In early 1838, three brothers from Brazil visited the ports of Ambriz and Luanda in Angola to buy slaves. “In ballast,” with a passport for Rio de Janeiro and Mozambique, their ship left Luanda on 9th April.Footnote 1 Secretly, and probably by cover of nightfall, the ship was then loaded with the 251 young slaves they had purchased from present-day Angola and the Congo.Footnote 2 Around one-third of them were just children.Footnote 3 The ship quickly travelled west from Angola towards Rio de Janeiro, taking a little more than one month to arrive at its destination. The name of the slave ship was the Brilhante, and it encountered an unusual fate when, on 13th of May 1838, it was captured off the Fluminense coast of Rio de Janeiro by the British warship HMS Wizard.
The slave trade to Brazil carried out north of the equator was made illegal in 1815 by bilateral treaty between Britain and Portugal. Enforcement of the treaty included the commitment to mutual right of search and detainment of vessels suspected of slave trading. As part of an additional convention to the treaty in 1817, two Anglo-Portuguese mixed commission courts for the suppression of the slave trade were established, one in the British territory of Sierra Leone and one in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 4 They were presided over by representatives of both signatories of the treaties. In exchange for Britain’s recognition of Brazilian independence in 1822, negotiations began for an anti- slave trade treaty between Britain and Brazil, which adopted the 1817 Portuguese treaty as a basis, but was more comprehensive. The treaty of 1826 and the resulting laws were designed to enforce a partial and then, from 1831, a total ban on the slave trade carried out by Brazilian subjects.Footnote 5
Similar treaties between Britain and other maritime powers established courts of mixed commission to adjudicate captured slaving vessels in various Atlantic port cities including Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Havana and several courts in Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century.Footnote 6 This article focuses on enslaved Africans who travelled on ships intercepted in this way and who belonged to a particular legal category known as liberated Africans in Brazil, emancipados in Cuba or “recaptives” in other locations. As a result of the treaty agreements, some eleven thousand Africans from slave ships were freed from slavery by local authorities and by mixed commissions in Rio de Janeiro between 1821 and 1845.Footnote 7 Yet countless Africans continued to be forcibly transported across the Atlantic despite such measures. The slave trade to Brazil carried out by: Brazilian, Portuguese and American subjects remained a lucrative commercial activity and was largely supported by the Brazilian public.
In the year 1838, when the Brilhante was captured, at least ninety ships made the Atlantic crossing to the southeast of Brazil, and the majority managed successfully to land slaves on the coast.Footnote 8 That year the mixed commission court was particularly busy, causing controversy by condemning as Brazilian many ships that were flying the Portuguese flag when seized. The continued existence of loopholes in the treaties meant that slave trading under the Portuguese flag was permitted south of the equator. Slave traders strategically used flags and false papers according to which nations were more lenient and, more importantly, whether mutual search agreements with Britain were in force.Footnote 9 In such a way they reduced the likelihood that their ships would be searched and in the case of a ship’s detention they increased the chances that the ship would be restored by the court in Rio.
Although it was travelling under a Portuguese flag, evidence made it sufficiently clear to the adjudicators of the mixed commission court that the Brilhante was in fact a Brazilian slave trading outfit. She was awarded as lawful prize to the commander and crew of the Wizard and sold. The slaves on the ship were freed with the stipulation that they were first to undergo a period of apprenticeship lasting fourteen years before they were expected to be granted autonomy. Frequently, in practice, the working conditions of Africans freed by the mixed commission were similar to those of slaves.
In this article, I argue that liberated Africans were able to maintain networks and social relationships based on shipmate bonds, which helped to ameliorate the hardship of their lives in Brazil. Using the Brilhantes’ voyage as a case study, it examines the Middle Passage and possible origins of some of the Africans who were known in Brazil as africanos livres and thus engages with often neglected African experiences in the Atlantic World. Questions of identity formation and the negotiation of freedom are addressed in Atlantic spaces before and after arrival in the New World.
The case study relies on registers of the Africans from the ship which were made on arrival and several years after their distribution as apprenticed labourers in Rio de Janeiro, as well as Daniel Domingues da Silva’s analysis of Kimbundu names from the ship to help pinpoint African origins in the registers and identify the bearing this might have had on their lives in Brazil. Alongside records pertaining to the lives of the Brilhante’s captives in the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro and London, it was possible to cross-reference my own data with a digital history project: “The Broken Paths of Freedom: Free Africans in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Slave Society.”Footnote 10 This is a pilot visualisation tool currently being developed as part of the Spatial History project at Stanford University and includes data such as age range, deaths and occupations as well as maps of locations and hirers for the Brilhante and the Cesar slave ships. It will eventually provide information on all liberated Africans or africanos livres in Brazil.
