In 1826, a correspondent who identified himself as the amante da verdade (the lover of truth) addressed an impassioned editorial to the newspaper, O Universal, published in the capital city of the province of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His diatribe critiqued another journalist for his political support for a joint Anglo-Brazilian company that sought to open navigation along the Doce River from Minas Gerais to the Brazilian coast. The amante insisted that ‘the Doce River, our Rhône, should not be handed over to foreigners'.Footnote 1
Rhetoric aside, the Rhône and the Doce have little in common. The Doce was not one of Brazil's very largest rivers, nor were its banks heavily populated. The Doce did share some of the Rhône's navigational shortcomings, including seasonal flooding, winding stretches, and relatively steep drops in elevation that contributed to dangerous rapids and swift currents. Neither river would realise its commercial or hydroelectric potential until well into the twentieth century.Footnote 2 However, this editorialist probably knew little of the Rhône's actual qualities and instead invoked it as a potent symbol of French nationality and potential source of economic and social progress. In so doing, he suggested the Doce River should be regarded similarly in post-independence Brazil.
This article examines initiatives to develop commercial navigation on the Doce River, a waterway that begins in landlocked Minas Gerais and flows eastward to the Atlantic coast in Espírito Santo. While the river's potential had long excited the imagination of Portuguese officials during the colonial period, more ambitious efforts to develop river navigation began only in 1819, towards the end of Dom João VI's reign. These came to fruition in the Rio Doce Company, a joint British-Brazilian venture that was incorporated in the mid-1830s and disbanded in 1849.Footnote 3
While the venture ultimately failed, its trajectory reveals much about the barriers to infrastructural development that obtained in the early decades of the post-independence Brazilian Empire. Capital-intensive undertakings in the interior were complex and their histories cannot be reduced simply to obstructionist state policy or foreign dependency. While these factors indeed played significant roles, challenging topography, credit scarcity, fragile supply lines, and difficulties in effecting technology transfer were also relevant. Given the rugged mountainous terrain of the Brazilian interior, significant investment was required to improve rivers or build roads or railways. Although reducing transportation costs was essential to the expansion of domestic agriculture, the government did not devote much public funding to this goal. This was due, in part, to that fact that there were few resources to distribute. At the time, the dominant and most efficient and politically expedient form of revenue collection was the taxation of imports and exports. This policy translated into a relatively modest tax base, which, in turn, also restricted the amount that the Brazilian government could borrow abroad. The private sector confronted a regulatory environment that discouraged corporate ventures and offered little to no liability protection for investors. Banking was underdeveloped and access to impersonal sources of credit was correspondingly scarce.Footnote 4
In addition to domestic considerations, this article also addresses the role played by British capital and entrepreneurs. While Stephen Haber and Herbert Klein have convincingly challenged the notion that British intervention decisively contributed to post-independence Brazil's economic dependency on a macroeconomic level, there are comparatively few detailed case studies of complex British firms for the pre-1850 era.Footnote 5 The example of the Rio Doce Company demonstrates that the fortunes of a single firm could be derailed by political opposition within Brazil, even within a broader context where Great Britain wielded considerable diplomatic and commercial clout. I also provide a brief comparative analysis of additional regional transportation projects to further elucidate the relative significance of domestic and international factors to infrastructural development.
Finally, this article contributes to our understanding of economic history in Brazil for an era that has received relatively little scholarly attention. Interest in the second half of the nineteenth century is more robust for obvious reasons: the legalisation of limited liability corporations in 1849, the creation of a commercial code in 1850, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1850, and the reorganisation of the Banco do Brasil in 1851 all created more propitious conditions for business development.Footnote 6 It should not follow, however, that the multiple impediments of the immediate post-independence era should preclude its study. Nearly two decades ago, historian Nathaniel Leff called for less emphasis on the slave-driven export economy, and more focus on the Brazilian interior, the nineteenth century, and the domestic agricultural sector.Footnote 7 This article seeks to do precisely that.
Why the Doce River? Colonial Antecedents
The Doce River first captured the imagination of Portuguese authorities in the late colonial period. They saw it as key to the economic revival of Minas Gerais, a region where gold had been discovered in the 1690s. By the 1740s, gold yields were in decline and the economy had shifted to farming, ranching and craft production oriented primarily towards domestic markets.Footnote 8 High transportation costs limited the range of markets for low cost, high bulk products. A single authorised royal road stretched from the mineiro Footnote 9 capital, Vila Rica, to Brazil's capital city, Rio de Janeiro. The São Francisco river basin, curving north-east towards the Bahian coast, also served as a conduit for trade. The Doce, as well as the Mucuri, Jequitinhonha, and Pardo rivers, flowed from the mineiro heartland to the Atlantic, but these passed through the so called ‘forbidden lands', an area where the Crown prohibited settlement and road building in an effort to restrict contraband gold trade. The presence of native peoples, reputedly cannibals, served as a deterrent to smugglers and to permanent settlement by the Portuguese.Footnote 10
By the mid-eighteenth century, mineiros began looking eastward as a potential site of future mineral bonanzas and as an area of unclaimed fertile lands. However, the east was densely forested and mountainous, making road construction and maintenance both labour intensive and expensive. Torrential rains fell between December and February, transforming primitive trails and dirt roads into impassable, mucky, quagmires.Footnote 11 The captaincy's rivers typically accommodated only shallow-draft dugout canoes that could accommodate rapids, waterfalls, and seasonably variable depths. During the rainy season, many canoes were lost in the swift, rain-swollen rivers. Overland trade by mule train was slow, small-scale, and expensive.
