Rethinking Slavery’s Abolition in Ceará Through an Engagement with Maritime Marronage

: In late January 1881, a group of anti-slavery raftsmen blockaded the port of Fortaleza to slave traders declaring that enslaved persons would no longer be shipped to Brazil’s southern plantations out of Ceará’s northeastern harbor. The blockade was a decisive moment in the rising abolitionist movement in Brazil and culminated in slavery’s abolition in Ceará in 1884, four years before the national prohibition of the institution. Traditional narratives on slavery’s abolition in Ceará emphasize the development of a middle-class led, radical abolitionist movement in the province while lionizing the role played by Francisco José do Nascimento, a free man of color, in leading the raftsmen’s charge against human trafficking. Recent research on the raftsmen’s blockade highlights the role played by the formerly enslaved man José Luiz Napoleão in the anti-slavery strike. This article revisits the 1881 anti-slavery strike and places it in the context of maritime marronage in nineteenth century Brazil. By probing the long tradition of fugitive slaves using their access to the sea and their skills as sailors and boatmen to escape slavery and relocate from one province to another, this article demonstrates that the world of maritime labor provided opportunities and challenges for slave resistance, and fugitive mariners created a culture of contesting the geography of slavery in Brazil.

middle-class professionals in facilitating the flight of enslaved people from one province to another through various sea and land routes to freedom. 9 Historians of the Caribbean have long theorized and documented the significance of its waterways and the "marine underground" that connected its archipelago of colonial plantations in providing avenues for enslaved men and women to escape slavery. Julius Scott classically emphasized the significance of Caribbean port cities as sites where a motley of mobile workers transmitted ideas of freedom from ports to ports, and from harbors into the hinterland seeding the ground of resistance and rebellion against slavery in the Caribbean. 10 N. A. T. Hall creatively coined "maritime marronage" as a concept to interpret the use of the Caribbean Sea by the enslaved to escape slavery to the territories existing on the edges of the plantation such as the teeming forest of Porto Rico and Vieques island in the eighteenth-century, thereby challenging land-centered understanding of slave resistance. 11 More recent research on maritime marronage in the Caribbean and the costal United States reaffirmed the significance of waterways as paths to freedom in the pre-civil war era as Marcus Rediker argues in this issue. 12 Juliana Barreto Farias, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, and Eduardo Moreira de Araújo's research on Black Cities in Brazil showed that "urban slaves took advantage of ships to escape" slavery. 13 These pathbreaking studies lay the ground for interrogating slave resistance beyond the terracentric model that has shaped studies on slave agency. The jangadeiros' strike demonstrates how abolitionist politics in Brazil deployed protests on land and at sea, especially along coastal waterways, to successfully challenge slavery in the last slave society in the Americas.

Brazil's Port Workers and the Routes of Maritime Marronage
An inquiry into the jangadeiros' strike, especially José Luiz Napoleão and Francisco José do Nascimento suggests an alternative fertile ground for rethinking abolitionism in Ceará as rooted in the labor relationship that port workers developed through their occupation in Fortaleza's harbor and the long history of maritime marronage along the Brazilian coast.
Jangadeiros, lancheiros and other small boat operators were very familiar with the tragedy of the slave trade by the nature of their profession, especially after the 1831 law which forced the traffic away from major ports to smaller points of entry along the Brazilian coast. 14 As the traffic shifted from major port cities to hideaway coastal regions, jangadas became a preferred means of disembarkation of the enslaved especially in the northeast. They also served to transport fugitive slaves from slavery to freedom. 15 They were traditionally complicit in the commerce, and thus port-workers cannot be easily viewed as anti-slavery activists. They were witnesses to enslaved people, including enslaved mariners, utilizing their access to ships and barks to escape slavery. They understood the potential of the ocean to allow the enslaved to self-liberate through marronage but also its dangers as the route of slavery from Africa to Brazil, and from one province to province after 1850.