Critically, this is the first study that brings together information on origins from the Brilhante, conditions during the journey and analysis of the captives’ subsequent experiences in Rio in order to illuminate details of the lives of some of these individuals and the associations which they might have formed, including shipmate bonds. As well as the many abuses of the system created to ensure their welfare and eventual freedom, they were inserted into a slave-based society clearly segregated by race, and further discriminated against because of their African origins, which marked them apart from those of African descent born in Brazil.Footnote 11 Although each captive’s experience was unique, the survival strategies that they employed in these circumstances can convincingly be shown to “connect separate groups to the larger Black Atlantic tradition,” as Beatriz Mamigonian and Karen Racine suggest.Footnote 12
Despite the eventual fate of the ship, the captives on board the vessel shared the experience of the Middle Passage borne by millions of slaves before them. The captives became shipmates throughout a journey of extreme endurance. Indeed, as well as the physical suffering and cramped and unhealthy incarceration, the conditions of the journey were treacherous. On 4th of May, about halfway through the transatlantic crossing, the ship was caught in a storm. The captain of the Brilhante wrote in the nautical diary: “A lot of rain, very bad weather with very strong wind, and the sea wanted to swallow the ship.”Footnote 13 The journey undertaken linked the Atlantic port city of Rio de Janeiro with a region of Africa which constituted a common supply and transportation route of the nineteenth-century illegal slave trade to Brazil.
Walter Hawthorne, who uses a detailed analysis of the voyage undertaken by those on-board the Emilia, another ship which was captured by the British Navy and taken to Rio, believes that “for those able to maintain contact with shipmates, these bonds became the most important and most enduring of any that the African Diaspora would create,” maintaining the captives’ links to the past, as well as offering support in the present.Footnote 14 As a consequence of the capture, similarly to the Brilhante, there is a wide range of information available concerning the voyage, the contact maintained in Rio de Janeiro and in this unusual case, the eventual return to Africa together of many of the Emilia’s captives along with other slaves.Footnote 15 But it is still difficult to characterise exactly what type of bonds were formed and between whom.
Hawthorne’s study of the Emilia contributes to a larger debate, which has predominantly focused on the North Atlantic. The discovery of enduring relationships formed during the Middle Passage has led to two main currents of thought, one which focuses on an “Africanist” perspective suggesting that shipmate bonds were built upon existing cultural and social similarities and the other represented by authors such as Sidney Mintz and Richard Price who suggest that these bonds “announced the birth of new societies based on new kinds of principles.”Footnote 16 Enslavement meant a drastic and painful separation from the lives, kinship and families in Africa to which slaves would never be able to return. This event has even been described as a “social death.”Footnote 17
At the same time, on the Brilhante a mother and daughter are listed and family members appear together on other mixed commission ships’ records from Havana and Rio de Janeiro. These records confirm that Africans that arrived in the Americas often belonged to “coherent cultural groupings.”Footnote 18 A swathe of scholarship now undermines the original premise supported by Mintz and Price and shows that African cultures in the Americas not only survived, but were constantly renewed and strengthened. Indeed, at this time in Brazil, huge numbers of first-generation Africans were being transported to the country, and slave traders often relied on familiar trade routes, creating “many diasporas.”Footnote 19 It is hard to believe that during one month’s passage across the Atlantic, the slaves on board the Brilhante had their identities totally reformed. As Paul Lovejoy points out, “people, unlike goods, have memories, habits and expectations.”Footnote 20
Observations from Mintz and Price’s analysis remain important, including the extraordinary circumstances which helped to forge the relationships between shipmates. Their comparison with the types of bonds formed as a result of boot camp or prison is one which supports the important place of the effects of trauma itself in forming these relationships and how they developed over time.Footnote 21 As Alex Borucki argues, relationships to other shipmates, or “brothers in suffering,” were developed and re-shaped during the journey and afterwards in Brazil to overcome differences between people which would have been evident and have seemed insurmountable in Angola, for example.Footnote 22 Paul Lovejoy sees shipboard bonding as a phenomenon largely based on ethnic bonds and “communicated through a common language,” thereby making it possible that these bonds varied depending on who was on the ship, and when and from where it set out.Footnote 23
On the Brilhante it seems that just over forty per cent of the captives had Kimbundu names, whilst the rest spoke other Bantu languages such as Teke and Kikongo.Footnote 24 They had similar origins, and there is a high probability that they would have been able to converse with each other. However, Beatriz Mamigonian and Karen Racine remind us, regarding identity formation in the black Atlantic, that “neither legal condition nor African origin favoured instant association.”Footnote 25 In the context of addressing identity formation amongst the africanos livres with their unique legal status, there is no indication that the captives saw themselves as African or identified immediately as africanos livres upon arrival in Brazil, but rather began to re-establish close inter-personal relationships as soon as they could.
