15.2. THE LAST PORTUGUESE STRONGHOLDS IN SOUTH AMERICA
II. The Campaign in Matto Grosso
After the annexation of the province of Goyáz, the Captaincy of Matto Grosso remained as the sole territory in Portuguese America directly ruled by a royalist Portuguese Governor. Differently from Goyáz, however, whose central location in the very center of Portuguese America didn't made it a strategic liability, Matto Grosso was a territory that bordered the former Spanish dominions in South America, namely the Viceroyalty of Perú and the Viceroyalty of La Plata. Being scarcely populated, with but a few Portuguese military outposts built in the XVIII Century near the Paraguay River, its military security was a geopolitical priority in the viewpoint of the Federal Brazilian government.
The situation, in that fateful year of 1820, became more concerning to the recently-created Brazilian government, as the immense Spanish Empire seemed to be crumbling under its own weight. Much like the Luso-Brazilians, the millions of Hispano-American subjects of the Crown of Spain were tired of the centuries of abuses and despotism, and the situation had reached a breaking point during the arbitrary and brutal regime of King Fernando VII of Spain and México. Since the previous decade, various emancipationist and liberal factions had risen in rebellion from Santa Fé de Bogotá to Buenos Aires, and from Caracas to Santiago de Chile, with powerful and ambitious warlords (
caudillos) commanding their armies against the royalist Spaniards.
Preoccupied with the unforeseeable advance of these revolutions, the nationalist government of President Mena Barreto was determined to preserve the territorial integrity of former Portuguese America, and this meant the fortification of its borders.
However, from the strategic point of view, Matto Grosso was expected to be a more problematic affair than Goyáz. The frontier was immense and virtually uncharted, with the landscapes going from dense rainforests and rugged plateaus, to vast prairies and mosquito-infested wetlands. There were few colonial settlements dispersed through the wilderness, and none able to furnish necessary resources for a large army in campaign, so the soldiers would have to live off the land. Besides, there was but one charted route that connected the littoral to the very border zone of Portuguese America. There was no direct overland road to the provincial capital, Vila do Bom Jesus de Cuyabá, where the Portuguese Governor resided.
President José de Abreu Mena Barreto assigned the Matto Grosso campaign to his own cousin,
João de Deus Mena Barreto, a reputable Gaúcho veteran officer. Since early 1817, when the short-lived “Republic of the Gaúchos” was founded and José de Abreu Mena Barreto was acclaimed its first (and only) president, his cousin had been serving as a member of the provisory governing Junta of Rio Grande do Sul.
Paiting of João de Deus Mena Barreto as provisory Governor of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (1819)
Now, after the conclusion of the War of Independence and Mena Barreto’s election to the office of President of the Federation, his cousin was promoted to Colonel and assigned the command of the
Second Brazilian Corps (now that the former colonial militias were being restructured along the British military model), a force composed mostly by veteran and volunteer Gaúchos, Paulistas and Fluminenses (the ethnonym given to those inhabiting the State of Rio de Janeiro), that in 1820 numbered about 3.000 men.
Due to the cautiousness of Col. João de Deus Mena Barreto, the troops remained headquartered in the starting point – the city of São Paulo – until late April 1820, as he sent various reconnaissance groups ahead to collect intelligence and thus avoid surprises in their march. The time was well spent, at least, as the troops were dutifully trained by Lieutenant Colonel James Grant, a British veteran of the Napoleonic Wars employed by the Brazilian government as a combat advisor.
As the lengthy month of April finally ended, the 2nd Brazilian Corps marched due northwest, following the course of the
River Tietê. The deep frontier of São Paulo was only the recent generations being settled by colonists, descendants from the old
Bandeirantes adventurers, slave hunters, gold rushers, cattle herders, peddling traders and poor farmers, riverine fishermen, and so many other families and groups of settlers, but the vast country was still mostly inhabited by Christianized Indians. In their march, the soldiers were sometimes surprised to find ruined remnants of the Jesuit missions of old ages, and aboriginal tribes who lived naked but knew some words of Portuguese, and caravans of mule herders carrying good from São Paulo to the communities living in the shore of the Paraná River.
Painting of the “Salto de Itu”
, a famous landscape in the course of the Tietê River
After almost two months of difficult march on a difficult terrain, the army sighted the
Paraná River, a vast watercourse that fled to the southwest, crossing the border of Portuguese America and venturing deep in the fertile heartlands of the former Spanish colony of La Plata. The Paraná River also served a politico-administrative function, as it represented the border between the Federated State of São Paulo and the still loyalist Captaincy of Matto Grosso.
The march continued by following the left bank of the Paraná River, and it took another month to reach the Pardo River, whose placid waters discharged inside the Paraná River, but whose origin lay hundreds of kilometers in the northwest, and it was the route to be followed now.
