BRAZIL
TODAY AND TOMORROW
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[Illustration:
_Botafogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro._
In the background are the Dois Irmãos Mountains, the flat-topped
Gavea, and the curved granite peak of Corcovado.
]
BRAZIL
TODAY AND TOMORROW
BY
L. E. ELLIOTT, F. R. G. S., F. R. A. I., Etc.
AUTHOR OF “BLACK GOLD,” “CHILE, TODAY AND TOMORROW,” etc. LITERARY
EDITOR, PAN AMERICAN MAGAZINE
ILLUSTRATED
“The time will come when the Ocean will no longer limit the known
lands, when a new world shall be opened up to the followers of the
sea, and Thule will be no longer the Ultima Thule of the earth.”
_Seneca_, “Medea.”
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1917.
Revised Edition October, 1922.
Printed in the United States of America
TO
M. L. E.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
Brazil’s Great Extent—Virgin Interior—Development during Last
Hundred Years—Variety of Soil and Climate—Amazon Basin,
Central Plateau, Coast—Diversified Industries and
Populations—Divergent Interests—Brazil Over-Praised and
Over-Blamed—South American Standpoint—North and South
Americans—Ties with Europe.
CHAPTER I
HISTORY OF BRAZIL 10
Discovery—Henry the Navigator—Search for Cathay—Captain
Cabral—Duarte Coelho—The Capitanias—Ramalho and Caramarú—São
Paulo, Bahia and Pernambuco—The Jesuits—Mamelucos—First
Entradas—The Sertão—The Bandeirantes—Raposo—Fernão Dias—Gold
and Diamonds—Destruction of the Missions—Brazil under Spain—
Corsairs—The Dutch in North Brazil—Portugal regains
Independence—Evacuation by Dutch—The French in Rio—Interior
Mines and Settlement—The Marquis de Pombal—Expulsion of
Jesuits—Dom João in Brazil—Dom Pedro I—Independent Monarchy—
Dom Pedro II—Abolition of Slavery—Republic.
CHAPTER II
COLONIZATION 56
Group Immigration Planned—Swiss in Nova Friburgo—First
Germans in Rio Grande—Petropolis and Blumenau—Joinville—
German Emigration Forbidden—Portuguese Colonies—Parceria
System—French and Alsatians—North Americans—Santa Barbara and
the Consul—New Italian Stream—Colonos and the Patronato
Agricola—Poles and Russians—Conditions of Settlement in São
Paulo—Present Status of Colonies—Japanese at Iguape—Numbers
of Immigrants entering Brazil—Future Immigration—Best Points
of Settlement—Class needed.
CHAPTER III
SOCIAL CONDITIONS 76
Brazilian Courtesy—European Influence—Titles—Dominating
Class—Fazendeiros and Commerciantes—Mixed Blood and the
Labouring Classes—Bacharelismo—The Sertanejo—Life in the
Interior—Festas—The Tropeiro—Lotteries—The Bicho—Coffee
Drinking—Religion—Saints’ Days—Ceremonies—Position of Women—
The Brazilian Girl and Wife—City Life—Literature—Novels—
Poets—The Stage—The Press—Influence of Blood, European and
African—Negro Cooking and Folklore—The Native Brazilian—
Pottery and Weaving—Ideas and Ability—Work of Rondon—Fate of
the Indian—Education—Brazil not Revolutionary—The A. B. C.
Treaty.
CHAPTER IV
TRANSPORTATION. I. RIVER AND ROAD 123
Early Water Communication—Waterways Penetrating Interior—
Great rivers—Early roads—New Automobile highways
II. RAIL 129
First Railroad Planning—First Construction—Coffee Railways—
Climbing the Mountain Barrier—Work in Empire and Republic—
Borrowing—Linking Centres—Radiating Lines—Roads Serving
States, South to North—Brazil Railway Company—The Central
Line—Leopoldina—Bahia Roads—Great Western—Northern Lines—
Roads Passing Falls—Financial Conditions—Status of Ownership—
Future Lines.
III. SHIPPING 161
Steamship River Service—Sea Communication—Nationality of
Lines—Brazilian Mercantile Marine.
CHAPTER V
INDUSTRIES 167
The Coffee Industry of Brazil—The Rubber Industry of the
Amazon—The Meat Industry: Cattle Raising and Packing-Houses—
Cotton Growing and Weaving—Herva Matte—Sugar—Tobacco—Wheat—
Fibres—Cacao—Mining—Brazilian Manufactures: Artificial
Industries; Industrial Centres; Capital; National Industries
Competing with Importations; Imposts; Factories of São Paulo;
Textiles; Locality of Mills in Brazil; Labour and Consumption
of Material; National Dyes; Water power.
CHAPTER VI
FINANCE. I. CURRENCY 276
Value of the milreis—Fluctuations—Caixa de Conversão—
Convertible and Inconvertible Paper—Emergency Issues—Treasury
Bills—Paper Currency, at Different Dates—Metal Coinage—
Effects of Fallen Exchange.
II. INVESTMENTS 285
Blood, Brains and Money—British Investments—Railways—Public
Utilities and Industrials—External Loans—French Investments—
German Work—North American Interests—Banks in Brazil.
III. State Debts—Municipal Debts—Federal Debts—Funding Loans—
Resumption of Specie Payments—Sources of State and Federal
Revenue. 297
CHAPTER VII
THE WORLD’S HORTICULTURAL AND MEDICINAL DEBT TO BRAZIL 306
Brazilian Origin of Well-known Flowers—First Botanists—Piso
and Marcgrav—Loudon’s Hortus—Gardner—Orchids—Cattley—Flowers
and Shrubs—Fruits—Medicines—Ipecacuanha—Copaiba—Jaborandi—
Guaraná—Native Remedies—Mineral Waters.
CHAPTER VIII
BRAZIL’S EXTERIOR COMMERCE 316
Dominant Districts and Industries—Figures of Ten-year Periods
of Commerce—The Nine Principal Articles—São Paulo’s Share—
United States Purchases—Imports—Their Origin—Balance of
Trade.
List of Brazilian States, Area and Population 324
Glossary of Brazilian terms 325
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece, Botafogo Bay, Rio
de Janeiro
_Opposite page_
Entrance of Rio de Janeiro Harbour, 4
Ponte Santa Isabel, Recife; Praça Mauá; Water-front
at Bahia, 20
Falls of Iguassú, 32
Old and New Brazil, 38
Two views of S. Paulo City, 46
Two views of the Avenida Rio Branco, Rio, 50
Agriculture in S. Paulo, 66
Barra Road, Bahia; Resaca, Rio; Upper Amazon, 74
Monroe Palacio, Rio; Municipal Theatre, S. Paulo, 88
Igapó near Rio Negro; Caripuna Indians, Madeira
River, 110
Agricultural School, Piracicaba; Butantan
Institute, 116
The São Paulo Railway, 132
Rua Barão da Victoria, Pernambuco; Avenida 7 de
Setembro, Bahia, 150
Porto Velho, Madeira-Mamoré; Igarapé S. Vicente,
Manáos, 154
Water-front of S. Salvador (Bahia); Floating docks
at Manáos, 162
The São Paulo Coffee Industry, 176
Rubber on the Amazon, 200
The Cattle Industry, 212
Carioca Cotton Mill, Rio; Catende Sugar Mill,
Pernambuco, 244
Coffee-loading equipment, Santos; Sugar lands in
Pernambuco, 264
Ministry of War, Rio; Avenida Nazareth, Belem, 284
Fishing Boats; Rocks at Guarujá; Bertioga;
Cantareira Water Supply, 302
On the Madeira River, Amazonas; Victoria Regia
lilies, near Manáos, 310
Map showing factories, employees, etc, 274
Map showing agricultural production, 324
Coloured map of Brazil, showing railways, rivers,
mountains, chief towns, 328
BRAZIL: TODAY AND TOMORROW
The greatest of all American countries is comparatively the least
developed. Brazil, with her 3,300,000 square miles of territory, four
thousand miles of coast, and her incomparable system of great waterways,
has the largest extent of wild and almost unknown country of any
political division of the New World; she, and she alone, owns thousands
of square miles of forests where no one has set foot but the native,
still really living in the Stone Age, mountain ranges never properly
prospected, with their deposits of minerals scarcely scratched, and
millions of acres of grassy uplands waiting for the farmer and the
stock-raiser.
