Small change, rich story

When I arrived in Brazil in 1957, this was the smallest banknote, 1 cruzeiro, and it was worth about half a penny. There were millions of them in circulation; they were the small change for bus and tram travel, and they stank. I can still close my eyes and smell them. I have never seen a crisp one. I think they went out of circulation sometime before we left in 1964. By then, a pound was 5000 cruzeiros, so they were pretty useless!

It’s only in later life that I have stopped to look at the artwork, and it carries a fascinating story, of the ‘Brazilian Nelson’, commemorated here and in a coin from 1936. The figure on the obverse is Joaquim Marques Lisboa, Marquis of Tamandaré (1807-1897), an officer in the Brazilian navy at the time it was fighting for independence from Portugal. He eventually rose to the rank of Admiral. As Patron of the Navy to this day, a kind of secular saint, his birthday is observed as Sailors’ Day [Dia do Marinheiro].  

His Portuguese father was the port manager of Rio Grande, one of the most southerly ports in the country and state capital of Rio Grande do Sul from 1835 to 1845. He and his brother Henrique accompanied their father on his visits on board ships in port, which is presumably where he gained his love of ships and the sea. When he was seven, his brother enrolled in the Academia Real, and he joined the navy himself in 1822, the year of Brazil’s independence from Portugal. 

His first posting in 1823 was on the frigate Niterói, then under the command of the English mercenary James Norton. This itself is interesting, as the United Kingdom was in the 19th century very supportive of independence movements in South America, mainly because the Spanish Empire was a major natural competitor!  In this role, he took part in a number of battles, including one against the northeastern provinces [Bahia, Maranhão, Pará, Piauí e Cisplatina] which had remained loyal to Portugal.

He returned to Rio de Janeiro and joined the Naval Academy, there studying English among other subjects. Meanwhile, the War of Independence continued, with rebellions against the newly indepedent nation breaking out sporadically, notably the formation of an Equatorial Confederation [Confederação do Equador]. In July 1824, he fought against this group on Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s flagship Pedro Primeiro. Cochrane was yet another British mercenary naval officer. In February 1825, he was promoted to Second Lieutenant, at the tender age of 18. 

Further battles followed against those who sought to overthrow the fledgling monarchy, especially in the Regency after Dom Pedro I’s abdication in 1831.

By 1840 he was captain of a frigate, and in 1844 he was appointed commander of the Central Naval Region. In that role, he went to England to collect a new corvette, the Dom Afonso (the first under sail and steam in the navy), under orders from Dom Pedro II. In 1859, he was back in Europe again with his wife, recruiting sailors and technicians, and commissioning 10 cannons from French and British manufacturers. Not long afterwards, he was commander of the naval division that took the Emperor and his wife to Pernambuco, to the town of Tamandaré, where there had been an uprising.

As a result of this, in 1860 he received the title of Baron of Tamandaré, which appears on the banknote’s obverse. In 1864, he was deeply involved in the longest of Brazil’s 19th century wars, the Paraguayan War. Following this, he was promoted to Admiral, and twenty years later, became Count, then Marquis, receiving the Order of the Rose.

He was clearly a notable man, of great dignity. One biographer describes him as ‘of a humble personality, who mixed with the slaves who were liberated by the Golden Law’. In the 19th century, this marks him out as a person of astonishingly liberal values.

He was also a staunch monarchist. He stood beside the Emperor in 1889 at the age of 82 during the overthrow of the monarchy, and asked the Emperor’s permission to fight back against the insurgency. The emperor, however, refused, and went into exile in France. In his will Tamandaré comments that the Emperor died in exile without honour, so he would like to be buried without any military honours whatsoever, in a simple grave with the marker ‘Here lies the old sailor’.