Revolt on the High Seas

If it was conceived as a rebellion, it was a flop. But if it was a publicity stunt, it was imbued with idealism and conducted with a flamboyance that forced the world's attention on an issue that the world had long ignored.

The stunt was planned and plotted by Portugal's Henrique Galvao, 65, soldier, playwright, pamphleteer. His object was to dramatize the wrongs wrought by Premier Antonio Salazar, who is unquestionably a dictator, but a man so seemingly mild that even the most fervent libertarians have trouble working up any great indignation against his regime.

Disguised Doctor. Galvao had intimate knowledge of just how oppressive Salazar's rule can be. He served as inspector general of the African colony of Angola and irritated the dictator with a report denouncing Portuguese mistreatment of the Angolans. Jailed in Portugal, Galvao continued to write, and smuggle out, pamphlets attacking Salazar's rule. Sentenced to an additional twelve years' imprisonment, he feigned illness, was sent to a Lisbon hospital and walked out disguised as a doctor. Escaping Portugal, Galvao went first to the Argentine and turned up in Venezuela in November 1959, where he got in touch with other exiled leaders of the Portuguese Liberation Junta, a widespread but ineffectual anti-Salazar group. His plan: to capture at sea the Portuguese liner Santa Maria on one of its regular Caribbean cruises.

Under Galvao's direction, young men of the junta went into training at a "vacation camp" near Caracas and practiced calisthenics and hand-to-hand fighting. A girl sympathizer got a job as telephone operator on the Santa Maria. During several voyages she memorized the ship's communications system and noted the stations taken by the crew during night watches.

Just before Christmas, the junta began buying third-class tickets for the January cruise of the Santa Maria, but after purchasing 30 tickets, the junta ran out of money. It was decided that the ticket holders would carry arms in their hand luggage, while the remaining 40 men in the plot would board ship pretending to be relatives and friends saying goodbye to passengers. Then they would remain as stowaways. With their eye on world-wide publicity, the junta urged a Caracas newspaper editor to send a reporter and photographer with them. Long accustomed to the pipe dreams of anti-Salazar exiles, the editor laughed them out of his office.

Last week, carrying 580 passengers, the trim, 20,906-ton Santa Maria put in at La Guaira, the seaport of Caracas. The conspirators boarded the ship, arousing no particular suspicion, since young, male, single employees of Royal Dutch Shell in Venezuela often use the Portuguese line to travel to the U.S.

Ten Minutes. At 1:30 on Monday morning, armed men appeared in the officers' quarters and on the bridge. The third pilot dashed toward the captain's cabin, but was dropped with four bullets and died. In the wild shooting, an apprentice and a ship's doctor were wounded. Taking charge on the bridge, Henrique Galvao ordered the ship's engines stopped, then he picked up the intercom phone, got the captain and told him casually that he was taking over his ship. It was all over in ten minutes.

Galvao ordered the Santa Maria to change course and turn east toward St. Lucia, one of Britain's Windward Islands. At 10 a.m. Galvao summoned the passengers to the tapestried first-class lounge, where the seizure was explained in Portuguese and Spanish, with an English resume added for the benefit of 38 U.S. tourists.

Galvao concluded the meeting by playing Tchaikovsky's militant 1812 Overture on the public address system. The casualties of the fight were put ashore at St. Lucia in a lifeboat manned by six sailors and a male nurse. Then the Santa Maria steamed off into the wide Atlantic.

No Aid. In flowery Portuguese, Galvao radioed his "first official communique to all democratic newspapers of the free world." Speaking in the name of "General Humberto Delgado, legally elected President of the Portuguese Republic, who has been fraudulently deprived of his rights by the Salazar administration," Galvao saluted the "oppressed peoples" of Portugal and Spain, swore he had received aid from no foreign government, and added that the capture of the Santa Maria marked the liberation of the first piece of Portuguese "territory."

General Humberto Delgado, 54, Portugal's most celebrated revolutionary, has lived in exile in Sao Paulo, Brazil for the past two years. An air force general and longtime supporter of the regime, Delgado struck out for himself in 1958 when he broke all the rules by campaigning seriously for the presidency of Portugal in one of Salazar's mock elections. There were plenty of issues to campaign on. After 29 years of Salazar's glacial rule, literacy barely reaches 60%, the tuberculosis rate is almost double that of any other Western European country, and per capita income ranges from $100 to $199 a year--on a level with Libya and below Mexico and Panama.