Beginning in the 1760s, the Crown began to authorise settlement of the Doce River basin in discrete areas under the control of military authorities. In the absence of reliable, safe, year-round transportation, however, there were few takers. Supply lines were tenuous and the prospect of indigenous resistance was unappealing. The Portuguese government coerced convicts and vagrants to populate the eastern frontier but most quickly deserted the area. Those who stayed hoped to strike it rich by discovering new gold deposits. Agrarian producers faced transportation costs to coastal markets that exceeded the value of the foodstuffs that they produced.
It is no wonder, then, that authorities looked towards rivers as a panacea for their transportation woes. Multiple rivers crisscrossed the province and a few, like the Doce, extended to the Atlantic Coast. These watercourses had been associated with real and imagined wealth during the colonial era.Footnote 12 Some believed that the confluence of the Cuieté and Doce Rivers was the site of the first gold discoveries in Brazil. However, the Doce was as foreboding as the lure of fabulous mineral wealth was tempting. Only the most skilled boatmen, typically piloting dugout canoes measuring up to 12 metres in length, could traverse it successfully along its entire length.Footnote 13 Crossing the bar at the river's mouth was notoriously tricky and inspired trepidation even among experienced navigators. During years of heavy rainfall, the high water level of the Doce could increase by as much as 25 feet.Footnote 14 As the waters receded, swampy areas provided breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitos.
The Doce originates in the foothills of the Mantiqueira and Espinhaço mountain ranges near the historical capital of Minas Gerais, Vila Rica (Ouro Preto). From there it flows approximately 850 kilometres to the coast, with a total elevation drop of 1,200 metres. Its course curves to the North before descending to the south/south-east. From its source to the eastern mineiro border, at least eight major stretches of rapids and waterfalls interrupt the river's course.Footnote 15 During the period under study, crewmen had to disembark and guide their dugouts from the river's bank using cables or tough vines to navigate stretches of rough water, or portage over short stretches.
At the border of the two captaincies, the confluence of the Guandú and Doce Rivers form a formidable stretch of rapids named Escadinhas, which extends some 10–15 kilometres.Footnote 16 Below that point, the Doce might accommodate shallow-draft steam vessels but still presented obstacles including over 100 small islands, tricky currents, variable depths, and shifting banks.Footnote 17 The river's bar posed the greatest hazard. Typical were the words of one official recorded in 1790, ‘its mouth can only handle canoes and even these are obliged to wait for the tides. Many canoes have run aground. The bar is changeable, conforming to the inundations of the river, however once passed, it is deep enough to accommodate ships'.Footnote 18 Antônio Pires da Silva Pontes, a governor of Espírito Santo and one of the river's most ardent boosters, attributed his safe passage over the bar in 1800 to his possession of relics of the venerable Padre Anchieta, as well as the ‘devotion that these people have for that missionary’.Footnote 19 To render this course navigable would require the construction of diversion canals and the removal of large stones and other impediments.
Governor Antônio Pires da Silva Pontes, who hailed originally from Mariana, MG, saw the Doce River basin as the means to revive the mineiro economy. He proposed the distribution of royal land grants (sesmarias) and expansion of Crown-regulated timber extraction to develop the region. Following his inspection tour of the Doce River in 1800, he identified strategic points for military detachments and customs houses to limit native attacks and contraband respectively. Pontes aggressively augmented fortifications along the Rio Doce and throughout the interior, especially Porto de Souza (present-day Baixo Guandú) on the border with Espírito Santo.Footnote 20Sesmarias were reinstated in Minas Gerais in 1808 and in Espírito Santo in 1814. Tax exemptions for settlers in the Doce region followed in 1816.Footnote 21 In the absence of viable transportation routes to the coast, the Portuguese population remained low. The principal settlement of the Espírito Santo interior, Linhares boasted only 36 households and a population of 234 in 1816. Military forts, housing from five to 25 soldiers each, were spaced a day or two's journey apart. Indigenous peoples, identified mostly as Puris and Botocudos, vastly outnumbered settlers with whom they maintained an uneasy and fragile truce.Footnote 22
Companies
In 1819, a group of landowners from Espírito Santo sought Crown approval for the formation of a commercial society to introduce regular navigation services on the Doce River.Footnote 23 They offered shares at 200$000 mil-réis (approximately £50) each during a six-month period to both national and foreign investors.Footnote 24 Four directors would be elected to serve five-year terms from among the largest shareholders. The society pledged to construct at least eight way stations along the river for travellers, to construct roads and canals, and to clear obstructions within the river. It requested of the Crown, eight land grants measuring one square league each (36 km2) upon which these way stations would be located. The land would be used to grow crops, maintain pastures, and build warehouses. The society also received a ten-year tax exemption on goods transported along the river as well as an exemption from the dizimo, a 10 per cent tax paid on agricultural produce. Its revenues would come from rentals, freights and fees for access to warehouses and other facilities. The associates envisioned a finite partnership of 20 years, at the end of which all of the property would be sold and the profits divided proportionately among the shareholders. Investors would receive periodic dividends, assuming a profit was realised.