Ships captured during the Middle Passage, such as the Brilhante, offer a rich source of data about the illegal trade in slaves. Information collected in this way eventually contributed towards the effective suppression of the slave trade. It also allows historians to better understand the complex nature of relationships formed during the crossing. The details of journeys documented through court records can be used to illustrate the extraordinary circumstances which fostered a strong sense of unity and social identity amongst the captives. As Walter Hawthorne argues, despite the recognition of the importance of the Atlantic, studies of communities which developed during the Atlantic crossing are few and far between.Footnote 26
Building on Hawthorne's work on the Emilia, and others who have analysed shipmate bonds in depth, this article seeks to reinforce the idea that those bonds were lifelong and significant foundations for the development of communities in Brazil.Footnote 27 Although neither the Emilia nor the Brilhante can be considered typical or representative because they were ships which were detained by anti-slave trade patrols, they allow us an insight into the liberated African experience in the early and mid-nineteenth century Atlantic World, and thus to shed light upon and portray more faithfully the nature and importance of relationships which were formed during the Middle Passage.
The Ship, the Slaves and their Journey
Although Brazil relied heavily on slave labour, by the late eighteenth and certainly the nineteenth century, many of the elite were cautious about the effects on society of continuing to introduce more slaves. The independence of Haiti in 1794 demonstrated the worst fears of slaveholders. There were also notorious examples of slave revolt closer to home, such as the Malê revolt in central Salvador in 1835.Footnote 28 However, according to Jaime Rodrigues, it was not only the figure of the African who came to be seen as a negative influence on society. By 1833 the slave traders were beginning to lose their prestigious image in parliamentary circles.Footnote 29 This was because they were responsible for the influx of slaves. They were also renowned for involvement in criminal activity. After the trade became an illegal endeavour, the close relationship between other criminal activities and slave trading escalated. For example money laundering and slaving were crimes that often seem to have gone hand in hand.Footnote 30 When the trade was made illegal some slave traders cut their losses and abandoned the trade, whilst others saw an opportunity and were just starting their negotiations.Footnote 31
The nature of the slave trade was constantly evolving and different types of slaving vessels and tactics were employed, particularly once it became illegal. Slave traders specialised in illicit trading, which also involved evading capture by anti-slave-trade patrol. To hide the Brazilian nationality of the venture, British adjudicators believed that two of the Correa brothers involved in the Brilhante slaving outfit, including the real captain of the ship, posed as passengers on the Brilhante. They were caught out by evidence such as a list of washing from Ambriz addressed to the ship’s captain, Antonio Correa, instead of to the stated captain, Antonio Jorge da Costa.Footnote 32
Upon reaching Brazil, many ships with cargoes for the slave market in Rio made covert landings in such areas as Cabo Frio, Ilha Grande and Angra dos Reis.Footnote 33 The Brilhante had been involved in slave trading for at least two years prior to its capture.Footnote 34 It was known to have operated from two places, Itaguai and Dois Rios. Dois Rios on Ilha Grande was used later in the twentieth-century as the site of a high-security prison, which gives some indication of the seclusion and inaccessibility of the area. Itaguai was also a secluded spot amongst dense Atlantic rainforest. Ample opportunities would have existed for hiding slaves and allowing them to acclimatise before selling them. Mary Karasch describes foreign observers’ accounts of newly arrived slaves as grey-coloured from scurvy and very thin, often suffering from a variety of skin disorders.Footnote 35 Giving slaves time to recover was important because “emaciated” slaves would have been less easily absorbed within the rest of the slave population, which was the slave traders’ aim.
Slave ships varied in capacity, number of decks and number of masts. The Brilhante is sometimes identified as a brig-schooner and occasionally as a brig, although it was most commonly referred to as a bergantim or brigantine and was built in the United States.Footnote 36 By the early nineteenth-century from 1825 to 1830, these ships, which had been relatively rare in the previous century because of their small capacity, accounted for as many as fifty per cent of slave ships involved in trading to Brazil probably as a result of the preference for speed.Footnote 37 The captain of the Brilhante attempted to evade capture, suggesting that he was confident of the ship’s speed in relation to the British cruisers.Footnote 38 Speed would have become more significant after the slave trade was made illegal and helped to minimise slave mortality.