Brazil is not scantily developed because little has been done; on the
contrary, a wonderful amount of development has been accomplished, but
the period of expansion has been short and the country so great and
varied that whole regions remain out of the track of progress. Until a
century ago, when Dom João opened Brazilian ports to international
commerce, Brazil lay in a trance, bound hand and foot to Portugal,
isolated from the world. Her erection into a separate monarchy found her
without capital, without education, for she had neither adequate primary
nor technical schools, without a press, and without any knowledge of her
own resources except that gathered by the interior raids, wanderings and
settlements of her own hardy people.
Everything that has been done to bring Brazil into the race of nations
is the work of the last hundred years; the most intense period of rapid
building since the establishment of the republic has lasted less than
thirty years, for in that time has taken place the great acquisition of
private fortunes in the industrial regions of Brazil. Much of the civic
building, creation of public utilities, establishment of transportation
lines, has been due to foreign capital and technical skill, but Brazil
herself has contributed no small share of enterprise during the last
fifty years; descendants of Portuguese _fidalgos_ have taken up
engineering, agriculture, commerce and city-making with energy and
intelligence which is not always given a due share of recognition by
those onlookers who think that all development of Latin America must
come from without. In Brazil much progress, much creation, has come from
within, and will come to an even larger degree in the future with
improvement in technical education; but the country is enormous, the
centres of population have always lain on or near the sea-border, and
interior Brazil, the virgin heart of South America, remains practically
untouched.
The two great interior states of Matto Grosso and Goyaz cover an area of
more than two million square kilometres; they make up one-fourth of the
whole Brazilian territory, and Brazil covers half of South America: but
this huge heart-shaped wedge in the centre of the continent has no more
than half a million population. This is not because the country is
tropical or worthless, but because it is unopened and unknown.
Within her wide area Brazil encloses a great variety of soils and
climates: she has no snow line, because she has no great mountain
heights; a peak less than three thousand metres high, Itatiaya, in the
Mantiqueiras, is the point of greatest altitude. But she has almost
every other climatic gift that can be included within the fifth degree
of North and thirty-third of South Latitude; between the eighth degree
East and thirtieth West Longitude of the meridian of Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil is a vast plateau with a steep descent to the sea along half her
coast, and a flat hot sea margin of varying widths; this plateau, scored
by great rivers, sweeps away in undulating prairies, sloping in two
principal directions—inland, in the centre and south, to the great
Paraná valley; and in the upper regions, northward to the immense Amazon
basin. This is not a basin so much as a wide plate, for not only is the
course of the huge _rio-mar_ almost flat for the last thousand miles of
its journey to the sea (Manáos is only 85 feet above sea-level) but this
practically level ground extends northward all the way to the confines
of Venezuela and the three Guianas, and southward until the Cordilheiras
of Matto Grosso are encountered. Great expanses of this plate are filled
with the sweltering forests of tropical tradition, forests containing a
thousand kinds of strange orchids, immense and curious trees, insects,
reptiles and animals; from Orellana and Lopez de Aguirre to Humboldt,
Bates, Wallace and Agassiz, from the Lord de la Ravardière to Nicolas
Hortsman the practical Dutchman who announced that El Dorado did not
exist, to Charles Marie de la Condamine, Martius, Spix, Admiral Smith,
Lister Maw, Schomburgk and Wickham, every traveller upon the Amazon has
tried to describe the indescribable Amazonian forest. Deep, monotonous,
silent, dark and changeless, the forest unconquerable walls in the
uncountable rivers traversing it from the snows of Peru and the interior
plateau of Brazil, closing in upon the little cities where man has
settled himself in a puny attempt to steal treasures out of its mighty
heart.
There is a remarkable contrast between this humid forestal area of the
north and the cool high cattle lands of the centre, the pine and matte
woods and wheat lands of the south and the hot coastal belt of the great
promontory with its deep fringe of coconuts, its sugar country, tobacco
fields and cacao plantations; between the coffee country of São Paulo
and the regions of the carnauba palm and the babassú. No physical
contrast could be more acute than that of the flat tropic swamps of Pará
and the austere, fantastic and beautiful granite peaks of the Serra do
Mar near Rio—the slender Finger of God in the Orgão Mountains, the
curved up-rearing of the Corcovado, the cloud-wreathed head of Tijuca.
Nor is there less contrast in the different industries resulting from
the different products of the widely diversified regions, and the
population inhabiting them. The extreme north exists largely upon the
rubber business, where independent individuals extract gum from wild
trees in regions that are sometimes scarcely charted; in the south an
imported Italian population performs routine tasks on the highly
organized coffee plantations.
[Illustration:
_Entrance of Rio de Janeiro Harbour_ (Bahia de Guanabara).
Showing the farther shore, the forts, the Pão d’Assucar, and the loop
of Botafogo Bay.
]
In between these two sharply marked divisions there are many industries
and many grades of labour, from the _caboclo_ half-Indian of the north
to the negro of the centre and the Japanese, Syrian and Pole of the
southerly colonies, as well as the descendant of the Portuguese. There
is in some parts of Brazil such a mixture of races and tongues that it
seems as if the Jesuits were needed again to invent a new _lingua
geral_. Contrasts in personality, as well as in soil and climate in
Brazil, and the difference in accessibility between an open seaboard and
a deep and roadless interior, have all aided to bring about the marked
diversity of interests which have more than once proved the salvation of
the country. Publicists in Brazil sometimes sound a note of warning
against the decentralization that has grown more emphatic since the
erection of the Republican system gave autonomous powers to the States;
there have been suggestions of separation of north from south on account
of their distinct interests; but it is impossible to doubt that a
country with a score of industries and of products to offer to world
markets is in a better economic position than lands depending upon two
or three main sources of income.
In the Argentine the city of Buenos Aires is the centre and fount of
business; every great house has its headquarters there, its railway
links and commercial arms reach out into all productive parts of the
country. To Buenos Aires everything comes to be marketed whether from
the interior or from abroad: it is _the_ city, the head and heart of the
Argentine. It is not possible to point to any one city in Brazil and to
say the same. Not even lovely and splendid Rio, federal capital and gay
vortex as she is, can claim to represent the commercial interest of the
country; she is the spending-place of much of Brazil’s income, but she
is not the greatest earner. This honour falls to São Paulo, with Santos
as the biggest exporter of values; no one denies the commercial palm to
the Paulistas, but it is not heresy to say that the elimination of the
coffee industry would not destroy the life of Brazil as, for example,
the disappearance of the cereal or cattle industry would threaten the
Argentine. She would still retain her _herva matte_, her cattle, her
mines; her rubber, wax, fruit, cotton, sugar, and tobacco; her hardwoods
and forestal drugs and dyes, her cacao and fibres and nuts.
A whole world of interests divides São Paulo from Bahia, Bahia from
Pará, Pará from Pernambuco, Maranhão from Victoria, Maceió from Porto
Alegre, Rio de Janeiro from Manáos, Ilhéos from Paranaguá, Mossoró from
São Francisco, Fortaleza from Florianopolis; some of these ports are
great economically, alive with shipping, while others are little
developing points which have not yet achieved international fame; but
each has its distinct _raison d’être_ and has a divergent social and
economic impulse from that of many of her sisters. It is true that
certain states seem to produce almost everything tropical or
sub-tropical as well as being endowed with minerals, as Minas Geraes,
growing coffee, cotton, raising cattle, mining precious stones, gold and
iron ore, weaving her cotton and running a great dairy business with
interstate shipments of her famous cheese and butter; or Pernambuco and
the other states of the great promontory, with a host of different
products; or São Paulo, where an energetic Brazilian _fazendeiro_, to
show what his state can grow besides coffee, cotton, rice and sugar, has
gardens containing “every known fruit” of temperate and tropical zones.
But the distinct local industries of the widely varying Brazilian soil
and climate are the most striking and promising elements of her economic
life.