The society never came to fruition.Footnote 25 The 640 associates pledged to purchase 4,510 shares, which would have amounted to working capital of 902 contos de reis, or approximately £225,500 in 1819.Footnote 26 It is likely that local investors were unable to raise the necessary capital. The price of an individual share was significant, equal to the minimum annual income necessary to enjoy voting rights in Brazil as stipulated in the Constitution of 1824. Moreover, the statutes required investors to commit their investment capital for the 20-year life of the association. In the event of a death, heirs were not permitted to sell the shares before the dissolution of the company.
Additionally, provincial governors of Espírito Santo had begun to build roads into the interior as an alternative to river navigation. In 1812, Governor Rubim had a road built connecting the capital cities of Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais. The cost was relatively modest, consisting of tools, food and meagre salaries to pay a military engineer and 57 impressed soldier-labourers who wielded ‘axes and scythes, cutting through forests and mountains’. The road was dubbed the Estrada do Rubim and renamed São Pedro de Alcântara after independence. Another road followed in 1816, stretching from the outer edge of settlement along the Santa Maria River to the Pardo River, fortified by military installations spaced a day's journey apart.Footnote 27 However, these roads quickly fell into disrepair rendering them nearly impassable, especially in the rainy season.
A second attempt to develop a navigation company was proposed in 1824 by Alexandre Carneiro Leão, the youngest son of one of the most prominent merchant families of Rio.Footnote 28 He favoured the use of foreign capital to pay for machinery, skilled labourers, and foreign engineers. Johann Jakob Sturz (1800–1877), a Prussian consul then resident in Brazil, also endorsed the scheme. Sturz had revised statutes drawn up in 1825, which added the inducement of exclusive mining rights along the Doce River and its tributaries to prospective investors. The Imperial government approved Sturz's proposal on 6 May. The new statutes recapitulated much of what had been negotiated in 1819 but added one significant change. The company directorate would be based in London, not Rio, effectively excluding representation by Brazilian shareholders.Footnote 29
Public opinion about the scheme diverged wildly in Brazil and the United Kingdom. Articles in the London papers were replete with fulsome predictions and factual inaccuracies about the company's prospects. One article, offered the following lyrical description:
The whole of this interesting district is watered by considerable rivers … Most of them are auriferous, and on their margins smiling valleys, of the most inviting kind, are seen to extend. Lofty and luxuriant forests bound them on every side, and frequently cover the mountains to their very summit. They abound in game, and afford ship timber and ornamental woods of the most variegated and choice kind. Gums and resins, with medicinal and other properties, promise to reward the industry of man, although now untouched and unlooked-for. The indigenous fruits are in the highest perfection, and most of those of European or Asiatic origin, in richness and flavour exceed the parent stock. Culinary vegetables and roots … may be planted and gathered every day in the year. The extremes of summer heat are unknown, except immediately on the coast, and there the air is refreshed by cooling breezes. In the Interior, the whole year is a continued Spring. Not a day passes on which the business of cultivation may not be forwarded. The uninterrupted verdure, the vivid and richly variegated colours of the flowers, adorning the ground and frequently tinging the summit of the loftiest trees, which appear to change their form and aspect every month, fill the most insensible minds with astonishment and admiration.Footnote 30
This exaggerated prose was typical of the giddy boosterism that prevailed in England during Latin America's early independence period. British investors were swept up in a wave of speculative investment in bonds and enterprises of dubious merit, Gregor MacGregor's fictional country of Poyais being perhaps the most egregious example. Between 1822–5, seven emerging Latin American nations, Brazil among them, negotiated some £20 million in loans. Some 624 companies were formed to promote transportation, mining and other enterprises. These firms were nominally capitalised at approximately £372 million, although only £17 million actually was advanced. By 1827, Latin American governments began defaulting on their payments and only one-fourth of those companies had survived.Footnote 31
Just as the Doce River Company was attempting to take off, the investment bubble had begun to deflate. Additionally, journalists and politicians in Minas Gerais vociferously objected to the granting of liberal economic concessions to foreigners. Leading the opposition were mineiros Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos (1795–1850) and Francisco Pereira de Apolônia (1743–1831), both then serving on the provincial governing council. Vasconcelos, then a relatively green 30 year-old jurist, was just beginning what would become a distinguished public career. At the time, he identified as a liberal with a preference for decentralised government. His strident opposition to extending monopoly privileges to British capitalists contributed to his growing political visibility. He and Apolônia waged an active campaign in the Rio and mineiro papers to ensure the measure's repeal.Footnote 32 To this end, Vasconcelos effectively used the mineiro newspaper, O Universal, of which he was the principal editor.
