Operation Dulcineia: Galvão's rebels seize the liner Santa Maria

In the early hours of 22 January 1961, men in khaki uniforms without insignia gathered on the promenade deck of the Portuguese liner Santa Maria. Some sat on the edge of the swimming pool, others leaned on the rail. The ship had left the Dutch island of Curaçao the previous evening and was steaming across the Caribbean towards Florida, its passengers asleep.2 sources2 sources

Their leader had sat up until 01:15 reading Missão em Portugal, a new book by Álvaro Lins, the Brazilian ambassador who had sheltered Humberto Delgado in his Lisbon embassy two years before. At 01:45, by his own account, Henrique Galvão gave the order to attack. One group, led by a Spanish former naval officer who called himself Jorge de Sottomayor, made for the radio room and the bridge. Galvão's group went for the officers' cabins on the second deck.2 sources2 sources

On the bridge the officer of the watch, third officer João José do Nascimento Costa, resisted and was killed. Galvão wrote only of a brief exchange of shots in the darkness of the bridge; José Mota Belo, whose 2009 study drew on declassified Portuguese files, says one of the Spanish group shot him. An apprentice officer, João António Lopes de Sousa, was hit by three bullets, and Cícero Campos Leite, the doctor who looked after the emigrants aboard, was reportedly shot in the back as he tried to get away. Time magazine reported that the takeover was over in ten minutes.2 sources2 sources

The Santa Maria, which the historian José Freire Antunes called the best ship in Portugal's merchant fleet, now belonged to a band of exiles who had come aboard with guns in their luggage. Most historians date the seizure to the night of 21 to 22 January. Time, which placed it on Monday morning, the Dutch Anefo photo archive and Ocean Liners Magazine put it on the 23rd, the day the news reached the world.5 sources5 sources

Portugal had been a dictatorship since a military coup on 28 May 1926. Under António de Oliveira Salazar the Estado Novo, or New State, kept power with censorship and a political police, the PIDE, while ruling a large empire in Africa and Asia. Its opponents at home were jailed or driven abroad, many of them to Brazil.3 sources3 sources

Galvão had once been one of the regime's own men. Born in Lisbon in 1895, he was an army officer who backed the 1926 coup, held posts in Angola, became the first director of the state radio, Emissora Nacional, in 1934 and organised the colonial sections of the great exhibitions of 1934 and 1940. He sat in the National Assembly as a deputy for Angola and rose to be a senior inspector of the colonial administration.2 sources2 sources

In 1947 he used the Assembly to attack the government's colonial policy, and that year he delivered a report on the “native problems” of Angola and Mozambique. It condemned the forced labour imposed on Africans and the profit some officials made from it. The report stayed confidential until the clandestine Communist Party printed it as a pamphlet in 1949.2 sources2 sources

His break became open in 1951, when he ran the campaign of the opposition presidential candidate Admiral Quintão Meireles. On 7 January 1952 the PIDE arrested him for plotting to overthrow the government. A military court gave him three years; a further trial in 1958, over pamphlets he had smuggled out of prison, took his combined sentence to 18 years by Mota Belo's reading of the court ruling, or 19 by the Museu do Aljube's count. He passed through Peniche, the Aljube and Caxias, and his friend Humberto Delgado was one of the few officers who visited him.3 sources3 sources

Moved under guard to the Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon, he walked out in the early hours of 16 January 1959 in a doctor's white coat and a false moustache. After four weeks in hiding he entered the Argentine embassy on 17 February dressed as a porter, carrying an empty crate past the PIDE men watching the door. In May he flew to Buenos Aires with a safe conduct, and in November 1959 he settled in Caracas.3 sources3 sources

Venezuela had about 60,000 Portuguese residents and many Spanish Republican exiles. Early in 1960 supporters of Delgado's movement and Spanish opponents of Franco founded the Directório Revolucionário Ibérico de Libertação, the DRIL, to bring down both Iberian dictatorships by armed action. Galvão signed for the Portuguese side on Delgado's behalf. The Spanish leaders were Xosé Velo Mosquera, a Galician teacher in whose flat the group was born, and José Fernández Vázquez, the “Comandante Sottomayor”, a veteran of the Republican navy.3 sources3 sources

It was an uneasy alliance. The Spanish members were Marxists who wanted the colonies freed; Galvão was an anti-communist who wanted democracy in Portugal, and the Portuguese Communist Party denounced the DRIL as adventurist. The group set off bombs in Madrid in February 1960, but it never acted on Portuguese soil.2 sources2 sources