Many parts of South America have suffered from over-praise as much as
from unmerited blame. None have suffered more than Brazil, shut off from
the non-Latin world rather more than is Spanish America because of her
Portuguese idiom. There is little enough thorough study of Spanish on
the part of Anglo-Saxons, but it is mighty compared to the study of
Portuguese, a beautiful language and probably rather more readily
acquired than the formal and clear-cut idiom of Castile.
Non-comprehension of Portuguese and Spanish has been a bar to
understanding of the soul of Latin America; nearly every person who
wishes to learn something about any part of the Southern Continent runs
to the libraries for a book of travels, generally written by a
foreigner, himself sparsely acquainted with the language of the country
about which he is writing, and frequently entirely from an outside
viewpoint. There is a remarkable absence of study of South America from
the South American’s viewpoint, and it is for this reason that I have
tried in this book to quote from Brazilian books and newspapers rather
than from the ideas of foreigners, however distinguished. It is a loss
to the Anglo-Saxon that so much fine and acute comment and description
of South America by South Americans falls on deaf ears because of the
language difficulty; perhaps the next few years may see the new interest
in things South American stimulated by translations from many more of
the writings of South American authors.
Only by understanding the South American better can the Anglo-Saxon see
the relation that mutually exists, and realize the depth of the gulf
between them at the same time. Especially since the outbreak of the
European War we have seen an astounding number of agreeable but
visionary articles written on the subject of the strong logical tie,
geographical, political and mental, between North and South America. The
truth is however that the two continents have little geographical
connection—Panama was once a strait—and perhaps even less racial,
religious, and mental leanings. Both sections of the Americas have drawn
their blood, language, religion and political ideals from Europe, but
from two strongly marked sections—one, the Protestant Anglo-Saxon,
commercial, mechanically inventive: the other, the Roman Catholic Latin
section, artistic and mentally brilliant but not usually a born
_commerciante_.
It is just as well to realize this difference clearly, to know that, at
least in the past, the Americas have been more closely bound to Europe
than to each other; the ties are especially strong in Brazil, more
tender than in many parts of the New World, because separation in a
political sense was obtained without violence. It is only through
understanding of the mental and social attitude and conditions of the
Brazilian that the newcomer can avoid pitfalls.
Mistakenly advised, and often lured by too golden promises, the stranger
has often rushed to one or another part of South America, has found
bitter disappointment, and gone home with denunciation of all things
South American upon his tongue; but in many instances the fault lay
within himself, in his want of knowledge of circumstances, physical and
mental, and of his improper equipment for the task that lay to his hand.
There are many such tasks, but they must be approached with equipment
and spirit equally prepared; no fortune is to be attained by a mere rub
of the magic lamp.
This book is offered chiefly with the hope of helping to stimulate
interest in Brazil, to induce a more thorough study than these pages can
offer in the only place where Brazil can be studied—in her own fair
confines. If it supplements what has already been written, brings up to
date for the time being the story of Brazil’s development, if it awakens
in more of the energetic and able people of the world a wish to take
part in the opening-up of the great Brazilian resources, this book will
have served its modest purpose. It is the fruit of seven years’ travel
in and study of Latin America, and two years’ special work on and in
Brazil, where seventeen out of the twenty States were visited.
A debt is owing to many Brazilian publications, sources of much
statistical matter as well as illumination of Brazilian thought, as the
_Jornal do Commercio_ of Rio, _Brasil Ferro Carril_, very many local
journals of different States, _Wileman’s Brazilian Review_, the _Diario
Official_ issued by various authorities; the invaluable _Mensagens_,
with their financial and industrial surveys, issued by State Presidents;
to many kind and helpful friends in Brazil, England and America; to the
_South American Journal_; and especially to Mr. W. Roberts of the London
_Times_, to whom I am indebted for most of the subject matter in “The
World’s Horticultural and Medicinal Debt to Brazil.”
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORY OF BRAZIL
Brazil and the Brazilians cannot be understood without knowledge of
their history, for here as in no other part of Latin America the past
has led up to the present without any violent upheaval. While the
Spanish colonies of Central and South America were plunged first in
revolutionary and afterwards in civil war, shedding not only blood but
also tradition and brotherhood with their kin, Portuguese America was
saved from similar conditions by the odd turn of fortune that made her a
monarchy, independent of Europe and yet ruled by a European prince,
during the most critical years of the nineteenth century.
Thanks to Napoleon Buonaparte, no furious chasm, difficult for even
thoughts to bridge, was opened between Brazil and the Mother Country; it
was never necessary for young Brazilians to be taught that Europe was an
oppressor who must be bitterly fought. Brazil gained in the arts of
peace and in the retention of pleasant relations between herself and the
_lusitanos_, while, in contrast, Spanish American feeling is still so
strongly anti-Spanish that in times of unrest it is the immigrant of
Iberian blood who is singled out for special ill-will. These republics
are without memorials to their Spanish discoverers or rulers; Mexico,
for example, has no statue or tablet to the memory of Hernan Cortés,
great figure as he was. Admiration for the _conquistadores_ is generally
forgotten in bitterness against Spanish rule, all history before
revolutionary times is coloured with this deliberately fostered feeling,
and only occasionally does there arise a speaker or writer broad-minded
enough to take up the cudgels for Spain and the rich inheritance she
left to her children.
Brazil was more fortunate. From the time of the first Portuguese
settlement down to the present day she has never suffered any great
internal conflagration: there were persistent Indian troubles in the
first centuries until the survivors of these unlucky natives moved back
to the interior forests, but among the population that grew up in
Brazil, hardy and prolific, there has been little strife with the
insignificant exception of the feuds of the Emboabas, the Mascates and
the Balaios.
Brazil was discovered twice. First came a Spaniard, Vicente Pinzon, an
old companion of Columbus: he found and reconnoitred the mouth of the
Amazon, and sailed south to a point which he named Santa Maria de la
Consolación, but which is now known as Cape St. Augustine. On his return
to Spain his report roused no interest at a Court where new discoveries
of land only added to the _embarras de richesses_, and the attention of
the adventurous was already taken up with the West Indies; the second
discovery (if we ignore the tale of the sight of Brazilian shores by
Diogo de Lepe, whose wanderings were, in any case, unfruitful) was a
pure accident, but, occurring to a Portuguese, was immediately seized
upon as a basis of claim to part of the new lands in the West. This was
on May 3, 1500, three months after the voyage of Pinzon to the Amazon.
Spain, to whom the all-powerful Pope Alexander VI had allotted in the
famous bull of 1495 all the new lands discovered or to be discovered in
the West, while Portugal was given rights to discoveries in the East,
might have contested this claim but for two reasons: the first was that
the Treaty of Tordesillas had shifted the Pope’s dividing line westward
to a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands so that Portugal
could retain her Atlantic island discoveries; the second was that either
by accident or design the early cartographers drew Brazil’s easterly
outline about twenty-two degrees more to the east than it should have
been, so that the whole of the enormous tract of what is Brazil today
fell within the legitimate claims of Portugal. It was but a matter of
equity that Portugal should have a share in the lands of the West, for
to the work of that Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, the
initiative for sea adventure was due. Henry, inheritor of sea traditions
on both sides of his parentage, for his mother was an English princess,
daughter of John of Gaunt, spent his life in a long sea dream translated
into deeds; for forty years he lived on the lonely promontory of Sagres,
his observatory full of charts, the haunt of shipmasters and
geographers, with his shipyards below the windows ever busy with the
building of stout caravels: from 1420 until his death in 1460 the
Navigator urged and bullied his captains to go southward down the coast
of Africa, where no sailor had penetrated within Christian times,
whatever they had done in the days of the bold Phoenicians.
Thus were the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira rediscovered and settled,
the pilots venturing with terror into that “Green Sea of Darkness” where
sea monsters threatened their passage, and at last daring to sail
farther into the southern waters where not only the water but the land
boiled with the terrible heat, they said. Rounding Cape Bojador they
found a coast populated with sturdy blacks, began the slave trade that
demoralized half the world; in 1486 Bartholomeo Diaz rounded the “Cape
of Storms” and proved that there was indeed as Henry, dead for a quarter
of a century, had dreamed, a southern gateway to the Spice Isles of the
East—the goal of adventurers ever since Marco Polo’s tale was spread
abroad.