Apolônia argued that the Brazilian government had made river trade possible by waging a long and costly war against the region's Indians since 1808. Why then, should a British board of directors reap the benefits and the mineiros be left ‘with no compensation whatsoever for their sweat, substance, and blood spilled in the Doce River?’Footnote 33 Vasconcelos concurred that peace had been attained at the cost of ‘rivers of mineiro blood, excessively high sums of money, and a thousand other extraordinary sacrifices’. He downplayed the river's serious navigational shortcomings, instead blaming the ‘intrepid and resentful Botocudo’ as the main impediment. He also protested the lack of deadlines or penalties should the company fail to provide promised improvements. Vasconcelos predicted that the British investors would strip the river basin of its mineral wealth and fail to deliver infrastructure, or they would build the proposed canals and then gouge Brazilians on freight charges. This lose-lose scenario would be exacerbated further by creating a London-based directorate. Vasconcelos could see no means by which Brazilian shareholders could meaningfully participate in either company governance or fiscal oversight. He feared that wealthier Europeans would purchase the majority of shares and come to dominate the board of directors. Under such terms, he believed that few Brazilians would be willing to invest, effectively rendering the company wholly British in its shareholder base. He favoured a return to the 1819 statutes, which allowed for the possibility of foreign investment but did not cede control to foreign capitalists.Footnote 34
Less temperate Anglophobic screeds also appeared in O Universal under nativist pseudonyms like the ‘Amante da Verdade’ previously cited. These included, ‘O Amigo do Presente’ (Friend of the Status Quo),Footnote 35 ‘O Botocudo’ (an indigenous ethnonym),Footnote 36 ‘O Itacolomi’ (an iconic mountain peak overlooking Ouro Preto),Footnote 37 and ‘o Anti-Paraopebano’.Footnote 38 The last was a reference to a pro-British editorialist known as ‘O Paraopebano’ (the man from Paraopeba) who criticised Vasconcelos and his positions in the Rio-based newspaper, Diario Fluminense.Footnote 39 The Paraopebano may have been Manuel Jacinto Nogueira da Gama, the Marquês de Baependi (1765–1847), a senior military man and prominent statesman who hailed originally from São João del Rei, MG.Footnote 40 Alternately, some scholars have suggested that the Paraopebano was none other than Vasconcelos himself, a polemical alter-ego invented to raise awareness about the British question.Footnote 41
The Imperial government rescinded the decree of 6 May on 12 August 1825, which should have put an end to this acrimonious debate.Footnote 42 However, invective continued to spew forth from O Universal's pages on a regular basis through October, and re-emerged periodically through 1829.Footnote 43 The Paraopebano was called ‘a monster, a Cain’,Footnote 44 and ‘one of the most dangerous revolutionaries to appear in our day’.Footnote 45 A mock dialogue between the Paraopebano and the Devil ran in three successive issues.Footnote 46 José Pedro Dias de Carvalho, a young protégé of Vasconcelos, furthered the debate by launching the short-lived Patriota Mineira in 1825; its sole purpose seems to have been to discredit the Paraopebano and to placate O Universal's editors.Footnote 47
Curiously, this press battle dealt very little with the broader context of Anglo-Brazilian relations. After British ships had successfully escorted the court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, following Napoleon's invasion of Portugal, Dom João VI had opened Brazil's ports and had granted Great Britain most favoured trading status in a generous commercial treaty in 1810.Footnote 48 When British Prime Minister George Canning negotiated Portuguese recognition of Brazilian sovereignty in 1825, Brazil was required to pay onerous war reparations to Portugal, was obligated to renew the 1810 treaty, and was to honour and intensify prior commitments made by Portugal to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. For some Brazilian statesmen, these impositions reduced Brazil to little more than a British protectorate.Footnote 49 Within Minas Gerais specifically, British businessmen had begun investing in the revitalisation of gold mines in 1825. These companies tended to hire their own countrymen for skilled jobs and rented slaves for menial tasks.Footnote 50 Brazilian journalists saw only the benefits to British investors and neglected to consider how multiplier effects from mining might benefit the free Brazilian population.
Yet these broader diplomatic and economic issues were not discussed explicitly in the acrimonious exchange between O Universal editorialists and O Paraopebano. Ongoing and increasingly one-sided editorialising in subsequent years, suggests that the primary purpose was to stir public opinion. The Paraopebano's scepticism regarding the Doce River's commercial viability, moreover, would be vindicated in the paper that so decried him. An 1828 article written by Guido Tomás Marlière, the Military Commander and Indian Director of the Doce River Basin, described the difficulties inherent in obtaining technological inputs from abroad. He documented a delay of seven months in the delivery of eight tons of metal parts for an iron foundry located on the Piracicaba River, not far from Itabira. The machinery languished for months on the coast, ‘perhaps out of fear of pirates or a lack of small vessels’. Marlière's soldiers then had to wait out the rainy season before crossing the Doce River's bar and escorting the cargo to its destination.Footnote 51 Statistics published in O Universal in 1831 showed that over a 20-month period, a scant 30 canoes had plied the Doce River from Minas Gerais to the coast, hardly a bustling trade.Footnote 52
The Doce River Company Reborn
In 1832, Johann Jakob Sturz revived the idea of a British-Brazilian partnership to develop navigation along the Doce River. Sturz's involvement with Doce River development was embedded within a more ambitious trajectory as a facilitator of transnational business relations, technological innovation, and promotion of European immigration to the Americas.Footnote 53 Sturz had published a book in English about Brazil's economic potential and the merits of favourable trade agreements with Great Britain.Footnote 54 His wife was English and it is likely that her connections smoothed his entry into British business circles.Footnote 55 Sturz helped to establish coastal mail delivery in Brazil, organising the purchase of five steam packets from Naylor Brothers of Liverpool.Footnote 56 He also is credited with the issue of Brazil's first postage stamps in 1843, the first American nation to produce them.Footnote 57
Sturz's initial agreement included extensive land grants bordering the Doce River, the right to levy tolls on any roads, railroads, canals or bridges that the company built, a ten-year tax exemption, and exclusive rights to steam transportation along the river. To British investors, Sturz presented these terms and five overly optimistic Brazilian engineering reports, which minimised the number and extent of the river's non-navigable portions.Footnote 58 A group of businessmen met in London in July 1833, and based upon Sturz's fulsome assessment, they presented a formal prospectus for the ‘The Rio Doce Company’, to the Foreign Stock Market. They proposed capitalisation at £250,000 divided into 10,000 shares of £25 each.Footnote 59 Investors were restricted to a minimum of five and a maximum of 100 shares. Of the total, 2,500 shares were reserved for Brazilian subscribers who had six months from the publication of the prospectus in London to purchase them. Unsold shares would then revert to the London directorate, which would give preference to the original investors.
