The Revolt of the Whip

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior

University. All rights reserved.

Published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Love, Joseph LeRoy, author.

The Revolt of the Whip / Joseph L. Love.

   pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8106-0 (cloth : alk. paper) -

ISBN 978-0-8047-8109-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8369-9 (ebook)

1. Brazil--History--Naval Revolt, 1910. 2. Sailors, Black--Brazil-History. 3. Naval discipline--Brazil--History. 4. Race discrimination--Brazil--History. 5. Brazil. Marinha de Guerra-History. I. Title.

F2537.L832012

981'.05--dc23

2011043060

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.9/13 Adobe Garamond

THE REVOLT OF THE WHIP

Joseph L. Love

Stanford University Press

Stanford California

For Laurie

and the memory of Camille Bittick

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments and Spelling Conventions

Map of Guanabara Bay

1 The Marvelous City and the New Navy

2 The Rebellion and its Resolution

3 The Rebels and Their Motives

4 The Second Revolt and its Consequences

5 Past and Present

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

Although I hope to bring new information and insights to the Revolt of the Whip—a spectacular revolt in the Brazilian navy by largely black crews against an all-white officer corps in 1910—I am writing for a primarily American audience. Such readers might wonder whether there are similar events in the history of the United States. Unsurprisingly, there are no precise parallels in the American experience to the events described in the following pages, but three incidents in our own history deal with similar racial themes on the high seas or in the US Navy. Two of them concerned uprisings of captives aboard slavers—in 1839 on La Amistad, a Spanish-chartered vessel, and in 1841 on the Creole, an American ship.¹ Both ended in court cases, the first in Connecticut, and the second on Nassau, in the Bahamas. Both, but especially the first, fired the abolitionist movement in the United States. In the Amistad case, ex-president John Quincy Adams defended the self-liberated slaves before the US Supreme Court, and Steven Spielberg told the story to the world in his movie Amistad. Though considered mutinies rather than cases of piracy, the Creole and Amistad incidents were revolts by captives rather than crew members, and in both instances the slaves ultimately walked free.

An incident more directly resembling the Brazilian rebellion occurred in World War II at Port Chicago, California. The mutiny there was more unambiguously a race-based rebellion than the Brazilian revolt studied here. Like the US Army, the navy had remained segregated throughout World War II. At Port Chicago the black seamen’s assignment had been to load munitions onto cargo ships in the war against Japan. On July 17, 1944, a terrific explosion occurred at the loading dock: 320 men were killed, of which 202 had been black enlistees. Another 390 other men were injured; two-thirds of them were African Americans. These numbers amounted to 15 percent of all black casualties in World War II. The blast was equivalent to five kilotons of TNT, about one-third the force of the Hiroshima explosion. Port Chicago was the worst disaster on the American homefront during the war.

Blame was placed not on the white officers in charge of the loading, but on the black sailors who were killed.² Fearing another explosion, a seaman named Joe Small, who had been an informal broker between officers and men, led a work stoppage on August 9, 1944. As a result, 258 African Americans were imprisoned. Under threat of a charge of mutiny, four-fifths of the accused decided to return to work; despite this, all 258 were court-martialed. They were charged with mutiny, an offense that implies intent to take power, though their action was in fact a work stoppage to protest the perilous conditions in which they were forced to work. The sailors had no lawyers to represent them. The chief counsel of the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall—later to become the first African American on the US Supreme Court—took up their cause, although as a civilian, he could not represent them in a court-martial. Fifty men—those who had defied the threat of court-martial—were declared guilty of mutiny and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Punishments were subsequently reduced, but initially not that of Small and nine others. Following the United States’ victory in the Pacific, Small and others were released in 1946 and discharged from the navy in July, two years after the mutiny at Port Chicago. Perhaps the perceived injustice in the handling of the Port Chicago rebels contributed to the navy’s decision to abandon segregation in 1947; it was the first of the US armed services to do so.

Although the Brazilian revolt of 1910 occurred on ships afloat rather than loading docks, there were a number of similarities with the Port Chicago events. For one thing, both rebellions were implicitly working class. For another, the leaders of the Brazilian movement, like Joe Small, were older than their followers, but most, like Small, were still in their early twenties. And again, like the American Small, the three principal Brazilian leaders between them had sufficient skills and enough education and experience to earn the trust and obedience of their comrades. Furthermore, both Brazilian and American rebels were motivated by outrageous grievances—in the American case, the mass death of their fellows and the threat of impending death for the survivors, and in the Brazilian case, the persistence of flogging, associated with the recently abolished institution of slavery. To be sure, the Brazilian uprising was unique, and it played a memorable role in the history of resistance to oppression, not just of blacks, but of other lower-class people as well. In what follows I do not seek to create heroes or burnish the reputations of courageous men; some previous accounts have done this. Rather, my intention is to tell a good story, faithful to the known facts, about real people—sailors and the elites who ruled them—and their triumphs and failings.