By this discovery the whole imagination of seafaring Europe was
awakened: small wonder that Columbus in the end got a hearing when he
talked of a sea-path to the East by way of the West, or that, on his
return with a story of rich lands, Spain should have been satisfied to
believe the theory that the shores of Cathay had been found. Columbus,
who became half demented towards the close of his life, never knew that
he had found anything but lands on the edge of Cathay; he once forced
his men to take an oath to this effect under the penalty of hanging them
to the yards of his ship.
To his obsession was chiefly due the lack of any clear conception in
Europe of the existence of a great new continent until the Portuguese
captain stumbled upon Brazil in 1500, although three years before Alonzo
de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci had coasted the Caribbean, charting the
north coast of Venezuela and Colombia as well as the east of Central
America. That year of 1497 was the great year of discoveries, in sea
adventure, for then began the series of voyages of the Cabot family,
Labrador being discovered in that first scouring of the north seas by
Europeans; from that year also dates that strange chapter of oriental
history, Portuguese rule in India, when Vasco da Gama sailed past the
Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut.
Early in 1500 Captain Pedro Alvares Cabral was despatched with a fleet
of thirteen ships to follow up the conquests of da Gama; warned of the
calms off the African coast which later became notorious among sailors
as the “doldrums,” he stood far out to sea, was caught in strong
currents, and found himself to his astonishment off an unknown coast.
Sailing south until a safe landing place was reached (Porto Seguro, some
twelve miles north of the little town on the Bahian coast that today
bears the name) he landed on Good Friday morning, was received in a
friendly manner by the South American natives to whom Europe was thus
discovered, took possession of the territory in the name of the
Portuguese King, sent a ship back to Lisbon under André Gonçalves to
report the discovery, and sailed on again to India.
Dom Manoel was sufficiently interested by the tale of Gonçalves to make
farther investigation, equipped three vessels and sent them under the
command of the Sevillian pilot Amerigo Vespucci to examine the new Terra
da Vera Cruz. On the way they met Cabral’s fleet returning from India,
and this explorer put his helm about and with them re-found eastern
South America, sailing along and charting most of the coast of Brazil.
It is the precision and not the inaccuracies of these sixteenth century
maps that form their most remarkable feature.
On this journey much hostility was shown by coast-dwelling natives, and
a couple of landing parties met with disaster; the cannibal taste of the
“Indians” was plainly demonstrated. No settlement was made. A year
later, in 1503, Duarte Coelho came with another fleet, seeking the
waterway to India that was one of the dreams of adventurous Europe:
another, allied to the first, was the quest of Prester John. Anyone who
could find a quick sea-path to India and at the same time find and form
an alliance with the mysterious Christian Priest-King, would wield power
beyond rivalry.
Duarte Coelho was unlucky. His flagship and three other vessels were
cast away on Fernando Noronha island, the other two reaching the shelter
of what is today Bahia. Here the natives were kindly disposed, a little
colony of twenty-four men elected to stay behind near Caravellas, and
after a stay of five months the rest of the explorers went back to
Portugal. They took with them logs cut from the coastal forests which
proved to yield a dye equal to that known in Europe as “brasil,” a much
prized deep red colour: they also carried back Brazilian monkeys and
some of the parrots and macaws still common in the north. Many of the
old maps of Brazil are marked “Terra dos Papagaios” (Land of Parrots)
instead of the official “Terra da Vera (or Santa) Cruz,” but it was not
long before the new country became generally known as the Land of
Brazil-wood, and finally as Brazil.
From 1503 onwards no attempt at settlement or conquest of the land was
made for thirty years; captains on their way to India called at the
coast for fresh water, and on the return sailed into some northern
wooded bay and cut brazil-wood. The real attention of Portugal was taken
up with the splendid spoil that fell so readily to her hands in India;
she loaded her caravels with the silks and spices and precious stones of
the East, just as Spain a little later loaded her stout ships with the
treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas. Territory offering nothing more
and nothing less than fertile soil and genial climate was little
considered in the midst of those visions of gold: since then the whole
world has been plunged in blood for the sake of such wide spaces of
land. Land in great areas only became highly valorized, both in the
Americas and Africa, when the virile races of Europe needed space for
their teeming, dominating children.
Brazil benefited from her lack of wealthy cities offering loot. As a
consequence of that lack she was not flooded, as were Mexico and Peru,
with gold-seeking, brutal adventurers, but was instead slowly colonized
by genuine settlers. Some of them did not come willingly, for Portugal
used certain tracts spasmodically as penal settlements, but in the
Middle Ages severe punishment was frequently dealt out for offences that
would today be considered light, and many of the convicts thrust across
the Atlantic turned out to be good citizens: good or bad, they were the
stuff of which bold pioneers are made, and to their extraordinary
hardihood and that of their tireless descendants of mixed blood the
conquest of interior Brazil was due.
Portugal delayed occupation of Brazil until other European countries
began to establish themselves along different parts of the neglected
shore. In 1515 the mouth of the Rio de la Plata had been discovered by
Juan de Solis, and Spanish settlements were set up south of the
Portuguese claims—still indefinite. In 1540 the Spanish captain Orellana
made his wonderful journey from Peru over the Andes and down the Amazon,
and roused the interest of Europe, but long before then the Dutch were
trying to establish outposts on northerly Amazonian tributaries, and the
French had settled a little colony at Pernambuco.
Of these the Portuguese made short shrift, a fleet being sent from
Lisbon specially for their expulsion, but the settlement made by royal
orders on the same spot met with no better fate, for in 1527 French
raiders sacked the infant colony, to be followed a few months later by
an English raiding party under Hawkins. The Portuguese Government,
forced to take measures, determined on a plan which had already given
good results on the island of Madeira. Instead of assuming the burden of
colonization on the account of the government, large grants of land were
made to Portuguese of high standing or wealth; on them fell the burden
of settlement, but on the other hand to them would accrue the chief
rewards of tropical adventure and industry. The Crown attained several
objects at one stroke—the colonizing of a difficult country, the
rewarding of many noblemen whose claims were apt to be troublesome,
while at the same time an outlet was provided for the adventurous and
turbulent. The waning of her power in India left Portugal with a surging
class of stout-hearted folk upon her hands: she sent them to Brazil, and
suffered as Brazil benefited.
The allotment of Brazil into separate _capitanias_ (captaincies) was
made in 1530; the average coastal strip presented to the holders was
fifty leagues, and as to the depth of the land commanded was a matter
for the individual captain: he could have as much as he could conquer.
No one had any idea of what the hinterlands contained, for, with the
exception of the riverine explorations of the Spanish on the Orinoco and
the Plata, Europeans had not visited the South American interior east of
the Andes.
Martim Affonso de Souza came out in 1531 as Admiral of the Coast,
empowered to mark out the capitanias and to keep one for himself; he
found French vessels hovering about Pernambuco, seized them, and went on
to Bahia (Bahia de Todos os Santos) named thirty years before and
frequently visited, where he found a Portuguese sailor, survivor of a
shipwreck, married to the daughter of an Indian ruler and living like a
patriarch with a large family already grown up about him. This Caramarú,
“big fish caught among rocks,” was of great help to the Portuguese when
the colony was founded, and his half-breed family, possessing Indian
knowledge and Portuguese leanings, formed the nucleus of the true hardy
Brazilian of the north coast. Sailing south on his delimitation errand,
Affonso de Souza entered Rio harbour, but passed on to mark out his own
capitania on the hot sands of the São Paulo coast, near the present
Santos, under the name of São Vicente. By a freak of fate, here the
story of old Caramarú was duplicated. On the uplands beyond the Serra do
Mar another Portuguese sailor was living, one João Ramalho married to
the daughter of the native chief Tibiriça, and also surrounded by an
extraordinary number of descendants: these children and grandchildren of
Ramalho were the first _mamelucos_, that bold tribe who were thorns in
the flesh of the Jesuits, but who were instrumental in giving Matto
Grosso, Goyaz and Minas Geraes to Brazil.
