The Brazilian sailors who seized the brand-new dreadnoughts, Minas Gerais and São Paulo, in their November 1910 revolt against corporal punishment boldly proclaimed: ‘We, as sailors, Brazilians citizens, and supporters of the Republic, can no longer accept the slavery as practiced in the Brazilian Navy’ (p. 260). These mostly Afro-Brazilian enlisted men overpowered their white officers, commandeered the two warships, threatened to bombard Rio de Janeiro, and demanded an end to flogging. Contrary to racist expectations, they handled the warships well and forced the government to accept their principal demand, as well as to amnesty them. The revolt strikingly revealed Brazilian modernity's hollow nature: the two dreadnoughts were then the most powerful warships afloat but their crews suffered brutalities no different from those inflicted on their slave ancestors. The mutineers threatened the capital's newly-beautified downtown core, another symbol of Brazil's ‘civilisation’, from which black residents had been evicted. The government pledged to end corporal punishment, and quietly did so, but authorities soon wrought revenge on the amnestied sailors. The December mutiny in a battalion of marines provided a pretext to arrest many of those involved in the November events. More than two dozen of the alleged ringleaders were crammed into a fetid dungeon where most asphyxiated (miraculously, João Cândido, the leader of the November movement, survived); hundreds more were deported to near-certain death in the remote Amazon region.
Zachary Morgan seeks to understand the 1910 revolt ‘within the broader context of Atlantic slavery’ (p. 9) and ‘against the backdrop of nineteenth-century abolition, industry, and military modernisation in the Atlantic World’ (p. 10). The first two overlapping chapters (which account for close to half of the book) focus on the Brazilian navy from independence in 1822 to 1910. They examine the significant differences between the army and the navy in recruitment patterns (instead of impressing free men, the latter increasingly relied on apprentice schools to generate sailors from among the orphans and abandoned boys consigned to these institutions), discipline (corporal punishment persisted in the navy long after it was abolished in the army), and the officer corps’ social origins (more aristocratic in the navy). Morgan highlights the similarities between slaves and sailors, suggesting that scholarship on the African diaspora could be enriched by studying other coercive labour regimes alongside slavery (p. 77). The surviving collection of late nineteenth-century navy court-martial cases provides, as it has for other scholars, glimpses into daily life below decks (including sexuality), biographical and career information on a few sailors, and evidence of resistance.
The consequences of Brazil's 1904 decision to modernise its navy are the subject of the third chapter. After a lengthy digression into weapons technology, ship design and the history of Armstrongs (the Newcastle company that built the dreadnoughts), Morgan turns to the experience of the several hundred Brazilian sailors who spent up to a year in Newcastle. The population of this English shipbuilding centre apparently welcomed the racially-different groups of foreign sailors whose governments kept the shipyards busy. The Brazilians were left to their own devices for some months before training began; enjoying ‘unprecedented freedom’ (p. 185), they lived on their own and at least three married English women (p. 187). More important for Morgan's argument, the Brazilians saw the much better conditions of service in the Royal Navy and the prestige accorded to British sailors. Furthermore, they witnessed strikes at Armstrongs that slowed the dreadnoughts’ construction. That these experiences influenced the sailors who rebelled in 1910 is certainly possible, but Morgan admits that ‘there is limited hard evidence that Newcastle was the source or incubator for [the sailors’] revolutionary ideas’ (p. 153); nevertheless, he later claims that the revolt ‘was profoundly shaped by their experiences in England’ (p. 193).
Little more than 50 pages of this book are devoted to the revolt itself and its aftermath; this narrative is generally familiar and not closely connected to the previous chapters. Ultimately, Morgan cannot point to direct links between the mutineers’ experience in England and their rhetoric or actions in November 1910. Nor does he present any evidence, other than the important and well-known significance of the lash for black men and white officers, that connects the sailors’ protest to the legacy of slavery. Undeniably, these sailors were part of the Atlantic World, but Morgan does not show how setting the 1910 revolt in this context changes our understanding of it.
Morgan repeatedly criticises the twentieth-century historians associated with the Brazilian navy who downplay the movement's significance and argue that the sailors’ failure to fire the ships’ biggest guns demonstrates their incompetence. He engages less fully with classic and recent scholarship, whose existence casts doubt on his characterisation of revolt as ‘largely unknown’ and ‘forgotten’ (p. 1). Indiana University Press did not adequately proofread and copyedit the manuscript, and there are several errors: the brief abolition of whipping in the navy in 1889–90 was instituted and ended by presidential decree, not congress (which did not sit during the first year of the provisional government) (pp. 47–8, 68, 125). The Baron of Rio Branco (foreign minister in 1910) was not the author of the 1871 Free Womb Law (that distinction belongs to his father, the Viscount of Rio Branco) (p. 159). The army did not welcome former slaves serving as soldiers, much less promote them, during or after the Paraguayan War, and its request to be relieved of police duties that involved pursuing runaway slaves came in 1887, not ‘at the end of the war’ in 1870 (p. 254).