Initially, investors were to pay a deposit of £2 per share and the remainder would be paid instalments at intervals determined by the directors. A directorate in London was to consist of a president, vice president, ten directors and three auditors. Directors had to own a minimum of 25 shares, and auditors, ten. Officers were to serve three-year terms with the possibility of re-election.
The company was founded on 15 August and within a day, the shares reserved for British investors had sold out and within a few months they were being offered at a premium.Footnote 60 A public announcement was made in the Rio papers on 1 January 1834 and in O Universal on 31 January 1834.Footnote 61 Brazilian investors had until 14 February to purchase shares from agents located in Rio de Janeiro and in the mineiro cities of Ouro Preto, Sabará, and Serro. Recognising that Brazilians had less access to liquid capital, the minimum number of shares was reduced to two upon payment of a deposit of £2. These accommodations were insufficient for mineiros living in the Doce region itself, as is reflected in an angry petition from the municipal council of Itabira that complained that the deadline had passed before receiving notice of the offer.Footnote 62 Investors from Espírito Santo seem to have been excluded as well, unlike previous agreements, which explicitly solicited their investment and shared governance.
However, the leading mineiro newspaper, O Universal, softened its position with respect to the company compared to its position a decade previously. This is curious given that the new statutes were even more exclusionary with respect to participation by Brazilian investors. Instead, writers seemed pleased that the British found the political climate in Brazil stable enough to risk investing abroad. Editorialists predicted that enterprises like the Rio Doce Company might also cement friendships with foreign nations and perhaps inspire British immigration.Footnote 63 One journalist gushed, ‘We will receive them, not as foreigners, but as brothers, who come to embellish our country, augment the value of our lands, facilitate our transport, increase our exports, disseminate among us useful knowledge which it is impossible for us to possess perfectly, having had only three centuries to establish ourselves in small numbers in a vast, uninhabited Empire’.Footnote 64 An article in the mineiro paper O Astro de Minas, opined that it would not be in the interest of a ‘refined nation like the British, to carry out the crazy project of conquest, against its own interests, which would be better served in free trade with a free country’. The author hoped that British immigrants would introduce modern agricultural methods as opposed to ‘Africans, which serve only for our ruin’. He also observed that Brazil lacked the capital reserves to carry out such an ambitious project.Footnote 65
This about-face on the part of the mineiro press may reflect Brazil's somewhat more consolidated political and economic status within South America and a desire to affirm its respectability in British circles. In 1825, Brazil had still been negotiating recognition as an independent nation, for which it needed Britain's aid, and was embarking on a costly war (1825–18) over control of the Cisplatine province (present-day Uruguay). Close to a decade later, Brazil was one of the few South American nations to consistently service its foreign debt and its sovereignty was firmly established abroad. Pedro I had abdicated the throne in 1831 and had died in 1834. The child heir to the throne was American-born, and a Liberal-leaning Regency oversaw the government. While a politically conservative and centralising reaction known as the Regresso would develop by the end of the decade, and Bernardo de Vasconcelos would be one of its prominent leaders, this movement was still in the future as the Rio Doce Company entered negotiations in 1834.
With financial commitments in place, the British directors sent an expedition team led by civil engineer, John Humphreys, to explore the river. Humphreys specialised in steam navigation, had been credited with its inauguration in Germany, and had a number of ship design innovations to his credit.Footnote 66 The team arrived in Rio de Janeiro in April 1834 and then proceeded by canoe from Minas Gerais down the Xopotó, Piranga and Doce Rivers until they reached the ocean.Footnote 67 Humphreys ‘measured the distance traversed by taking the length of the strokes of the canoe, and the number of strokes. He took all the angles, and a large number of soundings; the document was comparable with a military sketch map’.Footnote 68
To his dismay, Humphreys discovered that the river was nearly twice as long as Sturz's initial estimate and obstacles to navigation exceeded Sturz's reporting in number and scope. Humphreys found that only limited portions of the river were navigable and by much smaller vessels than Sturz had claimed. He also highlighted the dangers posed by the bar. Humphreys argued that additional privileges had to be negotiated with the Brazilian government, proportionate to the greater costs and risks faced by the company. He returned to England in May 1835 to present his report and detailed maps. The Directors, in turn, communicated their concerns to the General Assembly in Rio and they re-entered negotiations.Footnote 69
Revisions to the contract would take years to hammer out. The first draft presented before the Chamber on 30 July 1835 offered 40 years' exclusive navigation rights for steamships on the Doce River, its tributaries, and to the coastal ports of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia. The company was empowered to charge tolls on any canals, bridges or roads it might build and was to receive extensive land grants along the river to attract foreign colonists. All machinery, including ships, was to be imported duty-free for the first five years, and no taxes would be levied on agricultural products for seven years. Any infrastructure could be sold to the Brazilian government after 40 years and would revert to the government without compensation after 80 years. Company vessels were also obliged to transport government correspondence free of charge.Footnote 70
One of the commissioners to draft this initial proposal was none other than Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, the most strident opponent of British investment in the Doce River in 1825. He bargained hard and a modified decree passed in January 1836 included restrictions on freight rates and penalties for interruption of services.Footnote 71 The company also had to bear partial costs for land surveying, registration fees and subsistence costs for soldiers. Stiff fines would be imposed for not opening regular transportation services within prescribed deadlines.Footnote 72 An additional round of revisions produced the decree of 8 August 1836. The company's obligation to provide steam vessels was reduced to the stretch between the coast and Escadinhas. It retained its 40-year monopoly on steam transport and could levy fees on any vessels using their facilities except for dugout canoes below 3,200 pounds cargo weight. Finally, while the company was still responsible for settling a minimum number of European colonists along the basin, they did not have to replace them should they die once in Brazil!Footnote 73
