Baquaque was baptized, given the Christian name José da Costa and forced to perform Catholic rites under his master's supervision, which only added to the depth of his sadness during that period of adaptation. He tried to kill himself and was subsequently sold to a merchant named Clemente José da Costa, captain of the Lembrança and originally from the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Baquaqua was enslaved on his master's ship on the route between Rio de Janeiro and the coastal ports of southern Brazil, close to the border with Uruguay.  
In a letter dated 28 October 1847, the Reverend William L. Judd, a missionary, noted Baquaqua's recall of the Arabic language and suggested that it might have been bolstered by 'his intercourse with other slaves from the same country' (Law and Lovejoy, 2007, p. 217). Although there is no confirmation of that. Baquaqua very likely did spend a great deal of time in the city of Rio de Janeiro where he was in touch with other enslaved or formerly enslaved Hausas; as Bezerra (2015) puts it, he was a sailor who 'knew the "life of the slaves in Rio de Janeiro"' (Bezerra, 2015, p. 162). The city's Muslim community was not small, especially after the Malê uprising in Bahia in 1835, when many Muslims were sold into slavery in the southern provinces, such as Rio de Janeiro and even Rio Grande do Sul (alRaman alBaghdadi, 1865; Reis, 2003; Reis et al., 2010). Copies of the Qur'an were sold in Rio de Janeiro and, by the end of nineteenth century, the demand in some Brazilian port cities was quite significant (Rodrigues, 1932, pp. 285-294; Farah, 2014). Baquaqua very likely  
[^0]
[^0]:    12 See Diário de Pernambuco, 1840-1849 - PR_SPR_00008, Hemeroteca Digital Nacional. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil. Database of fugitive slaves [Escravos Fugidos] in Pernambuco, Fundação Gilberto Freyre. Available (in Portuguese) at: http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/DocReader. aspx?bib=029033_02\&pagfis=1229 (Accessed 5 August 2022.)  
![img-5.jpeg](img_ref_6)
figure 2. Recently freed enslaved men in Rio Grande do Sul