Delgado told large and tumultuous Portuguese crowds that he represented "the persecuted intellectuals, the abandoned artists, the technicians denied the possibility of giving their best, the muzzled journalists--in fact, all those who in other countries stand for a true level of culture!" The embarrassed Salazar government conceded that Delgado won 23% of the presidential vote and promptly fired him from his job as director of civil aeronautics. Loudly insisting he had actually won the election, Delgado hid out for three months in Lisbon's Brazilian embassy until he got a safe-conduct to leave the country.

Raisins & Wine. Portugal has not been the same since. Salazar's hard-working if often inept secret police keep stumbling on plots and conspiracies. In 1959 they thwarted a coup with the unlikely name of "Operation Cocktail" and rounded up 31 suspects, including nine army officers, a Catholic priest and several professional men. Last year the police pounced on another conspiracy in the African colony of Angola, and 46 persons were tried for treason.

In Sao Paulo last week, Delgado celebrated the coup with convivial glasses of red Portuguese wine, raisins and crackers. Chatting happily with newsmen, he answered overseas phone calls and fired off stirring communiques informing the U.S. and Britain that the capture of the Santa Maria "does not represent mutiny or piracy but only the seizure of Portuguese transport by Portuguese to fulfill Portuguese political objectives." The act, he cried, "will contribute greatly to the liberation of Portugal" and prepare the way for setting up a "provisional government."

In Lisbon, the Salazar government spluttered denunciations of the "wicked act committed by this gang of pirates," and likened it to "the barbarian practices that made the Caribbean Sea an area of dishonor, which took centuries to clean up." Panic-stricken that a similar fate might be in store for the Santa Maria's sister ship, the Vera Cruz, which was en route to Brazil, Lisbon rushed ten secret servicemen by plane to Rio de Janeiro with orders to allow no visitors aboard when the Vera Cruz docked. The Portuguese government appealed to the U.S. and Britain to recapture the Santa Maria and return it to its rightful owners.

Lost Sight. A British frigate glimpsed the Santa Maria sailing in the general direction of Africa, but then, surprisingly, lost sight of it. Four U.S. destroyers, two tankers, a nuclear sub and 18 planes combed the area, but found nothing. The pirated liner seemed to have vanished from the map until a Danish freighter, chugging along a normal shipping lane, radioed that it had passed the Santa Maria and exchanged greetings. At the Pentagon press room in Washington, someone put up an ironical sign reading: "Sleep soundly tonight. The Danish merchant marine is watching over you."

Neither Washington nor London had much appetite for putting a shot across the Santa Maria's bow and sending aboard a party of marines. Part of the difficulty was to decide just what crime had been committed. The 1958 Geneva treaty on Rules of the High Seas, specifically states that piracy involves the action of one ship against another, and therefore could not apply to the Santa Maria. Though Portugal is a NATO member and a centuries-old ally of Britain, Washington and London shrank from the worldwide clamor that would ensue if these particular rebels were handed over to Dictator Salazar.

Hope of Asylum. There seemed little chance of capture by the Portuguese navy, whose major elements are four destroyers, twelve frigates and three submarines scattered among Portugal's far-flung possessions. Galvao announced that he was headed for Angola, the Portuguese African colony where he was once inspector general. But when trouble erupted in neighboring Congo last year, Lisbon rushed several battalions of crack troops to Angola, which would be more than a match for Galvao's 70 rebels and whatever sympathizers he may have in the colony. Brazilian observers speculated that Galvao was simply cruising about in the Atlantic until newly elected President Janio da Silva Quadros takes office this week, in the hope that he will grant asylum to Galvao and his men.

Hot Potato. U.S. Admiral Robert L. Dennison, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, radioed an offer of "safe-conduct" to Galvao and his ship. Concerned for the Santa Maria's passengers, Dennison promised not to interfere should Galvao enter a harbor to let them land. Galvao replied that he was willing to negotiate with U.S. authorities aboard the Santa Maria or at a neutral port. So saying, he ordered a radical change in course, veered toward the coast of Brazil.

Brazil reacted as if it had been handed a hot potato. U.S. planes, which had been refueling at Belem and Recife while keeping an eye on the Santa Maria, were suddenly ordered grounded. Trying to keep on the right side of everyone, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry announced that if the Santa Maria entered Brazilian waters she would be returned to her Portuguese owners, but that Galvao and his 70 men could have political asylum.

But Galvao at week's end had still another alternative, and one with dizzying implications. The tiny rock island of Fernando de Noronha lay only a few hundred miles to the south. While the island belongs to Brazil, it has been leased to the U.S. as a missile-tracking station, and its 1,000 residents include U.S. civilian technicians and troops. Should the Santa Maria land her 580 passengers there, Captain Henrique Galvao might possibly sail away again before the U.S. and Brazil can untangle the legal complexities of the situation.

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