With the contractual details finally hammered out, a second expedition set out from London in 1837. It shipwrecked on the bar, losing specialised equipment and instruments as well as basic provisions. Replacements from England were lost in another wreck upriver at Escadinhas. Three of four officers abandoned the project due to ill health, frustration, and low morale. Delays also occurred on the bureaucratic front. Although the contract was signed in November 1838, the government delayed ratification until delivery of the first steam vessel to Brazil. Moreover, some of the lands promised to the company had been claimed in a speculative land grab that dated from the prior attempt to create a navigation company in the 1820s.Footnote 74 By 1839, some British investors declined to make additional payments, thereby abandoning 1,500 of the company's 10,000 shares. Given the dismal performance of so many British investments in Latin America in the 1820s, they had grounds for pessimism.
Despite these setbacks, an iron steam vessel, custom built for the Doce River, finally left England in June 1840, laden with mechanics, machinery and tools necessary to construct a sawmill in Brazil.Footnote 75 A corps of artisans was sent to cut and load timber, clear land, improve the river, and colonise its banks. The company planned to build additional small steamers to serve the interior mining districts once necessary river improvements were completed.Footnote 76 The inaugural vessel was constructed to navigate in both shallow river conditions and the open seas. It had a capacity of 211 tons, measured, 136 feet in length, 18 feet in breadth and a hold depth of nearly ten feet. It was equipped with two 30 horsepower engines, an innovative two-part sliding keel, and an elaborate system of compasses. When launched from Southampton in May 1839, she drew only 25 inches of water.Footnote 77 Stability was enhanced by the keel design, which offered greater ease and precision in steering.Footnote 78 The iron vessel was described as ‘a perfect model of her class’.Footnote 79 She arrived at the mouth of the Doce River on 15 August after an uneventful passage.Footnote 80 Triumphantly, a Southampton paper reported the steamer's successful navigation of the bar, claiming it was ‘the only vessel that ever crossed the bar at the mouth of that river, of her size, and with a north-east wind’. Allegedly, the local pilot absconded in fright, leaving Mr. Humphreys and the British captain to operate the specialised keel system to achieve a smooth, uneventful crossing.Footnote 81
Troubles followed this euphoric moment. The company's main facility had been built on a swampy site and many expedition members sickened and died from mosquito-borne fevers. They had to rebuild at a healthier location, incurring still more delays and costs. The ship then proceeded to Rio de Janeiro in March 1841 to finalise the contract. A change in ministry and the celebration of various saints' days resulted in an additional two-month delay.
Negotiations fell apart when the Brazilian government attempted to impose upon the British-built ship the sisa, a 15 per cent tax customarily assessed on transfers of property from foreign to domestic ownership.Footnote 82 The company's engineer was incensed. In his estimation, it expressly violated their contract, which allowed importation of company goods tax-free for a five-year period. The attempt arose from a technicality, Humphreys insisted. The contract required the company to deliver goods from various points on the river to coastal ports, yet Brazilian law forbade ships sailing under foreign flags to trade internally. To bypass this stipulation, the Rio Doce steamer flew under the Brazilian flag and hired Brazilian crewmen – a reasonable compromise, given that the vessel was owned jointly by Brazilian and British investors. Moreover, Humphreys argued, the sisa was typically imposed on real estate transactions for which a transfer of title occurred. No such transaction had taken place. The engineer concluded that the Brazilian government had been consistently obstructionist in its dealings with the company. While the taxation issue was being sorted out, government authorities held the vessel in Rio de Janeiro for five months and vital supplies mouldered on board. Humphreys predicted that these acts of bad faith and unnecessary delays ‘cannot fail to damage the confidence of all interested parties and threaten the complete destruction of the company’.Footnote 83 Thus he concluded a pamphlet, which he had printed and distributed to the Brazilian Senate to press his case.
The ship was released shortly after the distribution of Humphreys' report and was seen departing the port of Vitória a month later, described incidentally as a ‘Brazilian vessel’.Footnote 84 For the next several months, she made regular trips between Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro, exporting hardwoods, principally jacarandá.Footnote 85 In July 1842, it was reported that the steamer ‘got aground inside the bar, and is expected to become a wreck’ but within a year she was once again engaged in the carrying trade between the Doce River and the city of Rio.Footnote 86 However, troubles continued to plague the vessel. Early in 1845, the Rio Doce suffered a boiler explosion. Five men were killed on the spot and the civil engineer, Thomas White, died as a result of his injuries six months later.Footnote 87 A news item in the Diário do Rio in 1846 suggests that the company vessel might have been sold, changed its name to Carlota, and was navigating under a Brazilian captain and crew.Footnote 88
The Rio Doce Company was disbanded under the Joint-Stock Companies Act in October 1849, one of 30 companies eliminated in that year, six of which were steam navigation companies. A number of lawsuits against the company were then pending.Footnote 89 Available documentation does not shed much light on the specific causes of its demise. Overall, the Brazilian government's intransigence coupled with insufficient investment capital seems most germane. The company's records have not survived and the British Foreign Office records are all but silent on company matters. It is likely that in the context of suppressing the slave trade to Brazil, and given the numerous commercial ventures that had failed in South America, the vicissitudes of a relatively small navigation company were not a diplomatic priority.
