Pirajá, 8 November 1822: the battle for Salvador da Bahia

Before first light on 8 November 1822, boats from Salvador put 250 picked Portuguese soldiers ashore on the beaches of Itacaranha and Plataforma, on the bay side of the peninsula that holds the city. As day broke they pushed inland. At the same moment a sizeable column marched out along the land route, hoping to catch the Brazilian posts on the heights of Pirajá by surprise.1 source1 source

The outposts at Coqueiro and Bate-Folha, on the Pirajá road, saw them coming and opened fire. Soon the firing ran along the whole line. The Portuguese threw their main weight against the Engenho do Cabrito, a sugar estate on the hills, and nearly took it before Lieutenant Alexandre Gomes de Argolo Ferrão brought up his battalion and spread it across the slopes.1 source1 source

After more than five hours of continuous fire the Portuguese were still advancing from Itacaranha, working round behind the Brazilian positions. Major José de Barros Falcão de Lacerda, who was directing the action, judged that his men could not hold and ordered the bugle to sound the retreat.1 source1 source

By nightfall it was the Portuguese who had gone back to the city. How that happened is the most retold story of the war, and the hardest to pin down.2 sources2 sources

Salvador, founded in 1549 as the seat of Portuguese power in Brazil, was in 1822 the capital of the province of Bahia and a major Atlantic port. Since the royal court's flight to Rio de Janeiro, which reached Brazil in 1808, the colony had been the seat of the monarchy and a kingdom joined with Portugal. The liberal revolution of 1820 in Porto changed that. The new Cortes, the parliament in Lisbon, brought King João VI home in 1821 and wanted Brazil's provinces answering to Lisbon again.4 sources4 sources

A royal letter of 9 December 1821 named Colonel Inácio Luís Madeira de Melo, newly promoted brigadier, governor of arms of Bahia. The news reached Salvador on 11 February 1822 and the letter itself on the 15th. Under a decree of 1 October 1821, a governor of arms answered only to the Cortes and the king, not to the provincial junta, and residents of Salvador petitioned for the post to go instead to a local hero, Brigadier Manuel Pedro de Freitas Guimarães.1 source1 source

On 19 and 20 February the two sides fought in the streets. Troops loyal to Madeira stormed the barracks of the 1st Regiment and went on to loot houses. At the Convent of the Lapa they killed the abbess, Joana Angélica, with a bayonet as she opened the door, and clubbed the elderly chaplain with musket butts. Brazilian-born soldiers and many families fled the city for the Recôncavo, the sugar country round the bay.2 sources2 sources

The break came from the towns of the Recôncavo. On 25 June 1822 the council of Cachoeira, on the Paraguaçu river, acclaimed Pedro as regent. Other towns followed, refused to recognise Madeira and stopped sending food to Salvador, and a provisional government formed in Cachoeira. The historian Luís Henrique Dias Tavares dated the war itself from February 1822, which makes it about seventeen months long.2 sources2 sources

The patriot army began as a mixture of rural militias, regular soldiers and officers who had escaped from Salvador, the city's non-white militia and volunteer companies raised in the towns. Pedro sent a professional to command it. Pierre Labatut, a French officer who had fought in Europe and in the Spanish American wars of independence, left Rio on 14 July 1822 with a small squadron carrying 200 militiamen, 40 light infantry and 34 officers.2 sources2 sources

He reached the front at the end of October, with arms and a larger force raised in Pernambuco and the town of Penedo: 550 light infantry and gunners under Major Barros Falcão. He tightened discipline, and coin that absent Portuguese planters had buried on their estates, dug up in October, gave the army funds. On 5 November he split his forces into two brigades. Colonel Felisberto Gomes Caldeira took 600 men of the Torre battalions to hold the left at Itapuã, on the Atlantic coast. Barros Falcão held the right, from Itapuã's boundary to the Engenho do Cabrito.2 sources2 sources

The line ran for about 17 kilometres across the neck of the peninsula, from Cabrito and Pirajá to Itapuã, and blocked the roads that fed the city from the interior. A 2022 study in the Revista Brasileira de História Militar puts about 1,000 men at the Pirajá and Cabrito end, where the main supply road came in, and about 300 at Itapuã. Accioli gives Caldeira 600 at Itapuã.2 sources2 sources

Ignacio Accioli, whose history of the province was printed in Salvador in the 1830s, says Madeira had the larger force but stayed inside the city, treating the rebels as a mere faction. On 29 October his soldiers fired volleys at an envoy Labatut had sent to the trenches under a flag of truce. Pressed by the pro-Portuguese party and its newspapers, which wanted the roads to the food-growing Recôncavo reopened, Madeira at last decided to attack.1 source1 source

Accioli is the fullest early narrative. In his account the Portuguese fought well and held the better ground, and would have won. When their attack broke, the Pernambuco soldiers seized the moment and inflicted heavy losses on them as they fell back in disorder. News of the rout spread quickly in the city through the men who got back.1 source1 source

Braz do Amaral, writing in 1923, summed up the result in a sentence: Madeira tried to cut off the independents at Pirajá, his columns were beaten, and the metropolitan army shut itself up in the city, which it did not leave again except to embark. A 2022 military study describes Pirajá as the action that turned the patriot army from defence to offence.2 sources2 sources

Nobody agreed on the losses. Accioli admitted that neither side's could be known exactly, and he trusted neither side's published figures.1 source1 source

The story goes like this. Barros Falcão ordered the retreat. The bugler, Luís Lopes, instead blew “cavalry, advance” and then the call to give no quarter, known as “à degola”, which means to cut throats. The Portuguese, believing that Brazilian horsemen had arrived, broke and ran.2 sources2 sources

