9. The battle of Fernão de Loronha
Nowadays, the small archipelago of Fernão de Loronha is mainly a touristic attraction, owing to its comfortable climate, paradisiacal beaches, green cliffs, and impressive vistas, and some tourists miss the opportunity of visiting the local History Museum, which narrates in detail the naval battle that occurred between Brazilian and Portuguese forces in August 1831, certainly the largest engagement of the war.
The Portuguese fleet did have more experienced sailors and officers, and were in a better defensive position, but the
Armada Real d’Angola spanned some swift vessels designed to chase merchant ships – such as schooners and corvettes – and but a few heavily armed vessels. The Brazilians, on the other hand, had invested a staggering amount to produce ocean-worthy warships, more fit to pitched battles and coastal blockades – with four brigs and a ship of the line.
The official commander of the fleet (in fact, of the whole Navy) was
Adm. Sávio Soares, but the tactical operations were actually undertaken by
Commodore Harry Hawkins, a British privateer, who, among all those who had accepted the letters of marque, had greater naval experience, having participated in the Napoleonic Wars, then against Malay pirates in Malacca.
Cmd. Hawkins, likely unsure about the competence of the freshly recruited crews, realized that the battle would have to be won by a stratagem. He devised a very risky plan, firstly rejected, but later accepted, by Adm. Soares. Some of the medium-weight ships would be used as bait to bring the Portuguese ships out of their defensive position with a feigned retreat – as they were anchored in near a tight bay of crags, safe from the approach of any maritime force – and then their spread vessels could be intercepted in smaller groups.
The Portuguese armada did not fell for the ruse. Only a single corvette was detached to chase the arriving Brazilian ships in their fake retreat, and after navigating a few miles, they returned. Two days later, Cmd. Hawkins made another attempt, without success.
After another day of wait, Adm. Sávio Soares became impatient. He was under pressure from the federal government to attack the Portuguese armada, and obtain a much-needed victory to bring back a semblance of dignity to the Presidency of Inácio Joaquim Monteiro. It did not help that he had been nominated by the President himself to command the maritime attack, and expected to rise in a political career by military triumph.
The outcome of the battle did not produce the decisive victory the Brazilian admiral desired. The Portuguese had been established in a convenient defensive position, in a bay near a rock that rose from the sea and created difficulty for an approaching fleet to maneuver. Nevertheless, despite the tactical disappointment, it resulted in a strategic victory for the attackers, due to the fact that the careful Portuguese admiral became desperate to avoid becoming surrounded, and decided to abandon the place altogether, trusting their speed to escape from whatever chasing attempts the Brazilians would make.
His plan was accomplished, and this time he was the one that used a bait to attract the attention of the Brazilian armada, while the rest of the flotilla successfully escaped the zone, favored by the wind, while the more cumbersome Brazilian vessels lost a good opportunity to follow up.
The expulsion of the Portuguese from Fernão de Loronha – barring the “minor” detail that the
Armada d’Angola was still at large and apt to launch coastal attacks – received thunderous applauses in Rio de Janeiro, and President Inácio Joaquim Monteiro himself capitalized on it, in preparation for the reelection campaign.
10. The Republic strikes back
The next moves, however, ordered by an euphoric Joaquim Monteiro, consisted in another series of blunders that effectively sealed the fate of the war.
On the sea, the Brazilian Navy was ordered to resupply in the closest port and then sail immediately to the Guyanas to wrestle the region back from Portuguese control.
On the land, a part of the 1st Brazilian Army was detached to go the Northeast, join forces with Nogueira Gaspar and then march directly to the Guyanas along the coast.
In spite of the precariousness of the roads linking the cities of the northern Brazilian littoral, Nogueira Gaspar’s 4th Brazilian Corps arrived in a relatively quick march in
Belém, the capital of Grão-Pará, in late November 1831. Nogueira Gaspar had been there at the head of an army before, almost a decade earlier, during the War of Independence, and was still familiar with the terrain and the strategic situation of the locale. The city was nested in the swampy and sandy shore where the Tocantins River meets with the Atlantic Ocean, with a citadel overlooking the sea and the island of Marajó, wedged in the estuary of the great watercourse.
