A Companhia de Aprendizes Marinheiros do Pará: recrutamento, cotidiano e deserção – segunda metade do século XIX

Abstract

The company of Marine Apprentices of Pará, created by Decree law nº 1.517, of 1855 emerged from a state policy of national scope, which between 1840 and 1874, implanted 18 Companies of Marine Apprentices throughout the Empire, whose objective was to take to the ranks from the national armada individuals prepared - since childhood - to carry out a job that would meet the technological advancement that the naval industry had been going through since the second half of the 19th century. But it would also have a social role, that is, removing children from the poor strata of the “addictions” and “criminality” that they were subject to and, at the same time, they would function as a replacement mechanism for the forced recruitment system responsible for taking on board the navy warships, elements averse to naval life. These minors were interpreted by part of society as criminals, vagrants and vagrants who put military discipline and morals at risk. However, we can see that the political discourse that involves the creation of the Companhia de Aprendizes Marinheiros, in practice, unfolded in a policy of criminalizing the “offspring” of the poor and colored, in the Empire, as well as an extension of the system of forced recruitment for this portion of the population, which would push hundreds of children and young people into the Companhia de Marinheiros do Pará who had traumatic experiences on the premises of the Navy Arsenal or on the Company's school ships marked by constant surveillance. In addition, they experienced the control of time and space, the exploitation of the workforce, illnesses, deaths and corporal punishment. In this sense, this research demonstrates that the smallest apprentice sailors form practices of reaction to the environment of repression imposed by the State on their lives, mainly by the practice of desertion in order to make their choices again from the social experiences built outside the dependencies of the Navy Arsenal of Pará, that is, based on traditional ways of earning a living from habits very common to the daily life of the Amazonian population in the eighties.