Martim Affonso de Souza marked out twelve capitanias, but of the
accepted applicants few besides himself made serious and systematic
efforts to settle and hold their great lands; the rights offered them
were very large, including almost every authority of the king himself
except that of coining money: possession was perpetual and
hereditary.[1] “If these hereditary captaincies had continued to exist,”
says the Brazilian historian, Luis de Queiros, “we should have today so
many republics, corresponding to the number of territorial divisions,
and not a homogenous whole which a nation so full of life and hope as
Brazil constitutes. By good luck, however, almost all of the recipients
of the grants were unsuccessful in their attempts at colonization, and
some of them did not make any real beginning....”
In the far north nothing was done by the _donatario_ to colonize Ceará,
and it was not until the French had for years established themselves on
that coast and inside the mouth of the Amazon that, in 1616, a
Portuguese military expedition from Maranhão turned out these rivals and
founded Pará. Genuine colonization work was done at three outstanding
points—Pernambuco, Bahia, and São Vicente, or rather, São Paulo, which
became active nuclei of agricultural production, of a sturdy population
born on the soil, dowered with a clannish fighting spirit that, local as
it was, did much that was of extreme value in the evolution of Brazil.
The strength of two of these centres, S. Paulo and Bahia, was largely
derived from the two old Portuguese castaways, the battered heroes
Ramalho and Correia; that of the third markedly successful colony,
Pernambuco, was due to the powerful personality and real ability of the
Captain, Duarte Coelho; he was aided by the fertility of the soil of the
north-eastern promontory, Pernambuco showing itself so prolific a
producer of sugar that it began to feed the mother country from very
early colonial days, no less than forty-five ships a year calling to
fetch sugar and brazil-wood. Settled with good immigrants by Duarte
Coelho, who protested successfully against the dumping of convicts upon
his capitania and ruled his people like a feudal lord, Pernambuco was
the only territory that escaped control by the Captain-General sent out
by the Crown in 1549 to try the effect of centralized power upon the
languishing capitanias. Hardy and jealous of their independence, the
Pernambucanos remained a little kingdom apart, ruled over by Duarte
Coelho and his wife’s relatives after him, until the Dutch appeared in
strength off the north Brazilian coast and from 1630 onwards for over
twenty years held possession of Pernambuco and a long strip of the coast
above it. The Pernambucanos have always been a factor to be reckoned
with in Brazilian affairs: the territory they hold is richly productive
and has never looked back in commercial importance. They do not forget
that great tracts of land were in early days won by their ancestors by
hard fighting from the Indians, nor that they have sent many an able son
to high places in the governing of Brazil. It was the productivity of
the Pernambuco (“Nova Lusitania”) and Bahia colonies that made colonial
Brazil valuable and attracted hardy settlers to her shores.
[Illustration:
Ponte Santa Isabel, Recife (Pernambuco).
Praça Mauá—one of Rio’s wharves.
Water-front at Bahia, Lower City.
]
Bahia was the queen city of Brazil from 1549, when Thomé de Souza was
sent out as Captain-General and made this the administrative and
political head of the country, until 1762, when Rio de Janeiro became
the Vice-regal Capital; she also was a fighting city, seized and sacked
now and again but successful in getting rid of her foes in the end, and
she was the centre of tobacco cultivation from early days. When gold and
diamonds were discovered in the interior valleys and serras the Bahianos
played a plucky part in exploration and opening, as well as charting,
regions of forest and sertão hitherto unseen by white men. To the men of
Bahia, as well as to the courageous legions of Pernambucanos led by the
Albuquerque family, Brazil owes much: but the great pioneers, the
unsurpassed confronters of hardship, the men who made Brazil the huge
country that she is instead of the strip upon the Atlantic seaboard that
she might have remained, were the _bandeirantes_ of São Paulo.
When the gallant Martim Affonso de Souza, sailing first to Cananea,
eventually built his modest mud and palm leaf town at S. Vicente, he was
saved from the hostility of the Tamoyo Indians by the friendliness of
Ramalho, father of many children by a daughter of Chief Tibiriça. The
Tamoyos as a rule gave a great deal of trouble to the Portuguese,
although the French in their numerous attempts at settlement along the
Brazilian littoral always managed to make fast friends of this tribe. To
anyone who knows the São Vicente of today, it is difficult to imagine on
what the first settlers lived; the shore is hot, sandy, backed by
mangrove swamps, producing beans, maize, mandioca and sugar. Small
wonder that an early chronicler said that to live in these colonies it
was necessary to forget all European habits of life, to begin a new
existence upon new food, with all old ideas of comfort and even
necessity thrown aside.
When a company of Jesuit priests, headed by José de Anchieta, came to S.
Vicente, they found their ministrations thrown away on a disorderly and
undisciplined band of settlers. Conceiving their duty to be here, as the
Padre de las Casas and many of his cloth conceived it in Mexico and
Central America, the Christianizing of the natives, Anchieta decided to
leave the coast (where Braz Cubas had now built his little chapel and
hospital on the island where Santos stands today) and seek converts in
the uplands. The mountain barrier was climbed, and on January 25, 1554,
an altar was set up on the green and well-watered plains of the
interior, and mass was said on a site named São Paulo de Piritininga, in
honour of the saint whose day it was. The habit of early missionaries
and discoverers of naming new places with the Roman calendar in their
hands has helped the historian to fix many a doubtful date.
A few miles away from the mission was the town of João Ramalho, who had
been tactfully confirmed in his possession of lands, the “Borda do
Campo,” by Portugal, while his settlement was formally named a township
with the title of Santo André in 1533. Its site was near the present São
Bernardo, an open sunny region of prairie with woods on the horizon.
With this tribe of Ramalho’s making the Jesuits sought no connection;
they could not convert those half-breeds any more than they could make
the hardy impenitents on the coast give up stealing Indians. Better and
more pliable material was to hand in the pure Indian tribes; two groups,
one under Tibiriça and the other under chief Cai-Uby, built their cabins
in new S. Paulo, Tibiriça’s people forming a line which is now the Rua
São Bento, while the other converts guarded the road that led over the
hills to S. Vicente.[2] It was not long before trouble came. João
Ramalho’s children plagued the priests: the priests retaliated by
getting an order from the then Captain-General, Mem de Sá, by which
Santo André was razed to the ground and its inhabitants forcibly
incorporated in São Paulo. The latter soon changed its character as a
peaceful mission settlement, the Indians suffered from aggressions by
the whites who now came up from S. Vicente or their own half-white kin,
and in the end a concerted attack was made by the natives upon the town,
only old Tibiriça remaining loyal. The Indians were beaten, but the
Jesuits saw that the mission could not be restored; they determined to
carry the cross farther afield. With indomitable energy and indifference
to suffering the band of priests made their way across the interior
plains and woodlands, until they founded a new city (Ciudad Real) at the
junction of the Paraná and Piquery, and began to gather the Indians
together in new settlements.
For a time they were undisturbed. But the life of the new Portuguese
colonies depended upon agriculture; the white men were neither many
enough nor sufficiently acclimated to till the fields themselves, and
they seized the unfortunate natives and forced them to field labour. It
was unsatisfactory work, as a rule: the native of the eastern coasts of
South America was not a cultivator of the soil by habit, but rather a
hunter and fisher, as he is still in his interior retreats. They were
too on the whole a gentle as well as an idle race, and they died like
flies under the whip.
It was not long before the coast plantations of the Portuguese were
denuded of workers: to get more slaves it was necessary to follow the
Indian across the sertões. It was about 1562 that the first
slave-hunting expeditions, the “entradas,” began; they were headed by
the _mamelucos_, the descendants of Ramalho, who had no hesitation about
betraying their native kinsfolk to the white man. Violence was avoided:
the preferred plan was to coax any tribe approached “_com muito geito e
enganos_” and only when blandishment failed was force resorted to. Tamed
natives accompanied the “entries” and when the children of the woods
heard tales of waiting pleasures told in their own tongue, whole clans
often followed willingly to the coast, never to return. When they
retreated more deeply and became more wary, and it was found that the
Jesuits were advising them, a grimmer system was planned; it was decided
to conduct open warfare against the missions.
