Did Dom Pedro I ride a horse or a mule when he declared Brazil’s independence?

The road up from the coast

In September 1822 Brazil was still joined to Portugal, and Pedro, the king’s 23-year-old son, governed it from Rio de Janeiro as prince regent. On September 7, now Brazil’s Independence Day, he was riding back from Santos, the port below São Paulo, up the Serra do Mar, the steep wall of mountains behind the coast. A guard of honor of some 30 men rode with him.

He was ill. Father Belchior Pinheiro de Oliveira, who traveled with him, says Pedro was “racked by a dysentery with pains he caught in Santos.” The guard went on ahead; the prince followed with a small party. That is the group two couriers, Paulo Bregaro and Antônio Ramos Cordeiro, caught up with near a stream called the Ipiranga, carrying urgent letters from Rio. What Pedro said after reading them is in Who said ‘Independence or Death’?.

What the witnesses saw

Four men who were there left accounts of that afternoon: Father Belchior, Colonel Marcondes, Canto e Melo and the guard’s commander, Gama Lobo. A study in the journal of the Museu Paulista, São Paulo’s history museum, set them side by side in 2023. Those who describe his mount never call it a horse.

Marcondes, writing in 1862, remembered that Pedro “rode a bay dun beast.” Belchior speaks of “his fine bay beast.” The Portuguese word is besta, and here it means a mule, the cross between a donkey and a mare. Mules were the mounts of the tropeiros, the muleteers who hauled goods up and down the range: tougher than horses and surer on steep, broken ground. Gama Lobo even called the newspapers’ story of a fiery Minas thoroughbred “less true.”

Where the horse came from

The horse first appears in a text of 1854, three decades later. It became permanent in 1888, in Pedro Américo’s huge canvas Independência ou Morte! (Independence or Death!). São Paulo commissioned it for a monument at the Ipiranga, and the artist painted it in Florence between 1886 and 1888, 66 years after the event. It measures 4.15 by 7.60 meters (about 13.6 by 25 feet) and was unveiled when the Museu Paulista opened in 1895.

Américo put the prince on a horse, in full dress uniform, radiant, his guard waving sabers around him. His model for the composition was French: Ernest Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland (1875), a Napoleonic cavalry scene. Faced with complaints about the liberties he had taken, he answered: “Reality inspires, but does not enslave.”

A painting, not a photograph

So is the painting wrong? It idealizes, as nearly all nineteenth-century history painting did. It was made to give a young nation a founding image, and it worked: it is the September 7 that Brazilian schoolchildren grow up with. The witnesses describe a mule, a jacket buttoned in haste and a sick man. The canvas turned all of that into a horse, gala and glory.

There is an irony in it. Pedro loved horses; he grew up running between the São Cristóvão palace and the royal stables. On the most famous day of his life he was on a mule. Bronze preferred the horse too: Rio’s equestrian statue of Pedro I, in the square now called Praça Tiradentes, went up in 1862. His whole life, from the palace where he was born to the crypt at the Ipiranga, is in Who was Pedro I of Brazil?.