Description

PORTUGAL-BRAZIL AND GREAT BRITAIN GOVERNMENTS.

 

Convenção entre os muito altos, e muito poderosos senhores o Principe Regente de Portugal, e elrei do Reino Unido da Grande Bretanha e Irlanda, para terminar as questões, e indemnizar as perdas dos vassallos Portuguezes no trafico de escravos de Africa: Feita em Vienna pelos Plenipotenciarios de huma e outra corte em 21 de Janeiro de 1815, e ratificada por Ambas.

 

Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Régia, 1815.

 

In 1807, Great Britain banned its involvement in the global slave trade (although it did not ban slavery itself within its colonies) and declared its intention to compel all other nations to do the same.  Placing emphasis on the Transatlantic slave trade, it commanded the Royal Navy to interdict suspected slave ships of all flags on the high seas and the take them to designated ports to be judged and, if found guilty of slaving, condemned.  Naturally, these unilateral actions enraged many countries, and despite the noble intent behind Britain’s actions, they were clearly against international law.

 

Portugal had the longest history of involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade that commenced around 1525 when it first transported captives from Africa to its colony of Brazil.  It was the first European nation to construct an archipelago of slaving posts along the Western coasts of Africa, from Cabo Verde to Angola, and for much of the time from the 16^th to the mid-19^th centuries, Portugal was the leading player the Transatlantic slave trade.

 

Largely due to Portugal’s efforts, between 3.6 and 5 million slaves were transported to Brazil, making it by far and away the largest destination for African slaves in the world.  Portugal was also active in transporting and selling slaves (both legally and illicitly) to Spanish, British and French colonies in the Americas, such that a large percentage of all the slaves in the New World originated from the Portuguese trade.

 

In November 1807, Portugal was invaded and briefly occupied by Napoleonic France.  This compelled the Prince Regent João (later King João VI) and his entire court to flee Lisbon for Rio de Janeiro, under British protection (Britain was Portugal’s oldest military-political ally).  This made Rio the capital of the Portuguese empire, turning the normal colonial-metropolitan paradigm on its head.  Britain was also largely responsible for liberating Portugal from French occupation, in 1809 (although Dom João and his government would remain based in Brazil until 1821).  Thus, Portugal owed Britain ‘big time’ for saving its skin.

 

Britain’s first ‘ask’ in return for coming to the aid of its oldest ally was the ‘Strangford Treaty’ (properly the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty of February 19, 1810), whereby (under duress) Portugal agreed to give Britain preferential trading access to the Brazilian market, while under Article X of the accord, Portugal agreed to restrict its slaving activities in Africa to its own colonies (ex. Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde and Guiné, plus a few West African forts), while also spouting various noble but practically meaningless platitudes about the evils of the slave trade.

 

In truth, Portugal had no intention of honouring its commitments to limit the slave trade per the Strangford Treaty.  Abolition was exceedingly unpopular in Brazil (at least amongst the white powerbrokers) and across the mercantile communities of Lisbon and Porto, while a serious abolitionist movement had not yet developed in the Lusophone world.  As such, Portuguese and Brazilian slavers continued to cross the Atlantic from Africa with full cargoes, bound for Brazil and other destinations, such as Cuba.

 

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was under orders to interdict suspected Transatlantic slaving vessels, including those flying the Portuguese flag that were accused of operating outside of the Portuguese colonies as proscribed in Article X of the Strangford Treaty.

 

As it happened, between 1810 and 1814, dozens of Portuguese slaving ships were seized by Britain on the high seas and condemned, leading Portuguese and Brazilian traders to lose vast sums, not to mention their peace of mind.  Britain maintained that the Strangford Treaty granted them the right to seize Portuguese slavers, while Portugal countered that the British had no way of knowing in advance if the ships they intercepted had violated Article X and, as such, their operations were inherently illegal.

 

The Congress of Vienna (November 1814 to June 1815), whereupon European powers convened to conclude the Napoleonic Wars, presented a rare opportunity for high-level diplomats to meet in-person to resolve a variety of issues not necessarily connected to the conflict.  Portugal’s plenipotentiaries in Vienna submitted the Memorandum of December 14, 1814 to Britain’s representative, formally protesting the Royal Navy’s seizure of their slaving vessels.  Indeed, Dom João and his court were livid over the matter, and the Memorandum caused the British government to believe that the intensifying diplomatic headache was ‘not worth it’, while spotting a new opportunity to advance the abolitionist cause.