Studies on maritime workers and port-city laborers in Brazil show that they originated from diverse social groups. They were racially mixed but also cosmopolitan. The creation of navy arsenals in major provinces after 1830 trained a class of port workers that specialized in ship construction and sailing among other things. They were of both enslaved and free status, and others were freedmen. Many of the enslaved were sent to the arsenals to be trained in marine craft by their owners which increased their value on the labor market. They lived a life of scarcity since training was without wages, and when they ascended beyond the class of apprentices, these workers earned low wages that kept them in an impoverished condition. 16 Jangadeiros and canoeiros were among the people hired at times by the navy arsenals who contributed to construction works among other things in port cities like Bahia, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. In 1848 for example, the Intendant of the Navy in Bahia published a call for hire for bricklayers and carpenters as well as other workers including the request for a jangadeiro who would be paid 500 réis. This was three times less than the salary of a bricklayer 14  which was 1$500 milréis. 17 Enslaved jangadeiros were also advertised for sale and for hire in the nineteenth century as was the case of a twenty-four-year-old man "without any vices, a fisherman who was a good jangadeiro and canoeiro, and a great diver. 18 " An analysis of advertisements to recover fugitive slaves show how the sea and port cities were utilized by enslaved people to escape slavery to areas where they could get anonymity as free Blacks. The extent to which they could be successful was shaped by the expanse of slavery over the Brazilian territory and the policing of quilombos. 19 Unlike the United States, where fugitive mariners could expect to live a life in quasi freedom in the north if they were not caught by slave catchers toward the end of the eighteenth-century, Brazil did not have free soil territories until abolition in Ceará. The ads reveal that enslaved mariners and jangadeiros often successfully escaped for months and in a few cases years without being recovered. In these instances, their enslavers advertised the call to recover their captives in newspapers published in major metropolitan centers such as Rio de Janeiro and in newspapers that had Comercio describing the two men and emphasizing João's occupation as a "jangadeiro and a fisherman," and Matheus' origin from Loanda highlighting that he "spoke sailors' slang. 21 " Likewise, for at least eight months, Antonio, an enslaved man originally from Angola, evaded his captors when he fled from aboard a ship that arrived in Rio de Janeiro from Pernambuco in 1839. Antonio was a sailor who worked aboard the Patacho Quatro de Maio.
As the Quatro de Maio anchored in Rio's Bay, Antonio used a propitious time to sail toward the harbor probably utilizing a canoe that carried passengers to shores to lose himself in the city among the Black population. Antonio managed to evade being re-enslaved for at least eight months -the length that the runaway slave ad ran from January to August. 22  Jangadeiros were a subset of the enslaved mariners that escaped slavery utilizing the opportunities and mobility afforded by their occupation. They oftentimes worked as fishermen and these two activities were listed in runaway ads to alert the public about the work sector where the fugitive might seek a means of employment post-flight. When the enslaved Manoel fled aboard a war ship after having "had a previous life as a jangadeiro and a fisherman", his owner the Sergeant Manoel Zeferino dos Santos from Pernambuco published an advertisement in Brazil's premier gazette which had a wide territorial circulation 24 For at least three months, João Crioulo's enslaver published an ad about his flight describing him as a "jangadeiro, canoeiro, and a fisherman," skilled "for all types of services on land and at sea. 25 " A national search was done when Athanazio fled his owner who resided in the province of Alagoas. Athanazio was described as a "skilled jangadeiro and a fisherman" who also could "work well enough as a bricklayer and a carpenter." He was a very valuable slave and they offered 100$00 milréis to whoever could bring him to his owners. There were five provinces -Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Sergipe, and Alagoas -and five respective businessmen who were identified and authorized to negotiate Athanazio's return. 26 Jangadeiros had a particular appearance and way of dressing themselves that slave-owners identified in runaway ads. Enslaved fugitives were described as wearing "a linen clothe shirt and a large jangadeiro hat," or the "clothing of a jangadeiro" in many instances to identify their occupations and possible future source of employment. 27 Slaveholders notified the people of the sea to be on the lookout for escaped slaves. At times sailors vigilantly returned captives to the police. Enslaved people often saw in foreign ships -especially those of the British navy -opportunities to flee slavery from Brazil due to their knowledge of the geopolitics of abolition in the mid-nineteenth century. 28 Enslaved people would offer themselves as sailors to ships that anchored in the bays of Brazil and it was a way for them to get anonymity aboard a ship. Slaveowners were cognizant of this marronage strategy and warned ships' captains about the tactic. In 1824, an ad ran warning all "ships' captains especially those from Rio Grande do Sul" about an enslaved mariner named José who may offer to sail with them." José had fled from Maranhão and had been hired as a sailor aboard a Brazilian war vessel. 29  the ship before sailing to its destination. Under renewed pressure, the sailor divulged that he was a fugitive slave from Minas Gerais from whence he had fled six months earlier.
