Legacy of the Lash

Race and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy and the Atlantic World

Zachary R. Morgan

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780253014290
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

A history of corporal punishment in the Brazilian navy and the four-day mutiny that took Rio hostage and put an end to the violent practice. Legacy of the Lash is a compelling social and cultural history of the Brazilian navy in the decades preceding and immediately following the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil. Focusing on non-elite, mostly black enlisted men and the oppressive labor regimes under which they struggled, the book is an examination of the four-day Revolta da Chibata (Revolt of the Lash) of November 1910, during which nearly half of Rio de Janeiro's enlisted men rebelled against the use of corporal punishment in the navy. These men seized four new, powerful warships, turned their guns on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's capital city, and held its population hostage until the government abolished the use of the lash as a means of military discipline. Although the revolt succeeded, the men involved paid dearly for their actions. This event provides a clear lens through which to examine racial identity, violence, masculinity, citizenship, modernity, and the construction of the Brazilian nation. "Offering new insights into the spectacular sailors' revolt of 1910, Zachary R. Morgan treats the "deep structure" of Brazilian naval discipline, one based primarily on flogging. Slavery was only abolished in 1888, and the mutineers, largely of African descent, saw flogging as an intolerable holdover from the slave era. Morgan also shows the incompatibility of the old labor regime and modern naval technology. Trained on the new battleships in the English shipyards where they were built, Brazilian sailors increasingly viewed themselves as citizens in uniform." —Joseph L. Love, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign " Legacy of the Lash is a stellar contribution to the growing global scholarship on mutiny and maritime radicalism. Zachary R. Morgan brings back to vibrant life the history-making powers of Brazil's motley crews in the early twentieth century." —Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

Because Uncle Tom would not take vengeance into his own hands, he was not a hero for me. Heroes, as far as I could then see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection: I despised and feared those heroes because they did take vengeance into their own hands. They thought that vengeance was theirs to take.

JAMES BALDWIN, The Devil Finds Work, 1976

ONE

Introduction: Race and Violence in Brazil and Its Navy

WHAT DID IT MEAN FOR BRAZIL WHEN A GROUP OF MEN, overwhelmingly poor Afro-Brazilians, violently rose up and demanded their right to citizenship? For generations, Brazilian sailors were pressed into service and forced to work under the direct threat of the lash. But then, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, they seized the navy’s battleships and held hostage Brazil’s capital city of Rio de Janeiro. These sailors, overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilians, demanded that their white officers stop “the slavery that is practiced in the Brazilian navy.”¹ They staked a claim for citizenship and rights that should have resonated throughout the Atlantic; yet the story of the Revolta da Chibata (Revolt of the Lash) remains largely untold and has been until very recently, even for most Brazilians, forgotten.

On November 22, 1910, the Brazilian capital of Rio de Janeiro was the site of one of the great naval revolts of the twentieth century, the Revolta da Chibata. By that time, Brazilian sailors had faced nearly a century of callous and violent treatment at the hands of naval officers. In their manifesto rebelling sailors complained of poor pay, inadequate food, excessive work, and, most importantly, the ongoing application of the lash to dominate the lower ranks. In fact during the Brazilian Republic following Brazil’s 1888 abolition of slavery, sailors were the only Brazilians who could be legally lashed. In the face of an aggressive policy of modernization of the Brazilian navy, sailors continued to be whipped in the traditional manner of slaves. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Brazilian navy traded its wooden sailing vessels for modern steel battleships purchased from British shipyards. In order to man such vessels, the navy required sailors who were at least professionalized enough to crew what have been described as factories at sea. The navy sent hundreds of sailors to the port city of Newcastle for necessary training on these new ships. Near the coast of the North Sea, these sailors freely interacted with Newcastle’s radical and organized working class. Their long-standing grievance over the application of corporal punishment was exacerbated by the heightened and regimented workload on these drastically modernized ships as well as the crosscurrents of Newcastle’s working-class radicalism. Together these factors motivated these sailors to execute a distinctly modern rebellion. This work tells the story of the Revolta da Chibata, its impact in Brazil, and its ties to the black Atlantic.