By this time, in the first part of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits
had attained remarkable success with their converts; they were not
content with teaching them the Christian faith, but insisted upon the
girls learning spinning and weaving while the men planted and reaped.
Results were much the same as those desired by the coast settlers, but
methods differed. About Ciudad Real, in the Guayará region, fourteen
great missions flourished when the Paulistas began to disturb them: by
the middle of the sixteen hundreds they were all broken up, the fields
waste, the priests fled, and the Indian converts prisoners in S. Paulo
or hiding in the forests.
To accomplish this, more careful expeditions were arranged than the
earlier “entradas,” although the _mamelucos_ had made some wonderful
journeys, across the river Paraguay, over the Chaco and into Bolivia,
now and again having a brush with the Spanish settlers of the South,
who, later on, were expelled from tentative settlements in Rio Grande do
Sul: no land was too wide for the Paulistas to hold. But the “bandeiras”
were now organized like an army, men enlisted in them regularly and
accepted rigorous discipline. Beginning with the deliberate object of
uprooting Jesuit control of the Indians, explorations continued in this
form for over eighty years with other aims added—conquest of the
interior, discovery for its own sake, and search for mines of gold and
precious stones, as well as the repression of Spanish entries from the
south and from Peru.
At the time when these extraordinary expeditions began the interior of
South America was still unknown. The high sertão and the forests were
still full of mystery, although the coast had been stripped of such
marvels as the giants who frightened Pinzon’s sailors, the men fourteen
feet high seen by Magalhães, and the alligators with two tails which
Vespucci reported. In the interior magic still reigned, with its trees
yielding soap and glass, Lake Doirada with shining cities about its
margin, and the marvellous kingdom of Paititi, lure of many disastrous
expeditions, where some of the natives were dwarfs, others fifteen feet
tall, some had their feet turned backwards and others had legs like
birds. The bandeirante opened the sertão and dispelled these wonders.
In his book, _O Sertão antes da Conquista_, Sampaio says that the
Paulista “was compelled by his habitat to be a bandeirante: the conquest
of the interior was written in his destiny.” If that is true, at least
these labours were taken up with a kind of fierce joy. There was
scarcely an able-bodied man of the time who did not join one or more of
the bandeiras, and there is on record the case of Manoel de Campos who
made twenty-four of these journeys. Many bandeirantes never returned,
remaining in the sertão to found towns in Minas, Matto Grosso or Goyaz;
some, returning after years of absence, found their wives married to
other men, while “many heroes brought back from the sertão children whom
they had not taken in,” says Rocha Pombo.
The bandeira went always under the supreme command of a leader to whom
implicit obedience was due; before setting out the bandeira in a body
heard mass, the leader confessed and made his will, invariably including
the phrase ... “_setting out to war and being mortal and not knowing
what God our Lord will do with me_.”... A priest accompanied each
bandeira, not only to shrive the dying and bury the dead, but by way of
easing the conscience of the band regarding their mission and
“reconciling it with the Divine Mercy.” The outfit for every man was
made at his own cost, and if it is possible to judge by the baggage of
Braz Gonçalves, who died on an expedition in 1636, and whose goods were
scrupulously recorded and sold at auction, it was simple. His greatest
possessions were three negro slaves, but he had also an awl, a bit and a
hammer, a pair of worn slippers; some lead and gunpowder, one tin plate,
a chisel, a mould for casting shot, a ball of thread, an old cape.
It was only possible to face what lay beyond the outposts of settlement
when equipped and ready for war; the bandeirantes knew that there was
constant risk of attack by Indians and that nature opposed them with as
fierce a menace. The country through which they passed was likely to be
foodless, and they were prepared to sow seeds of grain in green valleys,
camp, and wait until the crop was harvested before going on their way.
The rivers of the interior plateau, flowing westward with the tilt of
the sertão, themselves offered a great highway of adventure to the early
bandeirantes, bringing them into Paraguay and the outskirts of Bolivia
and the Argentine, but as they went farther afield the Paraná was left
to the east, Goyaz and Matto Grosso were traversed, and the path of the
pioneers led up unknown mountains, through untracked woodland; they
marched across boundless prairies as if navigating the ocean, with only
a sea-compass and the starry night to guide them. Nothing checked these
explorers; had not the discovery of the General Mines turned their minds
to gold-hunting, they might have followed Antonio Raposo across the
Andes and disputed Peru with the Spaniards. Wherever they penetrated
they established outposts and forts counting a collision with the
Spanish as the best reason for creating a stronghold: it was the work of
these untiring sertanistas that led the way to the present magnitude of
Brazil.
The bandeira was the original creation of the Paulista, without parallel
in history; not even the white pioneer of North America had the same
functions: he neither wandered so far nor performed such deeds. João
Ribeiro remarks that “as in the case of the caravans of the desert, the
first virtue of the bandeirante was a resignation almost fatalistic, and
abstinence carried to an extreme; those who set out did not know if they
would ever return, never expected to see their homes again—and this
often happened.” The bandeira in its greatest phase was a travelling
city, a commune linked by mutual interests, that surged forward over the
silent country; nothing deterred them, whether mountain passes,
precipices, hunger, weariness, or constant fighting. If they had a path
it was that of the crosses on the graves of the men who had gone before
them. They went always on foot.
There is a long list of great sertanistas. It includes many names well
known in Brazil today—Martins, Soares, de Souza, Barreto, Tourinho, Sá,
Leme, Paes, Almeida, Dias, Ribeiro, Carvalho, Rodrigues, and a host of
others; few men escaped the lure of the sertão, and some leave stories
which are the Iliads of Brazil, putting these among the great adventures
of all time. There is for instance Antonio Raposo, who headed a bandeira
which left S. Paulo in 1628, and which was “the biggest and most
devastating known.” Three thousand people composed the expedition, and
its main object was the destruction of the Jesuit missions on the Paraná
river, near Ciudad Real. One by one the missions, which had grown into
thriving industrial communities, were attacked, besieged, and smashed;
as they fell, escaping brothers or converts carried the warning to other
convents, stiff fights were made, and in some cases long resistance was
maintained. But in the end the Jesuits were broken and dispersed, and
the bandeirantes went back to S. Paulo with thousands of Indian slaves.
The courageous Jesuits went deeper into the interior, collected such
remnants as they could of their property and their protégés, and began
the work again.
Raposo, years afterwards, made another journey which brought him into
fame as a legendary hero; he crossed the Paulista sertão by Tibagy,
thence traversed the heart of Brazil from south-east to north-west,
entered Peru, scaling the Andes, crossed to the Pacific and waded into
those waters sword in hand; returning, he discovered the headwaters of
the Amazon, sailed down it, and when at last after years of travel he
came back to São Paulo no one recognized him.
A magnificent figure among indomitable bandeirantes is that of Fernão
Dias de Paes Leme. Well may the wild sertão be haunted by the shade of
such a man as this, or of his lieutenant, Borba Gato, or that father and
son who were known among the Indians of Govaz as Old Devil the First and
Old Devil the Second.
Fernão Dias, the “Hercules of the Sertão,” was the discoverer of the
emerald mines of Sumidouro, after ten years spent in search. He was a
famous slave-chaser of the sixteen hundreds, an extremely religious man
whose zeal was only assuaged by much building of chapels and convents
with the money earned in long raids; practical, astute, suave, he won
his ends by tact rather than violence, among his exploits being that of
leading the whole of the allied Goyana tribes to São Paulo. Approaching
their territory Dias made no threats, but camped nearby, cultivated
fields of cereals and vegetables, and so ingratiated himself into the
confidence of Tombu the chief that one day the old Indian collected his
people and agreed to go to the pleasant lands of which the Paulista
spoke. Five thousand natives thus marched voluntarily into captivity;
Tombu remained the worshipper of Fernão Dias until his death, but with
the exception of runaways none of the Goyanas ever saw the sertão again.
This was in 1661. Three years later the Portuguese court, greatly
desiring the discovery and development of mining regions which should
yield tribute to Lisbon, offered special rewards to discoverers of
mines, appointed an Administrator of Mines in Espirito Santo, where some
coloured stones had been found, and Affonso VI wrote to Fernão Dias
asking him to search the interior that he knew so well for the source of
the “emeralds” whose beauty raised hopes of finding mines equal in value
to those of the Spaniards in New Granada (Colombia), still today the
cradle of the finest emeralds. As a matter of fact the green stones
found in Brazil are the beautiful but semi-precious tourmalines.