He seemed to have lived a transient life but was desperate to escape Rio and avoid the net of police surveillance that regulated the movement of the black population in the city. 30 For four months the enslaved mariner Simão fled aboard the galera Leopoldina and his owner found out that he found work aboard a ship. 31 For at least two years, the enslaved man Marcelino escaped the wide search net that his owner deployed to recover him from fugitivity. Marcelino was purchased for only a few months and was supposed to be shipped to a new owner aboard the ship Despique that maintained the traffic with Moçambique.
Marcelino was also a sailor and his captors believed that he embarked on another ship after his flight, likely one that sailed to a southern port or one that maintained the traffic between Brazil and Mozambique where he originated. The owner "beseeched all ship captains" who "catch him aboard" any vessel to bring Marcelino to Rio. 32 In 1838 the enslaved mulatto José fled from an engenho in Quintinduba in the interior of Pernambuco in late December 1837. He was seen on his way to Recife, the capital of the province. It was not José's first time living as a fugitive. In a previous instance, he had worked as a sailor in a "war vessel that sailed in the southern ports" of Brazil. The owner suggests that José may try again to work aboard a war vessel where he could benefit from anonymity and live in precarious freedom at sea. He warned "captains of ships to exert all possible vigilance so that this mulatto does not get hired among your crew." He also warned merchants who purchase and transport food from the sertão on the oxen mule train to Recife to not "add this fugitive" among their crew. 33 " Fugitives lived a life on the move because they were constantly threatened with apprehension by the police, or the capitão do mato -bush captain-that hunted runaway slaves. When they utilized the sea to escape, it afforded them greater protection from policing which was land based. At the same time, they had to avoid being discovered as fugitives by ship captains. Their level of ladinization to luso-Brazilian culture, that is their ability or lack therefore to pass off as freed Blacks and to manipulate socio-cultural and commercial symbols of the slave society while retaining African rooted identities could determine whether they would be identified by the police as fugitives or not. 34 Slaveowners therefore highlighted when a fugitive could pass of as a member of the free Black population in major urban centers like Rio, Bahia, or Recife. For example, the Diário de Pernambuco advertised that in December an enslaved sailor from São Thomé in West Africa fled from aboard the Bergantim Incansável Maciel and that he "would probably try to pass off as a forró -a freedman -since he was a mariner and bastante ladino" that is an African well adapted to the Brazilian slave society. 35 Domingues fled from his owner named Boaventura José Rodrigues who lived on the Praça do Maranhão. He was a skilled shoemaker and described as "very ladinized and born in Pará." He had boarded a ship and sailed to the south of Brazil. 36 When Lourenço, nação Calabar fled his owner published an ad in the Diário de Pernambuco identifying the enslaved as a sailor but adding that "however he hasn't sailed for a while." The owner asked he asks ships' captains to "not invite the fugitive aboard their vessels" and for the police to "now allow Lourenço to transit from one county to the next," and for any capitão do campo who encountered the enslaved to return him to a given address in Rio. 37 Enslaved mariners often utilized the lapse of time when their ship anchored in a new city and delivered its cargo to escape to shore and disappear among the population. They sometimes deployed the trust that they had developed with their ship captains who sent them on errands on shore to disappear and never return aboard. When José Congo arrived in Rio de Janeiro as a sailor aboard the Sumaca Libertino Feliz from Ilha Grande and was sent on an errand he used the opportunity to flee to freedom on land using a smaller boat. 38 When José failed to return aboard the sumaca, the vessel's captain advertised authorities that the enslaved had become a fugitive. The runaway ad informed the public and the police that José was a slave for hireescravo do ganho from Villa de Paranagoa where his owner lived. 39 Likewise two enslaved sailors were sent to collect water at Rio's water fountains in one of the city's public squares. They were passing through Rio de Janeiro with the crew of the Brigue Escuna Navegante. They never returned to the ship. They blended into the crowd of Black workers that transited through Rio's streets. 40 The ship transited between Rio Grande, Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro and as far as Montevideo and was involved in the provincial trade by sea linking these cities.
