“A New Canada”: A Maritime Route to Freedom in Northeastern Brazil

From late 1883 until the eve of the Brazilian abolition law in May 1888, an estimated three-thousand enslaved persons fled the northeastern province of Pernambuco en route to Ceará, a neighboring province that opened the first fissure in the foundations of Brazilian slavery by declaring itself a free territory in March 1884. A haven for those fleeing from Pernambuco as well as from other surrounding provinces in the Brazilian northeast, the creation of a “new Canada,” as it was referred to by abolitionists and slaveholders, alike, fundamentally recast the legal, political, and spatial parameters demarcating the institution of slavery. Enslaved people were catalysts in these wide-ranging transformations; their initial decisions to escape gave impetus to the construction of a broad network of free, freed, and white abolitionists, male and female, who coordinated the logistics of this journey to freedom—a route that, unlike the more familiar overland “underground railroads” in southeastern Brazil and the United States, was conducted via a short, northward sea voyage along the Atlantic littoral. To some extent, historians of Brazilian abolition, and particularly those of the northeast, have made mention of this extensive operation, yet besides identifying it as a directive of the Club de Cupim, a radical abolitionist society, little is known about the background, dynamics, and political ramifications of this maritime route to freedom.
This paper revisits a number of these considerations, focusing, however, on how the mass movement of people stretched the boundaries of debates over slavery, freedom, and state control. Based on the records of the Club de Cupim, the Pernambucan Legislative Assembly, and local newspapers, this analysis underscores the importance of researching practical and symbolic interconnections among sites of antislavery activism—as these ties influenced not only the trajectory of contemporaneous events, but also offer a broader frame to abolition studies.