Two months later, lice-ridden and in rags, the Portuguese court arrived in Brazil. After a brief sojourn in Salvador da Bahia, the old capital, they proceeded south down the coast to Rio de Janeiro, then a noisome slave port, its narrow streets filled with rootling pigs and goats. And there in Rio, to the bemusement of the colonial population, the royal party proceeded to re-establish the European imperial court in its archaic magnificence, with all the ritual trappings and hierarchies of an absolutist state. On the shores of the Guanabara Bay, against the spectacular backdrop of sheer rock for which the city is still celebrated, the Portuguese created what a Brazilian historian has described as a tropical Versailles, or, to use Patrick Wilcken’s more precise analogy, a sub-tropical Rome.

The thunderstorms on Guanabara Bay

Wilcken tells this extraordinary story with élan. Empire Adrift is a model of historical writing, erudite yet lively, maintaining narrative vigour while accurately rendering complex events at different times in different continents, combining a sense of place with a keen eye for the grotesque. There is a striking cast of characters to work with: the dowager Queen Maria, half-demented and permanently in mourning for her husband; the egregious Lord Strangford, British envoy to Lisbon and Rio, a spin doctor avant la lettre, eager to take the credit for any diplomatic advantage gained. There is Dom João himself, short, fat and indecisive, excessively fond of food, but keen also on  conversation with men of learning. And Dona Carlota, his scheming wife, a child bride who tried to bite her husband’s ear off on their wedding night and contrived thereafter, for the rest of her life, to spend as little time as possible in his company. As dysfunctional families go, the Braganças and their in-laws, the Borbons, make the Windsors and Spencers of present-day Britain look tame.

Last, but not least, there is Dom Pedro, their son (or probably so—his paternity was disputed). Handsome, half-educated, Dom Pedro grew up in Brazil a unrestrained philanderer, who referred to his mother ungallantly as a “bitch” and was wont to urinate and defecate openly in front of his troops. It was this Dom Pedro, scion of the imperial line, who turned out, remarkably, to be the standard-bearer of Brazilian independence.

The Portuguese court remained in Rio for thirteen years. Dona Carlota hated the place. She saw Brazil as the domain of “blacks and monkeys”, and longed to return to Europe. But Dom João, though terrified by the thunderstorms that swept across the Guanabara Bay, quickly took to the new world, overseeing the rebuilding of the capital and the establishment of Rio’s botanical garden (the latter, in Wilcken’s phrase, a laboratory of empire to rival Kew Gardens). When the time came to return to Portugal, with Napoleon defeated and the British impatient to restore royal authority in Europe, Dom João—now King João VI of the United Kingdoms of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve—found himself reluctant to leave.

In the event, Dom João did go home, but Dom Pedro stayed on in Brazil as his regent. Aged nine at the time of the flight from Lisbon, the Prince Regent had by then spent most of his life in Brazil. And in 1822, with Dom João beset by demands for constitutional reform back in Portugal, and with anti-colonial, republican movements gathering force in the rest of Latin America, Pedro made a daring unilateral declaration of independence from Portugal. As Emperor Pedro I of Brazil, he thus established the Bragança dynasty as the first European monarchy of the new world.

It was an act that seemed to go against the tide of history, both in Europe and the Americas. It is as if George III and the British ruling class abandoned Great Britain for North America in order to escape the Napoleonic wars (and George IV, rather than George Washington, had then become ruler of the United States). Or if, say, Queen Victoria had moved the seat of British imperial government to India.

But it was arguably this action on Dom Pedro’s part that made it possible for Brazil to remain a single country. Despite its huge size, Brazil survives today as a stable, independent state, while the multifarious republics of Latin America and Central America reveal, by contrast, the fragmentation of the former Spanish empire. The Brazilian monarchy was finally abolished only in 1889, and Braganças still crop up in the social register there. There is even a Brazilian royalist party—and more than one claimant to the erstwhile throne.

Para Inglês ver

The British did well out of the relocation of the Portuguese court. They forced Dom João to open the ports of Brazil—previously confined to Portuguese shipping—to “friendly nations”, meaning Britain. Rio was immediately flooded with British manufactured goods that had been excluded from European markets by the Napoleonic blockade. English glassware and textiles and Irish butter went on sale. The first pub opened on the Guanabara Bay. (Wilcken reports that a British textile trader found that the fabrics he was importing were insufficiently bright for the people of Rio. They wanted, he told his suppliers, “no dismal colours suitable for an English November”.) Brazil, a visitor may note, still bears the marks of this British invasion, with a telling, if anachronistic, pair of expressions in everyday use: pontualidade Britânica (to be on the dot) and para Inglês ver (to put up a front, to cultivate appearances).

Prince D. Luiz de Orleans e Bragança, current head of the Brazilian royal family

Those who took longest to benefit from the royal sojourn were slaves. Slaves comprised a third of the colonial population of Brazil, and tens of thousands more arrived from Africa each year. The new imperial capital in Rio was built, like Rome, as Wilcken points out, by slave labour. The privations that the members of the Portuguese court had endured on their voyage across the Atlantic did not, it seems, make them any more sympathetic to the sufferings of those who were forced to serve them there—and who had endured far worse in their passage from the old world.

British pressure may have opened the ports of Brazil to free trade in goods, it had difficulty closing them to the slave trade. It was only in 1888 that the Princess-Regent, Dona Isabel, Pedro I’s grand-daughter, finally abolished slavery, making Brazil the last country in Europe and the Americas to do so. The adverse reaction to the abolition of slavery among the Brazilian plutocracy contributed to the abolition of the monarchy the following year, but the end of slavery was irreversible. In Brazil, in this respect, during the final years of their tenure, the royal family acted as a progressive force.

So Brazil provoked a change in the Braganças; and the Braganças wrought an alteration in Brazil. It is possible to see this episode in Portuguese imperial history as a model example of the tendency that the Brazilian sociologist and historian Gilberto Freyre called lusotropicalism, a special affinity for the tropics that, according to Freyre, the Portuguese possessed to a greater extent than other European colonising nations. Alternatively it can be seen as an agile political response on the part of an established dynasty to the coming end of absolutism and the start of the new age of constitutional monarchy.

Saramago’s allegorical stone raft; the cultural determinism of Freyrian lusotropicalism; the material opportunities and hard constraints of history. However these events are understood and interpreted, it was in this manner, in Brazil, that the remarkable story of the Portuguese seaborne empire—the first European power into the southern hemisphere and the last to leave–reached its most curious and spectacular conclusion. ★