Part 6

The first sensible effect of the arrival of the royal family in Brazil was the opening of its numerous ports[27]; and in the very first year (1808) ninety foreign ships entered the single harbour of Rio, and a proportional number, those of Maranham, Pernambuco, and Bahia. The effect of the residence of the court was soon felt in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It was before 1808 confined to little more than the ground it occupied when attacked by Duguay Trouen in 1712; and the beautiful bays above and below it, formed by the harbour, were unoccupied, except by a few fishermen, while the swamps and morasses which surrounded it rendered it filthy in the extreme. A spot near the church of San Francisco de Paulo had been cleared for a square, but scarcely a dozen houses had risen round it, and a muddy pond filled up the centre, into which the negroes were in the habit of throwing all the impurities from the neighbourhood. This was now filled up. On one side of the square a theatre was begun, not inferior to those of Europe in size and accommodation, and placed under the patronage of St. John; several magnificent houses rose in the immediate neighbourhood, the square was finished, and another and much larger laid out beyond it, on one side of the city, while on the other, between the foot of the mountain of the Corcovado, with its surrounding hills, and the sea, every station was occupied by delightful country-houses, and the beautiful bay of Boto Fogo, where there were before only fishermen and gipsies, soon became a populous and wealthy suburb.

[Note 27: 28th January, 1808.]

It is not in my power to give a detailed account of all the transactions of this important year. The trade had naturally rapidly increased; the money brought by the emigrants from Portugal, had called forth greater exertions and speculations in commerce; and in October a public bank was chartered in Rio, with a capital of from seventy to eighty thousand pounds sterling.

The establishment of a regular gazette naturally took place, for the speedier dissemination of whatever tidings might arrive from Portugal, where lay the possessions and the interest of the court and the new people of Brazil; and though the press, of course, did not boast of much freedom, nor indeed would its freedom at that time have been of any consequence, it formed the first step towards awakening rational curiosity and that desire for reading, which has become not only a luxury, but even a necessary, in some countries, and which makes a rapid and daily progress here.

On the arrival of the court many of the old Creole families hastened to the capital to greet their sovereigns. The sons and the daughters of these married into the noble houses of Portugal; the union of the two nations became intimate and permanent; and the manners and habits of the Brazilians more polished. With the artificial wants that sprung up, new industry was excited, especially near the capital; the woods and hills were cleared, the desert islands of the bay became thriving farms, gardens sprung up every where, and the delicate table vegetables of Europe and Africa were added to the native riches of the soil and climate.

The numbers of the royal family furnished birth-days for frequent galas, the foreigners vied with the Portuguese in their feasts, so that Rio presented a scene of almost continued festivity. On the 17th of December, the birth-day of the queen, six counts were created, that is, Luiz de Vasconcellos e Souza was made Conde de Figuerio, Don Rodrigo de Souza Continho, Conde de Linhares, the Visconde d'Anadia, Conde d'Anadia, D. Joao d'Almeida de Mello e Castro, Conde das Galveas, D. Fernando Jose de Portogal, Conde d'Aguiar, and D. Jose de Souza Continho, Conde de Redondo. The Papal Nuncio, Sir Sidney Smith, and Lord Strangford[28], were honoured with the order of the Tower and Sword; six English officers were named commanders of the order of the Cross, and five others were made knights of the same.

[Note 28: Sir Sydney Smith had followed the Portuguese court to Rio, less as commander of the British naval force in those seas, than as the protector of the Braganzas. Lord Strangford had resumed his character of ambassador.]

The beginning of 1809 was marked by an event of some importance. By the treaty of Amiens, Portuguese Guiana had been given up to France, and was now, together with French Guyana and Cayenne, governed by the infamous Victor Hughes. It was long since France had been able to send out succour to these colonies. The fleets of England impeded the navigation, and the demands at home were too urgent and too great to permit much to be hazarded for the sake of such a distant possession. The court of Rio, therefore, resolved to send a body of troops under Colonel Manoel Marquez, to the mouth of the Oyapok. The English ship of war, Confiance, commanded by Captain Yeo, accompanied him, and their combined attack forced the enemy to surrender on the 12th of January. The terms were honourable to both parties: and among the articles I observe the 14th, by which it is stipulated, that the botanic garden, called the Gabrielle, shall not only be spared, but kept up in the state of perfection in which it was given up. War is so horrible, that a trait like this, in the midst of its evils, is too pleasing to be overlooked.

The rest of the year passed in Brazil in quiet though important operations; many roads were opened through the still wild country in the interior; a naval academy was instituted; a school of anatomy was founded in the naval and military hospital; and the vaccine establishment formed in Brazil in 1804 having declined, it was renewed both at Bahia and Rio, and immense numbers of persons of all colours were vaccinated.

