The day the Portuguese court sailed for Brazil: 29 November 1807

On 27 November 1807, a little before midday, the Prince Regent of Portugal stood on the quay at Belém, on the western edge of Lisbon, and held a last beija-mão, the ceremony at which subjects kissed the royal hand. Then he was rowed out to the Príncipe Real, an 84-gun ship of the line anchored in the Tagus, which was to carry him, his mother, Queen Maria I, his sons Pedro and Miguel and his Spanish nephew Pedro Carlos.3 sources3 sources

His wife, Carlota Joaquina, went aboard the Afonso de Albuquerque with four of their daughters. The queen's sisters took the Príncipe do Brasil, and two more princesses the Rainha de Portugal. Behind them, courtiers, officials, servants and their families scrambled for room on the remaining ships.2 sources2 sources

José Trazimundo, the future Marquês de Fronteira, was five. Relatives of his were leaving with the court, and his aunts tried to take him to see them off. Decades later he described what they found.1 source1 source

For two days the wind held from the west and the fleet could not move. During the night of the 28th it swung round to the south-east. At first light on the 29th the crews weighed anchor, took the river pilots aboard and ran down the Tagus and over the bar.2 sources2 sources

Outside, Sir Sidney Smith's British squadron was waiting in line of battle with its guns manned. Until the day before, in Smith's words, the two fleets had been on terms of hostility. After a friendly exchange the ships fired a salute of 21 guns at about half past four. The Príncipe Real stayed silent so as not to frighten the queen, who was mentally ill. By Light's reckoning, the first French troops marched into Lisbon some eighteen hours later.3 sources3 sources

By 1807 Napoleon had beaten every power in continental Europe, but after Trafalgar, in 1805, he could not touch Britain at sea. His answer was the Continental Blockade, begun in 1806: no port in Europe was to trade with the British. Portugal, Britain's old ally, was the last gap in the wall.2 sources2 sources

Portugal was ruled by João, Prince of Brazil, as regent for his mother, Maria I, whom illness had left unable to govern. He wanted above all to stay neutral. On 12 August 1807 the French and Spanish envoys in Lisbon gave him until 1 September to declare war on Britain, close his ports, seize British goods and arrest British subjects.1 source1 source

João tried to do half of what was asked. He offered to close the ports but refused to seize British merchants without a declaration of war. Napoleon rejected the offer, and on 30 September the envoys left Lisbon. The prince gave way step by step: he declared war on Britain on 20 October and ordered the detention of the British subjects still in Portugal on 8 November.2 sources2 sources

At the same time he kept a door open to London. A secret convention signed with Britain on 22 October provided for the Royal Navy to escort the Portuguese fleet if the court had to leave. According to the historian Kenneth Light, the voyage had been prepared over the previous six months without alarming France or Spain.1 source1 source

Napoleon had already decided what would happen to Portugal. On 27 October 1807, at Fontainebleau, his marshal of the palace, Géraud Duroc, and Eugenio Izquierdo, the private agent of the Spanish chief minister Manuel Godoy, signed a secret treaty that carved the kingdom into three.1 source1 source

The French army had crossed into Spain on 18 October, before the treaty was even signed. Its commander, General Jean-Andoche Junot, knew Lisbon well: he had been Napoleon's ambassador there in 1805. Charles Oman, the British historian of the Peninsular War, judged him a good fighting man but a mediocre general.1 source1 source

On 12 November, at Salamanca, Junot received orders to hurry. Napoleon told him to drop the usual road through Almeida and Coimbra and go straight down the Tagus valley, the shortest way on the map. “20,000 men can feed themselves anywhere, even in a desert,” the emperor wrote.1 source1 source

The map did not show the country. The army struggled over the mountain track to Alcántara and then along the Portuguese side of the frontier in the November rains, through granite ravines with every stream in flood. Half the horses died, nearly all the guns were left behind, and a quarter of the infantry scattered to look for food. The head of the column reached Abrantes on 23 November.1 source1 source

