Brazil was a beautiful but dangerous place 200 years ago, when three Liverpool brothers set out for its shores. They began by working as merchants, but were soon appointed as British Consuls in the ports of the newly-independent Empire of the Brazils. There, their official duties brought them into close and daily contact with rebellion, piracy, shipwreck, mutiny, but, above all, with the cruelty and the chicanery that surrounded the Slave Trade. In this unusual book, Ian Sargen paints a fascinating picture of the lives and fortunes of the three brothers. One spent twenty years in the northern port of Sao Luis, with its gracious buildings and its dangerous tides, where he successfully protected the British residents against attack, and had to deal with the devious Lord Cochrane. He then spent another twenty years battling against aggressive slave-traders in the bustling port of Rio de Janeiro, with its dramatic backdrop of volcanic peaks. Another brother represented the British Crown in Belem on the banks of the vast and muddy Amazon, from which he had to flee for his life when the vicious Cabanagem Rebellion broke out. The third brother acted as Deputy Consul in Sao Luis, and then offended the Foreign Office, and was deprived of promotion. We meet their wives - the beautiful and love-lorn Margarida, and the 19 year-old Georgiana who married the British Consul in Rio, thirty years her senior. We meet their many children, some of them orphaned and left penniless by the early and tragic deaths of their parents. We also meet the towering authoritarian figures of Castlereagh, Canning, and Palmerston, who controlled the complex network of British diplomats and consuls throughout the world from their antiquated Foreign Office building in Downing Street. Palmerston, in particular, emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic figure. Compiled from rarely-seen original sources, Our Men in BrazilA gives a vivid picture of the vanished world of the nineteenth-century British Consul, who worked without complaint in the tropical heat, surrounded by his often quarrelsome compatriots, to help British merchants, British seafarers, and wretched African slaves. It is a timely reminder that great causes, like the growth of a newly-independent nation like Brazil, or the abolition of the heinous Slave Trade, often depend for their success on the quiet work of forgotten men, like the Hesketh brothers of Liverpool.
