The Ponte das Barcas disaster: Porto's bridge of boats, 29 March 1809

At three in the morning of 29 March 1809 a thunderstorm broke over Porto, driven by a gale from the north-west. Portuguese sentries in the earthworks above the city thought they saw French columns coming up through the rain and opened fire. For half an hour some 200 guns of position fired into the dark at nothing. Napier puts the storm and the false alarm nearer midnight.2 sources2 sources

The French were out there, lying soaked in the fields, but they had not moved. Marshal Nicolas Soult put back his attack by an hour so his men could dry off, eat something and let the ground harden. At seven o'clock they went forward.1 source1 source

Below the lines, the city ran steeply down to the Douro. At the bottom of its streets, at the Ribeira quay, a single bridge crossed the river to Vila Nova de Gaia: a wooden roadway laid on boats, the Ponte das Barcas. Within a few hours a fleeing crowd had been pushed into the water there, and nobody has ever known how many died.2 sources2 sources

Portugal was facing its second French invasion in two years. During the first, a French army under General Junot had occupied Lisbon and the royal family had left for Brazil. After an Anglo-Portuguese victory at Vimeiro in August 1808, the last of Junot's men left the kingdom on 9 October 1808. Napoleon then ordered Marshal Soult, who had just driven a British army out of Spain at Corunna in January 1809, to invade from the north.2 sources2 sources

Soult's vanguard crossed the frontier near Chaves on 9 March 1809, and the French marched into Chaves three days later. On 20 March he broke a huge but badly armed peasant army in front of Braga. Its commander, Bernardino Freire, had been dragged from prison and killed by his own men a few days before, accused of treachery.1 source1 source

In three weeks the people of Porto had dug a line of works six or seven miles long, from São João da Foz on the sea to the chapel of Bonfim above the river: twelve redoubts on the hills north of the city, palisades and ditches between them, and 197 guns. A battery on the Serra do Pilar, across the river in Gaia, overlooked the bridge and the whole city: twenty heavy guns according to Oman, fifty according to Napier.2 sources2 sources

Inside the lines there was something close to anarchy. When news of Braga arrived, a crowd hauled people accused of French sympathies out of the prisons and hanged fourteen of them, among them a brigadier, Luís de Oliveira. On the night of 28 March the bishop blessed the garrison and crossed the river to the convent on the Serra do Pilar, leaving three brigadiers to fight the battle.1 source1 source

For centuries people crossed the Douro between Porto and Gaia by boat. A permanent bridge of boats opened on 15 August 1806, which Pinho Leal gives as the day Our Lady of the Pillar was honoured at her church on the Serra do Pilar, the hill above the Gaia bank. It is credited to the military engineer Carlos Amarante. Pinho Leal says the government had it built at the request of the city's authorities; Porto's tourist board says it was ordered by the Companhia Geral da Agricultura das Vinhas do Alto Douro, the Douro wine company.4 sources4 sources

It was about 20 boats moored side by side and anchored upstream and downstream, joined by iron cables, with a wooden deck for people, animals and carts. João António Monteiro de Azevedo, in his topographical description of Vila Nova de Gaia, praised it because it rose and fell with the tides, opened to let larger vessels through and could be taken apart when the river flooded. Oman puts its length at more than 200 yards; Napier, at nearly 300.4 sources4 sources

Soult attacked on the flanks first. General Merle pushed into the houses and gardens below the western end of the Portuguese line, and General Delaborde broke into the north-eastern corner of the city. Brigadier Parreiras, who held the centre, sent most of his reserves to help both wings. That was what Soult had been waiting for.1 source1 source

He threw General Mermet's division and two regiments of dragoons at the half-empty central redoubts. The Portuguese gunners fired two salvos before the French were in through the embrasures. The line was cut in two, and Mermet's men chased the defenders down the streets towards the river. The Diário de Notícias account has the alarm raised in the city at nine.2 sources2 sources

Brigadier Vitória took the eastern wing out along the Valongo road and got away. In the west, Brigadier Lima Barreto ordered his men to spike their guns and fall back; they shot him as a traitor. Merle's division then drove them towards Foz and the sea, where several thousand, trapped between the river and the ocean, were cut down or pushed into the water. Napier says that nearly all of those who tried to swim or row across the river mouth died.2 sources2 sources

The centre ran for the Ribeira. Parreiras crossed the bridge early to report to the bishop, and several thousand men followed him. Then, Oman writes, an unknown officer had the drawbridge between the central boats raised to stop the French following, while most of the fugitives were still on the Porto side.1 source1 source

Behind the soldiers came the townspeople. When word spread that the lines had fallen, men, women and children rushed down to the quays to get across before the sack began. The boats were still riding on their cables, and from the bank the bridge looked whole. Only those at the front could see the gap.2 sources2 sources

Nobody at the back could hear the warnings. French infantry reached the quay and fired into the rear of the crowd, and the twenty guns on the Serra do Pilar opened fire on the French. Then a squadron of Portuguese cavalry, cut off from the eastern road, galloped out of a side street into the packed crowd at the bridgehead and trampled hundreds before the mass of bodies stopped it.2 sources2 sources

So many were pushed in that the gap filled with the living and the dead, and a few fugitives are said to have scrambled across on top of them. Germano Silva adds that boats trying to reach Gaia capsized as the bridge gave way and in the crossfire between the two sides.3 sources3 sources

The French on the quay saw that the crowd was mostly women, children and other civilians, and their firing died away. Both Oman and Napier say many soldiers then turned to helping people out of the river. Others drove the crowd back from the bridgehead with their musket butts. In the late afternoon some of Mermet's men patched the gap with planks and rafters, crossed, and took the battery on the Serra do Pilar.2 sources2 sources

