This silence of the sources regarding capoeira might be due to the fact that police surveillance was minimal
prior to 1808, not carried out by professionals and not reported upon in a regular, bureaucratic fashion.
Until then, the civilian watchmen in charge of vigilance had to request help from army or militia units if
there was any threat to public safety. Yet the relatively low incidence of capoeira arrests in the 1810s could
also indicate that capoeiragem only developed in the last years of the Viceroyalty. Hopefully future research
into still unexploited sources will shed more light on this issue.
The transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio resulted in the creation, in 1808, of a Police Intendant and a
professional police force, the Royal Police Guard. From the very beginning, police energy was directed at
the repression of any behaviour considered ‘unacceptable’. This included ‘vagrancy , begging, curfew
violation, disrespect to authority, verbal insult, unspecified disorderly conduct, and public drunkenness’—
and, prominently among all these, capoeira.^11 The royal decree establishing the Police Intendancy granted it
authority to punish minor offences in the following terms:
as there are crimes that require no punishment other than some correction, the Intendant may in such
cases arrest such persons as deserve correction, keeping them imprisoned for a time judged by the
Intendant as proportional to the disorder committed, and as seems necessary for correction.^12Yet despite the introduction of these sharp measures and the threat of immediate correction, slaves
continued to indulge in the infamous practice. On one occasion, the prince regent was almost forced to
watch it. The police chief of the city, extremely annoyed by the episode, complained to the judge of the
central Candelária parish in March 1814, that
after five o’clock in the afternoon, in fact the time when His Royal Majesty was there passing by, a
rancho [group] of capoeiras, with knives and sticks and with the ribbons they sometimes use to come
out, causing great mayhem and shouting [...]^13Taking on board the recommendations by his Majesty, he required thorough investigations to find out the
identities of slaves responsible for such an act of disrespect. These and similar occurrences seemed to justify
harsh measures against capoeiras and any similar threat against the public safety in a slave society.
In 1817 the Police Intendant Paulo Fernandes Viana announced that slaves found with knives were to
suffer harsh penalties (300 lashes and three months of forced labour). Free individuals, even whites, though
exempted from the whip, were threatened with the same three months of forced labour. No excuse was to be
accepted from artisans or sailors who needed such instruments for their office, because they should leave
them at their workplace. The Intendant then turned to the capoeiras, and, by the same token, gave one of the
first definitions of their practice according to the authorities:
The same penalty will apply to all those who roam around the city, whistling and with sticks,
committing disorder most of the times with no aim, and which are well known by the name of
capoeiras, even if they do not provoke any injuries or death or any other crime [...]^14The Intendant’s announcement reflected a problem that concerned legislators and police chiefs throughout
the Empire: how to outlaw a practice that did not, in itself, represent a crime according to Western legal
traditions? The first Brazilian Criminal Code (1831), inspired by liberal principles, does not even mention
capoeira, and leaves it to the local legislation (posturas municipais) or the discretion of police chiefs to
repress the practice. Yet it is mainly through these elite concerns and the repressive measures which police
70 CAPOEIRAGEM IN RIO DE JANEIRO