By Jorge de Souza
Even today, rare visitors to the Albardão lighthouse, the most isolated in Brazil, in a particularly irregular area of 241 kilometers of Cassino beach, considered the longest in the world, between the city of Rio Grande and the border of Brazil and Uruguay. , can see, at low tide, part of the side of a ship buried on the shore.
It is the remains of the Prince of Wales, an English four-masted merchant ship that capsized and sank there 161 years ago.
But there was not only debris left from that great ship.
Her drowning also left a historical legacy: the worst diplomatic crisis ever to occur in relations between Brazil and England.
And this, for very little, did not lead the two countries to War, just over a century and a half ago.
THE FLEXIBLE HABIT
It all started when the Prince of Wales sailed from Glasgow, Scotland, bound for Buenos Aires, carrying several passengers and a varied cargo ranging from pottery to bags of coal.
After leaving for several Brazilian ports, the large cargo ship fell victim to the unfortunate combination of strong winds, intense currents and a lack of reference to the extensive coastline of the Rio Grande do Sul and ran aground on a section of that long beach, known. at that time as Albardão (the same name that would later christen the lighthouse built there) in the early hours of June 7, 1861.
Some say the disaster happened only because of a disgusting habit of some shipwreck hunters of the time: lighting torches on the beach as beacons to confuse nighttime navigation.
But this was never proven.
A DISASTER WITH TWO VERSIONS
Shortly after the ship went down, the wind became even worse and the Prince of Wales’s body began to convulse.
Some crew members managed to get to the beach using ropes lying on the sand and from there, they went to the village of Rio Grande, almost 100 kilometers away, to ask for help.
However, the other passengers of the sailboat (it was never known whether or not there were any fatalities in the accident) remained on board, hoping that the boat would not completely disintegrate.
The round trip to the Rio Grande took days.
And it was during this period that the events took place that eventually caused a diplomatic – and almost armed – crisis between Brazil (then still an Empire, under the command of Dom Pedro II) and England.
But, to this day, there are two versions of what happened: the English one and the Brazilian one.
“CRIMINAL GAUÇO BARBARE”
In the English version, after returning to the site of the sinking, in the company of the police from the Rio Grande and the English consul in the city, the crew of the Prince of Wales found a large part of the stolen cargo and ten passengers of the boat (including two passengers, a woman and a girl) dead, some already buried in the sand on the beach – which, for them, became a blatant case of piracy committed by the Brazilians.
According to the deductions of the English consul, those people had been killed to avoid denouncing the perpetrators of the robbery, who were “barbaric criminals from Rio Grande do Sul”.
But there was another version of what had happened on that beach.
THE THREE SUSPECTS WROTE
According to the version of some residents of the area, the bodies of the victim were found on the beach, and they buried them only for charity.
However, when formally questioned, none of them wanted to comment on the fact.
Then three people suspected of robbing the boat’s cargo fled across the border into Uruguay, prompting the British to accuse Brazilian police of negligence.
This was the beginning of a conflict that would also become political.
THEY HAD COMPENSATION
Subsequent examinations of the victims’ bodies indicated that they had died of suffocation and not of violent acts.
But this did not convince the British, who reported the fact, in their own way, to the English ambassador in Rio de Janeiro, William Dougal Christie – who, in turn, made an official protest to the emperor Dom Pedro II, demanding not only an apology from Brazil but also compensation for the robbery of the sailboat and the death of those people.
It was the beginning of a dispute that would last more than four years and have unusual developments in Brazil’s history.
BRAZIL REFUSED
In fact, hostilities between the British and Brazilians had continued long before, due to the illegal slave labor trade that was still widely practiced here.
Several slave ships on their way to Brazil were blocked by the British, creating strong tensions on both sides.
In this scenario, the sinking of the Prince of Wales was just the latest in the already strained relationship between the two countries.
But it ended up taking unimaginable proportions after the Brazilian monarch refused to accept the impositions of the English ambassador – whose name would eventually christen the case, which went down in history as “The Christie Affair”.
THREAT IN REMOVAL
During the inquiry that investigated the case, Ambassador Christie even asked the English Navy to send a warship to the port of Rio Grande, to intimidate the Brazilians and put pressure on the Rio Grande authorities.