Writers have never agreed on how the gap opened. Le Noble, Soult's official chronicler, and Napier who followed him, said the central boats simply sank under the weight. So did Hennegan, who had brought British ammunition to Porto and was in the city that day. Luz Soriano and other Portuguese witnesses said the gap was made on purpose, and Pinho Leal gives both versions at once.3 sources3 sources

Oman sided with the Portuguese version, on the grounds that historians who tell a story against their own side can usually be trusted. Porto historians are still divided. At the bicentenary in 2009 Júlio Couto backed the weight version, while the military historian Sérgio Veludo thought it more likely that Portuguese sappers had pulled up planks to stop the French. Germano Silva mentions a darker hypothesis that has been raised, without endorsing it: that the bishop, from the Serra do Pilar, ordered the trapdoor opened so the French would fall into the trap.3 sources3 sources

The nineteenth-century novelist Camilo Castelo Branco put the weight version into his novel Onde Está a Felicidade?: the crowd choked the boats, the weight broke the spars with a crash, and the abyss swallowed “families bound together in a last embrace” (translated from Portuguese).1 source1 source

Nobody counted. The bodies went down the river, and the figures given afterwards usually lump together everyone killed in the lines, at Foz, on the bridge and in the sack. Oman found contemporary totals ranging from 4,000 to 20,000. Napier wrote that ten thousand Portuguese were “said” to have died. Soult reported his own losses as 80 killed and 350 wounded.2 sources2 sources

Oman thought the lower figure nearer the truth and guessed 7,000 or 8,000 dead, about half soldiers and half civilians, with thousands drowned. He noted that the town was not emptied and that most of its defenders turned up later in other Portuguese forces. One regiment of the line still had only 193 men under arms six months later.1 source1 source

For the bridge itself the numbers are smaller and softer. Pinho Leal gave 4,000 and 5,000 in the same book. In 2020 the Diário de Notícias reported that some historians speak of many hundreds of victims and others of more than four thousand; Germano Silva called the disaster one of the worst in the city's history but thought four thousand too high.3 sources3 sources

Away from the bridge, small groups fought on from barricaded houses. Militiamen in the bishop's palace held out for hours and were bayoneted when the doors gave way: 400 of them, according to Oman, 200 according to Napier. Then came the sack, with looting, rape and killing through the afternoon.2 sources2 sources

Napier says the fury grew when French soldiers found comrades who had been taken prisoner tied up in a square, alive and horribly mutilated. He also says Soult and hundreds of his officers and men tried to stop the slaughter, at the risk of their lives. Oman credits Soult with restoring order before the next morning, and notes that dozens of French prisoners were found alive, so not all had been killed or tortured. Germano Silva told the Diário de Notícias in 2020 that the French looted, killed and raped for three days.3 sources3 sources

Soult took 200 guns, a large store of British munitions and more than thirty merchant ships loaded with wine. He held Porto for six weeks, and Leal records churches, convents and houses stripped of anything of value. The French repaired the bridge, then destroyed it in May to stop Arthur Wellesley's Anglo-Portuguese army; Wellesley crossed the Douro anyway on 12 May and drove them out of the city.3 sources3 sources

Porto rebuilt its bridge of boats, this time on 33 pontoons, and later built another. In 1843 a suspension bridge replaced them.2 sources2 sources

Porto has had other disasters, among them the wreck of the steamer Porto in 1857, in which everyone aboard died, and the fire at the Teatro Baquet in 1888. None, Germano Silva told the Diário de Notícias, is remembered with as much feeling as the bridge of boats.1 source1 source

Remembrance began on the quay. For many years a painting of the disaster by an unknown artist hung in a niche in the medieval city wall at the Ribeira, and people left flowers, candles and coins there for the alminhas da ponte, the “little souls of the bridge”. In 1810 the people of the Ribeira handed the money they had collected to the Brotherhood of Souls of the church of São José das Taipas, so that a mass would be said for the victims every 29 March. It still is.1 source1 source

There was also a yearly procession from the Cordoaria down to the Ribeira. It stopped after the First Republic was proclaimed in 1910 and has never been revived. The painting moved into the church of São José das Taipas, where it hangs in an altar niche.1 source1 source

At the Ribeira the candles now burn under a bronze relief made in 1897 by José Joaquim Teixeira Lopes (1837–1918), the father of the better-known sculptor António Teixeira Lopes. It shows French horsemen riding down the crowd at the bridgehead, the bridge and the drowning in the river, and God the Father in the clouds above. In 2020 the Diário de Notícias wrote that the lights there never go out.3 sources3 sources

For the bicentenary in 2009, a monument by the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura was unveiled, made for Porto's urban renewal agency, APOR: two symmetrical sculptures of 12-millimetre Corten steel, one on each bank, jutting about three metres out over the river near where the bridge was moored.2 sources2 sources

The disaster was a military defeat, a civilian massacre and a failure of command all at once, and the Portuguese sources do not spare their own side. The defence was run by a bishop who left the night before. Two Portuguese generals in the campaign, Freire at Braga and Lima Barreto at Porto, were killed by their own men, and the gap, in most Portuguese tellings, was opened by Portuguese hands.3 sources3 sources

What the city chose to remember was the people on the bridge. Its memorial is a shrine where people light candles, not a battle monument, and the mass paid for by the Ribeira's alms in 1810 is still said each spring. On 29 March the candles at the Alminhas da Ponte are lit for people whose number nobody has ever known.1 source1 source