Introduction

I recently had the pleasure of visiting several places in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in August just gone. Arriving in the city of Porto Alegre after a three-hour flight from Belo Horizonte, my friend Luiz and I then took a three-hour bus journey to the city of Pelotas.

In Pelotas, Luiz and I met our friend and fellow academic Profa. Dani Gallindo, who is a teacher and researcher at the Universidade Federal de Pelotas (the home of an institute for medieval and classical studies called POEIMA).

After a conference, at which I was very kindly invited to give a keynote address on the opening night, Luiz and I, with Dani as our guide, were treated to various tours of the sights of Pelotas. In Pelotas one will find the remains of Brazil’s colonial and imperial past.

Most of the public buildings situated in the middle of the town date from the nineteenth century and this is true of most of Rio Grande do Sul’s larger cities. The heart of the town of Pelotas, in fact, is the Mercado Central, a nineteenth-century covered market which boasts several boutique shops, cafes, restaurants, and bars.

The town of Rio Grande we also visited, and Luiz, Daniele, and I spent quite a long time in the city’s library and archive. To my astonishment, it was there, in the relatively unknown first Portuguese edition of a novel which I had given a paper about in the previous week (Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of the People)

When I came back to the UK from my trip (with a short detour which took Luiz and I on to Rio de Janeiro where I met my friend and fellow G.W.M. Reynolds researcher Matheus Mello), I began looking in the online newspaper archives to see whether any of the cities which I had visited in Rio Grande do Sul (Pelotas, Rio Grande, Jaguarão) were featured.

I expected the usual notices of imports and maybe some news of the Anglo meat company which was stationed there until the early nineteenth century. I did not, however, expect to find a story in the Liverpool Mercury from 1892 which had all the trappings of a Victorian adventure novel.[1]

The Life of an English Sailor Boy

The lot of an English sailor boy in the mid-nineteenth century was a very sorry one indeed. Often enough a boy might be put out to sea because his family were poor and couldn’t feed him. It made sense for his parents to, however painful it might be for them, pass the bill for his upbringing on to someone else. Often this was done in conjunction with various charitable institutions who were dedicated to procuring places in either the Royal Navy or Merchant Navy for poor and/or ‘friendless’ boys.

It was to this end that the Marine Society was founded in the eighteenth century which, working closely with Magistrate John Fielding (brother of the novelist Henry Fielding), launched a newspaper campaign to recruit

All stout Lads and Boys who incline to go on board His Majesty’s Ships, as servants, with a view to learn the duty of a seaman, and are upon examination, approved by the Marine Society, shall be handsomely clothed and provided with bedding and their charges borne down to the ports where His Majesty’s Ships lye, with all proper encouragement.[2]

Added to this was a general popular belief which held that sailors were best bred from a young age; merchant shippers especially liked to have young boys on board ship to help keep cramped quarters clean.^[3] There was something of a ‘civilizing mission’ at work in the designs of this society (and the many private philanthropists doing similar work as well) for oftentimes a condition of the (predominantly working-class) boys’ apprenticeship would be that they were given a practical education in reading, writing, geography—how much these conditions were adhered to once the boys were at sea, of course, was probably hit and miss. Nevertheless, boys were a common sight on Britain’s ships during the first half of the nineteenth century.

John Scott Hood

The fate of serving on board a sailing vessel befell a young lad from Grimsby named John Scott Hood. Hood was born sometime in 1835. He did not receive an education but, at age 14, was apprenticed to a commercial shipping company based in Sunderland. Making his way from Grimsby to Sunderland, Hood was taken into service on board the schooner John Murray.[4]

Whoever the captain of the John Murray was, in all likelihood he was not a very nice man. Corporal punishment was an accepted way, in both the Royal and Merchant Navy, of dealing with allegedly unruly boys. On-the-spot caning, of which records were never kept, could be dished out by either the captain or the boatswain for minor everyday offences. One man who served under Admiral Collingwood in the late eighteenth century recalled in later life that

Youth often runs wild and riotous, and requires a tight hand to keep it within bounds. On board the Mediator, all these punishments were inflicted at various times; and one morning after breakfast, while at anchor in St John’s Road, Antigua, all the midshipmen were sent for into the Captain’s cabin, and four of us were tied up one after the other to the breech of one of the guns, and flogged upon our bare bottoms with a cat-o’-nine-tails, by the boatswain of the ship; some received six lashes, some seven, and myself three. No doubt we all deserved it, and were thankful that we were punished in the cabin instead of upon deck, which was not uncommon in other ships of the fleet.

