The Revolt of the Whip.

Kraay, Hendrik

The Revolt of the Whip, by Joseph L. Love. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012. xviii, 157 pp. $70.00 US (cloth), $22.95 (paper).

On 22 November 1910, Afro-Brazilian sailors on board the dreadnoughts Minas Geraes and Sao Paulo, very recently acquired by the Brazilian navy, mutinied and took control of the ships in Rio de Janeiro's harbour to demand an end to corporal punishment. For four days, they maneuvered the ships with aplomb, occasionally firing on military targets, and negotiated with the government. As terrified residents of Brazil's then-capital fled, congress hastily passed an amnesty and promised to abolish flogging, which allowed the sailors to turn the ships back over to the government. The next month, a revolt in the navy fusiliers battalion was violently repressed and this provided the justification for a crackdown on the amnestied sailors, many of whom had already been dismissed from the navy. Twenty-five of twenty-nine crammed overnight into two fetid dungeons perished; many more were deported to near-certain death in Acre (in Brazil's western Amazon region) where they were forced to labour on a railroad construction project or for rubber tappers. Joao Candido Felisberto, the thirty-year-old Minas Geraes helmsman who led the November revolt, survived the night in the dungeon and was eventually acquitted of involvement in the December revolt.

While these events are well known to historians of Brazil, Revolt of the Whip is the first book-length English-language study of the mutiny. Joseph L. Love (emeritus, University of Illinois), author of important works on the political history of Brazil's Old Republic (1889-1930), skillfully traces the social, political, and cultural context of the first decade of the twentieth century and Brazil's naval rearmament program that prompted the purchase of the two state-of-the-art warships from British shipyards. He provides compelling narratives of the November mutiny and the December revolt and carefully analyzes the issues of race and class that the mutiny cast into sharp relief--lower-class and mostly black sailors who removed their white officers and demonstrated their ability to handle the massive dreadnoughts (contrary to the prevailing scientific-racist wisdom). Love accomplishes all of this in only 116 pages of text, which makes this an ideal book for classroom use.

Revolt of the Whip has numerous strengths. Love carefully synthesizes the work of Brazilian and North American historians on the mutiny and thoughtfully assesses the contemporary sources. He ranges widely as befits a historian of sailors who had, in some cases, traveled literally around the world, and of events that were widely reported in the Western world's media. Many of the mutineers had trained on the new dreadnoughts in England and had seen the difference between their experience and that of their counterparts in the Royal Navy. In October 1910, the Sao Paulo's crew had witnessed the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy, a movement that began in the navy (the ship had taken Brazil's president-elect, Hermes da Fonseca, on a state visit to Lisbon). The mutineers knew of the Potemkin's 1905 mutiny in Russia (at least two of the leaders had served on a Brazilian ship that toured northern European ports in 1906). Love offers effective summaries of the international naval arms races of the period, as well as the transition from sail to steam and the new demands that operating dreadnoughts placed on sailors. And Love's knowledge of Brazilian political history stands him in good stead as he raises the interesting possibility that Joao Candido, a native of Rio Grande do Sul, was in fact the protege of Jose Gomes Pinheiro Machado, the senator from that state and opponent of President Hermes. This protection kept the helmsman from deportation to the Amazon; it is consistent with the kinds of patron-client relationships that structured Brazilian society. Indeed, one of the other rebel leaders landed a job in the presidential palace's garage soon after his acquittal.

Although triggered by the brutal flogging of a sailor on the Minas Gerais, the revolt had been carefully planned; the rebels resolved not to rise up on 15 November (the date of Hermes's inauguration as president) so as to avoid making their rebellion appear a political movement. Their principal demand was the ending of corporal punishment, closely associated with slavery, abolished in Brazil only in 1888, and many Brazilians saw the mutiny in racial terms as a dangerous inversion of the social hierarchy. While the rebels espoused no explicit ideology, Love argues that their underlying demand was for treatment as full citizens of the Brazilian republic: "The sailors believed that as citizens, they could make claims on the state" (p. 85). The repression after the December revolt made a mockery of the congressional amnesty, but corporal punishment effectively disappeared in the navy, even if it was not abolished by formal decree.

In his concluding chapter, Love considers how contemporary Brazilians made sense of this movement through the lenses of race and class and through the juxtaposition of the most modem warships afloat with the savage flogging of their sailors for minor infractions. He contrasts the navy's official memory of what it calls the "Sailors' Revolt" with sailors' recollections of the "Revolt of the Whip"; in March 1964, just a week before the military coup, the recently-founded Association of Sailors and Marines invited an elderly Joao Candido to address its members (the former helmsman lived .until 1968). The Revolt of the Whip will effectively stimulate classroom discussion on these and many other issues central to Brazilian and Latin American history (but Canadian students will have to overlook Love's comparisons to the United States which will have little resonance here).

Hendrik Kraay

University of Calgary