Food and pack animals were poorly replenished after the army arrived in the outpost of
Camapuã, in early August 1820. This city was founded as a small fort located between the courses of the rivers Pardo and Coxim, and had experienced sudden growth in the early XVIII Century with the gold rush in the region, but since then it was desolate and almost abandoned.
The nearby regions were occupied by the mostly peaceful tribes of the
Guaná peoples. The lack of grain and wheat forced the soldiers to emulate the aboriginal cuisine, innaugurating a diet based in manioc, beet, fruits and fish; indeed, by now many Indian adventurers had joined the column, in search of enrichment, and provided useful knowledge for the comrades to subsist and trek in the wilderness.
As they followed the course of the Coxim River, day after day nearing the confluence with the Paraguay River, whereupon they would arrive in the very edge of their newborn Republic, the denser rainforests were abandoned, and through August and October they traversed a vast country of brass-colored grasslands and rocky mesas in the distant horizon.
Itinerary (the red line) followed by the 2nd Brazilian Corps, from São Paulo along the River Tietê until its convergence with the River Paraná, and from there until minor waterways along the prairies as far as the border with the former Spanish dominions, in the River Paraguay. After the capture of the fortress of Corumbá, the army went north along the course of the River Cuyabá, and found the provincial capital, Vila do Bom Jesus de Cuyabá
In the height of the tropical spring – early November – the tired troops finally sighted a white-walled settlement, and realized their long journey had finally taken them to the fort that the Portuguese colonists had named “
Forte de Coimbra” in the XVIII Century, but whose spelling was rapidly corrupted by their descendants, and was called, in 1820, simply as
Corumbá. The bastion, known in the region for its white-colored walls, was situated atop a promontory circled by a sinuous curve of the Paraguay River. The southeastern front, from where the federalist Brazilians were marching from, was accessible by a dirt road.
After the Luso-Brazilian garrison – numbering about 200 conscripted militiamen from the nearby villages and some 60 soldiers of the line – refused to surrender peacefully and initiated a hostile artillery barrage, Col. João de Deus Mena Barreto decided to display his own strength by bombarding the ramparts. The defenders after a single day wasted their ammunition and the cannons in the walls became useless, but fire cocktails, boiling oil and shots from the battlements warded off two attempts by the besiegers to take the city by storm in the first week. Col. Mena Barreto, seeing no use in compromising the fortifications of the outpost, as he intended to establish it as his headquarters, decided to starve the garrison into capitulation.
The siege was only concluded a few days before Christmas, when a detachment of the 2nd Brazilian Corps intercepted a small relief force navigating along the Paraguay River, some 20 kilometers north of Corumbá, to deliver supplies to the besieged garrison. The small band, having least than 40 men cramped into three boats, was taken prisoner and paraded before the walls of the fortress with their looted supplies. Realizing that the defense of the settlement was useless, the garrison commander decided to surrender. Some of his troops had mutinied in the previous day, and were bloodily executed, a measure that demoralized the rest of the garrison.
Col. João de Deus Mena Barreto, instead of continuing immediately to the north, decided to give his troops some rest during the end of the year, taking in consideration that they were tired, lacking in supplies, and the summer season (between December and February) in that region so distant from the ocean was unbearably torrid, and there was a high risk of spread of tropical diseases. The next three months were used to strengthen the communication and trade lines with the Paulista communities in the Paraná basin, a region that was dependable enough to acquire basic resources. By late February, the fortress was receiving a steady flow of much-needed goods – such as clothing, metallic utensils, pack animals, and others – while the troops were employed in military building works, such as the digging of roads and the restoration of the battlements. The British Lt. Col. James Grant emphasized the need of keeping the troops busy even during the truces. He used to say, now having learned some of the Portuguese dialect: “
A soldier must be either in the battlefield, the training camp or the fortifications… and in the bed only in the night hours”.
In March 1821, with a sizeable garrison securing the fort, the column resumed its northern journey, with the troops more motivated, but walking much more slowly due to the days of extreme heat and nights of bug infestations. Malaria and yellow fever proved to be much more dangerous enemies than the isolated Loyalist forces.
The whole month of April and the better part of May involved the difficult traverse of a country of serene
wetlands called the “
Pantanal” [literally meaning “Great Swamp”]. The flooded plains, even in the months of tropical autumn, were exuberant. The moisty landscape was painted by a plethora of purple-colored trees, golden fields of flowers, and lakes covered in drowned shrubs and roots, while exotic animals such as multi-colored toucans and macaws, timid anteaters, orange monkeys and red-footed tortoises, as well as predators such as caimans and anacondas in the floodplain, and the mighty jaguars. Even in their elder years, various veterans of the 2nd Brazilian Corps would boast to their grandchildren that in the fateful Campaign of Matto Grosso they had hunted capybaras, jaguars, marsh deers and other exotic creatures. Of course these veterans would never forget about the cursed bugs and vermin that infested their tents during the night, with whom mankind appeared to be at perpetual war since time immemorial.