Additionally, summary ceremonial flogging as well as flogging as ordered by a Court Martial were the punishments meted out for more serious offences. The danger was, of course, that if one had the misfortune to serve under a tyrannical captain, then the on-the-spot canings and random beatings would become a regular occurrence. These punishments remained on the books until 1906.

The John Murray was bound for Brazil. The journey from England to Brazil on board a ship was a long one and there was plenty of time for our anonymous captain to treat young Hood badly. When the ship docked at Rio Grande, Hood seized his chance to run away into the Brazilian countryside.

The captain decided not to pursue him and fraudulently recorded in the ship’s log that the boy had drowned. Notice of this ‘fact’ was accordingly sent to Hood’s family in England who, with this news, never tried looking for him.

Lost in Rio Grande do Sul

In the nineteenth century, the city of Rio Grande was not very big and even today hardly ranks among Brazil’s largest cities. Drive a short distance beyond the city limits and you will enter into the pampas—a vast open countryside of fertile low grasslands. So young Hood travelled through this open countryside and came across a family of farmers. Further misfortune befell him, however, as the family decided to keep this young boy (who could not initially speak Portuguese) as a servant in their household. Hood described his time with them thus:

I wandered into the country and a family of farmers took me in and were very kind to me, but as they were afraid that I should leave them, I was never allowed to go far from the house; and as reading and writing were very little known in those days, in the country about here, I had no opportunity of writing, and, in the course of time, I not only forgot the address of my people at home, but also forgot my native language.[5]

The family did not mistreat him by beating him, it seems, but looking back as an old man in the 1890s, Hood recognised that his time as a youth with this family was a form of ‘mild’ slavery.

The Gringo Gaucho

In time, it seems that Hood eventually gained the family’s trust not to abscond and he became a valued farm hand. The total time he spent with this family was ten years, driving cattle for them from Montevideo in Uruguay all the way up to Pelotas.

The gauchos (speaking of these cattle drivers as a class rather than as a general description for any rural inhabitant of Southern Brazil, Uruguay, or Argentina) have a somewhat mixed reputation. Many times they are depicted as white-skinned ‘noble savages’ or the modern equestrian equivalent of a chivalric medieval knight, as the gaucho is José de Alencar’s novel O Gaucho (1870). Indeed, the figure of the gaucho is still revered in the south of Brazil; the town of Jaguarão features a large statue of an idealised gaucho on its outskirts.

At other times, the gauchos are depicted as a devious quasi-criminals who are not to be trusted. As one observer remarked

There is in that land, and particularly around Montevideo and Maldonado, another class of people, most appropriately called gauchos or gauderios. Commonly all are criminals escaped from the jails of Spain and Brazil, or they belong to the number of those who, because of their atrocities, have had to flee to the wilderness… When the gaucho has some necessity or caprice to satisfy, he steals a few horses or cows, takes them to Brazil where he sells them and where he gets whatever it is he needs.

In the likes of Juana Manso’s novel Misterios del Plata (1852), the gauchos are the henchmen of Juan Rosas, the tyrant and dictator of Argentina who are fond of shouting ‘DEATH TO THE UNITARIAN SAVAGES!’

Hood the Farmer

Let us hope that Hood was one of the more chivalric gauchos, a profession which he pursued for 20 years. The life of a gaucho was a romantic yet tough one. It involved many nights of sleeping alone under the stars next to the cattle, ready for the next day’s droving. But it was a life which could make a man rich. With the money he had made from cattle droving, Hood decided to buy a farm, get married (which he did in 1868), and settle down to a quieter life.[6]

The farm which he owned was located on the outskirts of Canguçu, a small town then and now, and about an hours’ drive away from Pelotas.[7] Hood also bought a second farm ‘on the shore of Lake Patos’. Hood never gave the precise location of the second farm which he owned on the shore of the lake and, being one of the largest lakes in the world and certainly the biggest one in Brazil, trying to locate it without further markers is most difficult. However, the fact that he did own land on its shore is relevant to our story later.

In any case, Hood, who eventually forgot his native language, lived with his wife and eleven children in a hut on their farm. The hut consisted of three rooms, was composed of dried mud walls, and was scantily furnished. The whole family busied themselves with farm work. They owned a considerable number of cattle (60 cows in total), and cultivated tobacco, potatoes, beans, onions, and pumpkins. Most of the family’s trade was done with steamers passing up and down Lake Patos. The family appear to have been such successful farmers that they were even able to rent some land out to other would-be farmers.