Approximately half of the enlisted men stationed in Rio de Janeiro – it has often been stated that the number was as high as 2,400 sailors though likely a significantly smaller number of sailors actively participated – challenged their treatment by the naval elite.² These men seized four warships and turned their turrets on Rio de Janeiro. Among them were three newly acquired ships from Newcastle’s shipyards; two of those were new dreadnought-class battleships emblematic of Brazilian aspiration to become a “modern” nation. With guns trained on Rio’s recently rebuilt downtown, and with both houses of the Brazilian National Congress (Congresso Nacional do Brasil) and the presidential palace within striking distance, the rebels demanded fundamental changes in the laws and practices governing naval service. Their actions represented both a critique of and an attack on the forced conscription of overwhelmingly black men during the nineteenth-century deterioration of Brazilian slavery. Considered through contemporary coverage in the Brazilian press, debate among politicians, and publications critical of Brazil’s naval policy, this violent uprising offers a rare window into the day-to-day hardships faced by Brazilian sailors, terms of service long obscured from the world outside Brazil’s navy.

During nearly a century preceding the revolt – a period also defined by Brazil’s reliance on plantation slavery – the treatment of sailors at the hands of naval officers remained consistently brutal. But, in the early decades of the First Republic (1889–1930), the period that ended Brazil’s monarchical governance, the social and racial strains within the navy were masked. Among the first pieces of legislation passed following the overthrow of the monarchy were reforms that trumpeted better treatment for all Brazilians; they specifically addressed improvements for those citizens serving in the navy.³ Over time those laws were systematically ignored and later quietly overturned, allowing for the continued abuse of black men forced into naval service. In the face of this silence, the Revolta da Chibata made public, at least for a time, the brutal conditions facing sailors following the final abolition of slavery in 1888. At the very moment when Brazil’s naval elite claimed a new age of military modernization based on the acquisition of modern technology, the revolt drew immeasurable shame upon them. Coverage in the local and international press garnered public sympathy for the sailors among ordinary Brazilians, the political elite, and a worldwide audience. With the very ships that substantiated the officers’ claims of modernization in the hands of enlisted men, the insurgents quickly won a series of concessions from the Brazilian government.

Despite the sailors’ short-term victory, the story of the Revolta da Chibata generally vanished from Brazil’s historical narrative and from the general consciousness of Brazilians both black and white. It would be nearly half a century before the publication of Edmar Morel’s 1959 A Revolta da Chibata, a popular history based largely on detailed interviews with the leader of the uprising, Seaman First Class João Cândido. Though Morel’s work is credited with rekindling general interest in the revolt as a significant movement with relevance to both class and race in turn-of-the-century Brazil, during those ensuing years there was one group that retained a keen and constant interest in the revolt and the way its story was told. In 1912, José Eduardo de Macedo Soares anonymously published under the name “A Naval Officer” (Um Official da Armada) his book Politica versus Marinha (Politics versus the Navy). In it he argued that the conditions that led to the revolt were not the responsibility of naval officers; rather it was the mistreatment of the entire naval institution at the hands of the Brazilian government that created the conditions that led to the revolt. Written by an officer intimately familiar with the early-twentieth-century navy, his book blamed the circumstances that lead to the revolt on the policies of the federal government. That book drew a response from author and journalist Álvaro Bomilcar. Drawing on a series of articles he had published in 1911, he collected them into a book that challenged “A Naval Officer,” arguing that the problems leading to the Revolta da Chibata were not those of politicians acting against the interests of the navy, but it was instead the racism that permeated the navy and its officers. Bomilcar, using the Brazilian army as a somewhat idealized national institution as a model, argued that the navy should allow its best apprentices into officer training to challenge the segregation that was so deeply entrenched in that institution.⁴