Meanwhile the Portuguese arms were employed in another quarter of the world. The extensive dominions of Portugal in the east had fallen off one by one, as pearls from a broken thread. Yet Macao was still Portuguese. For twenty years past, it, in common with the coast of China, had been plagued with the pirates of the Yellow Sea; till, at length, the Chinese government found it necessary to take measures for suppressing them, and therefore made a treaty with the Portuguese government of Macao, signed by the following personages, on the 23d of November.

MIGUEL DE ARRIGA, Judge. BRUN DA SILVA. JOSE JOAQUIN BARROS, General. SHIN KEI CHI. CHES. POM.

The Portuguese were by this treaty to furnish six vessels of from sixteen to twenty-six guns, but being in want of ball and other stores they were supplied liberally by the English East India Company's factory; and the result was, that after three months' resistance, the pirates surrendered their ships, and promised to become peaceable subjects, and the people of Macao performed a Te Deum in honour of their success; but twelve months elapsed ere the happy tidings reached Brazil.

The great European interests of Brazil and its sovereign might have been forgotten in the country itself, during the year 1810, so tranquil was it, but for the packets which brought across the Atlantic the details of those desperate battles, which the strength and the treasure of England were waging in defence of them in the Peninsula. On the 19th of February, Lord Strangford and the Conde de Linhares, in behalf of their respective governments, signed a commercial treaty at Rio, by which great and reciprocal advantages were obtained, and the English were allowed the free exercise of their own form of worship, provided they built no steeples to their churches, and that they used no bells.

This was followed in the month of May by a formal notice from Lord Strangford, that the British Parliament had voted 980,000_l._ for the carrying on of the war in Portugal. In fact, England had now taken the battle into her own hands, as she had decidedly the greatest interest in opposing France; and the royal house of Braganza was at leisure to devote its whole attention to its American dominions. Several well appointed detachments were sent into different parts of the country for the purpose of repelling the Indians, whose inroads had destroyed several of the Portuguese settlements, of forming roads to connect the different provinces with each other, and, above all, of furthering the gradual civilisation of the Indian tribes. Strict orders were given the commanders to proceed peaceably, especially among the friendly Indians; but such as were refractory were to be pursued even to extermination. To further the views with which these expeditions had been formed, a proclamation was issued in the month of September, holding out to such as should become proprietors and reclaimers of land in the province of the Minas Geraes and on the banks of the Rio Doce, all the advantages of original donatories and lords paramount; and promising that every settlement that should contain twelve huts of reclaimed Indians, and ten houses of white persons, should be erected into a villa, with all its privileges. The party that was sent up the Rio Doce discovered one hundred and forty-four farms that had been ruined by the Indians, and which they restored: they formed a friendly treaty with several tribes of Puri Indians, whom they found already settled in villages, to the number of nearly a thousand. These people were gentle, and not without some of the arts and habits of industry; but they were heathens and polygamists; not that a plurality of wives was general, or even common, for there were only one hundred and thirteen wives to ninety four husbands. They do not appear to have been cannibals, though it is strongly asserted that the neighbouring Botecudos were so, and that having gained a slight advantage over the Portuguese, they had eaten four of them who fell into their hands.[29] I confess I am sceptical about these anthropophagi. That savages may eat their enemies taken in battle I do not doubt; under the circumstances of savage life revenge and retaliation are sweet: but I doubt their eating the dead found after the battle, and I doubt their hunting men, or devouring women and children. With the latter atrocities, indeed, they have not been charged in modern times; and as at the period the missionaries wrote the first histories of them, it was politic to exaggerate the difficulties these useful men had to encounter, in order to enhance their services, it is not uncharitable to believe that much exaggeration crept into the accounts of the savages, especially if we recollect the miracles ascribed in those very accounts to many of the missionaries themselves. Besides these measures concerning the Indians, other steps were taken for the good of the country of no less importance; several colonies, both of Europeans, and of islanders from the Açores, were invited and encouraged. The fisheries off the coast were attended to, and particularly that of the island of St. Catherine; and on the same island sufficient experiments were made upon the growth of hemp, to prove that time and industry only were wanting to furnish great quantities of that valuable article of a very good quality.

[Note 29: I have in my possession a curious drawing, found in a Botecudo cottage, and done by one of the Creole Brazilians, of mixed breed, who shows himself hidden in a cave, his white companions dead, and they, as well as the soldiers of the black regiment who accompanied them, have the flesh stripped from the bones, excepting the head, hands, and feet. The Botecudos are represented as carrying off this flesh in baskets. These savages appear quite naked, having their mouth pieces, and being armed with bows and arrows.]

