Finding the Sea Dragon's Tomb

[Judi Lynn]

A historian tells how he located a hero of the abolition movement in Brazil.
By JULIA CRAVEN
FEB 10, 20217:15 PM



Graffiti stands in an area known as “Little Africa”, located near the Valongo slave wharf, in Rio de Janeiro. The Valongo slave wharf, entry point in the Americas for nearly one million African slaves, was only discovered during renovations in ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Francisco José do Nascimento was a man of the sea.

A 19th century fisherman of indigenous and African descent, Nascimento was appalled by the slave trade in his home state of Ceará, Brazil. In his job as a jangadeiro, work that is intricately associated with poverty, Nascimento was required to carry enslaved Africans and other goods onto the ships that would eventually sell them elsewhere in the country. The disgust inspired him to organize a strike in the port of Fortaleza, one of the largest cities in Brazil, amongst his fellow fishermen and port workers in August 1881. The strike effectively ended the slave trade in Brazil, and symbolized a shift in the abolitionist movement where more common folk were beginning to push back against the institution.

Less than three years later, in March 1884, enslavement was abolished in Ceará—four years before the rest of the country. Nascimento was lauded as a national hero and his name was placed into Brazil’s Book of Steel, officially honoring him as such. He became one of the few Black faces of the country’s abolitionist movement to be remembered.

Nascimento became known as Dragão do Mar, which translates to the Sea Dragon, a nickname that evokes an air of mythology around him. But the location of his grave was lost until mid-July 2020 when Licínio Nunes de Miranda, a historian and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, found it in the São João Batista cemetery in Fortaleza.

In an interview with Slate, Miranda discusses the importance of Nascimento’s legacy, the parallels between Brazil and the U.S., and why he searched through 15,000 tombs during the Brazillian summer.

. . .

You’ve said that the significance of the strike is that this was a revolt led by common people, so what was the general nature of the abolitionist movement in Brazil?

In Brazil, slavery came to an end because of popular mobilization—unlike the U.S. where there was a civil war. People were going through the streets, protesting. Newspapers attacked slavery. Politicians in the parliament attacked slavery. There were slave uprisings, and slaves fleeing the plantations. It even reached a moment where common people protesting against slavery, helped purchase the freedom of slaves. Then, in 1888, the government enacted a law that abolished slavery, but the state in which the Sea Dragon lived was able to abolish slavery in 1884. So what you’re talking about here is popular pressure that led to the government to act against slavery.

More:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/lost-tomb-found-how-a-scholar-found-brazilian-slavery-abolitionists-missing-burial-place.html