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The Cabanagem Rebellion
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The
Cabanagem Rebellion
ravaged the region around BelAİm for sixteen months between January 1835 and May 1836, in the uncertain years following Independence and the abdication of Pedro I. Starting with political division among Brazil's new rulers, it rapidly became a revolt of the poor against racial injustice: the
cabanos
were mostly black and Indian or mixed-blood settlers who lived in relative poverty in cabana huts on the flood plains and riverbanks around BelAİm and the lower Amazon riverbanks. Following years of unrest the pent-up hatred of generations burst into BelAİm in August 1835. After days of bloody fighting, the survivors of the BelAİm authorities fled, leaving the
cabanos
in control. In the area around the city many sugar mills and
fazendas
were destroyed, their white owners being put to death. Bands of rebels roamed throughout the region, and in most settlements their arrival was greeted by the non-white population's spontaneously joining their ranks, looting and killing. The authorities described the rebellion as "a ghastly revolution in which barbarism seemed about to devour all existing civilization in one single gulp".
The rebellion was doomed almost from the start, however. Although the leaders declared independence from Brazil and attempted to form some kind of revolutionary government, they never had any real programme, and nor did they succeed in controlling their own followers. A British ship became embroiled in the rebellion in October 1835, when it arrived unwittingly with a cargo of arms which had been ordered by the authorities before their hasty departure a couple of months previously. The crew were killed and their cargo confiscated. Five months later, the following March, a British naval force arrived demanding compensation from the rebels for the killings and the lost cargo. The leader of the
cabanos,
Eduardo Angelim, met the British captain and refused any sort of compromise; British trade was threatened, too, and the fleet commenced a blockade of the fledgling revolutionary state. Meanwhile, troops from the south prepared to fight back, and in May 1836 the rebels were driven from BelAİm by a force of 2500 soldiers under the command of Francisco d'Andrea. Mopping-up operations continued for years, and by the time the Cabanagem Rebellion was completely over and all isolated pockets of armed resistance had been eradicated, some 30,000 people are estimated to have died - almost a third of the region's population at that time. Other useful information
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Brazil,
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