The Brilhante, as with all ships, required a signed Carta de Saúde or bill of health on leaving the port at Luanda. This letter certified the outstanding health both of the ship’s crew, “all in perfect health,” and that the port from which it sailed was “free of plague or any other contagious disease.”Footnote 39 The ship itself was said to be carrying sufficient water, and to be in an orderly and clean state.Footnote 40 Jaime Rodrigues suggests that such letters were easily procured by slave merchants from corrupt officials even when no such conditions were in fact evident, as in the case of the Leal, another slave ship, which was detained by British anti-slavery cruisers in April 1839 and found to be leaking and in an unsanitary and filthy state.Footnote 41
However, the Brilhante was perhaps in a better state of hygiene and general upkeep than many slave ships. Considering the anecdotes of sharks tailing slave ships, and the available evidence for this decade which shows that average shipboard slave mortality from West Central Africa to Brazil was around 7.7 per cent, it may come as a surprise that, according the report made by Lieutenant James Bower, the Commander of the Wizard, all of the slaves aboard the Brilhante were still alive after crossing the Atlantic.Footnote 42 The journey had lasted 34 gruelling days, but was only the beginning of the captives’ shipboard confinement.Footnote 43
A Floating Prison
During the trial the slaves remained on board the ship and were subjected to “nightly attacks” on the vessel for the purposes of kidnapping them for sale.Footnote 44 By September one of the Africans had gone missing from the hospital and another from on-board ship.Footnote 45 Whilst the Brilhante was at anchor in the port of Rio, two other ships the Cezar and the Flor de Luanda awaiting adjudication also faced the same predicament. Two Africans were taken from the Cezar on the night of 20th June with the help of one of the Brilhante’s crew, who watched out for the sentry.Footnote 46 During the trial the Brilhante’s crew were also held on the ship although some of them in fact managed to escape after attending the hospital. The British Foreign Secretary even suggested that the Africans were more at risk than if they were held on land, although conversely the British were rather keen to find justification for sending them to British colonies to work.Footnote 47
Whilst they were kept on the ships they were described by one of the British commissioners of the mixed commission court as “the unfortunate slaves whose wretched condition by long confinement is most offensive to humanity.”Footnote 48 This would have been a traumatising time after the rough journey across the ocean. The slaves were then held on the ship, crowded together for almost five months, where the spread of disease and sickness was high.Footnote 49 Conditions aboard whilst under British custody were ameliorated through diet and the provision of clothing, but their inability to go ashore was detrimental to the health of the Africans on the Brilhante.Footnote 50 A list of runaway mortality was made on the nearby Flor de Loanda as the circumstances led to ill health and disease.Footnote 51 Burials were always at midnight, perhaps to minimise the risk of corpse robbery.
Court proceedings for the Brilhante began on 17th May and continued through the 25th June.Footnote 52 However, the sentence of the court was then suspended. On August 29th Commodore Sulivan enquired about the progress of the case and reported that six Africans had now died in hospital, and twenty-nine were currently in the hospital with a further three cases for hospitalisation.Footnote 53 There had been an outbreak of smallpox which was in danger of infecting everyone.Footnote 54 Vaccination against smallpox was readily available and, when slave trading was legal, was usually administered to slaves at the warehouses.Footnote 55 This situation hardly suggests that the welfare of the africanos livres was of the upmost concern to the Brazilian authorities or even to the court officials. Finally on 26th September a decision was made in favour of the ship’s condemnation. The captives had now spent an intense and incredibly difficult time in the close company of each other. Glimpses of the relationships and networks which were formed as a result can be found in the documents of British commissioners and consuls who attempted to trace the fate of the africanos livres in Rio de Janeiro.
Methodologies in the search for African identity and origins
The Congo-Angolan origins of the Africans on the Brilhante were typical of slave imports to Rio pre-1830; around sixty-eight per cent of the slaves imported from 1790 to 1830 were from West Central Africa.Footnote 56 A high proportion of the African slave population in Rio were therefore of this descent, but more detailed knowledge of the origins of slaves transported to the Americas, including Brazil, is still lacking. This would have been an important factor in the ability of the africanos livres to adapt to life in Rio and to find common references with which they could reconstruct cultural practices and relationships. Further defining the likely origins of the Africans on-board the ship helps to determine whether shipmate bonds were possible and how much the captives had in common. This section addresses some of the issues and problems associated with methodologies in this search, the results of which are demonstrated in the final section.
Liberated Africans were subject to a “formal ceremony of emancipation” where they were given new names.Footnote 57 Despite the symbolic imparting of certificates of freedom, the renaming of the Africans in Brazil makes clear the intended cultural and psychological separation from their African past. It is important to note in this context that it was quite common in West Africa for one to have many names throughout one’s life.Footnote 58 After arrival, slaves in Brazil were referred to according to their new names as well as the “nation” to which they belonged. These “nations” were used as a way of categorising slaves in Brazil and can give some indication of where the slaves originated from, at least in a geographical sense.Footnote 59 They were, however, based on rough origins and ports of embarkation and were not sensitive to the myriad different ethnic origins contained within them.