Accioli is one of the earliest writers to tell it, and he adds two details that later versions often drop. Lopes was “a Portuguese in Brazil's service”, and he played the calls on the clarion he used for the light infantry drill. Accioli did not doubt the story, and he lamented that Lopes's part had been so quickly forgotten.1 source1 source

The other early source is the poet Ladislau Titara, who wrote the words of the Dois de Julho hymn and, according to the Bahian historian Jorge Ramos, was charged with cataloguing Labatut's correspondence. His epic Paraguassu, published in 1835, mentions the bugler in a footnote that calls the call “a decision, or mistake”. Accioli's second volume followed in 1836, so both accounts appeared more than a decade after the battle.2 sources2 sources

Eight days after the battle Labatut wrote to Madeira. He accused the Portuguese of flogging, flaying and quartering Brazilian prisoners and announced that he had ordered the same treatment for Portuguese ones.1 source1 source

The siege army kept growing. In mid-November Labatut asked the provisional council for as many freed men of colour as it could find for a new freedmen's battalion. By December he had gone further and formed a battalion of enslaved men, African and Brazilian-born, taken from absent Portuguese planters. The council called it a “horrifying” measure. In January 1823 the Batalhão do Imperador, about 800 men, arrived from Rio.1 source1 source

The Portuguese squadron attacked the island of Itaparica, across the bay from the city, on 7 January 1823 and was beaten off. In May a weak imperial squadron under the Scottish admiral Lord Cochrane appeared off the coast. It came off worse in its first brush with the Portuguese fleet, but went on cruising off Bahia and cut the city's supplies by sea as well as by land.2 sources2 sources

The besiegers suffered too. Tavares lists tuberculosis, malaria and typhus in the trenches. Labatut quarrelled with the council and with his own officers, and in May 1823, after he had Colonel Felisberto Gomes Caldeira arrested, the officers of the left brigade deposed him. Colonel José Joaquim de Lima e Silva took command, with his headquarters at Pirajá.3 sources3 sources

Totals for the whole war vary with what is counted. Tavares estimated 9,000 to 10,000 Portuguese, including the navy, against about 12,000 Brazilians. The 2022 military study gives 1,000 to 2,000 dead for the whole conflict in Bahia.2 sources2 sources

By June the city was starving. On the 21st Madeira called a council of his battalion and ship commanders, who agreed with him that the city must be evacuated. He told the Portuguese junta the same day, but refused to tell even them the date of departure.1 source1 source

On 30 June he sent word informally to Lima e Silva asking to be allowed to embark in peace. In the silence before dawn on 2 July a single cannon shot from the fort of Santo Alberto gave the signal. At four in the morning the garrison boarded launches at Gamboa, the Arsenal and the Noviciado. At daybreak the streets were almost empty and the guard posts abandoned.1 source1 source

Madeira later told the king that the division had embarked without losing a single man. At about eleven the whole convoy put to sea for Portugal, with merchants and their money aboard, and Cochrane followed it out, taking prizes. João Francisco de Oliveira, known as João das Botas, who had commanded the patriot boats in the bay, occupied the Fortaleza do Mar and raised the national flag over it.3 sources3 sources

Lima e Silva got the news at Pirajá at nine and rode into the city at one in the afternoon at the head of the army. Behind the Pernambuco battalion, Accioli wrote, marched a great crowd of the homeland's defenders, almost naked and barefoot.1 source1 source

In Lisbon, Madeira was arrested in November 1823. At his trial, Tavares said, he was presented as solely responsible for the defeat of Portugal's army and navy. His report on the evacuation survives in the Arquivo Histórico Militar, filed with the proceedings against the commander of Bahia.2 sources2 sources

On 8 November 1823 the victory was marked for the first time, with a thanksgiving in the parish church of São Bartolomeu de Pirajá. The bones of some of the men killed in the battle were then carried in procession to the church of the Soledade, outside the city walls.1 source1 source

Victory left Bahia's planters with a problem. The army now held many former slaves and enslaved men. The government freed those who had served officially as soldiers, compensating owners, and returned the rest to slavery. After the revolt of the Periquitos battalion in late 1824, seen as a rising of Black soldiers and former slaves, most of them were moved out of the province.1 source1 source

Portugal recognised Brazil's independence in 1825. That September Labatut came back to Bahia from France, and Braz do Amaral wrote in 1923 that he had been “in reality, the victor over Madeira and the Portuguese”. Tavares disagreed: he saw no reason for Bahia to go on honouring Labatut every Dois de Julho, and gave the credit to the fighters of the Recôncavo and the interior.3 sources3 sources

Brazil dates its independence to 7 September 1822. Tavares called that “a symbolic date, not really the date of Brazil's independence”, because a huge part of the country was not yet independent: a Portuguese army held Salvador for ten more months. He argued that the north-east fought a real war for independence, unlike the negotiated separation in Rio de Janeiro.1 source1 source

In Bahia the Dois de Julho became a civic festival almost at once. In the 1830s Accioli could write that every year people and troops gathered at the Lapinha square and went in triumph into the city, retracing the army's entry. Kraay argues that the festival represented Bahian society as a whole while marking its divisions of origin, class and race, and that by celebrating popular mobilisation it told a story of Brazil's origins at odds with the official cult of Emperor Pedro I as founder.2 sources2 sources

The bugler belongs to that popular memory. Pinho sees legends such as Lopes's as a way for ordinary Bahians to place themselves in the story of a war that was fought by the people, enslaved men among them, while warning that historians must keep their distance from the episode itself.1 source1 source