Unfortunately, the London papers did not report consistently on the stock's value over time. Through October 1834, its price remained stable, fluctuating between £2.5 and £2.875 per share.Footnote 90 As late as June 1836, shares were still being offered to Brazilians by Rio-based agents at the original asking deposit of 12$000 per share, by then the equivalent of £4.7.Footnote 91 The 500 shares reserved for Brazilians remained available throughout 1 July 1837, far past the original deadline.Footnote 92 From then to 1842, the directors made eight calls on their London investors to pay additional instalments. These increments varied from ten to 30 shillings and investors were given one month to turn in their old certificates, and receive new ones reflecting the updated cost basis. Any investor who did not comply risked forfeiture of their existing shares.Footnote 93 One wonders what provisions were in place for Brazilian investors who could not possibly have responded to these notices in a timely way.Footnote 94 These periodic calls brought the amount paid per share to approximately £11, far short of the £25 stipulated in the original company prospectus. It is likely that many shareholders did not comply, as the quote for Rio Doce Company shares on the London stock exchange in February 1840 had collapsed to a mere ten shillings.Footnote 95
Regardless of the company's financial viability, the Rio Doce Company seems to have accomplished little in the way of durable infrastructure, colonisation or economic production. Instead, it focused on hardwood extraction. As it seemed to be fulfilling the most dire Anglophobic predictions voiced in the 1820s nativist press, the mineiro province began to favour a home grown alternative.Footnote 96 In the 1840s, Liberal politician Teófilo Benedito Otoni, formerly an ardent supporter of the Rio Doce Company, began promoting the development of the Mucuri River basin located to the Doce's North.Footnote 97 In 1847, he received government approval to incorporate a steam navigation and road construction company on contractual terms similar to those offered to the British Rio Doce Company.Footnote 98 The Mucuri Company was active from 1852 to 1861 and it created a viable route from the mineiro interior to the coast, combining road construction and navigation with shallow-draft steam vessels. Otoni was much more proactive in his implementation of social policy, successfully promoting European immigration and negotiating peaceful working relations with a number of indigenous communities. However, the Mucuri Company failed for reasons similar to the Doce River venture: inadequate access to credit, political intrigue, insufficient engineering capacity, and a fundamentally non-navigable river. Footnote 99 By 1858, Otoni's company had exhausted its working capital.Footnote 100 He obtained an additional loan from the government in 1859 but a change of ministry had empowered some of his political adversaries from the opposition Party of Order. They delayed disbursements and attempted to impose onerous new provisions to Otoni's contract.Footnote 101 While negotiating, a company vessel sunk offshore of Espírito Santo.Footnote 102 Political opposition made stockholders nervous and they voted to wind up the company in 1861.Footnote 103
In contrast to the Doce River Company, Otoni relied heavily on family networks to raise capital and staff its operations. His relatives possessed wealth, slaves and local knowledge of the terrain and of the indigenous peoples who lived there. However, the company could not overcome some of the serious obstacles to corporate development then present in Brazil. Commercial law still required businesses like Otoni's to obtain the approval of the Chamber and Senate before commencing operations and for any subsequent revisions to company statutes. These bureaucratic requirements facilitated the possibility of politically motivated obstructionism. Government intransigence at critical junctures contributed to both the Mucuri and the Doce companies' demise.
While frustrated navigation entrepreneurs were quick to blame the state for their woes, scholars must also consider economic limitations specific to Minas Gerais. Historian Sérgio de Oliveira Birchal offers valuable insights regarding the business climate that apply to the Rio Doce Company. In nineteenth-century Minas Gerais, ‘industry’ consisted primarily of small iron foundries and textile firms. Foundries tended to use local techniques and labourers to serve local markets; mills were dependent upon imported technologies and skilled technicians to install and maintain specialised machinery. Inadequate infrastructure limited the markets for both. Additionally, most mineiro entrepreneurs came from the landed and political elite and relied on family-based capital to diversify their holdings. As family enterprises, they favoured kinship over competence in their hiring practices and business partnerships. In those that transitioned to joint-stock companies in the 1870s, family members typically held the majority of shares. Impersonal, hierarchical, business structures were almost entirely lacking.