The main destination of the campaign was only reached in late May 1821, the provincial capital of
Vila Real do Bom Jesus do Cuyabá. “Cuyabá” was the name given by Indians to the large river at the side of which that sequestered colony had been founded, barely a century previously, by Luso-Brazilian colonists, in a breath-taking green landscape surrounded by immense mesas with hidden grottos and high waterfalls. In fact, in the XX Century, the Brazilian scientists and geographers would find out that the city of Cuyabá lay in the exact middle point between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, meaning that it is situated in the very geodesic center of the southern American continent [3].
Vila Real do Bom Jesus do Cuyabá
Center of the continent or not, it was a Portuguese town that must be Brazilian, so Col. Mena Barreto prepared for the siege. After a couple days of surveying the relatively modern circuit of walls, he realized that an attempt of taking it by violence would be potentially disastrous, and his consciousness opposed it. Rather, he decided to await for the capitulation of the defenders by starvation, as he had done in Corumbá.
Even if his forces outnumbered the defending garrison, there were no numbers to completely encircle the town, and thus the 2nd Brazilian Corps, as suggested by Sir James Grant, was fragmented in three divisions to blockade the gates, with the largest division, led by the Colonel himself, positioned near the Cuyabá River. To be protected against sorties by the city guard, the divisions spent a week digging up circuits of trenches and ditches, and in some places erected crude timber barricades, as their intelligence had noticed the presence of irregular cavalrymen among the defending garrison. After the city’s water and food supply was cut off, the besiegers awaited for hunger to set inside.
The months of May and June awarded some small triumphs for the besiegers, as the Portuguese Governor – Lieutenant-General
Gustavo Mourão Abrantes – a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, commanded two quick assaults against the Brazilians during nighttime. In his first attack, a week after the start of the siege, he was almost successful in ousting the smallest division from its camp, considering the speed and violence of his advance, and the fact that the Brazilians had yet to finish their protective ditch circuit. In this day, the besiegers suffered disproportionate losses, but the diminutive raiding party had no chance against the whole army, and was forced to hurry back to the city as soon as the startled platoons reorganized and counterattacked. In the second attempt, during the second day of June, Lt.-Gen. Gustavo Mourão Abrantes performed a night raid. This time the Brazilians proved their mettle and maintained cohesion in face of the aggression, and the loyalists were pushed back. Four Brazilian dragoons even tried to penetrate the opened gates in a frenzied chase, but only one of them survived to see the next day.
Even if the Brazilian soldiers arguably suffered more due to the direct sun exposition during the day and surprisingly cold nights, the region was extremely dry, so much that access to water became the ace in the hole, and the besiegers collected plenty of it from the Cuyabá river. They also had a reliable supply of food, milk and leather, as Col. Mena Barreto took great pains to assure that the cattle herders of the region would furnish necessary resources. Meanwhile, the population inside quickly exhausted its own resources, including gunpowder, always an extremely scarce commodity in that side of the world, and suffered with thirst.
By the month of July, after a determined resistance, the situation had become unsustainable for those inside the city, to whom the walls instead of seeming like a protection now appeared to be a prison. Or a grave, in many cases, as those who died were forced to be buried inside. In 13 July, during the night, Col. João de Deus Mena Barreto was surprised to receive a delegation from inside the city. The Luso-Brazilian militiamen had rioted during the twilight hours and imprisoned Gustavo Mourão Abrantes after a brief, but bloody showdown. They then proclaimed surrender and the Brazilians were peacefully allowed inside.
The last military action of the Matto Grosso Campaign was the capture of the fortified citadel of
Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade, another western border outpost whose military control was necessary to safeguard the province. The town surrendered without fight in September 1821 after its small guard was informed about the annexation of the province.
Col. João de Deus Mena Barreto remained as provisory governor (at the head of the 2nd Brazilian Corps, now headquartered in Corumbá) of the constitutionally denominated “Federal Territory”. A presidential decree published in December 1821 vested him with the official designation of “Federal Delegate”, a function that made him the effective political, legal and military representative of the Federal Union in Matto Grosso. In the next months he would focus on the garrisoning of the frontier outposts, as well as in the consolidation of direct communication lines and overland roads between Matto Grosso and Goyáz (linking Vila do Bom Jesus de Cuyabá and Vila Bela de Goyáz), as well as with São Paulo (linking Corumbá and Cuyabá with the city of São Paulo).
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[3] This is true. In geographic terms, the city of Cuiaba in Brazil is located on the exact center of the South American continent, thus considered by being the middle point of a line between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