Alongside other clues and markers of identity, analysing names as well as “nations” can lead to a wider understanding of African diaspora and of specific African ethnicities. At the same time it is important to avoid transposing culture, or attempting to find modern equivalents, when the process of cultural transformations is never static. The uncertainty about how much cultural transfer was possible has been a source of considerable debate, particularly regarding the North American case.Footnote 60
Records, including registers of liberated Africans from slave ships freed by mixed commission courts and British Vice-Admiralty courts in Cuba, St. Helena and Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century, have been recognised as an important source of information on slave origins in this respect.Footnote 61 They include the African names and personal details of each African as they sounded to the British- and Spanish-speaking court secretaries who compiled these registers with the help of African interpreters. The information available in the registers has enabled the development of a database, giving rise to a more accurate ethno-linguistic analysis of the slaves arriving in the Americas.Footnote 62 In contrast to the court of mixed commission registers in Cuba and elsewhere, however, the African names of the africanos livres in Brazil were not recorded in the court registers of liberated Africans from the ships, so the database currently excludes all of the recaptives or africanos livres freed in Brazil.
Even so, the Rio court registers do contain information that is crucial for this analysis. They provide lists of Africans with information such as their “nations,” the Christian names that they were given, an identification number and whether they were adults or children. The identification numbers link them to records which were created after they had been distributed in Rio and make it possible to see how different factors might have affected how they subsequently lived their lives. Each of the captives on board the Brilhante were branded before the journey with letters or patterns; the marks of individual slave traders. Where still visible, these brands were sketched in the records by the court clerk and sometimes other marks, including scarification.Footnote 63 For example, number 197 was written thus: “A black woman ‘Custodia’ of the Congo nation marked on the right side of her chest with an S.”Footnote 64
By a lucky coincidence a copy of an earlier register to the official list exists in the case of the Brilhante, which was made on the ship on 23rd June 1838 to keep a record prior to the captives’ emancipation. It is the only list, found thus far, amongst the Rio de Janeiro mixed commission court records which closely corresponds to the lists made in Havana and Sierra Leone containing African names and is therefore thought to have been compiled by the British on the Brilhante.Footnote 65 The work carried out by Daniel Domingues da Silva in analysing the African names in the list is an important breakthrough in determining the origins of Africans from this region being imported to Brazil as well as how they came to be captives.Footnote 66 So far the information from the lists has not been used to analyse the possibility of shipmate bonds nor has it been possible to link the two lists together. This article goes some way towards advancing these aims.
The register made on the Brilhante gives slightly more information than the register from the court, but disappointingly it is incredibly difficult to cross-reference the two records because the unofficial list from the ship contains no identification numbers and only African names. There are 245 captives listed in the unofficial list and 225 in the final list which was made just a week later. This means that, even through a process of elimination, matching each of the African names in the unofficial list to the Portuguese names in the official list remains out of reach. However, comparing branding and markings in conjunction with names and “nations” – as the case of Cassandra Angola shall demonstrate -- can help to narrow down the differences between two lists of captives from the Brilhante and even identify individuals in both lists.
The unofficial list gives further insight into the toll of the voyage because it includes a column for “observations,” where two of the Africans are listed as “maluca” or crazy.Footnote 67 The ages of the captives are included as well as more detailed references to “nations” confirming the limits of the accuracy of such terms. Yet they give an indication of how the captives were later defined during their lives in Rio.Footnote 68 Stereotyped differences between Africans such as “Minas” and “Angolans” were keenly perceived by slaveholders and viewed as indicative of aptitude for work and propensity to run away.Footnote 69 It seems these terms were appropriated and helped to establish a process of adaption to life in Brazil amongst Africans in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 70
Domingues da Silva’s research suggests that the “nations” can be used as well as other indicators to confirm that the languages the captives spoke were quite closely related. Since the languages all belong to the Bantu family, the captives would presumably have been able to communicate with one another. African languages were “widely spoken” in America, where it was often the case that groups of slaves came together through their linguistic affiliation and where they might have transcended hostilities which existed in Africa.Footnote 71 Whilst focus on language as a formative foundation of identity has been criticised, it remains an important clue to the origins of the captives and the high percentage of Kimbundu speakers would seem a significant point of commonality. Although there was one person on the ship described as Benguela, Domingues da Silva suggests that this was someone who had in fact travelled on one of the other ships that were in Rio at the same time as the Brilhante.
