Settler–Soldiers and Mutineers: Carceral Migrations Between Hamburg and Brazil

On the night of July 4, 1824, eight men aboard the sailing vessel Germania took advantage of a violent storm to stage a mutiny. The ship, which had departed from the port of Hamburg, was carrying approximately four hundred settlers and soldiers bound for newly created agricultural-military colonies in Brazil’s borderlands. After a fierce struggle, the mutineers were subdued by the Germania’s crew. Subsequently, a group of self-fashioned honorable passengers formed an internal commission and conducted a swift extrajudicial trial aboard the ship, sentencing the conspirators to death. According to the commission’s records, the mutineers confessed that their intent had been to seize control of the ship and “seek freedom” in a European port, avoiding an uncertain future in Brazil, where they were destined to serve as mercenaries. At least five of the eight rebels were formerly incarcerated in Hamburg’s Spinnhaus after accusations of desertion and thievery. The following day, the eight deviant migrants were executed by a firing squad somewhere across the Atlantic, one by one.

This paper takes the case of the eight mutineers of the Germania as a window to examine how the Brazilian Empire—then in a process of consolidation after its independence in 1822—intertwined the maintenance of slavery with experiments and regimes of unfree labor in the era of abolition. Through a micro-analytical study of the life trajectories of those involved in the mutiny, it also explores how the Hamburg government incorporated global repertoires of penal transportation into the plan to ship former convicts to Brazil. Finally, this exceptional case raises broader questions about the very concepts of freedom and unfreedom that formerly incarcerated individuals (and future soldiers) envisioned and mobilized.