Two months after its completion in January 1910, Minas Geraes was featured in Scientific American, which described it as "the last word in heavy battleship design and the ... most powerfully armed warship afloat".

Led by João Cândido Felisberto, the mutineers threatened to bombard the Brazilian capital of Rio de Janeiro if their demands were not met.

In 1924, mutineers seized São Paulo and attempted to persuade the crews of Minas Geraes and several other ships to join them, but were unsuccessful.

Beginning in the late 1880s, Brazil's navy fell into obsolescence, helped along by an 1889 revolution, which deposed Emperor Dom Pedro II, and naval revolts in 1891 and 1893–94.

[14] The Minister of the Navy, Admiral Júlio César de Noronha, signed a contract with Armstrong Whitworth for three battleships on 23 July 1906.

[17] Two of these ships were laid down by Armstrong in Elswick (Minas Geraes and Rio de Janeiro), while the other was subcontracted out to Vickers in Barrow (São Paulo).

[20] Minas Geraes, the lead ship, was laid down by Armstrong on 17 April 1907, while São Paulo followed thirteen days later at Vickers.

[21] The news shocked Brazil's neighbors, especially Argentina, whose Minister of Foreign Affairs remarked that either Minas Geraes or São Paulo could destroy the entire Argentine and Chilean fleets.

[24] In particular, the United States now actively attempted to court Brazil as an ally; caught up in the spirit, U.S. naval journals began using terms like "Pan Americanism" and "Hemispheric Cooperation".

[25] Minas Geraes was christened by Senhora Regis de Oliveira, the wife of the Brazilian minister to Great Britain,[26] and launched at Newcastle-on-Tyne on 10 September 1908.

[4] During fitting-out, it was moved to Vickers' Walker Yard, and thousands turned out to see the incomplete ship squeeze barely underneath and through overhead and swing bridges.

[28] Although the idea of having superfiring turrets was not new—the American South Carolina-class battleships were also designed and built in this fashion around the same time—the trials attracted interest from a few nations, who sent representatives to observe.

[29] When the ship reached Norfolk, Virginia, it escorted the American armored cruiser North Carolina, which was carrying the body of the former Brazilian ambassador to the United States Joaquim Nabuco (who had died in Washington, D.C., on 17 January) to Rio de Janeiro.

[30] The two ships set sail on 17 March 1910 and reached Rio de Janeiro one month later,[31] where Minas Geraes was commissioned into the Brazilian Navy on 18 April.

[6] Soon after Minas Geraes' arrival in Brazil, the country's prosperity began to wane, and a severe depression hit the Brazilian economy.

The sailor's back was later described by José Carlos de Carvalho, a retired navy captain assigned to be the Brazilian government's representative to the mutineers, as "a mullet sliced open for salting.

The revolt began aboard Minas Geraes at around 10 pm on 22 November; the ship's commander and several loyal crewmen were murdered in the process.

[35] The ships were well-supplied with foodstuffs, ammunition, and coal, and the only demand of mutineers—led by João Cândido Felisberto—was the abolition of what they called slavery: they objected to low pay, long hours, inadequate training, and punishments including bolo (being struck on the hand with a ferrule) and the use of whips or lashes (chibata), which eventually became a symbol of the revolt.

[36] Humiliated by the revolt, naval officers and the president of Brazil were staunchly opposed to amnesty, so they quickly began planning to assault the rebel ships.

The rebels, believing an attack was imminent, sailed their ships out of Guanabara Bay and spent the night of 23–24 November at sea, only returning during daylight.

Later research and interviews indicate that Minas Geraes' guns were fully operational, and while São Paulo's could not be turned after salt water contaminated the hydraulic system, British engineers still on board the ship after the voyage from the United Kingdom were working on the problem.

Despite these restrictions, neutral[F] Brazil was pro-Allied for the first three years of the war because of its sizable merchant fleet; as merchantmen from Allied countries were sunk, Brazilian ships were able to take over routes that had been vacated.

[49][50] Beginning on 22 August,[51] the day it arrived,[52] and finishing on 4 October 1921,[51] the battleship was dramatically modernized, with Sperry fire-control equipment and Bausch and Lomb range-finders for the two superfiring turrets fore and aft.

[49] While being refitted on 16 September 1921, a squad of Brazilian sailors stood at attention on the rear deck of the ship as the remains of the crew of the ZR-2 dirigible disaster passed by on the British light cruiser HMS Dauntless.

[53] In July 1922, Minas Geraes joined São Paulo in helping to quash the first of the Revolução Tenentista (English: Tenente revolts), in which the garrison of Rio de Janeiro's Fort Copacabana rebelled and began bombarding the city.