The local Governor,
José Serafim da Cruz, was half-Brazilian and half-Indian (his mother belonged to the tribe of the Wajãpi), an extraordinary character because he grew from absolute poverty, transitioning between jungle, farm and wharf, to become a hero and a leader in the region of northeastern Grão-Pará, deserving of a grudging respect by the white minority and utmost adoration by the Amerindian and African-descended peoples. He had witnessed the suffering of his people at the hands of the Patriot forces during the War of Independence, led by none other than Nogueira Gaspar himself, and remembered the prosperity of their homesteads and ports during the age of the Portuguese Empire. For these reasons, he and his partisans had wholeheartedly welcomed the European royal legions, proclaiming himself the most faithful and loyal of the subjects of His Majesty, the King of Portugal and Algarves.
Despite his populist façade, however, José Serafim da Cruz was a merciless and brutish dictator, who had many times launched persecutions against domestic opponents and conflicts with the Indians hostile to his own kin, with the intent of cleansing the Amazon basin. Thus, at the slightest signal of contrariety, especially from the faction unfriendly to the Portuguese recolonization prospect, he unleashed his henchmen to suppress the rivalries.
For these same reasons, of course, José Serafim da Cruz’ regime violently resisted the advance of the Brazilian federal army. If Nogueira Gaspar had expected to convince the collaborationists to peacefully surrender, he was wrong.
The attempt of retaking Belém in a land siege resulted in a failure, and heavy casualties for both sides. After a couple attempts, Nogueira Gaspar gave up the purpose of taking the capital by storm, as the urban militia, despite the lack of weapons and basic tactical resources, had been united in a cohesive block of defense, and outnumbered by far the besieging army. Besides, whatever losses the federal forces suffered could not be replenished, and so Nogueira Gaspar avoided direct confrontations, preferring to cut off the supplies from the Tocantis River to starve the city into surrender.
His plan, however, was doomed to failure, as the Portuguese joint maritime force – the
Armada d’Angola with the
Armada dos Açores – had expelled the Brazilian Navy under Adm. Sávio Soares in the middle of October 1831, forcing the attacking fleet to retreat to Fortaleza, the closest safe harbor. Belém, being a port town, could be perfectly resupplied by the sea if the land and fluvial routes were cut off, and the Portuguese ships did not miss any shipments of foods and other goods from their base in the Guyanas to assist the citizens of Belém.
*****
By the end of 1831, Nogueira Gaspar had given up the siege, and decided for an alternative approach: forcing the defenders out, and with meticulous planning the detachments of his army orchestrated hit and run raids to destroy the countryside. Despite his personal revulsion to resorting to a scorched earth tactic, his command was being sabotaged by the pressure of Lt. Gen. Bento Alonso Ferreira, the hierarch of the divisions of the 1st Brazilian Corps that had come all the way from Rio de Janeiro to join his own 4th Corps. Dozens, if not hundreds, of inhabitants of the Amazon basin, notably hostile natives that opposed the advance of the Brazilians, were either exterminated or reduced to destitution, and this merely a decade after the havoc wrought by the campaign in Grão-Pará during the War of Independence. An anecdote, likely apocryphal, claims that Lt. Gen. Bento Ferreira mocked Nogueira Gaspar by saying that: “
Twelve years ago, you slaughtered a half of this wretched race, then why you refuse to put the other half out of their misery?”.
The strategy produced a limited success, as the wrathful citizens of Belém, led by José Serafim da Cruz himself, marched against the federal army. Nogueira Gaspar chose the terrain, on the side of the Acará River, and awaited the approach of the militia. The resulting battle was a victorious butchery in favor of the Brazilians, as the infuriated mob, trusting solely on their huge advantage of numbers, failed to maintain cohesion against a disciplined and better-armed force, with but a handful of cannon shots being enough to force the mob into a panicked escape. Nevertheless, the 4th Brazilian Corps did not succeed in taking the city by storm even after the victory, as the citizens of Belém, despite the humiliation, only strengthened their resolve to expel the “invaders”.
Already in January 1832, a relief military force came from the sea: after many pleadings from the Government in Belém, the Portuguese finally acquiesced to send a regiment of soldiers of the line to assist.
This time, the 4th Corps established a fortified position in a hilltop near the parish of São Domingos da Boa Vista. The ensuing battle was the sole direct engagement between Brazilian and Portuguese military forces in the whole war, and, much like the naval battle in Fernão de Loronha, the result was tactically inconclusive, but this time the Brazilians remained in field. The Portuguese had suffered irreplaceable casualties, and were shipped off to Caiêna in spite of the protests of Gov. José Serafim da Cruz.