Galvão said the idea came to him while reading a newspaper notice that the Santa Maria was due at La Guaira, the port of Caracas. A ship at sea counted as a piece of its nation's territory, so he asked why an uprising should not begin “on one of these floating pieces” of Portugal. He chose the Santa Maria because a small, plain ship would never have the same effect on world opinion. He named the plan after Don Quixote's lady: “we too were romantics fighting for our lady, Liberty”.1 source1 source

The plan, as Galvão later described it, was to take the ship after Curaçao and sail her secretly to Spanish Fernando Pó in the Gulf of Guinea, seize weapons and boats there, and then attack Luanda with local rebels to set up a government in Angola. He reckoned he needed 120 trained men and $30,000. The group never raised more than $10,000. After repeated postponements, Galvão had a heart attack on 10 December.1 source1 source

One event gave him hope. In October 1960 Jânio Quadros, whom Galvão had met in Caracas that April, won Brazil's presidential election. A friendly Brazil meant a possible refuge at the end.2 sources2 sources

On 20 January 1961 most of the commando boarded at La Guaira as third-class passengers. The weapons, taken apart and packed in three suitcases, passed with the help of a bribed customs officer and were hidden in cabin 358. The youngest man was 18. Galvão, whose name on a passenger list would have alarmed the crew, flew to Curaçao and came aboard there on 21 January. Mota Belo counts 26 men: 12 Portuguese, 13 Spaniards and a Venezuelan. Galvão's own book speaks of 24, of whom, he wrote, only the 14 oldest carried firearms.2 sources2 sources

The secret did not last. To save the two wounded men the rebels stopped off the British island of Saint Lucia on 23 January and put them ashore with several crew members. Galvão later wrote that a strictly military mind would have let them die; Sottomayor claimed that Galvão argued for exactly that, and Camilo Mortágua, Galvão's right-hand man, told the historian Heloísa Paulo that Galvão had opposed the landing. The second purser, Valentim dos Reis, landed with them, reached the British frigate HMS Rothesay and radioed the owners in Lisbon.2 sources2 sources

Now hunted, the rebels put up a sign in red letters on the forecastle, Santa Liberdade (Holy Liberty), and called the ship the first free piece of Portuguese territory. Lisbon asked its allies for help. The Pentagon sent destroyers and the Admiralty a frigate, and the foreign minister warned the Americans that the rebels might set up a government “of the Fidel Castro type” in Portuguese Africa. Portugal flew paratroopers to Sal in Cape Verde and to São Tomé and sent warships south.1 source1 source

On 24 January Galvão spoke to the world by radio, through Agence France-Presse, United Press and NBC. He said he had seized the ship in the name of Delgado, whom he called the president-elect of Portugal cheated of office by Salazar, declared hostilities against the regime and promised to land the passengers at the first neutral port that guaranteed their safety.2 sources2 sources

The next afternoon a US Navy patrol plane found the liner in the open Atlantic and passed on the fleet's demand that she sail to Puerto Rico. Galvão refused: he would not be treated as a pirate or take orders from a foreign country. That day, at his first press conference as president, John F. Kennedy was asked whether the Navy could board her.2 sources2 sources

Washington's attitude had shifted. According to the historian Luís Nuno Rodrigues, as summarised by Mota Belo, the State Department's lawyers argued that a ship taken by people already aboard was not a case of piracy; the administration also feared for the American passengers and did not want to be seen siding with a dictator. In London the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell questioned the hunt, and the Rothesay went back to Barbados, citing a shortage of fuel.1 source1 source

For Lisbon the answer was simple. The government denounced the “wicked act committed by this gang of pirates”, in Time's translation, pressed its allies to treat the seizure as piracy, and the censored Portuguese press printed only the official line. Franco's papers ABC, Ya and Arriba presented it as piracy and terrorism, the work of international communism directed from Cuba. A local weekly in Amares, near Braga, put it this way.4 sources4 sources

Galvão's answer was the opposite. In his account, no ship had attacked another; Portuguese citizens had risen against their government on a piece of Portuguese territory, and the action had only political aims. He asked the UN Secretary-General and the State Department to recognise his men as political rebels at war, and received no answer. From São Paulo, Delgado told Washington and London that the seizure “does not represent mutiny or piracy but only the seizure of Portuguese transport by Portuguese to fulfill Portuguese political objectives”.3 sources3 sources

