George Anton Schaeffer

In this third book in the George Anton Schaeffer trilogy, Dr. George Anton Schaeffer has been expelled from Hawaii and finds sanctuary in Macau, China. From there he and two companions cross the Pacific and round Cape Horn on a Portuguese ship, arriving in Rio de Janeiro in April of 1818. There he revives his acquaintance with the Brazilian royalty, especially the German-speaking young wife, Dona Leopoldina, of Emperor Dom Joao's son Pedro, who is soon to become Brazil's first independent Emperor. From Rio de Janeiro he sails back to Europe, trying to gain an audience with the Russian Tsar Alexander I in order to convince him that the Russian annexation of the Hawaiian islands would be of immense future benefit to Russia as a port and provisioning station in the Central Pacific Ocean. But his effort to speak to the Tsar is futile and he returns to his wife Barbara and daughter Inga in St. Petersburg after an absence of more than five years. Barbara's life in St. Petersburg as the wealthy wife of an absent prominent stockholder in the government-chartered Russian-American fur Company is depicted in Chapter nine, focusing on the rivalry for her affections of the very colorful Russian Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoi, known as "The American," and the swashbuckling American adventurer in the far east, Peter Dobell. The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, future President John Quincy Adams plays a role in this drama. But when George returns, he and Barbara decide to liquidate their very considerable Russian assets and return to their homeland in Germany. From there they convince over forty of their friends and relatives to accompany them to Brazil, where they found a colony called Frankenthal on land in the southern horn of the Bahia State granted to them by Emperor Dom Pedro I. George then accepts an imperial commission to procure German mercenaries for Dom Pedro's army in a transportation-and-land-for-military-service scheme. For the next eight years, on two dozen ships specially fitted for the purpose, George pays for and supervises the transportation to Brazil...largely to the southern Rio Grande do Sul State...of thousands of German, Swiss, Dutch, and Austrian emigrants. One of the involved voyages, that of the GERMANIA in 1824, involved a controversial execution of eight convict-mutineers who tried to take over the ship and sail it, instead of to Brazil, to the United States.