For three turbulent days in June 1828 the city of Rio de Janeiro experienced a uniquely violent event: a large-scale military revolt led by disaffected Irish and German mercenaries, and repressed with the help of African and Afro-Brazilian slaves.

The story began in 1826 when the Emperor Dom Pedro I dispatched an Irish officer in the Brazilian army – Colonel William Cotter – to his native Ireland, to raise a battalion of foreign recruits to bolster his forces in the ongoing war with the nascent Argentine Republic.

Representing the venture as one of “agricultural colonization” – to circumvent restrictions on the recruitment of Irish subjects into foreign armies – Cotter rapidly assembled a force of 3,100 Irishmen, women and children.

But on arrival in Rio, the emigrants were given an ultimatum: to receive their promised land grants, all able-bodied Irishmen would have to enlist in the Brazilian Imperial Army for four years.

Outraged, most refused to comply and were left languishing on meagre rations in makeshift barracks. But a few hundred relented, opening a bitter rift with their fellow migrants.

When disgruntled German mercenaries revolted against the brutal punishment of a member of their own battalion, their press-ganged Irish comrades rose up and joined them in a three-day binge of wanton destruction against the city and its inhabitants.

Following a period of inaction by the authorities (in a city devoid of regular troops to put down the rebellion), a ceremonial battalion was hastily mustered which aided by local militiamen and armed slaves – pushed the mercenaries back to their barracks and bombarded them into submission.

The Irish survivors of the uprising were rounded up and sent on a homeward journey most would never complete. Within three years the Emperor would abdicate his throne, his authority fatally eroded by the recruits he had looked to for salvation.

Christopher Burden
Writer

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Image captions:

Image 1/4: Names and ages of some of the mercenaries. Credit: Collection of the National Archive, Rio de Janeiro.

Image 2/4: Campo de Santana, military barracks where the 1828 revolt took place. Credit: Collection of the National Library Foundation, Brazil.

Image 3/4: Campo de Santana, in the center of Rio de Janeiro (1818). Watercoloured engraving by Franz Josef Frühbeck. Credit: Wikimedia Foundation.

Image 4/4: The Military School of Brazil at Praia Vermelha, Rio de Janeiro, where Irish (and German) mercenaries murdered their brutal commander. Credit: Collection of the National Library Foundation, Brazil.