At Abrantes Junot found no Portuguese army, only an envoy offering submission. He picked the fittest companies of every regiment, formed four battalions and pushed on for the capital, about 75 miles away, with neither guns nor cavalry.1 source1 source

In Lisbon, the British minister, Lord Strangford, had left the city and joined Sir Sidney Smith's squadron off the Tagus on 17 November. Smith declared the river blockaded. What finally made up the prince's mind was a newspaper. A copy of the Paris Moniteur, brought from England by a British warship, reported that the House of Braganza had ceased to reign in Europe. Light dates its arrival to 24 November, and the Council of State resolved that same day to leave for Brazil. Oman has Strangford receiving the paper a day later.3 sources3 sources

The decree announcing the departure was signed at the palace of Ajuda on 26 November. The Lisbon chronicler says it was posted up on the 27th; Strangford wrote that it was published on the 28th. It blamed the French: the prince had closed his ports to the subjects of “My Ancient and Loyal Ally the King of Great Britain” and emptied his treasury to keep the peace, and still the emperor's troops were marching on the capital.2 sources2 sources

The decree named five governors to rule in his absence, with the Marquês de Abrantes first among them. Its written instructions told the governors to keep the peace and to see that the emperor's troops were well quartered and supplied, punishing any insult to them. Lisbon was to be handed over, not defended.1 source1 source

An anonymous Lisbon chronicler, writing in 1809, remembered the three days that followed as a time when everything seen and heard was misfortune: palaces being stripped and left open, and streets full of stunned crowds, like a flock that had lost its shepherd.1 source1 source

Money stopped moving. The discount on paper currency swung wildly, and on the afternoon of the 28th and all of the 29th the exchange houses stayed shut.1 source1 source

Not everything went. In a report to the prince of 12 October 1808, Alexandre António das Neves, keeper of the royal library at Ajuda, recalled that of the many crates of books ready for loading, not one had been taken from the quay on board. The historian Lilia Schwarcz follows the library to Rio in three shipments in 1810 and 1811, the last 87 crates arriving in November 1811. Other accounts, including the timeline of Brazil's National Library, have books landing with the court in 1808, and the crate counts differ.3 sources3 sources

The warships can be counted, because Smith copied the list given to him by the Portuguese admiral on the day of departure. The merchant ships are vaguer. Smith wrote only of “a crowd of large armed merchant ships”. Strangford put the whole fleet at about 36 sail, and the Lisbon chronicler's own list also adds up to 36.2 sources2 sources

Nobody counted the passengers. According to the historians Antonio Otaviano Vieira Junior and Daniel Barroso, writing in 2010, the version repeated most often puts the royal party at between 10,000 and 15,000. Lisbon's Museu dos Coches used 15,000 for its 2017 exhibition marking 210 years since the departure. Charles Oman also wrote of 15,000 people fleeing with the prince, and John Luccock, an English merchant in Rio, put the newcomers there at 15,000.4 sources4 sources

Kenneth Light, who spent five years on the log books of the British escort, wrote of “perhaps a total of some 12,000 to 15,000 Portuguese”. Other estimates, gathered by Vieira Junior and Barroso, are less generous. One puts the people who followed the squadron at about 6,000, before the royal family and the court are added. Another counts only 211 people, besides the royal family, arriving in Brazil in 1808, with 233 more travellers in 1809.2 sources2 sources

Drawing on a 2008 review of the figures by the historian Jurandir Malerba, Vieira Junior and Barroso put the spread down to the different documents used and how they were read. The logs give one hard number. After 69 passengers were moved to HMS London on 6 December, the Príncipe Real still had 1,054 people aboard: a crew of 950 and 104 passengers.2 sources2 sources

Smith went aboard the Príncipe Real to pay his respects on the day of departure and reported to London on 1 December. His dispatch was printed in the London Gazette on 22 December 1807, together with Strangford's, which presented the departure as the reward of British policy towards Portugal.1 source1 source