Domingues da Silva enlisted the help of a Kimbundu speaker who listened to the names being pronounced in a Brazilian accent and identified the names which were Kimbundu in origin. Alongside knowledge of the embarkation port, trade routes and “nations,” da Silva posits that at least forty-two per cent of the captives had Kimbundu names.Footnote 72 He also argues that the records from the Brilhante support the notion from recent research that slaves arriving in Brazil from Angola in the nineteenth century were typically from regions closer to the coast than previously imagined.Footnote 73 With the possible exception of one person labelled Coango, the rest of the regions from which the Brilhante’s captives hailed were fairly near to the coast.Footnote 74
Ever since similar analyses have been carried out on the registers from Sierra Leone and Cuba, the methodological problems related to tracing African origins by means of Africans’ names have been identified, due to factors such as variations in spelling, changes over time, and some records remaining unidentifiable. Indeed, those who came from places where Portugal had a strong colonial presence might already have had Portuguese names, and some may already have been baptised before the journey. This appears to be the case for twelve of the Africans from the Brilhante whose origins are described either as “Congo” or “Angola” in the record made on the ship.Footnote 75 However, there is certainly still much to be gained from this approach. Some names, for example, had a particular meaning that could refer to the way in which they had been enslaved.
Another important feature to analyse with respect to the likelihood of shipmate bonds is the large number of children aboard. The 89 children on the ship would probably have found it easier to adapt to their new lives in Brazil. Slave traders were motivated by the impending end to the traffic to import child slaves, who had previously been considered a drain on the slave owners’ resources, in increasing numbers. The importation of child slaves in the eighteenth century was the exception, for example.Footnote 76 Young slaves from Africa were said to acquire Portuguese easily, taking about two or three months. Foreign visitors, even those who spoke similar Romance languages, often had greater difficulty learning Portuguese.Footnote 77 A small group of boys who crossed the Atlantic on-board the Brilhante can be traced in their adult lives to Rio de Janeiro in 1851. Although they remained apprentices, many were working as hired-labourers or coachmen, further suggesting their adaptability. Hebe Mattos argues that roles which allowed for some independence such as these would have been perceived by African slaves as offering a degree of freedom in a world where freedom was such a malleable and relative concept.Footnote 78
Lives in Rio de Janeiro
The majority of the africanos livres stayed in Rio and were sent initially to the Casa da Correção da Corte until their final destinations had been decided.Footnote 79 This communicated a clear message about their place in the social hierarchy as the house of correction also functioned as a prison. In 1838 a British Doctor, William Cullen, described the conditions in uncompromising terms: “I was glad to be away from the degrading site, where human beings were treated much worse than dogs.”Footnote 80 They were very tightly confined and many were sick. However, there were other unintended consequences of placing the africanos livres in a house of correction, in that it offered an opportunity for socialising and bonding, encouraging contact between those from different ships and other prisoners.
Officials were employed to distribute the liberated Africans and regulate their welfare throughout the trial and afterwards. Attempts to avoid abuses of the system mean that extensive records of the destinations of africanos livres were kept. Two documents in particular offer insight about the captives from the Brilhante many years after they were first disembarked. One of these was the matrícula created in the 1860s, which was a means of keeping track of the freed Africans from each ship, detailing their destinations after hiring, including if they had run away, died or been taken sick. The second was a list made at the British consulate. The first three years after disembarkation were notoriously difficult for newly arrived slaves, and in the case of the Brilhante, thirty-six of the captives died within this period. The Santa Casa da Misericórdia hospital featured high on the list of destinations from which many of the slaves did not return. Gruesome numbers of the dying were sent there, according to Mary Karasch “as many as 700 to 800 new Africans each month in 1830.”Footnote 81
The names of private concessionaries were recorded in the matricula alongside places of work in institutions and in the public domain such as the Ordem terceira de S. Francisco da Penitência, and Colégio Dom Pedro II.Footnote 82 Ability to acquire africanos livres depended on social prestige rather than wealth.Footnote 83 Individuals who wished to obtain the services of Africans from the Brilhante wrote letters and addressed to the Emperor Dom Pedro II in 1838. Many registered a preference for the youngest Africans from the ship.Footnote 84 All of the Africans from the Brilhante were young, and none were older than twenty-six upon arrival in Brazil. Obtaining their services would have been considered an important asset and a source of cheap labour. Some of the private hirers were people who were supposed to be arbitrators of justice or responsible for protecting the liberated Africans such as Lourenço Caetano Pinto, the Judge of Orphans, who kept several africanos livres from the Brilhante.
Because the matricula included the names of concessionaries or “to whom conceded,” it is then possible to examine other documents and search for the Brilhante’s captives elsewhere. To cross-reference the names of concessionaries and further trace the captives the second-most-useful source of information was a list compiled by Robert Hesketh. Around twelve years after the arrival of the Brilhante, between 1849 and 1851 Hesketh, the British consul in Rio, made a list of some of the liberated Africans’ destinations and complaints.Footnote 85 In Hesketh’s list, many of the Africans were noted to have been “treated as a slave.” Hesketh was writing down the africanos livres’ own opinions, but British diplomats as well as Brazilians often reported similar statements about their conditions.