Painting of the battle of São Domingos da Boa Vista. According to Nogueira Gaspar's own memoirs, this battle was the one in his whole career that he felt "the breath of the Angel of Death", as the Galician marksmen employed as mercenaries by the Portuguese Army almost slew him in the heat of the clash, having successfully shot down his aide-de-camp (and cousin) Bruno Valmir Gaspar.
Nogueira Gaspar and the 4th Corps continued operating for a couple months in the eastern frontier of Grão-Pará, along the valley of the Tocantins River, in a desperate effort to weaken the regional government, as he now lacked the means to attempt a reconquest of the city itself. The Brazilian fleet led by Adm. SávioSoares, in later December 1831, had tried its luck against the numerically superior Portuguese, and were, again, expelled.
Afterwards, in a poorly advised maneuver to attract the European armadas away from the Guyanas, the South American fleet was commanded to raid vulnerable coastal settlements of the Portuguese Empire, and the crews sailed to attack Cabo Verde (February 1832) and Açores (March 1832), with a privateer maritime force led by the Mexican Juan Facundo going as far as Luanda, in Angola. The seaborne offensive continued for some more months, but were hurriedly recalled back to Brazil by agents of the federal government, fearful of a Portuguese reprisal in the home front. The Navy was stationed in Fortaleza, and there remained for the rest of the war.
Regarding the 4th Corps, they remained in Grão-Pará, having failed to obtain any other victories, until March 1832, when Nogueira Gaspar received orders from the government in Rio de Janeiro, recalling him back to a secure region.So, his legion retreated to São Luís, in Maranham, and remained there awaiting for new orders.
*****
Inácio Joaquim Monteiro lost the election, and was succeeded by
Gen. Agostinho Villas Bôas de Oliveira Curvelo do Amaral. The new President realized they had scant chance of winning the war, considering the circumstances: there was a grave instability in the peripheral regions of the republic, especially the Northeast and the far South (with a large rebellion breaking out in Banda Oriental in the middle of 1832), and insistent aggressions by the Plateans in the frontier of Santa Catarina.
The country lacked a reliable navy, and Adm. Sávio Soares, despite his best efforts, hardly proved a match to the more experienced and keen Portuguese navigators. The strategy of ranging raids in Portuguese bases in the other side of the Atlantic paid few dividends, as the European patrol fleets operating in Africa, especially from Great Britain and Portugal, effectively curbed slave commerce – the original
casus belli. The sudden restart of the fleet-building project that had been devised by former President Mena Barreto proved to be an extremely costly endeavor, and the acute issues faced by the slave market created a brief economic crisis in late 1831.
For all these reasons, despite having been elected with basis on a triumphalist rhetoric, President Agostinho Curvelo do Amaral had to accept peace talks when diplomats from Lisboa arrived in May 1832. The Brazilians, in fact, obtained a last-hour victory in that same month, when Nogueira Gaspar’s army, reinforced by three divisions of recruits from Minas Gerais and Bahia, successfully stormed Belém, deposing and executing the rebel governor José Serafim da Cruz, reintegrating the rebel territory to the Federal Union.
11. The Price of Peace
Due to the difficulty of establishing communications in the Atlantic during the 1830s, the peace talks with Portugal went from May 1832 until roughly the next year. At first, the Brazilian government had hoped to obtain a more neutral compromise with Portugal, likely an exchange of indemnities, but saw the plans frustrated by the entrance of Great Britain as a peace broker.
Meanwhile, low-level skirmishes continued in the Atlantic theater, with the Brazilian ships obtaining some easy victories against military-grade Portuguese ships dedicated to the
Cruzada Libertadora, but giving up the African zone altogether after the
Armada d’Angola sailed back to Luanda in August 1832.
The resulting
Treaty of London (signed in November 1832, but only ratified in Brazil in early 1833) resulted in an unquestionable and humiliating defeat for Brazil in the geopolitical aspect, with the following terms being imposed by the British on pain of renewing of hostilities:
- The whole of the Guyanas would be ceded to the Kingdom of Portugal and Algarves as its de jure territory, previously recognized by the Congress of London (1815).