An exception to this pattern was the Companhia União e Indústria, which had a hybrid structure that combined local and imported technologies and labour. The company was incorporated in 1854 and began operations in 1856 to build a 144 km macadamised road between Juiz de Fora, located in southern Minas Gerais, and the city of Petropolis in Rio de Janeiro. Additionally, it promoted European immigration, mainly from Germany. Initially capitalised at 3,000 contos de reis, it was a smaller than average enterprise compared to other firms registered in the commerce tribunal of Rio de Janeiro between 1850–65. During its peak years, it employed between 1,000 and 2,400 workers, the majority slaves, complemented by a small foreign-born skilled, technical and managerial class. This was substantially larger than the average iron foundry with a workforce of ten, or emerging textile mills with a typical starting workforce of 20. The road was inaugurated in 1861 and was bought out by the D. Pedro II railway in 1869.Footnote 104
União e Indústria was more similar to Otoni's Mucuri Company than the Rio Doce with respect to the size of its workforce and its reliance on local capital.Footnote 105 Although all of these enterprises recruited immigrants and relied upon specialised technicians from abroad, União e Indústria did not have to adapt specialised equipment to challenging watercourses. The basic technology for road construction, the fabrication of wheeled carts, and crushing and compressing stone to form macadamised roadbeds was within the grasp of the local workforce. The firm also had the advantage of being located in an emerging coffee zone, thereby ensuring lucrative freights.
Conclusion
While the comparative historical literature on river navigation in Latin America is not particularly abundant, available case studies suggest more failures than successes for the immediate post-independence period. A combination of inadequate capitalisation, poor technology transfer, and political obstructionism tended to hamper such efforts. For example, a navigation company founded by a North American businessman, Juan Bernardo Elbers, on Colombia's Magdalena River in the 1820s also foundered due to the intrinsic navigational challenges posed by the river as well as constant alterations to his contract every time a new regime came to power.Footnote 106 Even the more imposing Amazon and the Rio de la Plata posed navigational hazards including tricky currents, irregular tides, shifting sand banks, and variable depths, causing one eighteenth-century priest to refer to the Plata as a ‘hell for pilots’.Footnote 107 Attempts to implement steam service along the Brazilian coast, which bypassed some of the technical difficulties posed by river navigation, also struggled due to foreign competition and restrictive policies that required preferential hiring of Brazilian pilots and sailors.Footnote 108
The eventual success of steam navigation on the Amazon provides an illustrative counter-example to the failed Doce and Mucuri river companies. Until 1850, however, its trajectory seemed remarkably similar. The Portuguese Crown had promoted the development of commercial navigation on the Amazon as early as the eighteenth century, including the provision of Lisbon-trained technicians to oversee construction of shipyards and large ocean-going vessels. However, ‘the basic workhorse of colonial river vessels was the canoe’, a form of local technology that was cheap, sustainable, and suited to local conditions.Footnote 109
Proposals to introduce steam navigation to the Amazon in the 1820s failed due to nativist protests against foreign investment as the prelude to British imperialism, much like the Rio Doce case. In 1837, a new proposal was offered by none other than Johann Jakob Sturz. He requested contractual terms similar to those secured by the Rio Doce Company. His proposal ultimately was turned down in the Senate in 1841 due to objections regarding the scope of monopoly privileges.Footnote 110
Only in the 1850s did steam navigation become viable on the Amazon. In 1852, Irineu Evangelista de Souza (future Viscount of Mauá) secured a contract from the Imperial government to form the Amazon River Navigation Company (Companhia de Navegação e Comércio do Rio Amazonas). Initially, this venture encountered political resistance regarding the extent of its monopoly privileges and Mauá was forced to renegotiate the terms of his contract. By 1860, the company began to turn a profit. In 1866, when the Brazilian government opened the river to free trade, Mauá then sold his company to the British Amazon Steamship Company, which remained operational through 1911.Footnote 111
Mauá brought personal advantages to the venture such as his own shipyards and ready access to investment capital from his own banks.Footnote 112 However, timing also favoured his enterprise. Limited liability corporations (sociedades anônimas) were legalised in 1849 and a commercial code was adopted in 1850.Footnote 113 The closing of the slave trade in 1850 freed up capital and facilitated alternative forms of investment. Brazil also entered into a period of relative political stability during which the Party of Order (Conservatives) dominated politically from 1848–53 and a bipartisan Conciliation cabinet ruled from 1853–7, coinciding with this company's start up. Perhaps most importantly, the Amazon was fundamentally more navigable than the Doce or Mucuri Rivers and did not require expensive hydraulic engineering.
In contrast, regular steam navigation did not come to Minas Gerais until the 1890s, following the development of a more robust Brazilian financial sector.Footnote 114 Limited services were introduced on the Rio Grande in southern Minas Gerais in 1880 and between Pirapora, MG, and Joazeiro, BA, on the São Francisco River, in 1898, both using paddleboats formerly employed on the Mississippi River.Footnote 115 Neither of these options offered an uninterrupted route to the sea and both were integrated into diversified transportation networks including roads and railways.
With the exception of the Amazon, the history of steam navigation on Brazil's interior rivers fell far short of the easy fix envisioned by Brazilian politicians and businessmen in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Inadequate local capital formation and technical knowledge did not pair well with a cumbersome bureaucracy. Moreover, as Brazilian politics became more partisan in the post-Regency period, changes in ministries could potentially have disastrous effects for companies that had to renegotiate contractual details under a new and potentially hostile administration. While aggrieved businessmen were quick to blame the Brazilian state for their failing ventures, historians should also look to the additional hurdles of poor to non-existent infrastructure, underdeveloped markets, a lack of readily available credit, inadequate supply chains, and a scarcity of skilled, technically-trained labour. Given these considerations, it is unlikely that river development in frontier Minas Gerais could have corresponded to the fantasies spun by Brazilian authorities, British businessmen or gullible investors in the post-independence period.