Ships were therefore powerful vectors of captivity through slave trading but also beacons of freedom for runaway slaves who boarded them as fugitive sailors or stowaways. Toward the 1880s, increasingly commercial ships involved in the interprovincial trade were utilized by abolitionists with ties to the business sector to transport runaway slaves to freedom. As abolitionist ideas became part of the fabric of popular politics and as organizations such as the Sociedade Cearense Libertadora utilized public performances and emancipation funds to end slavery in Brazil, they took on the radical steps of facilitating slave flights utilizing ships and jangadas. The front line of this movement was often men and women from the working-class and port workers like Francisco José do Nascimento and José Luiz Napoleão who were likely

The Jangada Libertadora: A Tale of Two Abolitionisms
The participation of José Luiz Napoleão in the 1881 blockade of Fortaleza's harbor to slave traffickers is significant. Both Francisco José do Nascimento and José Luiz Napoleão were port workers and jangadeiros, an activity that was important to Ceará's economic life, but also as I argued in the previous section, a profession that was tied to marine slave resistance. Jangadeiros operated small wooden boats known as jangadas that transported goods and people to and from Fortaleza's harbor to larger ships anchored in the bay. These ships could not reach the harbor due to its shallow seabed. Jangadeiros often did not own their vessels but rather were employed as wage workers in Ceará's harbor and the coastline as fishermen among other activities. Jangadas were fragile embarkations against the treacherousness of sea waves and jangadeiros therefore developed skillful knowledge of oceanic movement, wind patterns, and the depth of local sea floors as they ply their trade along the coastlines for fishing or transportation. They were part of the chain of workers that linked Fortaleza and its hinterlands to other Brazilian provinces, among which Amazonia, Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. They shaped the region's political history and working-class activism beyond the 1881 strike. 42  to it brought people from these provinces but also sugar, coffee, cotton, and the news of abolitionist ideas out of and into the province. These ships were also utilized by a network of abolitionist individuals who were involved in interprovincial commercial networks to transport fugitive slaves from the slave economy of Pernambuco to Ceará after 1884. 43 Ceará province was on the frontier of the Brazilian economy and did not produce the three staples that ensured national wealth in the nineteenth-century: coffee, sugar, and cotton.
Colonization at the beginning of the 17 th century and the dispossession of native lands brought African slavery to the province. But a harsh climate that changed from a dry to a wet season was not propitious to an agrarian economy like in Bahia and the Paraíba Valley, or Pará/ Maranhão where sugar, cotton, and coffee fields were tilled by indigenous and enslaved laborers. The wet season began in Ceará around March bringing with it needed rain to an otherwise parched land marked by the expanse of the sertão and its catingas. The province thus developed historically mainly as a cattle ranching and livestock economy. 44 Francisco José do Nascimento and José Luiz Napoleão as well as the other jangadeiros that blockaded human trafficking were a racially mixed group that included whites, caboclos -people of mixed white, indigenous, and African ancestry -and people of African descent of enslaved and free status. Both Nascimento and Napoleão were of African descent. Unlike José do Nascimento who was born into a poor jangadeiro family of free status, Napoleão was born into slavery. He became a foreman at Fortaleza's harbor by 1881 where he oversaw the service of embarkation and disembarkation of passengers and goods carried out by other jangadeiros at the port. He seemed to have had good a relationship with his subordinates. 45 At some point before the 1881 strike, Napoleão amassed enough savings as a port-worker to purchase his freedom, that of his wife Maria Simôa da Conceição -Tia Simôa -and that of his four sisters and possibly other extended family members. 46 He owned property and was a taxpayer. He appeared in a list of citizens who owed taxes for three houses on Boulevard do Imperador and Rua do Patrocinio for a total of 36$ milréis in 1879 and 1880. 47 Napoleão and his wife both appear separately as proprietors of two buildings in Rua de Santa Isabel in Fortaleza. 48 Although not much is known about Tia Simôa, she probably acquired the savings to become Napoleão had a political identity although as a liberto, he did not enjoy the right to vote for the electors that nominated senators and deputies to the legislative chamber. He could participate in municipal elections. He appeared in a list of qualified voters to elect local officials. There, he was identified as a 55-year-old married man, an illiterate property owner, and son of José Félix da Silva, with an income of 400 milréis. 50 He therefore seemed to have exercised his limited voting rights as a member of the free working class. As a political actor been founded in December 1880 to end slavery through radical means. 54 The organization "convinced the lancheiros and jangadeiros" that participating in the interprovincial slave trade was "demeaning to their profession." The Gazeta do Norte qualified the jangadeiros' reaction as a "revolt" that was "immediate." It continued: "none of [the jangadeiros] was willing to take on board the poor creatures that ambition was going to throw away from their native land." The usual police repression against the workers' resistance was unable to compel the boatmen to aid in the embarkation of the enslaved.