The year 1811 was the last of the life and ministry of the Conde de Linhares, whose views were all directed to the good of the country. Fully aware not only of its richness and fertility, he also perceived how poor and how backward it was, considering its natural advantages. In endeavouring to remedy the evils, he perhaps aimed at doing more than was possible in the short time, and under the circumstances, in which his active disposition could operate. He had formed roads and planned canals; he had invited colonies, which indeed afterwards sunk; but they left behind them some of their ingenious practice, and some seeds of improvement which have not utterly perished. The possibility of navigating both the St Matthew's river and the Gequetinhonha had been ascertained; experiments in every kind of cultivation had been made; even the tea had been introduced from China. A botanical garden had been formed, in which the spices of the East were cultivated with success; and perhaps as the greatest possible good, a public library had been formed, and its regulations framed on the most liberal principles.

Towards the end of 1811 a royal decree was issued, assigning 120,000 crusadoes per annum to be taken from the customs of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Maranham, for forty years, to the Portuguese, who had suffered during the French war; a measure regarded even then with jealousy by the northern captaincies. But they all continued tranquil for the present, and seemed to attend only to domestic improvement. New buildings, both for use and ornament, arose in the cities. Maranham and Pernambuco improved their harbours. Bahia, besides the handsome theatre opened there in 1812, paved her streets; and at Rio, a subscription of 30,000 crusadoes was raised towards beautifying the palace square, completing the public gardens, and draining the campo de Sta. Anna.

In 1813, some disputes arose between the court of Rio and England on account of the slave trade. Three ships had been captured by the British squadron off the coast of Africa, while certainly engaged in illegal _slaving_; remonstrances were made, and the matter continued suspended until after the congress of Vienna, when that illustrious meeting, though most of its highest and most powerful members had exclaimed loudly against the villanous practice, suffered it to be carried on. Then indeed England consented to pay 13,000_l._ to indemnify the Portuguese slave traders for their loss (July, 1815)!

In the same year there appears to have been some discontent manifested, or suspected in the provinces. Many of the salaries of officers, both civil and military, remained unpaid; yet there were exactions, the more grievous, because they were irregular, in every department; the administration of justice was notoriously corrupt; the clergy had fallen into disorder and disrepute; and though much that was useful had been done, yet that was forgotten, especially in the distant provinces, and such a portion of discontent existed, that various officers who had come to Rio either on private business or to remonstrate on public wrongs, were peremptorily ordered to return to their own provinces.

It was wisely done at this juncture, to take off the public attention from such vexations by a measure at once just and gratifying to the pride of the Brazilians: by an edict of the 16th of December, 1815, Brazil was raised to the dignity of a kingdom, and the style and title altered so as to place it on an equal footing with Portugal. For some months addresses of thanks and congratulation poured in to the king from various provinces, and the feasts and rejoicings on that happy occasion occupied the people to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Meantime the victories of the allies in Europe, having caused the exile of Napoleon to Elba, the necessity for an English guardian squadron at Rio had ceased; and accordingly the British establishment was broken up, and the stores sold, and the family of Braganza, again independent of foreign aid, began to renew its connections with the other courts of Europe.

These negotiations suffered some little interruption from an event which had long been expected, namely, the death of the queen, on the 20th of March, 1816, whose state, both of body and mind, had long precluded her from all share in public affairs. She was buried with great pomp in the church of the convent of the Ajuda; and, as is usual, dirges were sung for her in all the churches in the kingdom.

In the month of June, the Marquis Marialva was received at Paris as ambassador of Portugal and Brazil, and shortly afterwards the way having been prepared by an inferior minister, he went to Vienna, to negotiate a marriage between Don Pedro de Alcantara, Prince of Portugal and Brazil, and the Archduchess Maria Leopoldina, which was happily effected. On the 28th of November, she was privately contracted at Vienna to the prince. On the 17th of February following, the contract was made public, and on the 13th of May she was married by proxy, the Marquis Marialva standing for Don Pedro; but it was not until the 11th of November that she arrived at Rio. The line of battle ship Joam VI. had been sent along with two frigates for her to Trieste, the voyage was performed without accident, and the person the most important to the hopes and happiness of Brazil, was welcomed with enthusiasm by all classes of people.

In the autumn preceding, two of the Infantas of Portugal had been married to Ferdinand the 7th of Spain, and his brother the Infant Don Carlos.

But the frontier of Brazil to the southward now began to feel the effect of those disturbances which had long agitated Spanish South America. The chief Artigas showed a disposition to encroach on the Portuguese line, and, therefore, a corps of volunteers had been formed for the purposes of observation, and the Porte da Santa Theresa had been occupied in order to check the motions of that active leader: during the autumn of 1816, several skirmishes took place, but the arts of negotiation as well as of war were resorted to, and on the 19th of January, 1817, the keys of Montevideo were delivered up to the Portuguese general Lecor, by which the long-wished-for command of the eastern bank of the Plata was obtained.