And so it was.
In March 1862, the English gunboat Sheldrake anchored off the town for several days as a veiled threat.
ANOTHER INCIDENT AT THE SAME TIME
To make relations between the two countries even worse, three months after the Prince of Wales episode, three drunken English sailors clashed with Brazilian police officers in the port of Rio de Janeiro and were arrested, after causing the death of one of theirs. .
Immediately, the English ambassador took action again, demanding the release of his countrymen, as under the rules of his country, the British courts were the only courts fit to try English citizens.
But Dom Pedro II ignored the diplomat’s foolish and insulting argument and replied that, to guarantee his sovereignty, Brazil would be ready for a war against England if necessary.
The tension between the two countries only increased.
BUILT RELATIONSHIPS
But Ambassador Christie quickly countered.
In December of that year, British warships also arrived in the port of Rio de Janeiro.
There, they blocked the exit from Guanabara Bay and imprisoned five Brazilian ships, demanding payment of compensation for the sinking of the Prince of Wales – in addition to that so-called official withdrawal from the Brazilian Emperor.
For seven days, the then seat of the Empire of Brazil was surrounded by English ships, which caused outrage among the Brazilians and caused Dom Pedro II to reverse the roles.
He was now the one who demanded a formal apology from England for the violation of Brazilian territory, in addition to compensation for the time the ships were detained in the port of Rio de Janeiro.
But the English did neither.
Dom Pedro II then decided to break diplomatic relations with Great Britain in May 1863.
DOM PEDRO II RETURNED ON HIS WORDS
Soon after, however, as Brazil was heavily dependent on trade relations with England, the Brazilian emperor agreed that the crisis between the two countries should be mediated by a neutral monarch, King Leopold I of Belgium, who was to judge the case of the sinking of the prince of wales.
Months later, however, fearing that the decision would be even worse for Brazil, Dom Pedro II went back on his word and decided to pay compensation for the cargo stolen from the ship stranded off the coast of Rio Grande do Sul, thus ending it. to the diplomatic crisis.
NO REFUNDS
Dom Pedro II’s argument to justify the payment of indemnity was that the deterioration of relations between the two countries was due to “English disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty”, not financial matters.
However, soon after, the Belgian king would end up agreeing with Brazil in the episode of the blockade of the port of Rio de Janeiro.
Then it was Dom Pedro II’s turn to demand that the British return the money, which was never done.
Neither that nor a withdrawal from the English government.
Finally, the ENGLISH REVIEW
The crisis between the two countries ended only two years later, in 1865, due to the Paraguayan War, when England, which was also politically involved in the conflict, finally agreed to apologize to the Brazilian emperor.
However, he never gave up his version of the case of the Prince of Wales, whose narrow ship did not lead Brazil to war against the greatest world power of the time.
A fact that to this day, more than 160 years later, still fuels the conversations of the lonely lighthouse keeper of Albardão, in one of the most isolated regions of the Brazilian coast, the scene of many other shipwrecks that led to its construction. of the lighthouse itself, sometime later.
A DOZEN LIGHTHOUSES ON A SINGLE SHORE
The Prince of Wales episode was not the only reason that the unusual and dangerous coast of Rio Grande do Sul acquired the string of seeds it has today – no less than twelve along a little more than 600 kilometers.
Because of its isolation, surrounded by a sea of sand dunes on all sides, the Albardão lighthouse is more legendary.
Almost all the lighthouses on the coast of Rio Grande do Sul were the result of an accumulation of shipwrecks in the region, which forced maritime authorities to better signal the coast of Rio Grande do Sul, one of the most difficult areas for navigation on the Brazilian coast – a feature that, however, has been easily exploited in the past by people with bad intentions.
RECOVERY THAT WORKED
One of the most famous cases of the genre was the grounding (intentionally, but with the justification of the difficulty of navigation in the region) of the Spanish passenger ship Sarita, a few years after the Prince of Wales episode and practically at the same time. region, which, while clearly a hoax, had an unexpected and happy ending for all parties.
With information from UOL