Also in 1912, politician and former naval officer José Carlos de Carvalho published the first volume of his autobiography O Livro da Minha Vida: Na guerra, na paz e nas revoluções: 1847–1910. Though Carvalho had been a high-ranking naval officer, he participated in negotiating the resolution of the Revolta da Chibata representing the interests of the government, and his portrayal of the rebel sailors was fairly sympathetic. Many naval officers felt that by negotiating with the rebel sailors, he had betrayed the interests of the officer class. He was severely criticized in several of the books produced later by naval officers. Then in the decades following the revolt several high-ranking naval officers went on to publish articles on the revolt in military journals. A series of these articles by Commander H. Pereira da Cunha was originally published serially in the Revista Marítima Brasileira in 1949 and was republished in book form by the Naval Press in 1953 under the title A Revolta na Esquadra Brazileira em November e Dezembro de 1910. Finally, in 1988 the Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha (an updated Naval Press) published Admiral Hélio Leôncio Martins’s A Revolta dos Marinheiros, 1910. Martins is a well-established historian who has published widely on themes of naval history. In fact he uses his access to sources in the Brazilian navy not widely available to civilian researchers, such as João Cândido’s medical records during the time he was institutionalized in a mental hospital while he awaited trail in 1911, to offer a very detailed narrative of the events surround the Revolta da Chibata.⁵ Together, these works told the story of nearly incompetent rebels who were not fully in control of their ships, who were simply incapable of posing a serious threat to the capital, and who all but stumbled into their eventual victory because the government was invested in protecting their ships at all costs. These works shared the overall purpose to discredit the qualifications and the actions of the rebels and to critique the government for its response to the uprising.⁶

These officers, in seeking to restore the honor of a naval officer corps that lost both life and honor during the uprising, invariably claimed that their studies uncovered the “truth” that had been obscured, first by the popular press sympathetic to the goals of the revolt, and later by leftist historians. The narrative and political framing of these military scholars represented a calculated decision to present the revolt as nonpolitical rather than the critique of state-controlled naval service that it was. Journalists and contemporary scholars alike argued that the central motivation for the revolt was the low quality of the food served to sailors, making the action into a glorified food riot. Additionally, they made claims to belittle the rebels’ military effectiveness: they maintain that the reclamantes (the aggrieved, as the rebels identified themselves to the press) would have attacked the city if they had been able to do so, that only their incapacity to hit their targets kept the city unmolested, and that they used small-caliber weapons only because of their powerlessness to fire the ships’ 12-inch guns. In his 1949 study of the revolt, Comandante H. Pereira da Cunha argued that had officers been allowed to fight, the vastly outgunned ships that remained loyal to the government would have made short work of the rebel-held ships because of the officers’ superior training.

It was no accident that military scholars sought to erase from Brazil’s national history a story so explicitly tied to slavery, abolition, and the ongoing manipulation of freedom for black Brazilians. For the Brazilian elite at the turn of the twentieth century, a commitment to racial and cultural improvement through branqueamento (whitening) defined the nation. The origins and events of the Revolta da Chibata challenged the rigid racial hierarchy that privileged European culture, labor, and race over that of Brazil’s existing nonwhite population. The elite – those individuals who first controlled the story of the Brazilian sailors who risked so much, and paid so dearly, for their role in ending the abuse of free Brazilian men – consciously appropriated the narrative of this national history and portrayed these enlisted men as barely competent. These publications reconstructed the Revolta da Chibata as an event of some national significance, but as one in which the sailors who revolted played no significant role.

The publication of Morel’s seminal A Revolta da Chibata in 1959 marked the introduction of a second wave in the historiography of the revolt. Morel sympathetically portrayed the rebels as men making justifiable claims against an abusive institution. Building off this work, most modern scholarship presents the reclamantes as unsung heroes, who successfully resisted an oppressive and manipulative state. In the decades that followed, numerous compelling works were published in Brazil. To date the most thorough is Álvaro Pereira do Nascimento’s excellent 2008 Cidadania, cor e disciplina na revolta dos marinheiros de 1910, and several Brazilian scholars continue work on the revolt. Overall, the Brazilian scholarship focuses on the treatment of sailors within the context of the institution of the Brazilian navy and more broadly within the overarching category of military history.⁷

Joseph L. Love recently published the first English language monograph on the revolt, titled The Revolt of the Whip. Love’s fascinating examination of the revolt through the international press looks for various motivating factors for the revolt; in this light he examines both the 1905 uprising on the Russian Potemkin as well as the reclamantes’ understanding of European Marxism. Among the most interesting events he documents is the short time that the São Paulo and its crew – most of whom would participate in the Revolta da Chibata – visited the city of Lisbon while transporting the Brazilian president elect back to Rio de Janeiro from his European tour in 1910. During that stay, a republican uprising overthrew the Portuguese monarchy; within three days the Brazilian president elect received formal visits aboard the São Paulo from both Portugal’s King Manuel and the new provisional president of the Portuguese Republic, Teófilo Braga. The Brazilian sailors witnessed this moment of political upheaval as well as the important role that naval personnel played in it. Finally, Love draws direct comparison between the Revolta da Chibata and the 1944 work stoppage among African American sailors following the naval munitions explosion at Port Chicago, California.⁸