Significantly, the Gazeta do Norte identified the "freedman José Napoleão at the head of the boatmen's strike against the shipment of slaves in the harbor." The article noted that a few years earlier Napoleão was himself a slave but had purchased his freedom and that of his four sisters through hard work. This suggests that Napoleão was an escravo de ganho, a system that was prominent in urban slavery especially in port-cities in Brazil where the enslaved participated in the labor market and earned wages. There were two forms of wage slavery in Brazil: one in which the enslaved was rented to employers by their enslavers, and another where the enslaved was allowed to live outside their owners' house, earn salaries as a worker by volunteering their skills and services in the labor market, and paid an agreed upon amount to their enslaver. If Napoleão was able to save enough money as an escravo de ganho to purchase his freedom and that of his family members, he probably worked as the latter because it afforded more autonomy and greater flexibility for savings. 55 It is significant that the Gazeta do Norte immediately recognized the leadership of rejected all financial enticements to bring the enslaved aboard the ship Espírito Santo which was to transport the captives to Rio as well as coercion by the police. 56 Raymundo Girão who wrote the classic story of abolition in Ceará attributed the jangadeiros' strike to the action of a member of the SCL named Pedro Artur de Vasconcellos who gave several abolitionist speeches in public squares and theaters where he encouraged those in attendance to "prevent the shipment of captives out of the province. 57 " At another abolitionist event, Vasconcellos again emphasized the necessity to recruit the jangadeiros to cease their involvement in the traffic through the transfer of the enslaved from the harbor to the ships.
Vasconcellos gave another abolitionist speech on January 26, 1881 at the Teatro São Luis where he raised the necessity to recruit jangadeiros in the SCL's campaign against slavery in the province. 58 Vasconcellos had a keen understanding of how the jangadeiros could offset the transfer of Ceará's enslaved population to the south of Brazil as an employee of Casa Singlehurst, a commercial shipping company that operated in the province. 59 Vasconcellos was also well known among Fortaleza's port workers as an employee of Casa Singlehurst. He and fellow SCL member José do Amaral recruited Napoleão to organize the jangadeiros to block human trafficking out of Ceará's harbor. According to Girão, Napoleão was recruited because he was a foreman at the port, and he was well known and appreciated by his coworkers. 60 Francisco José do Nascimento did not play a prominent role in the January 1881 strike, a fact recognized by Girão  using the law, "grabbed" Luiza from the ship where she was already brought with nine other slaves and "brought her to land under the banner of the Brazilian flag. 62

"
The SCL also utilized the occasion of the strike to free from aboard the Vapor Pará, one of the ships anchored in Fortaleza's harbor, "a mother, who though free, was embarked in Maranhão with four of her daughters to be sold into slavery in Rio de Janeiro!" The President of the SCL deployed the law to bring the issue to the Police Chief to secure the captives' freedom. The crossing of the enslaved from the sea to land is significant because it captures the spatiality of the ocean as a zone of ambiguous legal domain and the land as the territory where police authorities and Brazilian law encompassed more capaciously by 1881. 63 Since the November 7, 1831, law that abolished slavery in Brazil, slaveholders have traditionally deployed the ocean as beyond the reach of Brazilian sovereignty to continue human trafficking under the banner of illegality. They also exercised tremendous power to ensure that anyone of African descent could be reduced to slavery if their free status could not be asserted through legal documents. They casted Africans who had been brought on the Brazilian territory as property using the ambiguity of Brazilian politics on the Atlantic slave trade as well as the complicity of authorities to engage in human trafficking until the 1850 abolition law. 64 The 1871 law restricted the totality of slavery on the Brazilian territory and planter's power by freeing the womb of enslaved women and despite its limitations, the law served as an important tool for abolitionists to contest slavery by the 1880s. 65  landscape of unchallenged slavery. It also demonstrated the difficulty that the sea represented as a territory where transiting ships could easily perpetuate the enslavement of people of African descents thirty years after the 1850 law against the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil. As such, the jangadeiros' actions in stopping the embarkation of the enslaved to the ships in Fortaleza's harbor was pivotal to attacking slavery in one of its pillars following the abolition of the slave trade in 1850.
