The British Ultimatum of 1890: how Portugal lost its Pink Map

On the evening of Sunday 12 January 1890 a crowd began to gather outside the Café Martinho da Arcada in Lisbon's Baixa. That morning the newspapers had broken the news, and O Século, a republican daily, ran it under the headline “Lisboa será bombardeada”, Lisbon will be bombarded.1 source1 source

By the time it had marched up the Rua Augusta to the Rossio, the crowd numbered between 1,500 and 5,000, depending on the newspaper. People shouted “Down with the pirates” and “Down with the Braganças”, the royal family. At the British consulate they threw stones and tore down the British coat of arms. Stones also hit the house of the foreign minister, Henrique de Barros Gomes.1 source1 source

At the Geographical Society, its secretary Luciano Cordeiro spoke from a balcony. Protesters pushed into the São Carlos opera house, lowered the national flag to half mast and told the startled audience that this was no day for a show but a day of mourning. Demonstrations were still going at one in the morning, and more than fifty people were arrested.1 source1 source

The cause was a memorandum handed to the Portuguese government the day before. Britain had told Portugal to pull its troops out of a stretch of central Africa that Lisbon had coloured pink on its maps, and to say so that evening. Portugal had given way within hours.2 sources2 sources

In the middle of the nineteenth century Portugal held little more than scattered points on the two coasts of southern Africa: Angola in the west, Mozambique in the east. Between them lay an interior it did not govern, though Portuguese travellers had crossed into it many times; the historian Nuno Severiano Teixeira counts twelve documented journeys between 1785 and 1877.2 sources2 sources

In the 1870s the European powers began racing each other for African land, a contest the Times popularised as the “scramble for Africa”. The Lisbon Geographical Society, founded in the mid-1870s, pushed for Portuguese exploration. In 1877 Alexandre de Serpa Pinto, Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens set out together from Benguela; Serpa Pinto struck south to Durban while Capelo and Ivens went north. In 1884 and 1885 Capelo and Ivens crossed from the Angolan coast to Tete on the Zambezi.2 sources2 sources

Then the rules changed. At a conference that opened in Berlin on 15 November 1884, the powers agreed that holding land would require occupying it. Portugal had always argued from priority of discovery, which now counted for little. Britain wanted the new rule to apply to the whole continent; the others would accept it only for the coasts, so inland the race turned to claiming “spheres of influence”.2 sources2 sources

Portugal tried to secure the interior on paper. In a convention of 12 May 1886, France recognised “the right of His Most Faithful Majesty to exercise his sovereign and civilizing influence in the territories which separate the Portuguese possessions of Angola and Mozambique”, saving rights already acquired by other powers. Germany said much the same in a declaration of 30 December 1886. Barros Gomes then presented maps with a pink band running from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean: the Mapa Cor-de-Rosa, or Pink Map.3 sources3 sources

Britain had signed no such agreement. Scottish missionaries had settled by Lake Nyasa in 1875 and at Blantyre, in the Shire Highlands, in 1876, and a trading firm, the African Lakes Company, worked alongside them. Further south, Cecil Rhodes wanted a band of British territory running north from the Cape, across the same belt. London protested that Portugal did not occupy what it claimed.2 sources2 sources

The pink band crossed land that already had rulers. In the Shire valley, south of Lake Nyasa, power lay with the Makololo chiefs. Their founders had followed David Livingstone down the Zambezi as porters from the Barotse country; many had in fact been slaves of peoples of the upper Zambezi. When Livingstone withdrew in 1864 he left those in the Shire valley armed, and they soon made themselves chiefs over the Mang'anja people, holding off Yao and Ngoni raiders and slave traders from the Portuguese Zambezi.1 source1 source

By 1889 the strongest Makololo chief on the river was Mlauri, who had succeeded Chipatula. From his stronghold at Mbewe, below Katunga's, his men fired on passing steamers until they stopped and handed over presents. He resented the British for refusing to recognise him as paramount chief, and told the British consul Harry Johnston, by Johnston's account, that he thought the British and Portuguese were in league and that all white men were equally bad.1 source1 source

Further south, the Ndebele (Matabele) king Lobengula claimed authority over the Shona of Mashonaland. On 30 October 1888 he granted Rhodes's partner Rudd exclusive mining rights in return for £100 a month and 500 rifles, with 500 more promised. When he found he had been cheated, he had Lotshe, the councillor who had persuaded him to sign, put to death, and two of his indunas, or councillors, travelled to London to ask Queen Victoria's wishes. On 29 October 1889 Queen Victoria chartered Rhodes's British South Africa Company. Barros Gomes answered by insisting on Portugal's historic claims and arguing that the Shona were a people separate from the Ndebele.2 sources2 sources