The press made up its own mind. The French photographer Gil Delamare parachuted into the sea beside the ship for Paris Match. The exiled journalist Miguel Urbano Rodrigues radioed Galvão from Recife, hired a boat and, after a stormy night, reached the liner on 29 January. In Brazil the press baron Assis Chateaubriand, a friend of Salazar's regime, banned his papers from printing another line about it, for or against.3 sources3 sources

With the Americans shadowing him and no hope of reaching Africa unseen, Galvão turned towards Brazil. Juscelino Kubitschek, still president until 31 January, said the ship would be seized and the rebels detained if they entered a Brazilian port. Galvão waited for his successor.1 source1 source

At 06:45 on 31 January Rear Admiral Allen E. Smith came aboard about 50 miles off Recife and was received with military honours. Sixty-six journalists from NBC, CBS, Life, the New York Times, Paris Match and others had come out with him on the destroyer Gearing and waited in the ballroom. In three hours of talks Galvão promised not to harm the passengers and to free them as soon as he could. That same day Quadros was sworn in.2 sources2 sources

Delgado came out on 1 February in a fishing boat hired by reporters from Time and Life. He had known little of the operation, but he inspected the men like a commander-in-chief. Camilo Mortágua later said that Galvão had to calm Sottomayor and other Spaniards who wanted to throw the general overboard.1 source1 source

Aboard, tempers were short. The air conditioning had broken down at Caracas and food and water were rationed. Some passengers protested and demanded to leave at once. Galvão described a small disturbance broken up without force. Sottomayor later wrote of a revolt put down with rifle butts, and Miguel Urbano Rodrigues of weapons used to hold back an angry crowd of crew and passengers.2 sources2 sources

On 2 February the Santa Maria anchored at Recife. A Brazilian naval commander came aboard with marines and took charge. In front of the cameras the rebels filed into the lounge, laid their machine guns, rifles, pistols and knives on a sofa and went ashore by launch. Five crew members went with them. The next day Quadros signed a decree recording that the Brazilian navy had finished landing the passengers and crew, that the occupants had been granted asylum, and that the ship was placed at the disposal of the Portuguese government.3 sources3 sources

Most passengers were transferred to the sister ship Vera Cruz on 5 February and reached Lisbon on the 14th. The Santa Maria left Recife on 7 February and on the 16th tied up at the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos quay in Lisbon, dressed with flags, before a large crowd. Salazar came to meet her. A Lisbon court later tried the rebels in their absence, for the killing of Nascimento Costa among other crimes, and sentenced Galvão to 22 years and Delgado, Sottomayor and Velo to 19 each.1 source1 source

The episode did not end with the ship. Foreign reporters had flown to Luanda in case the rebels made for Angola. On 4 February, with the press still in town, armed men attacked the prisons of Luanda, the start of the armed struggle in Angola. In Luís Nuno Rodrigues's reading, the Portuguese authorities then tried to tie the Luanda attacks to the Santa Maria and to an international communist plot. The cotton growers of the Baixa de Cassanje had already risen that January.2 sources2 sources

The rest of 1961 went no better for Salazar. In April the defence minister, General Júlio Botelho Moniz, tried and failed to push him out. In November Hermínio da Palma Inácio's commando hijacked a TAP airliner to drop leaflets over Portuguese cities. In December India took Goa, Daman and Diu, the subject of a separate article in this series, and on the night of 31 December rebels attacked the barracks at Beja, which also has its own article.2 sources2 sources

The DRIL itself fell apart within months. Galvão and Delgado quarrelled over who led the opposition, and most of the Spaniards went back to Venezuela. Galvão stayed in Brazil, watched by the São Paulo political police despite his anti-communism. He died poor and ill in a São Paulo hospital on 25 June 1970, a month before Salazar. His remains were brought back to Lisbon in 1991.2 sources2 sources

The hijacking freed no one and toppled nothing. But for twelve days a regime that depended on silence was on front pages and television screens across the world, and its oldest ally, Britain, and its NATO partner, the United States, declined to treat the rebels as pirates. In the reading of historians cited by Mota Belo, the affair exposed how isolated Salazar had become; the historian Dawn Linda Raby judged that the affair did more to draw international attention to the Portuguese resistance than anything else in those years, while its effect inside Portugal was less clear.2 sources2 sources

Not everyone in the opposition agreed. José Freire Antunes found that the affair created no new momentum at home, where the Communist Party rejected Galvão's direct action. Heloísa Paulo shows how the memoirs still compete for credit: Galvão's book, written in the heat of the moment, left out comrades he had fallen out with, while Sottomayor's memoir sets out to restore the Spanish role that Galvão's fame had eclipsed.2 sources2 sources