ABSTRACT
It was here, in this pleasantly incongruous setting, that the prince regent and his courtiers would set out to make their visions of political salvation and imperial re newal a reality. And it was with Rio de Janeiro’s residents that they would negotiate the terms for constructing the new royal court and a new imperial politics. While a few of the statesmen who accompanied the prince regent had served previously in Brazil, most of the royal exiles knew little of Rio de Janeiro, apart from a general per ception of life in the colonies as inferior.2 For the exiles their arrival at the city thus was a discovery, one which, as the cleric Luiz Gonsalves dos Santos claimed in an epigraph to a history of his native Rio de Janeiro, recalled that most emblematic Por tuguese discovery, Vasco da Gama’s voyage to Asia in 1498. Just as the earlier Por tuguese mariners, Gonsalves dos Santos pointed out with words borrowed from the poet Luiz de Camoes (c. 1524-1580), the exiled courtiers came “from the far off Tagus.” Writing in a similarly triumphant tone, the exiled Marques de Bellas also
found the comparison of da Gama’s voyage and the royal journey to Brazil to be compelling and likened the prince regent to da Gama’s sponsor, King Manuel.3