In 1889 both sides moved. Serpa Pinto, now a major, led an expedition up the Shire with more than 700 African soldiers, many of them men from Gaza and Inhambane in southern Mozambique. Lisbon called it a scientific expedition. In August, Johnston, whom Salisbury had sent out as consul at Mozambique, met him in camp below the meeting of the Ruo and the Shire and warned him that Britain regarded the Ruo, provisionally, as the Portuguese limit.3 sources3 sources

The acting consul, John Buchanan, then made treaties with Makololo chiefs at Katunga's on 14 and 15 August, in which the chiefs undertook not to cede land or make treaties with any other power. Mlauri was not among them, though Johnston says he later made a treaty of his own, and Hertslet's list records one signed at Mbewe on 24 September. After a first clash between Portuguese troops and Makololo just below the Ruo, Buchanan declared at Mlomba on 21 September that the Makololo, Yao and Machinga countries were under the Queen's protection “with the consent and at the desire of the Chiefs and People”.2 sources2 sources

On 8 November Mlauri's men attacked the Portuguese column on the west bank of the Shire. The historian Teresa Pinto Coelho places this battle at Mupassa; Johnston, who was by then far to the north, gives a similar name, Mpatsa, for the earlier skirmish. Mlauri said afterwards that the Portuguese had raided his villages on the other bank. The attack was beaten off with heavy losses: Johnston called it “a very sanguinary defeat”, and Eça de Queirós, as summarised by Andrew Shepherd, put the Makololo dead at about a hundred.3 sources3 sources

Serpa Pinto left for Mozambique, and his second-in-command, João de Azevedo Coutinho, pushed on. He crossed the Ruo, seized and burned Chiromo, the village of the young chiefs Mbengwa and Makwira, hauled down the British flag at Katunga's and drove Mlauri upriver. The other Makololo chiefs took refuge at Blantyre, which the Portuguese, by Johnston's account, were preparing to occupy. Johnston believed Lisbon had not sanctioned the advance; the governor-general at Mozambique had announced that the Shire was annexed and named Coutinho its governor. In Lisbon, Barros Gomes defended the fighting as self-defence and restated Portugal's rights of discovery.4 sources4 sources

Lord Salisbury, who was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, had decided to force the issue. He had already told the German government that he might take a Portuguese territory in India or on the Atlantic coast “as a material guarantee”. Rhodes and the Church of Scotland pressed him from two sides. On Saturday 11 January 1890 George Petre, the British minister in Lisbon, handed over a memorandum with this demand:4 sources4 sources

Without this, the memorandum said, Portugal's assurances were “illusory”. That night the Council of State met under King Carlos, who had reigned for less than three months, since his father Luís died on 19 October 1889. The government resolved to “yield” to the demands, reserving the Crown's rights and protesting that Article 12 of the Berlin Act entitled Portugal to mediation or arbitration. The orders went to Mozambique.3 sources3 sources

Portugal's two monarchist parties, the Progressives and the Regenerators, took turns in office. The Progressive prime minister, José Luciano de Castro, resigned, arguing that resisting a power like Britain would only cost Portugal more of its colonies. On 15 January António de Serpa Pimentel presented a Regenerator cabinet. Britain then refused mediation or arbitration in notes of 28 January and 21 March.2 sources2 sources

The anger of 12 January spread through the country. Every commercial association except Porto's, where British trade weighed heavily, cut back dealings with Britain, and shops put up signs reading “We neither buy from nor sell to the English”. Tailors dropped English fashion plates, boatmen refused to carry cargo to British ships, and the circus at the Coliseu dos Recreios swore off English performers. In the first week depositors pulled 3,000 contos out of British banks.1 source1 source

Lisbon renamed three streets after the explorers Paiva de Andrade, Vítor Cordon and António Maria Cardoso, and Évora gave its main street to Serpa Pinto. Crowds made their own changes: the Travessa dos Inglesinhos became the Travessa dos Ladrões, the Lane of Thieves. A Grande Subscrição Nacional, set up under a huge Pink Map on the side of the Teatro D. Maria II, collected money “from the capitalist to the beggar” to buy a warship.1 source1 source

The Republican Party, shut out of government, made the cause its own. Its papers, O Século and Os Debates, blamed the British alliance and the House of Bragança. On 11 February, when republicans tried to lay a wreath on the statue of Camões, lancers broke up the crowd amid a deafening din of whistles, and the day became the Campanha dos Apitos, the whistle campaign. At the election of 30 March three republicans, standing on a joint protest ticket with dissident Progressives, won seats in Lisbon. The government answered with decrees on 11 March, which dissolved Lisbon's city council, and on 7 April, the Lei das Rolhas or gag law, which silenced the revolutionary press and closed republican clubs.2 sources2 sources