- Out of respect of the self-determination of the peoples of Grão-Pará who desired a political and economic reunion with the Portuguese Empire, a substantial fraction of the northern frontier of Grão-Pará would be aggregated to the Portuguese Guyanas, roughly corresponding to the whole region of the Guyana Highlands, including the coastal area to north and west of the Amazon River, and its inhabitants will be hereforward be considered subjects of the Portuguese Crown;
- A fringe of land corresponding to two-cannonball shots distance from either side of the Amazon River would serve as a demilitarized zone;
- Belém and the island of Marajó would remain as Brazilian territory, but the Amazon River would remain open to commerce and navigation for all the involved parties in the Treaty.
- Slave trade is hereby permanently outlawed outside of Brazil.
- Commerce between the signing parties will be resumed in earnest, and Brazilian ships will be allowed safe transit and harbor in Portuguese and British outposts in Africa and in India.
Needless to say, most of these terms were unacceptable to the Brazilian Government, especially the cession of such a large territory in Grão-Pará, which effectively dismembered the region with the greater populational density of the whole North. Nevertheless, despite the outcry and the other proposals forwarded by the Brazilian diplomats – such as the establishment of the border in the Oiapoque River instead of the Amazon, or the partition of the northern stretch of Grão-Pará equally between Portugal and Brazil – the Brazilians were at last forced to accept the compromise for peace.
So far, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had remained out of the war, but keenly interested in its developments, as London had its own designs in South America, but now it became clear that stubborn insistence on waging a war to restore slave trafficking would invite British aggression. And this… this Brazil could not afford.
Besides, Brazil indeed had suffered a strategic defeat, despite some tactical victories, having failed to retake the Guyanas, by sea and by land, which remained in Portuguese control for the reminder of the conflict. It was true, also, that the majority of the “civilized” peoples (thus excluding the myriad of Indian confederations in the Amazon basin) had called back for a Portuguese recolonization. All of this – summed to the fact that this region was too remote from the centers of power in Rio de Janeiro to be effectively controlled, and provided little to no economic advantage on the scope of the national outputs in Brazil – were all factors that forced the new government of President Agostinho Curvelo do Amaral to simply swallow the terms of the Treaty, and focus on inward development and the cultivation of better relations with the European powers.
The overall sour taste of the Treaty made some of the intellectual élite in Brazil argue that, in retrospective, the Brazilian victory in the War of Independence had been a stroke of luck. Portugal at the time was too weak, and the Brazilian patriots had successfully, albeit not without serious obstacles, stitched a nation from the disparaging fragments of a colonial empire.
Alas, it was not meant to last: domestic instability would continue for some decades, especially as the government in Rio de Janeiro invested in more centralizing policies under the pretext of “strengthening the nation”, inflaming the centrifugal forces – such as autonomists, federalists, and outright separatists – especially in the Northeast and in the far South.
The Republic of Brazil was an artificial construct, a political and legal framework imposed over a spectrum of diverse ethnicities, cultures, interests, dialects, economies and social mores. Its unity would not arise spontaneously; no, it left to their designs, the peoples of the nation would fragment it into various minor countries, weak and feeble to resist the inevitable encroachment of the European empires.
After this humiliation, the younger generation of statesmen in Brazil, who would still decades later remember the defeat of the elephant by the mouse, would, in their respective careers, whatever their political and ideological affiliations, hold as true a single basic premise: the federation and the republic of Brazil already existed on paper… but the
Brazilian nation would have to be forged and casted anew from the decrepit ruins of former Portuguese America.
By iron and blood, if necessary.
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Notes and comments: Yet another chapter in which I tried to demonstrate how the regional sub-national politics were almost feudal, especially in the less urbanized parts of the country, in which local strongmen disputed municipal and state government as consequence of their family vendettas. This trend will get even worse in the next few decades, as we'll see in with more detail in other chapter.
So, the War with Portugal results in a Brazilian defeat, even if Portugal is in a worse shape than, say, 1801, but we must always have in mind that its victory owes more to Brazilian internal factionalism than to the Portuguese might itself. That's a point I wanted to stress out, as implausible as a war in 1830 would be for such a ruined Iberian kingdom.
Regarding the Guianas, next chapter will deal with the short and medium-term consequences of its integration to the Portuguese Empire, and the fact that it will become Portugal's sole colonial outpost in the Americas. Pay attention, as well, to the British presence in the peace agreement... there's a lot more going for the UK than it appears...