Hesketh suggested that africanos livres should be notified to come forward by the informal means of sharing the message amongst one another, implying that a substantial network existed among them as over eight hundred registered during this period.Footnote 86 At least twenty-four of the Brilhante’s captives appear in the list, described as Congo, Rebola, Miombe, Monjolo and Angola. It is highly likely that they had maintained contact during this time. In fact four of them appeared on the same day, 19th July 1851. They were Paulino and Satiro, both described as Congo boys when they arrived, and hired to members of the Velho Motta family, Aprigio a boy in 1838 described as Miombe who bore a distinctive scarification pattern on his chest and stomach and was apprenticed by Joaquim Caetano da Silva. A possible fourth, Salusitano, appeared on the same day but the name of the concessionaire Jozé Gomes Ferreira appears slightly differently in Hesketh’s list. With added information regarding the date that he ran away in 1851, the spatial histories project would seem to confirm his identity.Footnote 87 Salusitano was also described as a Congo boy.
Of the traceable Africans from Consul Hesketh’s list, many were being hired out to third parties as labourers in the city, the equivalent to being an escravo de ganho, or slave for hire, a profitable venture for slave masters and one which would have allowed a degree of autonomy for the africanos livres. If so, they were responsible for paying a certain amount of their wage per day to their concessionaries. This left them provided with food and board but little else. Others also worked in relatively high status positions; three were coachmen. Amongst them were also a painter, a mason, washerwoman and washer-man, a baker, several cooks and house servants.
Through a process of elimination, open to a degree of error because of the possibility of deaths, non-referencing of marks, or lack of marks, it was possible to narrow down that one of the Africans appears in both the registers of Africans from the ship and was probably Cacende in the first list, a Kimbundu name. Because there were fewer girls, Cacende is the only girl in the list described as Angola and as having an S on the right-hand-side of her chest, the same markings as Cassandra, also listed as a rapariga or girl. There were several other Kimbundu speakers amongst the group but even with the brand markings it was difficult to reduce the number of possible names which could correspond to each of the liberated Africans who had been boys on the journey.
“Cassandra Angola,” mentioned above, was rented (alongside two other africanos livres from a different slave ship) by Antonio Manoel de Mello, and achieved her freedom within sixteen years. Cassandra was a girl of ten on arrival in Rio de Janeiro. By 1854 all three were considered prepared for earning their own living, Cassandra and another woman as cooks and washerwomen, washing and starching clothes, and the man as a mason. Each of the women had given birth to a child. These children were both granted freed status, as well as both being uniformly baptized Maria.Footnote 88 Cassandra also appears in Hesketh’s list, which states that her daughter was around nine-months-old. She gave birth to several other children, but all apparently died in the interim.
Cassandra’s freedom after long years of service was an exception, and many of the Brilhante passengers suffered a far worse fate. The matrícula states that the final destinations of sixty-eight of the Africans from the Brilhante were not known.Footnote 89 Those whose final destinations were omitted were likely to have been enslaved, and it was common for africanos livres to be deliberately maintained in slavery by falsifying their deaths.Footnote 90 The author of the matrícula omitted one of the Africans by jumping from number eight to number ten, whether purposefully or not. Only fifty-five from the Brilhante were known to have achieved their eventual freedom by official means. Mariana, who was reported as dead in the matricula as of 1848, re-appears amongst the liberated Africans in 1851. She travelled on the Brilhante with her five-year-old daughter Maria who was also rented by Lourenço Caetano Pinto the Judge of Orphans.
Three of the africanos livres from the Brilhante were rented out to Anna Maria Honoria. They were not from the same “nation,” and two of them went on the run on the same day, within a year of the ship’s arrival, suggesting they had received severe treatment.Footnote 91 The fact that they both disappeared on the same day from the same household would suggest that their escape was a collaborative effort, giving support to the argument that some of the Africans formed long-lasting relationships. Running away was an important means of resistance employed by slaves throughout the Americas: slaves could face a worse fate as fugitives attempting to stay alive and evade recapture, but at least they were free, although sometimes only temporarily, from perpetual servitude.
All the Brilhante liberated Africans who ran away were men, a detail which highlights the tough physical requirements of this means of resistance. Two others ran away from the same place in 1839 although it is unclear, as no month is stated, if they were together. Five of the total twelve who fled disappeared in the same month in 1839.Footnote 92 This detail opens up the possibility that the escapes were connected and that the escapees collaborated with one another. The africanos livres from the Brilhante were disembarked in October 1838 and probably placed for auction a while later after that, when they had had some chance to recuperate.