Consenting, the famous bandeirante made some preliminary excursions and
in 1676, when he was over eighty years old, led out a great _comitiva_;
the first winter’s camp was made in a valley beyond the Rio Grande, the
second at Bomfim, the third at Sumidouro. At last in the Serro Frio some
showings of gold were located, and on the way back Dias died by the Rio
das Velhas, in the far interior across Minas Geraes. The bandeira had
gone through great suffering, and scores of men were buried by the way:
at one time the remnants of the expedition had appealed to Dias to give
up the hunt and return, and on his refusal made a plan to kill him. The
conspiracy was headed by a young man who was the son of Dias by an
Indian girl, and dearly loved by the old sertanista, but when convinced
of his boy’s guilt Dias hanged him, pardoning the other plotters but
driving them from the camp.
To Fernão Dias was due the exploration of what is now the State of Minas
Geraes, the whole of it falling practically under his sway as the
founder of at least a dozen towns in that hilly interior, the majority
surviving to this day. His search had a curious sequel: his son-in-law
and faithful aide, Borba Gato, who had found gold mines in Sabará and
registered them in 1700, was returning to S. Paulo after the death of
his leader when he met with a party headed by the official Administrator
General of Mines. Borba Gato’s charts and proofs were demanded, refused,
a quarrel broke out, and the servants of the pioneer set upon the
Administrator and killed him. Not daring to face S. Paulo with this
tale, Borba Gato fled to the interior where a tribe of Indians friendly
to him dwelt by the Rio Doce, and there lived hidden out of the reach of
the law for twenty years. At the end of that time, attempts to find the
Sabará mines having failed, he was offered a pardon in exchange for the
secret; he accepted the offer, returned to civilization, and presently
retiring to a farm with his family died peacefully in his bed at the age
of ninety.
A direct result of the murder of the Administrator was the stocking of
the sertão of Minas with cattle: the entourage of the dead man, as much
horrified by the deed as was Borba Gato, instead of returning to the
capital took to the bush with the seeds, stores and livestock without
which no expedition set out, and formed nuclei of fazendas in a score of
different places.
One of the earliest discoveries of gold in Brazil was made by
Bartholomeu Bueno da Silva in the Serra Doirada, in Goyaz, about 1682.
He it was who found the Indians wearing scraps of gold as ornament, and
tricked them into showing the place of its origin; displaying a bowl of
agua-ardente (aguardente—spirit made from sugarcane) he set light to it,
telling the Indians that it was water and that he would in like manner
set fire to all their springs and rivers if they did not reveal the
source of their gold. Southey calls Bartholomeu Bueno “the most renowned
adventurer of his age,” and to him is due the opening-up of Goyaz, until
then only entered by passing slave-hunters: but his discoveries were not
followed up and it remained for his son, nicknamed by the Indians
Anhangoera the Second his father having been known to them as Old Devil
the First on account of the incident referred to above, to re-find the
mines and extend the gold-mining fever to Goyaz. It was in 1722 that
this son, then a man of over fifty years, succeeded in obtaining
government help for exploration: by this time Minas was overrun with
gold seekers from every part of Brazil and the authorities were ready to
give active help to new mining expeditions. This bandeira set out with
great éclat, crossed the Rio Grande and wandered for three years, the
leader seeking landmarks dimly remembered from his boyhood. Persistent,
patient, conciliating his weary followers, he founded the town of Barra,
at last located the gold mines, returned to São Paulo and got together a
new band of men, led the way back and settled them at what is now the
City of Goyaz, and so closed with a remarkable colonizing feat the last
of the great expeditions into the high sertão.
[Illustration:
_The Falls of Iguassú._
On the boundary of Argentina with Brazil; this series of lovely
cascades is said to have altogether four times as much force as
Niagara.
]
A little later gold-miners penetrating to Matto Grosso began operating
at Cuyabá,[3] and almost immediately the discovery of diamonds at
Diamantina brought a new rush of people into this far interior region.
The day of the explorer, the true bandeirante, was over, and the age of
mining was by this time in its epoch of greatest excitement.
Few writers on Brazil have refrained from scourging the bandeirantes for
their cruelty to the wretched natives and for their destruction of the
Jesuit missions. It is true that they were brutal, but theirs was a
brutal age, and in explanation, not extenuation, of their deeds it
should be remembered that they, the white civilian colonists, were
fighting for their own preservation against hostile Indians whose hand,
quite naturally, was against the invader, and secondly against their
economic ruin by the line of action taken by the Society of Jesus. Not
only did the patient Jesuits coax and catechise the Indian, but they put
him to work in the fields and sold abroad the product of his hands: when
later on conflict raged in North Brazil between colonists and Jesuits
the chief grievance was that the Society, for whose support the civilian
community was taxed heavily, used the Indian labour denied by Royal
decree to the settlers, and also maintained great stores (_armazens_)
where every kind of European merchandise was kept.
It was for this reason, and not because they were bad Christians, that
the colonists of Maranhão once stood on the shore with guns in their
hands and refused to allow a shipload of Jesuits to land until they had
given a solemn promise to do nothing with the Indians except to convert
them; they regarded the members of this religious body as business
rivals. Nor were the Jesuits tactful in their dealings with colonists or
colonial government authorities; secure in the support given them not
only by the Pope but, especially perhaps in the period of Spanish rule
in Brazil under Philip II, by the King, they made no concessions, defied
the civilians, and apparently courted trials of strength: right or
wrong, they were able to count upon judgment in their favour in any
quarrel referred to Europe.
When the bandeirantes began their unmerciful raids upon the Jesuit
communities in the south Brazilian sertão the number of missions had
increased from thirteen in 1610 to twenty-one in 1628, and to them had
been largely drawn the natives who once, as Thomé de Souza said in
writing to Portugal, had been so thick that “even if they were killed
for market there would be no end of them.” Attacked, the _padres_ might
well have counted upon help from the Governor General of Brazil, but for
the fact that about this time the whole military attention of the
authorities was taken up with the determined aggressions of the Dutch
upon the northern capitanias; the affairs of São Paulo were left in the
hands of the Paulistas. The great matter of regret is that in the case
of the Jesuits much excellent constructive work was wasted, just as the
fine colonizing work of the French in Rio and in Pará and Maranhão was
destroyed, and that of the Dutch on the Amazon and in Pernambuco; the
spirit and the interests of the times forbade the Portuguese to allow
settlers of other races a foothold in Brazil, but nevertheless it was
unfortunate that so much good blood and good work was thrown away in a
huge land that so badly needed both.
While the Paulistas were exploring and adding great tracts to the colony
in the south, a law unto themselves, undisturbed by invasion except an
occasional attempt by the Spaniards from the Plate and attacks on S.
Vicente by English and French corsairs, the history of the north was one
of constant aggression and desperate defence. Until the year 1578 no
concerted attempts were made by England, France and Holland against the
colonies of Portugal, a country towards which feeling was not unfriendly
but in that year King Sebastião of Portugal, with the flower of his
nobility was killed in North Africa in the terrible battle of Alcazar el
Kebir, and Philip II of Spain, the “Demon of the Middle Ages,” seized
Portugal and all that was Portuguese two years later. The South American
colonies automatically came under his sway, and at once fell heir to the
feud between Spain and her European neighbours. Brazil was fair game,
and during the sixty years that elapsed before Portugal was able to
re-assert her independence the easily approached northern capitanias
were threatened, sacked and occupied by one or another of the three
chief enemies of Spain. Sackings of coast towns made no great difference
to the development of Brazil; when the ransom was paid the raiders
sailed away and the business of life was resumed without any vital
change; no towns were ever ruined by such predatory visits. Occupation
of districts was another matter, and, with the exception of loss of
lives every one of which was precious in young colonies, the effect was
good rather than harmful; the period of Dutch rule on the northern coast
of Brazil was a lasting beneficial stimulus. Nor was Spanish control of
any direct hurt to the Portuguese colonies: their internal management
was little interfered with, Portuguese officials continued to be
appointed to Brazilian posts, and if Spain did not adequately defend
them because her hands were already desperately full she at least did
Brazil the kindness to leave it alone. The one serious administrative
measure she took was the formation in Lisbon of a Junta to care for
Brazilian commerce, similar to the Council of the Indies sitting in
Madrid, and this was undoubtedly useful: the narrow monopolistic trading
policy pursued was simply in line with the ideas and practice of the
times. It was protection carried to an extreme, was useful at the time
of its initiation, and, if it outlived its usefulness in its most
irksome manifestations, the principle has so far survived that today, in
the third lustre of the twentieth century, it may be said that only one
great commercial nation has ever definitely thrown it aside.
