wilcken also has a gift for evoking
personalities, notably those of Dom João and his Queen, Dona Carlota, both of
them larger than life. The King is described as “a short stout man, with a large
head and stocky arms and legs”, who suffered from skin diseases, scratched
himself in public, and liked old clothes, eating chickens, church music and
botany. his best memorials are surely the Botanical Gardens in Rio, which he
founded, and the incredibly tail imperial palms, named in his honour. As for
Dona Carlota Joaquina, Dom João’s Spanish wife, she kept a separate household
and conducted a “conjugal guerrilla war” with the King. Her love affairs were
notorious, in Brazil as in Portugal. Played unforgettably by Marieta Severo in
Carla Camurati’s film Carlota Joaquina (1994), the Brazilian equivalent
of The Madness of King George, Dona Carlota was short, lame, angular,
frizzy haired, hot-tempered and uninhibited, an “irrepressible personality and a
prima donna who needed to be the centre of attention and dressed in an
eccentric, flamboyant style. The French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret depicted her
with feathers on her head, “a kind of early nineteenth-century Carmen Miranda”.
A couple like this — not to mention Dom João’s mother, who had gone mad — lend
themselves to grotesque treatment, but Wilcken treats them with sympathy.
The main reason that this episode in
Portuguese and Brazilian history has attracted Anglophone scholars is because of
Britain’s role in the affair. When Napoleon put pressure on Portugal to join the
blockade of Britain, the British advised Dom João to take refuge in Brazil,
offering to provide a naval escort for the ships taking the Court to the New
World. The offer was a difficult one to refuse because it was clear that the
British were prepared to bombard Lisbon (as they had recently bombarded
Copenhagen) in the event of a refusal, and to destroy the Portuguese fleet in
order to prevent it from falling into French hands. The price of protection was
the opening of Brazil to British exports, denied their usual outlets by
Napoleon’s blockade. It was not only the Portuguese Court that arrived in Rio in
1808, but also various English merchants, “buying up all available space in the
city’s warehouses, renting shops in the centre and snapping up the most sought
after properties on the surrounding hill-sides”. In the 1940s, the Brazilian
historian Gilberto Freyre described this episode in a brilliant essay in his
Ingleses no Brasil (a book that has sadly never been translated into
English). Rio was invaded by British products such as beer, cheese, Chippendale
furniture, Sheffield cutlery and porcelain tea services. A royal edict of 1808
banned traditional wooden shutters, describing them as “barbaric”, “Gothic” and
“Turkish”, and ordering their replacement by glass windows, made in England. It
is true that some items did not sell, and that it was necessary for the
Yorkshire merchant John Luccock to write home to explain that heavy overcoats
were unnecessary in a tropical climate and that drab colours were inappropriate
for sunny Rio. But, despite such mistakes, the impact of the British on
Brazilian culture was extremely important in the long term.
While the French influence was
exercised by means of a so-called Artistic Mission of architects and painters
who arrived in 1816, as well as through the dressmakers, hairdressers and
milliners who reached Rio at about the same time, that of the British was felt
primarily through trade. Wilcken largely concentrates on the political
situation, in which the British envoy Viscount Strangford played an important
part - as was common for diplomats in an age before the telegram and the
telephone. Besides the many printed sources, the author has studied Strangford’s
correspondence with London in the archives of the British Foreign Office.
It is fascinating to learn that George
Canning, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, was hoping that British
merchants would “make the Brazils an Emporium for the British Manufactures
destined for the consumption of the whole of South America”.
Where culture is concerned, the
author’s touch is less sure, and a few errors have crept in, from the use of the
term “Romanesque” to describe nineteenth-century architecture, to mistaking the
gender of the figure representing America at a festival in 1810, claiming that
King Sebastian of Portugal was “beheaded” (after the defeat of Alcazarkebir —
Ksar ei Kebir, in Morocco — the King’s body was never found). Wilcken does not
have anything very new to say about the political consequences for Brazil of the
transfer of the Court, but this would have been a difficult task so soon alter
Kenneth Maxwell’s brilliant essay on the subject. Maxwell views this episode as
crucial for Brazil’s escape from the divisions, conflicts and civil wars that
followed independence in Spanish America. (He discussed the potential
consequences of Carlos IV of Spain’s asylum in -Mexico — an option he seriously
considered— which is a fascinating example of what Niall Ferguson calls “virtual
history”.) What Wilcken offers are some interesting reflections on the long-term
consequences for Portugal of the thirteen-year absence of the King. In general,
he succeeds at a hard task: writing both for specialists and for general
readers. By telling a good story, and placing it in multiple contexts, lie makes
Empire Adrift a distinguished and enjoyable first book.
Question:
Why did the entire Portuguese royal family move to Brazil?
The immediate reason for the Portuguese court's decision to relocate to Brazil
was survival. When, in November 1807, courtiers scrambled aboard the fleet,
Napoleon's forces were on Portuguese soil storming towards the capital. Out off
the coast was a sizeable British navy, its cannons trained on the port.
Portuguese royalty had been caught up in the Napoleonic wars as the conflict
spread into the peninsula, and were in danger of being crushed by the two
superpowers of the age: Britain and France.
"Napoleon was intent on imposing a continent-wide trade blockade against the
British, and Portugal's ports had long served as British trading posts. Should
Portugal fall in line with Napoleon, Britain was prepared to bombard Lisbon and
destroy the Portuguese fleet (as they had done in neutral Copenhagen months
earlier).
"But the British, through their envoy Lord Strangford, were also backing the
wholesale removal of the court and government. In a secret convention signed a
month before the royal family set sail, the British agreed to escort the fleet
across the Atlantic in return for preferential trading rights in Brazil.
"Caught in the middle of all this was the Portuguese prince regent, Dom João
(ruling in place of his mad mother Maria), a man known for his indecisiveness.
As he dithered, events were rushing towards their climax. With the French army
closing in, the royal family, their ministers, nobles and servants a staggering
10,000 people in all clambered aboard the fleet, clearing port at the
eleventh-hour. After stopping off in Salvador, they eventually disembarked in
Rio de Janeiro, then the New World's largest slave-market town.
"There, in an unprecedented event in colonial history, they set up their court.
Up until that point no European royal family has ever visited the New World, let
alone tried to rule from the Americas. For the next 13 years Portugal and her
string of colonies fell under the sway of Rio de Janeiro, a slaving port
converted at a stroke into an imperial metropolis.
"What, perhaps, is a more intriguing question, is why they opted to stay in Rio
for such a long period. Napoleon was defeated by 1814 yet the court and
government to Portugal's chagrin - were still in Brazil half a decade later.
These, and many other questions, are explored in my book Empire Adrift, which
comes out later this year."
Patrick Wilken
pwilcken@yahoo.com
(From
here)