This would have been their first placement to work within the city, and these africanos livres were no doubt making the most of the first real opportunity to escape. They clearly had not adapted to or accepted their condition of subservience. Nonetheless, maintaining freedom would have been extremely difficult, even if they were able to join quilombo communities of escaped slaves. Without further evidence from other sources, it is impossible to say whether these were interconnected events, but they may well have been.
In contrast to the thousands of other Africans who were illegally brought to Brazil after 1831, the africanos livres possessed a minimum of legal recourse, as can be deduced from the letters regarding the treatment and complaints made by several Africans and their consequent removal from the guardianship of their supposed benefactors and their appearances before the Curator of liberated Africans.Footnote 93 The africanos livres and prisoners in the House of Correction wrote a protest to the Emperor of Brazil in 1841. They complained of food that was not fit for human consumption and of extreme measures of punishment.Footnote 94 Perhaps unsurprisingly, after the Eusébio de Queirós law of 1851, judicial cases brought by liberated Africans become more common and more widely accepted by the establishment. It is not hard to imagine that the africanos livres themselves who arrived after this date also became conscious of their position in relation to the new law.Footnote 95
The Middle Passage was an experience which would have an enduring and significant effect on the captives’ lives, as indicated by the way africanos livres in Hesketh’s list recalled the ships they had travelled on by name, including, for example, at least one from the Brilhante and one from the Flor de Luanda.Footnote 96 The fact that the list contains africanos livres from many different ships and the Brilhante’s captives came on different days throughout the period in which Hesketh compiled the list, would suggest that africanos livres had bonded over time for different motives, including the similar legal status in which they found themselves.
At least some of the shipmates from the Brilhante remained in contact for 12 years, including four men who had been young boys on the ship and were hired to different concessionaires who all appeared before Hesketh at the British Consulate on the same day. The type of work they carried out suggests they would have had a certain degree of freedom within the city in which to circulate and spread ideas amongst themselves. Paulino was a coachman for the same family as Satiro’s concessionaire, making it highly likely that they came into contact on a regular basis. They would have considered that appealing to the British was an opportunity to improve their situation and so spread the information to fellow shipmates who might also benefit.
Conclusion
The slaves freed by mixed commission courts were described as Africans lacking the education to conduct themselves.Footnote 97 In Portuguese, “education” can also refer to socially appropriate behaviours or manners. By the early nineteenth century, hard-grained views about the “uncivilised” Africans had been formed which influenced the way the africanos livres were overseen, reflected in the perception of slave societies across the American continent. They were considered to be childlike and in need of guidance as to how to behave in civilised society. Such perceptions certainly informed the way in which they were treated, whether as slaves or theoretically free people.
The treatment of the africanos livres by institutions and private employers offers clues about Carioca society in this specific historical moment.Footnote 98 Although they had not perpetrated any kind of crime, the africanos livres were made acutely aware of their subjugated position through the enforcement of a “sentence” of fourteen years of apprenticeship which was often deliberately extended to over twenty. We might well refer to Foucault’s proposition that “forced labour is a form of incarceration.”Footnote 99 The Africans who were declared free by the mixed commission court were given a harsher sentence than convicted slave traders themselves who, if punished at all, could be exiled for only five years.Footnote 100 Traders could even in some circumstances end up repurchasing their own slaving vessels. The British tried to stop this occurrence by pressing for the break-up of slave ships before auction in anti-slave trade treaties.Footnote 101
During the liberated Africans lifetimes, Rio had a large population of Africans of West Central African origin as well as from other locations in Africa, many of whom would have spoken similar languages and shared similar cultural traits. It is widely accepted that new identities were forged on the basis of these links. The Africans from the Brilhante spent an extraordinary six months confined at close quarters with one another, five months of which they were also in the company of British officers. They were then spread out across Rio de Janeiro, where at least some of them were employed in ways which enabled them to travel across the city and to have some independence.
Although significant changes occurred over time, especially in terms of the volume of the trade and the ports of origin of slaves, the use of a case study enables us to outline some of the specifics of the continuation of the trade as a well-established and lucrative endeavour on both sides of the Atlantic. Describing the social environment into which the africanos livres were released, where the slave-trade prospered at an intensified rate due to its imminent demise, helps to explain the hostility towards the “salvation” of slave ships as well as some of the conflicts arising from the British establishment’s claims to impose their self-perceived moral superiority.
The captives themselves experienced a drastic separation from their lives in Africa and their human qualities were forgotten by those who packed them into the ship and brought them across the Atlantic as merchandise. Apart from during its final phase, when the ship was seized, their journey was not remarkable compared to other Atlantic crossings. Therefore, this article contributes to the discussion about how africanos livres and other captive Africans might have supported one another. It also shows that the africanos livres were often from similar areas of origin, and how this would have affected their ability to overcome some of the constraints of their social destiny in Brazil.