The Sociedade Cearense Libertadora played an important role in changing public opinion on slavery in Ceará. Formed on December 8, 1880, the organization assembled a group of middle-class activists who swore to end slavery "by any means necessary" according to its statutes. 67 The SCL published its activities in its newspaper the Libertador starting on January 1, 1881. The organization was not the first abolitionist association created in Ceará. It took over from budding anti-slavery activism that began in 1870 with anti-slavery organizations that sought to end the institution through free-womb laws and the liberation of minors. In particular, the Sociedade Manumissora Sobralense aimed to raise funds to free enslaved girls. 68  in 1879. 73 As late as 1877, Girão asserted, there were 2909 slaves that were shipped from Ceará's port to southern Brazil. 74 More than 7000 enslaved cearenses were sold out of the province between 1871 and 1881, which was a fifth of the servile population. However, as new research shows a great number of the enslaved reported to have been sold out of the province were runaway slaves who had been led out of the province through the land and sea underground railroad fomented by abolitionist organizations among which the SCL. 75 The demographic shift led one provincial deputy to state during legislative debates on abolition that "Ceará only turned to abolition after having sold its slaves" to the south. 76 Enslaved people like José Luiz Napoleão and Maria Simõa da Conceição relied on selfemancipation through self-purchase to free themselves as between the 1871 law and 1881, few people in Ceará appeared particularly disturbed by the sight of the relocation of the enslaved to the south. Others fled to freedom through the abolitionist network that that Nascimento utilized his jangada and rescued the two enslaved women from the ship in plain sight of the Police Chief who was taken over by the course of events and offered no resistance. The two rescued women were hidden in the residences of abolitionists and were later transferred to the house of a free black woman -Tia Esperança -through a land underground railroad. Bezerra recounted the August 1881 strike in a dramatic fashion. Although he mentioned José Luiz Napoleão's participation in the event, he attributed Nascimento as the main "leader" of the jangadeiros' activism. 79 At some point, Bezerra reported, Nascimento offered himself to assassinate the police chief for the cause of abolition since he did not have children and had therefore nothing to lose. 80 Curiously, Bezerra's story of Nascimento's dramatic August 1881 strike is not reported in Ceará's main newspapers which had profusely written on the January 1881 strike. The Cearense's only note on the Vapor Espirito Santo which Bezerra reported was at the heart of the conflict between the police and an abolitionist crowd, anchored in Fortaleza on August 30, 1881, at ten in the morning and left the port sailing north later that day. It carried aboard it 2 slaves and an ingênuo, a child born after the 1871 free womb law, among other passengers.
The vapor Pará, also mentioned by Bezerra, was also in Fortaleza's port and sailed further north on that day according to the publication. 81 Puzzled by the lack of specific reports on the confrontation between the police and the jangadeiros on August 31, 1881, I studied the main newspapers for any reference to the event from August 30 th to September 1881. On September 6, 1881, the Cearense published an editorial lamenting the violent encounter between the police and the abolitionists. It stated that it supported the cause of emancipation but within the law. 82 The editorial was a mild reference to an event that hinted that there was abolitionist activism in the province but surprisingly the paper did not have a specific report on on the August blockade. 83 A few months later, in December 1881, the Libertadora published an editorial criticizing Ceará's Police Chief's promotion and lamenting that its members were being politically persecuted. It cited the fact that José Francisco de Nascimento had been fired from his job. 84 My conclusion from the lack of newspaper evidence on the August 1881 strike is that Bezerra conflated Nascimento's role in the event with the January 1881 blockade where Napoleão was unanimously reported as a decisive actor.