Writers took sides in print. The Generation of 1870, the circle around the poet Antero de Quental that included Eça de Queirós, Oliveira Martins and Guerra Junqueiro, had long argued that Portugal needed modernising. Antero now presided over a Patriotic League of the North. Junqueiro, who had cursed “cynical England”, turned on the king in Finis Patriae, published in early April 1890.3 sources3 sources

Eça, a diplomat in England from 1874 to 1888, wrote a long letter for the Portuguese press that began by denouncing the English and went on to argue that the boycott was futile. Portugal had sold Britain goods worth 30,000 contos in 1888, he pointed out, against 4,920,750 contos of trade across the British Empire, so a boycott would hurt only Portugal. Hatred, he wrote, was a “negative sentiment which creates nothing and sterilises everything”.1 source1 source

The protest also produced a song. According to an account in the magazine O Occidente of 21 March 1890, the composer Alfredo Keil improvised a tune at a dinner with friends on 12 January and asked the poet and former naval officer Henrique Lopes de Mendonça to write the words. They called it A Portugueza, and it was handed out free as a printed leaflet.1 source1 source

According to Teixeira, it was first heard in public on 6 March 1890, at a benefit for the national subscription at the Teatro Avenida. Under the decrees of March and April it was banned. It returned to the streets that September in the protests against a new treaty, and the Porto rebels of 31 January 1891 took it as their march. After the Republic was proclaimed in October 1910, the Constituent Assembly made it the national anthem on 19 June 1911, and an official version of the music and words was fixed in 1957.3 sources3 sources

Talks moved to London, where the Portuguese envoy Barjona de Freitas signed a convention with Salisbury on 20 August 1890. Britain was to have the Shire Highlands and Mashonaland; Portugal would keep the Manica plateau and what Teixeira calls a kind of trans-African corridor along the Zambezi. When its terms reached the Lisbon papers on 22 August, the protests began again, and the full text followed on 30 August.2 sources2 sources

Parliament reopened on 15 September with Lisbon's shops shut and most factories idle. Police charges led to 53 arrests and left an 18-year-old worker, known as António Pardal, dead. Serpa Pimentel's government resigned, and the convention was never ratified. After 28 days without a cabinet, the elderly general João Crisóstomo formed one that belonged to no party.2 sources2 sources

The collapse suited Cecil Rhodes, by then prime minister of the Cape Colony. On 23 September he urged the Foreign Office to “drop this wretched treaty, under which we get nothing and give away a great deal”, complaining that it surrendered Manica, Gazaland and half the Barotse country.2 sources2 sources

A six-month modus vivendi, signed on 14 November by Salisbury and the Portuguese diplomat Luís de Soveral, froze the lines while the two sides talked. The final treaty was signed in Lisbon on 11 June 1891 by Petre and the foreign minister, the Count of Valbom, and ratifications were exchanged in London on 3 July. It was harsher than the first in places: Portugal gave up the Manica plateau, coveted by Rhodes's company, for a somewhat larger but far less valuable zone. This time the country accepted it quietly.3 sources3 sources

One line depended on an African king. The 1891 treaty put the Barotse kingdom on the British side but left its western limit open. When the two governments could not agree, they asked Victor Emmanuel III of Italy to decide what land King Lewanika had ruled as paramount chief on 11 June 1891.2 sources2 sources

His award of 30 May 1905 went people by people. The Balovale had paid tribute to Lewanika, but they had their own paramount chief and were not conquered until 1892, so most of their land counted as independent. The Bampukush, Bamarshi, Mambunda and Bamakoma were “absolutely independent”. Where no natural line could be found, the arbiter drew straight ones along the 22nd and 24th meridians and the 13th parallel.1 source1 source

On 31 January 1891 a republican revolt in Porto was crushed within the day. Petre wrote privately to Salisbury that “the Oporto affair was a most serious one” and had “revealed a source of weakness”.1 source1 source

The monarchy lasted another two decades, but its parties never recovered their credit. One had accepted the ultimatum, the other had signed the August treaty, and both had put down the protests. The republicans came out of 1890 as the party of the wounded nation. King Carlos and his heir were shot dead in Lisbon in February 1908, and the monarchy fell on 5 October 1910.2 sources2 sources

The national subscription did buy its warship. The cruiser Adamastor, built by the Orlando yard at Livorno, joined the Portuguese navy in 1897. On 4 October 1910 she fired the three shots that signalled the start of the revolution.1 source1 source

The treaty of 1891 drew the borders that still separate Mozambique from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Two European governments signed it. The Makololo, Ndebele, Shona and Barotse rulers whose lands it divided were not parties to it.3 sources3 sources

A Portuguesa is still the national anthem. The alliance with Britain survived too: in October 1899, during the Boer War, the two countries signed a declaration reaffirming the old treaties. But the memory of humiliation lasted. Writing in 1932, the Marquis of Lavradio said men of his generation still felt their faces redden at “the brutal blow of January 1890”.3 sources3 sources