These are interesting and necessary comparisons, but one need not go so far afield to contextualize this rebellion. The arming of slaves and free blacks in the service of the nation represents a small but growing field in Latin American, and Atlantic, history. While this uprising certainly deserves a place in our understanding of modern military history, both the revolt itself and the role of the Brazilian navy overall are better understood within the broader context of Atlantic slavery – as the sailors themselves, with their call for an end to slavery as practiced in the Brazilian navy, demanded. These events fit better into the specific context of the nineteenth-century collapse of Brazilian slavery with the obvious coming of abolition. Rather than comparison to Russian rebel sailors or African Americans rising up more than thirty years later during WWII, the more relevant context seems to be the free Afro-Cuban soldiers who fought in the Cuban Wars for independence in the second half of the nineteenth century, documented by Ada Ferrer in Insurgent Cuba. An understanding of the Jamaican Christmas Day Rebellion and the Morant Bay Rebellion examined by Thomas Holt in The Problem of Freedom and the Aponte Rebellion in Cuba examined by Matt D. Childs in The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery offers a better understanding of “problem” of Brazil’s growing free black population and how a national policy of military recruitment helped the state control this growing crisis. More local to the site of the Revolta da Chibata, Kim Butler’s Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won offers insight into the world that Afro-Brazilians navigated in the age of freedom, and Zephyr Frank’s Dutra’s World shows us the impact that the domestic slave trade had on the lives of both slaves and free blacks in Rio de Janeiro. Of course the Revolta da Chibata was a military revolt, but given how many of the reclamantes had been forcibly conscripted into service, examining them primarily as sailors would be like categorizing a slave revolt on a plantation as an agrarian uprising or a farmers revolt. The revolt was a movement against state policies that violently located many young black men into a state institution just as they gained their independence from slavery.⁹

But the study of the Revolta da Chibata actually demands broader historical context than the Brazilian military and its control of black bodies. What began as a research project focused on a four-day revolt in Rio de Janeiro has morphed into a project with links to the working poor, to their governments, and to industry on three continents. Rio de Janeiro’s archives fail to sufficiently address the broader context of the Atlantic World (black or otherwise). Telling the stories of these Afro-Brazilian rebels demands an understanding of elite naval policy in Brazil, England, and, to some extent, the United States. To understand Brazil’s navy, it must be contextualized within the history and policies of the Newcastle shipbuilding company George W. Armstrong & Co., and to understand the radicalization of these Brazilian sailors, one must understand their contacts with worker radicalism in Newcastle and the shifting role that British sailors held as modern citizens in the British Empire. My study thus examines the 1910 Revolta da Chibata against the backdrop of nineteenth-century abolition, industry, and military modernization in the Atlantic World. This examination of the Brazilian navy goes back to its origins during the era of Brazilian independence from Portugal in the early nineteenth century, and the detailed examination of the lives and treatment of enlisted men in the Brazilian navy begins in 1860.

Although Brazil’s history is spotted with military insurrections, this revolt remains unique. Enlisted men planned, implemented, and orchestrated events; they forcefully removed all officers from the ships during the initial night of the uprising. During the four-day revolt, the overall chain of military command remained intact, with the reclamantes at the helm. The enlisted men’s organization and their ability to navigate ships effectively and operate armament sent a clear message to the Brazilian naval officers and to the population of Brazil. In government reports and internal documents, naval officers had long bemoaned the issue of base and untrainable sailors; officers insisted that enlisted men were incapable of obeying naval discipline without the motivational application of corporal punishment. The Revolta da Chibata shattered that misconception as enlisted men outmaneuvered an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Race and Violence in Brazil and Its Navy
• 2 Legislating the Lash
• 3 Control of the Lower Decks, 1860–1910
• 4 Roots of a Rebellion
• 5 The Revolt of the Lash
• 6 Betrayal and Revenge
• 7 Conclusion: The Measure of a Revolt
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index