Blockade of Rio de Janeiro in 1863
The blockade of Rio de Janeiro from January 1 to 6, 1863 was part of British gunboat policy .
occasion
The reason for the sea blockade was the refusal of the Brazilian government to pay compensation for an alleged beach piracy and a case of the deprivation of liberty of members of the Royal Navy .
The merchant ship Prince of Wales , launched in 1857, was grounded by the crew on the way from Glasgow to Buenos Aires from June 5 to 8, 1861 off the coast of Rio Grande do Sul . Part of the crew turned to the port administration of Rio Grande do Sul to successfully negotiate a salvage . When the crew returned, they found ten dead crew members on the beach and the cargo had sunk. The captain reported the incident to the British Envoy Extraordinary and Ministre plénipotentiaire in Rio de Janeiro, William Dougal Christie, as a beach pirate and demanded compensation. The latter forwarded the demands to Peter II of Brazil , who rejected them as unfounded. In response, British gunboats were ordered to Rio Grande do Sul in April 1862 .
On June 17, 1862, two members of the crew of the frigate HMS Forte were arrested in Rio de Janeiro after an argument with Brazilian sailors.
Christie ordered the blockade of the port of Rio de Janeiro and the confiscation of Brazilian merchant ships on December 31, 1862. The six-day blockade was carried out by a squadron consisting of the screw frigate HMS Forte , the schooners HMS Stromboli (under the command of Arthur Robert Henry) and HMS Curlew (under the command of Charles Stuart Forbes), the corvette HMS Satellite (under the command of John Ormsby Johnson) and the gunboat HMS Doterel , maintained under the command of Richard Warren. Five ships anchored in the harbor were seized and £ 3,200 in compensation claimed.
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This action met with protests from the people of Rio de Janeiro and led to threats against British investors. Peter II broke off diplomatic relations with Great Britain and asked King Leopold of Belgium to mediate this conflict.
In his award, Leopold considered the demands of Brazil to be appropriate. In 1865, Brazil took part in the invasion of Uruguay. This helped Peter II to accept Edward Thornton's proposal that the British government would accept the arbitration award with the exception of the financial claims.
background
From 1820, the Royal Navy undertook various humanitarian interventions to stop the slave trade. Until the formal abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, the Bandeirantes were regarded as role models. On November 23, 1826, a representative of George IV agreed with Peter I that three years after the ratification of the corresponding agreement, his subjects would no longer be legally permitted to engage in the slave trade.
On August 9, 1845, Queen Victoria ratified : An Act to amend an Act, intituled An Act to carry into execution a Convention between His Majesty and the Emperor of Brazil, for the Regulation and final Abolition of the African Slave Trade. ( Aberdeen Act ). In Brazil, the agreement was formally ratified with the Lei Eusébio de Queirós on September 4, 1850. The Haitian Revolution led to a boom in sugar cane sales, the cultivation of which in Brazil was predominantly slaves. After the continental blockade, a state-sponsored beet sugar industry developed in Europe . The appearance of these two competitors led to a sales crisis in Brazil, which was counteracted on the one hand with slave labor-based coffee production and on the other hand with military undertakings such as the invasion of Uruguay and Paraguay . At about the same time, the American Civil War took place.
Individual evidence
- ^ William Dougal Christie, The Brazil correspondence in the cases of the 'Prince of Wales' and officers of the Forte .
- ^ The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland , Volume 29
- ↑ Miguel Alexandre de Araujo Neto, Great Britain, the Paraguayan War and Free Immigration in Brazil (PDF; 554 kB), 1862–1875 p. 6