The fleet headed north-west at first, because a south-easterly gale allowed no other course. The ships struck their upper masts to ride it out. On 5 December, roughly halfway to Madeira, Smith turned back to resume the blockade of Lisbon. Four British ships of the line, the Marlborough, London, Bedford and Monarch, under Captain Graham Moore, stayed with the Portuguese all the way to Brazil.2 sources2 sources

On the night of 8 December, about 50 leagues north of Madeira, the fleet hove to in rain and poor visibility. The Príncipe Real and the Afonso de Albuquerque, with two frigates and the Bedford, sailed on without signalling and by morning were alone. The two halves of the fleet never met again at sea, although on 2 January 1808 they passed within sight of each other's lights.1 source1 source

The division with the Rainha de Portugal and the Conde D. Henrique watered at Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, and made straight for Rio. The royal ships went on without stopping, lost ten days crawling through the calms near the equator, and on 16 January changed course for Salvador da Bahia.2 sources2 sources

The Príncipe Real anchored at Salvador da Bahia on 22 January 1808. The royal family went ashore the next day and the queen the day after. For a month the prince held audiences and dealt with local business.2 sources2 sources

The most important decision of that month came on 28 January. With Lisbon occupied, Brazil's trade, which by law had to pass through Portugal, had stopped. A royal letter to the governor of Bahia, the Conde da Ponte, admitted to Brazil's customs houses all goods carried in Portuguese ships or in those of powers at peace with the crown. It was described as provisional. In practice the main beneficiary was Britain.2 sources2 sources

The fleet left Salvador on 26 February, with 84 strongboxes of valuables transferred to the Bedford, and entered the harbour of Rio de Janeiro on 7 March 1808 to salutes from the forts and ships. Rio had been preparing since January. The viceroy's palace was enlarged by taking over the jail next door, its walls hung with silk, and a canopy of fine cloth was put up near the quay.2 sources2 sources

On 11 March the prince named his ministers, and Rio began to acquire the machinery of a European capital: a royal press, the first in Portuguese America, a medical school, academies, the royal library, a Bank of Brazil and Brazilian copies of the high courts and treasury of Lisbon. The city's population doubled to about 80,000 between 1808 and 1821. About half its people were enslaved Africans and their descendants.2 sources2 sources

Oman puts Junot at the head of about 1,500 soldiers in rags, their cartridges soaked through; the Lisbon chronicler put the ragged first division at nearer 10,000. Nobody resisted. The stragglers took ten days to come in, and the Spanish columns entered the north and south of the country in December. When Junot had the Portuguese flag replaced by the tricolour on 13 December, a crowd rioted and was dispersed by a cavalry charge.2 sources2 sources

Junot then broke up the Portuguese army and sent about 6,000 to 7,000 of its men to serve Napoleon in northern Europe. Many of them later died in the retreat from Moscow. He was beaten by an Anglo-Portuguese army in August 1808 and left under the Convention of Cintra. Two more French invasions followed, the last stopped in 1810 by the Lines of Torres Vedras.2 sources2 sources

The crown, meanwhile, stayed across the Atlantic. Lisbon was governed by the regency, more and more subordinated to the needs of the British army. The king's return in 1821, according to the journalist Armando Seixas Ferreira, who has read the logs of two of its ships, was better prepared and better supplied than the departure of 1807.2 sources2 sources

Napoleon's plan for Portugal depended on capturing the dynasty or forcing it to submit, as happened to the Spanish Bourbons a few months later. By sailing, the Braganzas kept their crown, their fleet and their treasury out of his hands. Whether that was cowardice or statecraft has been argued ever since. Light, writing from the British logs, calls it a wise decision; Oman, writing in 1902, called the prince timid and incapable.3 sources3 sources

In Brazil, the consequences are easier to measure. The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, in its exhibition for the bicentenary of independence, dates the start of the road to 1822 to the arrival of the court in 1808. The opening of the ports ended the colonial monopoly on trade, and the royal library that crossed in crates became the core of Brazil's National Library in Rio, which dates its foundation to a decree of 29 October 1810.3 sources3 sources