Acknowledgments

and Spelling Conventions

As brief as it is, this book has a long history. I took my first notes for it in Paris at the Archives du Quai d’Orsay in 1982 [sic], while researching another subject. The notes went into a drawer for several years. I worked on the Brazilian sailors’ revolt at moments snatched from other concerns over the following decades, when I happened to be in Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Washington, or London. The project became a kind of hobby, a word I prefer to obsession. As the years went by, new materials became available and relevant new studies appeared. Even now, however, neither I nor other historians working on the revolt have explored all the relevant sources. Among other things, the reactions of the German and Argentine governments have yet to be adequately examined. In any event, like all researchers, I became indebted to a number of persons and institutions who helped me realize this project, minus the customary acknowledgment of foundation support that usually figures in such lists. Among those who helped me were fellow scholars interested in the revolt itself—Álvaro Pereira de Nasci­mento, Sílvia Capanema de Almeida, Zachary Morgan, Marco Morel, and Admiral Hélio Leôncio Martins. Others who assisted me at various times were two former students, Bert Barickman and Zephyr Frank, now colleagues. Dain Borges and Jeffrey Needell greatly improved the manuscript, whatever its present merits, by writing thorough critiques as anonymous readers. Michael Hall unfailingly offered good advice on sources and repositories. My research assistant, Noah Lenstra, helped me to organize the endnotes; he also standardized spelling and ordered the bibliographical materials, as well as combing through documents and using his skills in drawing maps and enhancing the quality of photographs.

I am grateful to the personnel of the following institutions that provided archival materials, published sources, cartoons, and photos: in Brazil, the Arquivo Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Arquivo da Marinha, the Museu da Imagem e do Som, the Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, the Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, the Asociação Brasileira da Imprensa, and the Casa Rui Barbosa (all in Rio), the Biblioteca Mário de Andrade in Sao Paulo, and the Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre; in the United States, the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, and the Library of the University of Illinois in Urbana; in Britain, the National Archives in London; in France, the Archives Diplomatiques du Quai d’Orsay in Paris; and in Portugal, the Arquivo do Ministério de Negócios Estrangeiros in Lisbon.

Brazilian Portuguese orthography has undergone several reforms since the period studied here, and I have followed the widely accepted practice of using modern spelling in the text and original spelling in the list of works cited. The original orthography will be useful for students and scholars who want to check the sources I used.

Map of Guanabara Bay, 1910

§1 The Marvelous City and the New Navy

With its granite mountains rising from the sea, its seemingly endless beaches, and its new landscaping, Rio de Janeiro had no rival in tropical splendor during the Belle Époque. Following the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the replacement of the increasingly inert imperial regime by a federal republic in 1889, Brazil’s leaders sought to catch up with Argentina, even surpass it, as a candidate member of the comity of civilized nations. Around 1890, Rio had lost its position as the largest city in South America to Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, and many Cariocas (inhabitants of Rio) admired the metropolis of the Rio de la Plata. General Emídio Dantas Barreto, who plays a role in the narrative below, wrote of the Argentine metropolis in 1906, Its avenues of luxurious palaces and its monuments, gracefully conceived in every detail, spoke to us of the wealth, taste, and culture of this hardworking and daring people who realized the ideal of progress and civilization in Spanish America.¹

Other Cariocas imagined their city to be in fierce competition with Buenos Aires: the protagonist of a 1909 novel by Afonso Henriques Lima Barreto, the celebrated bohemian writer and social critic, summed up Cariocas’ envy of the great city on the Rio de la Plata:

We were weary of our mediocrity, our lassitude. The vision of a clean, attractive, and elegant Buenos Aires provoked us and filled us with a mad desire to equal it. In this [emotion] there was a looming matter of national amour-propre and a dimwitted yearning not to allow foreigners, on returning [to their countries] to pour forth criticisms of our city and our civilization. We envied Buenos Aires moronically. [The argument ran:] "Argentina shouldn’t outshine us; Rio de Janeiro couldn´t remain just a coaling station, while Buenos Aires was a genuine European capital: Why didn’t we have broad avenues, carriage drives, formal-dress hotels, and gambling casinos?"²

Yet in many ways the Cariocas’ aspirations were already being met through advances in sanitation, public works, architecture, and the stylish display of wealth. By 1910, Brazil’s capital had become the Marvelous City celebrated in the Carnival march of that name.³ Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a pioneer of preventive medicine for the tropics, had attacked bubonic plague in the city in the late 1890s, vastly reducing the number of cases by 1908, and eliminating the disease altogether in the following decade.⁴ More spectacularly, Cruz had virtually freed Rio from yellow fever during the mosquito eradication campaign of 1907. In 1909 he declared Rio to be free of that illness.