Bezerra's claim that Nascimento offered himself to assassinate the Police Chief aligns with Raymundo Girão and Edmar Morel's rationalization of the disappearance of José Luiz Napoleão's leadership after the January 1881strike. Both authors argued that Napoleão chose to not continue being at the forefront of the jangadeiros' activism in the harbor and Girão specifically asserted that the freedman identified Nascimento as the person more qualified to continue the popular organizing of port-workers against slavery. However, this is contradicted by the fact that José Luiz Napoleão joined the directory of the SCL along with Nascimento where he could easily be identified by the police as any other member of the radical organization.
Bezerra, Girão, and Morel's explanation of the silencing of Napoleão's role does not suffice. Rather it seems that the leadership of the SCL deliberately lionized Nascimento at the expense of Napoleão both in its original report on the 1881 strike and in Bezerra's history of the province and its abolitionist movement. By May 1881 Morel reported that at the first Abolitionist congress of Brazil held in Maranguape, Nascimento was invited to sit in the first rank of the 123 members in attendance, but Napoleão's name vanished in subsequent history of the movement. 85 The erasure of Napoleão from the SCL's account of the 1881 strike, from its inception, may be due to his identity as a formerly enslaved person who self-emancipated because the organization as well as subsequent rendering of the movement privileged a selfrighteous opposition to slavery emanating from free people. While Napoleão's leadership among the jangadeiros was useful to successfully blockade the port to human trafficking, it is undeniable that the organization was not comfortable in making him the face of the movement. In subsequent years, it was Nascimento who travelled to Rio de Janeiro and his jangada was immortalized and placed in a museum to document the abolitionist movement in Ceará with the captivating image of the "sea dragon" freeing presumably hundreds of enslaved people from being sold to foreign lands. Nascimento, an impoverished jangadeiro of free birth leading the boatmen presented one geneaology of abolitionism as the work of free people. Napoleão, an impoverished jangadeiro of slave birth who self-emancipated, however, presented a radical genealogy of abolitionism shaped by the enslaved. For all its radicalism, the Sociedade Cearense Libertadora did not seem to fully embrace the Napoleão story of abolitionism. The Napoleão story of abolitionism would have reckoned with the tradition of the enslaved, and enslaved mariners, having utilized the ocean as territorial possibility for freedom and that fugitive 83  mariners created a culture of contesting the geography of slavery. However, the silencing of Napoleão from the story of abolition in Ceará by the leadership of the SCL is consistent with the discourse of abolitionists which created a fiction of emancipation as a gift granted selflessly from the free to the enslaved, without agency on the part of the latter. 86

Conclusion
This analysis of maritime marronage along the Brazilian coast in the nineteenth century affirms that seaborne fugitivity was a persistent method of self-emancipation deployed by the enslaved to escape slavery. Enslaved sailors, jangadeiros, canoeiros as well as slaves without any skills maneuvering ships, found in these transiting vessels a vehicle to freedom whereby they could reinvent new identities in Brazil. In doing so, they established a long tradition of maritime marronage that informed port workers' understanding of the possibilities of flight by sea for self-emancipation but also the operationalization of the ocean as a territory to enslave people of African descent through dislocation from Africa to the Americas, and relocation from one province to another in Brazil following the abolition of the slave trade (1850). While the Sociedade Cearense Libertadora did provide the organizational legitimacy for the jangadeiros to blockade Ceará's port to the interprovincial slave trade in 1881, its own rendering of the event, and its silencing of José Luiz Napoleão's role in leading the boatmen's strike presented abolition as the work of free Brazilians especially José Francisco de Nascimento. 87 Recovering and highlighting Napoleão's leadership in the sacred cause suggests another genealogy of freedom in Ceará rooted in slave experience and the long tradition of maritime marronage among the enslaved, many of whom were often jangadeiros and mariners themselves.