Reconnecting with his English family

In January or February 1891, an Englishman by the name of Mr Hellawell, a businessman with concerns in Porto Alegre, was travelling aboard a steamer bound there from southern Rio Grande. However, the steamer on which Hellawell was journeying ran aground on Lake Patos, close to that parcel of land Hood owned. This event enabled Hood and Mr Hellawell to meet.

The first thing which Hood asked the latter was if he could put him in touch with his family back in England. Hellawell promised to do as he requested. When Hellawell returned to England he inserted a notice in the Grimsby Weekly Mercury:

John Scott Hood, who left Dover when a boy[see note 8] in 1848 or ’49, and settled in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, the same year, would like to know if any of his brothers (or sisters) are still living. Having forgotten his native language, he desires that any communication may be addressed to Mr. W. Hellawell, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

In Scott Hood’s absence, his brother back in Grimsby had become a moderately successful businessman, and businessmen are always keeping an eye on the newspapers. When he saw this advertisement he was no doubt dumbfounded and ‘not a little mystified’—was this not the brother who had drowned at sea? The ship’s logs had said so back in 1848, after all!

Letters were soon exchanged between Hood (by now a grandfather) and his brother back in England. It was the sad duty of Hood’s brother to tell him that his mother and father had passed away and what little they had to pass on was divided up among their known survivor. Hood had no objection to this—he wanted for nothing on his Brazilian farm. Photographs were also exchanged between the two families (a ‘fine looking’ family according to the newspapers) and Hood extended invitations to any of his nephews who might want to come and be a farmer in Brazil.

Judging by reports in late 1892 in the Liverpool Mercury, the family appear to have remained in contact, though it is not known whether any of his nephews did take up his offer of being a farmer in Rio Grande do Sul. Who knows what became of the family! But it’s heartening to know that in later life Hood was able to reconnect with his family and let them know he was still alive.

UPDATE: 26 November 2023

After I published this post , my friends at the University of Pelotas shared it on their various socials as well. A grad student at UFPel, Gregory Oliveira, then got in touch with me to say

Amazing text, my friend! When I read the surname Scott Hood, I recalled in seconds the following story: back in the 2010s one of my sisters worked as a nurse at the Hospital Municipal of São José do Norte, the “twin-city” of Rio Grande, localized across the Lagoa dos Patos. So, she find quite curious that some patients in the hospital had the odd surname Scott Hood. She came here to lunch with us today, I talk about your text with her, and she remembered that some members of this family (spread in both sides of the Lake, mixed with families like Amaral) told her that the’re descendents of survivors of a shipwreck. Anyway, it was amazing to wonder whether John’s descendents are the same Scott Hoods from São José do Norte and Rio Grande, or it is another coincidence of this odd piece of the Gaucho country 😀

Personally, I think the incidence of several people named Scott Hood in the area where our Scott Hood lived is not a coincidence and these people of whom Gregory writes must be descendants!

References

[1] ‘The “Weekly Mercury” and Missing Friends’, Liverpool Mercury, 3 October 1892, 5.

[2] M.M. Bennetts [online], ‘Boy Sailors During the Age of Nelson and Napoleon’, English Historical Fiction Authors, 21 May 2013, accessed 25 November 2023

[3] Eliza Juzda Smith, ‘Raising Boys for the Navy: Health, Welfare, and the British Sea Services, 1870-1905’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 76: 1 (2021), pp. 53–77 DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jraa054

[4]  The British ship was built at Sunderland in 1847 and shipwrecked in 1875; it is not to be confused, it appears, with an American schooner of the same name which was active before 1847. For information on the British one see Register of Shipping, 1855-1879, Devon Heritage Centre, DSR/EXE/1/9. For information on the American ship see the following: Log of the schooner JOHN MURRAY: Diaries, Journals and Logbooks 1846, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[5] ‘The “Weekly Mercury” and Missing Friends’, 5.

[6] Presumably the number of years which Hood says he spent being a cattle drover also include the years he did it while living with the family who took him in, otherwise landing with the family in 1848, plus ten years’ service with them, and another 20 years’ service as a gaucho, would take us to 1878, yet he says that he got married after he stopped cattle droving.

[7]  The British newspaper which ran his story spelt this town as ‘Kangiussu’ which caused me no small headache when trying to figure out where Hood settled.

[8] Later investigations by officials said that it was Liverpool, not Dover, which the John Murray departed from.