The World полностью

Now João agonized for months then courageously decided to defy Napoleon and move his court to Brazil. As panicking courtiers mobbed the docks at Belém loading their belongings, ladies abandoned their carriages and waded fully clothed out to the ships, some of them drowning. João arrived disguised as a woman and boarded the Príncipe Real accompanied by his treasonous wife, seven children and the demented queen, who kept saying, ‘Go slower! They’ll think we’re running away.’ When over 12,000 Portuguese had embarked on a British fleet of fifteen warships and forty smaller vessels, they sailed, playing cards all the way to Rio.

On arrival, the Brazilians were unimpressed by the royal family: although bathing was prized by creoles in Rio, the príncipe regente never fully washed. But the people of Rio – the Cariocas (from the Tupi Kara-i-oka) – were excited to share the first American capital of a European dynasty.

This was a city run on slavery. Slaves worked as casual labourers, sold food and carried masters in sedan chairs, while new slaves arrived from Africa at the docks. The príncipe regente owned 38,000 slaves. The Braganzas embraced Brazil’s eclectic culture, forming a theatrical company of enslaved African musicians, but they were shocked by the chaotic informality of ‘this infamous Babylon’, African in appearance, its festivals combining Portuguese Catholicism with African ritual. The king, after the death of Maria the Mad, was happy to remain in Brazil – as British troops under Wellington fought the French in Portugal – a decision that would lead to an independent south American monarchy.

It would not be the only one. On 1 January 1804, Governor-General-for-Life Dessalines declared the independence of a new republic that he called Haiti, its Taíno name – a nation of freed slaves, the second free republic in the Americas and the first country to abolish slavery. ‘It is not enough to expel the barbarians that drenched it in blood,’ he declaimed. ‘Soldiers! give all nations a terrible but just example of vengeance.’ He promised ‘to kill every Frenchman who soils the land of freedom’. Five hundred were hanged in a row, and hundreds of men, women and children^* were paraded to the port, the women raped, then all drowned in front of foreign merchants. Pregnant women were killed to prevent the birth of more Frenchmen. The killings – somewhere between 600 and 4,000, mainly butchered with knives – were designed to ensure the French would never return. The bloodshed was brutal, yet it was a small atrocity compared to the 350,000 killed by the French.

‘I’ve avenged America,’ said Dessalines, but the killing of all whites helped destroy the Haitian economy. On 6 October, he was crowned Emperor Jacques I of Haiti. His empress Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité cared for wounded Frenchmen, begged her husband to spare the whites and hid some of them in their house (while also raising their own seven children and those of his many paramours). The emperor protected and gave a job to his old French slave master, but he backed the 90 per cent of black Haitians against the mixed-raced elite, a rivalry that still undermines the country in the twenty-first century.

The emperor rightly feared that France would try to regain the colony: he ordered his general Henry Christophe to start the building of the huge fortress La Citadelle and other defences. Jacques himself, rapacious ruler of plantations, used his army and the Haitian whip, the coco-macac, to enforce the labour of the cultivateurs who now toiled in the fields. His generals conspired against him; in October 1806, the emperor marched to crush the rebels but, lured to Alexandre Pétion’s house in Port-au-Prince, he was shot and stabbed and his head was sliced open. A crowd then paraded his dismembered body, shouting, ‘The tyrant is dead!’

After Jacques, Henry Christophe, English-speaking, veteran of the American War of Independence, former waiter, drummer boy and paladin, became president, with the mixed-race Pétion, sometime French ally and enemy of Louverture, as Senate president, but they quickly fell out. Pétion ruled the south leniently, breaking up the estates while favouring his own mixed-race elite. Nicknamed Papa Bon Coeur, he was advised by one of the most remarkable women in American history, his paramour Marie-Madeleine Lachenais, daughter of a French colonel and an African woman. Later in Pétion’s rule, she became the lover of his secretary and heir General Boyer and so was known as La Présidente de Deux Présidents. But the Haitians were far from finished with monarchy.

In the north, President Henry Christophe came to power just as Wilberforce and the British abolitionists who were finally making progress.