Meantime the discontents in the northern provinces had broken out into open insurrection, in the captaincy of Pernambuco. The people of Recife, and its immediate neighbourhood, had imbibed some of the notions of democratical government from their former masters the Dutch. They remembered besides, that their own exertions, without any assistance from the government, had driven out those masters, and had restored to the crown the northern part of its richest domain. They were, therefore, disposed to be particularly jealous of the provinces of the south, especially of Rio, which they considered as more favoured than themselves, and they were disgusted at the payments of taxes and contributions, by which they never profited, and which only served to enrich the creatures of the court, while great abuses existed, especially in the judicial part of the government, which they despaired of ever seeing redressed. Such were the exciting causes of the insurrection of 1817, in Pernambuco, which threatened for many months the peace, if not the safety of Brazil. The example of the Spanish Americans had no doubt its weight, and a regular plan for obtaining independence was formed, troops were raised and disciplined, and Recife being secured, fortifications were begun at Alagoas and at Penedo.

The insurgents, however, had probably miscalculated the degree of concurrence or assistance they should meet with from their neighbours. The people of Serinhaem as soon as the insurrection was known, namely the middle of April, posted themselves on the Rio Formosa as a check on that quarter, and the king's troops under Lacerda, marched immediately from Bahia. The Pernambucan leader Victoriano, having attacked the Villa de Pedras, received a decided check from a body of royalists, under Major Gordilho, who had been sent forward by Lacerda, on the 21st: and by the 29th Gordilho had occupied that post, as well as Tamandré, where he was not long afterwards joined by Colonel Mello, with a strong reinforcement.

Meantime the Pernambucan chief, Domingos Jose Martins, was actively employed in collecting troops, and forming guerilla parties, in order to harass the marches of the enemy. These parties were headed by Cavalcante, a man of wealth and family, aided by a priest, Souto, a bold and enterprising man, who was far from being the only ecclesiastical partisan. On the 2d of May, a vigorous attack was made on Serinhaem, by the famous Pernambucan division of the south, which had hitherto received no check; but the assailants were repulsed with the loss of their artillery and baggage, and a column under Martins coming up met with the same fate, on which he drew off his people with those of the south, to the ingenio of Trapiche. On the 6th of May they left that position, and meeting the royalists under Mello, suffered a complete defeat. Their chiefs were either killed or taken; and of the latter some were exiled, others imprisoned, and three, Jose Luiz Mendonça, Domingos Jose Martins, and the priest, Miguel Joaquim de Alameida, were hanged in Bahia.

At this juncture Luiz do Rego Barreto was appointed by the government at Rio to the office of captain-general of Pernambuco. He was a native of Portugal, and had served with distinction under Lord Wellington. Of a firm and vigorous mind, and jealous of the honour of a soldier, he was perhaps too little yielding to the people and the temper of the times. The severe military punishments inflicted on this occasion certainly produced irritation, which though it did not break out immediately, was the cause of much evil afterwards, and brought an odium upon that gallant soldier himself, from which his high character in other situations could not shield him.

This year the ministry underwent a complete change. The Marquis d'Aguiar, who had succeeded to the Conde de Linhares, died in January, and the Conde da Barca in June; when the Conde de Palmela became prime minister, Bezerra became president of the treasury, the Conde dos Arcos secretary for transmarine and naval affairs, the Conde de Funchal counsellor of state, and Don Tomas Antonio de Portogal secretary to the house of Braganza.

I cannot pretend to speak of the character or measures of these or any other Portuguese or Brazilian ministers. My opportunities of information were too few; my habits as a woman and a foreigner never led me into situations where I could acquire the necessary knowledge. I wish only to mark the course of events, and in as far as they are linked with each other, the causes of those effects which took place under my own eyes.

In the early part of 1818, some additional restrictions concerning the slave trade, which had been agreed to by Conde de Palmela during the last year at London, were published at Rio, and a commission of English and Portuguese jointly was formed for the examining into and deciding on causes arising out of the treaties on that most important subject, a certain number of commissioners being appointed to reside in the different ports in Africa and Brazil, where the trade was still considered lawful. That year opened at Rio with unusual festivity. On the 22d of January, a great bull-feast was given at San Christovam, the royal country house, in honour of the young princess's birth-day; it was followed by a military dance, in which the costume of the natives of every part of the Portuguese dominions in the east and west were displayed. Portugal and Algarve, Africa and India, China and Brazil, all appeared to do homage to the illustrious stranger. Music, in which the taste of the king was unrivalled, formed a great part of the entertainment, and never perhaps had Brazil witnessed so magnificent a festival.