 

The Present Work in Focus

 

Britain moved to repair Anglo-Portuguese relations by making amends to Portugal for seizing its slave ships in the Atlantic, a move codified by the present document.  In what could be called the ‘Convention to Indemnify Portuguese Slave Traders’ or the ‘Anglo-Portuguese Convention of January 21, 1815’ (being the present Convenção), Britain implicitly acknowledged that seizing Portuguese and Brazilian slave ships without having a clear pre-existing agreement with Portugal to do so was legally questionable, and so they offered generous compensation.  Britain hoped that not only would the Convention cool Portuguese-Brazilian outrage, but that it would create some goodwill that would see Portugal agree to additional anti-slave trade measures.

 

The Convention was signed in Vienna by the three Portuguese Plenipotentiaries, Pedro de Sousa Holstein, Count of Palmela (subsequently the Portuguese Foreign Minister and Prime Minister), António de Saldanha da Gama, Count of Porto Santo (the future Governor-General of Angola) and Joaquim Lobo da Silveira, Count of Oriola; and the British plenipotentiary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the diplomatically effective but politically controversial Foreign Minister (in office, 1812-22).

 

The Convention, as published here in full, was agreed in the names of King George III and Dom João and is printed in double-columns of parallel Portuguese-English text (as was custom for such treaties).  The preamble directly tackles the problem at hand:

 

“His Royal Highness the Prince Regent of Portugal, and His Britannic Majesty being equally desirous to terminate amicably all the doubts which have arisen relative to the Parts of the Coast of Africa, with which the Subjects of the Crown of Portugal, under the Laws of that Kingdom, and the Treaty subsisting with His Britannic Majesty, may lawfully carry on a Trade in Slaves; and whereas several Ships the Property of the said Subjects of Portugal have  been detained and condemned upon the alledged Ground of being engaged in an illicit Traffic in Slaves; and whereas His Britannic Majesty in order to give to His Intimate and Faithful Ally The Prince Regent of Portugal the most unequivocal proof of His friendship, and the regard He pays to His Royal Highness’s reclamations, and in consideration of Regulations to be made by the Prince Regent of Portugal for avoiding hereafter such doubts, is desirous to adopt the most speedy and effectual measures, and without the delays incident to the ordinary forms of Law, to provide a liberal indemnity for the Parties whose Property may have been so detained under the doubts as aforesaid”.

 

There then follows the Convention’s 3 articles, with Article I stating that Britain will pay Portugal £300,000 to create a fund “in discharge of claims for Portuguese Ships, detained by British Cruisers previous to the first day of June 1814, upon the alleged ground of carrying on an illicit Trade in Slaves”.  Article II affirms that “the said Sum shall be considered to be in full discharge of all claims arising out of Captures made previous the first day of June 1814; His Britannic Majesty renouncing any interference whatever in the disposal of this Money”.

 

Finally, Article III states that “The present Convention shall be ratified, and the Ratifications shall be exchanged in the space of five Months or sooner if possible”, and notes the accord as being signed at Vienna, January 21, 1815, for Portugal by Palmela, Saldanha and Lobo; and for Britain by Castlereagh.

 

There were two official Portuguese printings of the Anglo-Portuguese Convention of January 21, 1815, as was the custom for such treaties during the period when the Portuguese royal court was based in Brazil.  The Convention was published in both Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, by the respective branches of the government press.  In March 1808, shortly after the royal court arrived in Rio, the first enduring and legally sanctioned printing press in Brazil, the Impressão Régia, was established in Rio de Janeiro.  Initially, it was meant to (temporarily) replace the traditional Impressão Régia in Lisbon, which had been seized by the French, although this press was restored to Portuguese control in August 1808, upon the liberation of Lisbon.  Both branches of the Impressão Régia were to issue official documents, such as treaties, proclamations and laws, etc., with identical text.  However, due to the wartime scarcity of copper and paper in Portugal, the Lisbon imprints tended to be of a more rudimental and less decorative style, while the press in Rio had the advantage of ample resources.

 

The present work is the extremely rare Rio de Janeiro printing of the Convenção, which is, as is often the case, much less common than the Lisbon printing.  While the text in both versions is identical, the Rio edition is far more attractively printed, with the text more generously spaced (being 7 pages in length), with a title page bearing the Portuguese royal arms, whereas the text of the Lisbon edition is comparatively crammed and plain in style (being only 4 pages in length).  For comparison, please see a link to the John Carter Brown Library’s example of the Lisbon edition:

 

https://archive.org/details/convencoentreosm00grea/page/n3/mode/2up

 

The Significance of the Convention and Epilogue

 

As agreed, George III duly ratified the Anglo-Portuguese Convention of January 21, 1815, while Dom João signed it in Rio de Janeiro on June 8, 1815, so ensuring that the restitution funds were transferred.