The more salubrious city would attract new inhabitants, and by 1910 it would have 870,000 residents,⁵ though Rio still trailed Buenos Aires. Although it might be said that the beautification of Brazil’s capital dated from 1808, when the exiled Portuguese regent (the future João VI) commissioned the neoclassical Botanical Gardens, the city planners of the new Republic remade the face of the city. During the first years of the new century, Prefect Francisco Pereira Passos and his chief engineer Paulo de Frontin had overseen the redesign of the Brazilian metropolis, including the creation of its sinuous and sensuous Avenida Beira Mar (Seashore Drive). This thoroughfare connected the fashionable districts of Glória, Catete, Flamengo, and Botafogo to the commercial center of the capital, and the New Tunnel linked Copacabana to the established residential areas in 1906. Four years later, 615 licensed automobiles were cruising the city.

In the beachfront districts of Glória, Flamengo, and Botafogo, and soon in Copacabana too, palacetes, palatial multistory homes, were erected on the Beira-Mar in a style that might be called tropical gingerbread. They featured fanciful towers, arcades, and balconies fronting Guanabara Bay. The writer Lima Barreto even refers to a Botafogo style of palacetes, surrounded by iron fencing and featuring ornate plaster work and a veranda on the side.⁶ Art Nouveau motifs were frequent.

Official Rio was also showing a new face. When it opened its doors in 1909 Brazil’s premier theater, the Teatro Municipal, inspired by the Paris Opera, offered an adaptation of nineteenth-century French eclecticism coupled with modern ventilation.⁷ The building displayed a profusion of marble, velvet and gilding.⁸ It was Brazil’s answer to the great opera house of Buenos Aires, the Teatro Colón, which had opened a year earlier. The Teatro Municipal was situated on the Avenida Central, a motorway cutting a north-south line through the heart of downtown and stretching from today’s Praça (square) de Mauá to the Praia (beach) de Santa Luzia, thus linking two distant points on the bay. City planner Frontin had purposely designed the Avenida Central to be thirty-three meters wide, so that its width would exceed that of the famed Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires by three meters.⁹

But the Teatro Municipal was hardly the only memorable state building erected on the Avenida Central in early years of the new century. Other notable institutions were the National Library, the National School of Fine Arts, and the Naval Club, inaugurated in May 1910 in the presence of President Nilo Peçanha. Designed by the Italian architect Tomasso Bezzi, the Club was richly appointed with marble columns and parquet floors. An official pamphlet describes it as constructed in an eclectic style with elements of the Italian Renaissance, having marine motifs both inside and out.¹⁰ In the Green Salon one can still see a painting of Brazil´s first great battleships, the Minas Gerais and São Paulo, moving at full steam.

Among the stately new commercial buildings erected, slate-covered turrets and bell-shaped domes, topped with spires, abounded, though most of the Avenida’s construction involved a Beaux-Arts façade grafted on to a plain, functional building . . . a Brazilian body with a French mask.¹¹ By 1909, the city also had ten movie theaters, all concentrated on and near the Avenida Central. Meanwhile, the construction of the cable car to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, the most famous of the Rio’s granite morros, had been initiated in 1908 and would be completed in 1912. Rio’s new port—financed, like so many public works—by foreign loans, opened the city to expanded trade and travel in 1910. At that time, it was the fifteenth most important port in the world in terms of freight handled.¹²

Traversing the Avenida Central was the cultural heart of the capital city, the Rua do Ouvidor, built in the mid-eighteenth century, but recently spruced up by the new premises of the traditional Garnier and Lammert book stores. On the Ouvidor, the city’s most fashionable street, men could be seen in top hats at midday, while upper-class women more sensibly carried parasols. Most of the leading newspaper offices were located on the Ouvidor or the Avenida Central—among them Jornal de Comércio (the most respected daily), O País (the unofficial mouthpiece of the government), Correio da Manhã (the leading opposition paper), Jornal do Brasil, Diário do Rio de Janeiro, and Diário de Notícias. Ouvidor was also the most stylish street for Carnival activities. The modern Carnival had arisen in the early years of the new century, as the samba replaced the entrudo as the leading street dance of Carnival on the Ouvidor and elsewhere in the years around 1910.¹³ On an adjoining street, parallel to the Avenida Central, stood the city’s best restaurant and tearoom, the Confeitaria Colombo, which survives to the present day. Laid out in Art Nouveau style, the Colombo had four floors appointed with countertops of Italian marble, eight three-by-six-meter mirrors set in jacarandá frames, and crystal chandeliers. An oval window of tiffany glass provided additional overhead light.

No one was more concerned with Rio de Janeiro’s new glamour than the Brazilian foreign minister, the baron of Rio Branco, who was eager to display the city to the world. Rio Branco had hosted the third Pan-American Conference there in 1906,¹⁴ making Rio de Janeiro the first city in South America to sponsor the event, ahead of Buenos Aires. The Monroe Palace,¹⁵ a French eclectic extravaganza erected in 1904 to display