 

Importantly, the Convention was the first of several Anglo-Portuguese accords that explicitly focused upon the Transatlantic slave trade, so setting a progressive dialogue on the subject between the two powers.  While the convention might at first seem like ‘backsliding’ on the path towards abolition, in that it gave slavers financial redress, it ended up advancing the cause of limiting the Transatlantic slave trade.  It set an important precedent that henceforth led Britain to change tack, from pursuing legally dubious unilateral action towards battling the trade through legitimate means following bilateral agreements.  Henceforth, Britain would use its awesome diplomatic weight to pressure slave trading powers to agree to treaties that progressively choked off the trade, sometimes in return for compensation or incentives.  This proved to be a more effective and amicable way of moving forward, instead of the illegal and rancorous unilateral course.

 

As part of the quid pro quo for the Convention compensating the Portuguese and Brazilian slavers, Britain gained an important concession from Portugal, being the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 22 January 1815, signed in Vienna the day after the Convention.  Here Portugal agreed to refrain from slave trafficking in Africa north of the Equator (i.e., along West Africa’s notorious ‘Slave Coast’).  Significantly, it still allowed Portugal to maintain its principal slaving route between Angola at Brazil.  However, the agreement did not include an enforcement mechanism.

 

To set the scene for future international anti-slave trade accords, British pressure led to the symbolically significant, albeit not legally consequential, final act of the Congress of Vienna, during which the eight leading European states (including Britain and Portugal) agreed upon the ‘Declaration of the Powers, on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, of the 8^th of February 1815’.  This statement condemned the slave trade as “repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality”, making direct reference to the public outcry against it in “all civilised nations”.

 

In 1817, the British Supreme Court confirmed that Westminster’s new consensual approach was wise, as it ruled that the interception of foreign slavers was legal only if Britain had previously signed an anti-slavery treaty with the appropriate country.

 

The Anglo-Portuguese Anti–Slave Trade Treaty of July 28, 1817 provided an enforcement mechanism for the January 22, 1815 treaty, and indeed any future treaties that banned elements of the slave trade.  Hereby, the Royal Navy could apprehend Portuguese slave ships illegally operating from Africa north of the Equator and escorting them to designated ports to be tried by ‘Mixed Commission’ courts’ (i.e., tribunals with both British and Portuguese judges).

 

Britain’s anti-slaving treaties with Portugal became invalid in Brazil once the later gained its independence in 1822.  For the next two decades, Britain struggled mightily to convince and bully both Portugal and Brazil to respectively clamp down of the Transatlantic slave trade, signing several treaties to the effect, but these were never effectively honoured or enforced.

 

It was not until the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon of July 3, 1842, that Portugal, under tremendous British pressure, agreed to entirely abstain from the Transatlantic slave trade.  Faced with very tight surveillance by the Royal Navy and even some Portuguese patrols, most remaining Portuguese slave traffickers soon found their efforts to be prohibitively expensive and dangerous, so leading to a terminal decline in the trade.

 

Faced with similar pressures, Brazil’s involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade went into terminal decline upon the passage of its Eusébio de Queirós Law (1850), which unambiguously prohibited such commerce.

 

Looking at the bigger picture, one can see that the Anglo-Portuguese Convention of January 21, 1815 played a key role in advancing progress towards the end of the Transatlantic slave trade.

 

A Note on Rarity

 

The present Rio de Janeiro printing of the Convention is extremely rare, as are many of the works of the Impressão Régia do Rio de Janeiro, which tended to be produced in only limited print runs, while they have a low survival rate, in good part due to Brazil’s tropical climate.  We can trace only a single institutional example, held by the Biblioteca Nacional do Brazil.  Moreover, we cannot trace any sales records, at least going back 30 years.

 

The Lisbon edition is also rare, although somewhat less so; we can trace only a single example as having appeared on the market, being one offered by an American dealer in 2012.

 

References: Biblioteca Nacional do Brazil: Livros Raros – 078,005,019 n. 001 ex.1; Ana Maria de Almeida CAMARGO and Rubens Borba de MORAES, Bibliografia da Impressão Régia do Rio de Janeiro, vol. I, no. 428; Cf. Peter C. HOGG, African Slave Trade and Its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Articles (2013), no. 3175 (p. 256) [but not specifying the edition]; Jaime RODRIGUES, “Neste tráfico não há lugar reservado”: traficantes portugueses no comércio de africanos para o Brasil entre 1818 e 1828, História (São Paulo), v. 36, e. 38 (2017), pp. 1-18; Randall LESAFFER, ‘Mixed Commissions, Mixed Blessing: On the British-Portuguese Anti–Slave Trade Treaty of 1817’ [online]: https://opil.ouplaw.com/page/618