The group of capitanias extending from Espirito Santo northwards to
Ceará were when Brazil came under Spanish rule the most productive of
all; it was but eighty years from the date of Cabral’s discovery, and
only fifty from the time of colonization, but flourishing populations
were settled along the seaboard, growing sugar, tobacco and cotton and
cutting stacks of dyewoods to fill the fifty ships a year that called at
the main ports. Bahia, seat of the Captain-General’s administration, was
also a bishopric, and the chief religious orders had settled in each
considerable town and founded churches, schools and convents. In 1570 a
Royal Decree forbade the compulsory use of Indians as labourers, and to
fill the ranks of field workers Africans were brought in: to this idea
the Portuguese were inured, for the West Coast of Africa had been a
source of labour supply for them since 1440; it was the discovery that
negroes could be transplanted to the Americas and would there work with
docility, thrive and multiply, that made possible the cultivation of
thousands of square miles of land, both in North and South America, and
warmly as we may reject the principle of slave labour now, it was the
only one which could have opened American lands to the extent which they
attained in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The white man
could not have performed this physical labour.
Indian labour was abolished at the instance of the priests; it was
remarkable that to the enslavement of Africans under circumstances
equally brutal no objection was made. Negroes were brought to Brazil
from 1574 onwards until the abolition of the slave trade, though not of
slavery, in 1854. The debt of Brazil to the African negro is a very
heavy one.
Soon after the junction of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns there began
the series of purely plundering attacks delivered by European enemies of
Spain which lasted until the establishment of the Dutch at Pernambuco,
but which were of so little political importance that in the meantime
the Portuguese authorities were able to destroy entirely the French
settlements at Maranhão and Pará which lasted from 1594 to 1615. The
work of replacing French with Brazilian settlements was carried out by
Jeronymo Albuquerque, son of a dominating Pernambuco family, and not
only were well-started French colonies ruined but the exploration of the
Amazon, commenced by the famous Daniel de la Touche (Seigneur de la
Ravardière) was abruptly ended.
In 1621 the Dutch Company of the West Indies was founded, companion
organization to the rich East Indies Company; with the approval of the
Dutch Government the Company was equipped for settlement and conquest,
and could call upon the home authorities for the help of ships and armed
men if war occurred in the course of operations. A fleet of thirty-six
vessels under Admiral Jacob Willekens sailed for Brazil early in 1624,
made directly for Bahia, and took the city without much trouble. Holding
it was a different matter, the population taking to arms, and a year
later a combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet arrived and forced the
Dutch to capitulate. Another impermanent attack was made in 1627, and in
1630 a different point of aggression was chosen by a great fleet of
seventy vessels: the Pernambucan city of Olinda was besieged and taken,
the Dutch secured themselves in power and remained masters of this and
three other capitanias afterwards seized; they were governed by the West
India Company for nearly twenty-five years.
Evidences of the occupation of Olinda and its sister settlement, Recife,
now the capital and a very flourishing city, are to be seen in the many
houses surviving with curved gables, high unbroken fronts, the exterior
walls shining with blue and white glazed tiles; the Dutch brought with
them their love of order and cleanliness, good methods in plantation
management and excellent organizing power, and the only genuine
objection to the rule of the Hollander in Brazil was that the country
did not belong to him. All Brazilian historians bear witness to the
merit of Dutch methods.
[Illustration:
_Old and New Brazil._
]
A Remnant of Colonial days; street Modern residences near the Gloria
in Olinda, old capital of Gardens, facing the bay, Rio de
Pernambuco. Janeiro.
The West India Company was able to induce an admirable Governor to take
charge of the new possession, Prince John Maurice of Nassau; he reached
Recife in 1637, and inaugurated a conciliatory policy towards such
Pernambucanos as would accept Dutch rule: those who would not were
pursued into the interior forests where they retreated under one of the
Albuquerques, and were forced to flee from Alagôas into Bahia. When such
resisters were caught they were shipped to Dutch settlements in the East
Indies.
Religious freedom was promulgated by the Protestant rulers, more
systematic administration of settlements and estates inaugurated, better
sugar milling methods introduced as well as farming implements, and the
scientific exploration of the interior was made. Prince Maurice brought
with him map-makers, geologists, botanists and expert mineralogists, and
sent them to the valleys and hills of the Bahian hinterlands. Elias
Herkmann took an expedition of one hundred men from Recife in 1641, to
make scientific investigations, and although he did not find mines of
importance he studied native relics and language, subsequently
publishing a book on the Tapuyo race.
George Marcgraf and Wilhelm Piso are also Dutch names of note in
connection with Brazil; the former studied Brazilian topography and
water systems and wrote a treatise on the subject as well as the
_Historia Rerum Naturalium Brazilium_; the latter was the first
classifier of Brazilian flora and fauna. “We owe to him,” says Dr. Egas
Moniz of Bahia, “the discovery of the emetic-cathartic properties of
ipecacuanha and copaiba” as well as the therapeutic virtues of jaborandi
and red mangue and several other drugs obtained from the Brazilian
_matto_. The first scientific charting of the sertão behind Pernambuco,
Alagôas and north Bahia was done during this time; herds of cattle
already wandered over interior pastures, and settlers led by the
independent spirit which renders the Brazilian indifferent to solitude
had formed fazendas along river borders; explorers had wandered by these
water paths looking for mines, but systematic maps and charts were
lacking.
In 1640 Portugal revolted from Spain, regained her independence, and
offered the crown to a member of the House of Braganza, a line which
retained its inheritance until a few years ago. The effect upon the
Americas was again notable; the Pernambucanos, still carrying on
guerilla warfare from the forests, were heartened, obtained help from an
enthusiastic Bahia, and redoubled their efforts; the Dutch came to an
agreement with Portugal that all possessions conquered by them during
the Spanish régime should be held, and tried to extend their holdings
farther north—an effort which was vain in itself, costly in life and
money, and hardened the determination of the colonists to do for
themselves what the mother country would not do on their behalf. In 1643
Prince Maurice returned to Holland: he had the interests of the colony
as such at heart too much to please the West India Company. A liberal
minded man, he wished to see the colonial ports opened to free commerce,
succeeded in getting the Company to forego all monopolies except that of
taking dyewoods away from Brazil and sending in slaves and munitions of
war, any Dutch captain being free to visit ports controlled by his
compatriots; these were not agreeable pills for a monopolistic
organization to swallow. On the other hand in recalling Maurice of
Nassau the Company lost prestige, henceforward carried on a losing
struggle with the virile Brazilians, and were forced out of section
after section until by 1648 only the forts of Parahyba, Rio Grande do
Norte, the island of Itamaracá and the city of Recife were in Dutch
hands. A certain embarrassment was created in Europe by this situation,
and the Portuguese Government, taken to task by Holland, sent emissaries
to the insurgent Pernambucanos to order suspension of hostilities: the
leaders replied that they “would go to receive punishment for their
disobedience after they had turned the invaders out of Pernambuco,” and
went on with the war. Holland herself, now at loggerheads with England
or rather with Cromwell on account of her support given to the Stuarts,
could not help her Brazilian colony; a severe defeat was inflicted by
the Pernambucans in 1649, at the battle of Guararapes, and the Dutch,
never recovering from this blow, were finally obliged to capitulate to
Francisco Barretto in January, 1654. The Pernambucan attackers were
nerved to this final effort, the storming of Recife, by the news of the
disaster inflicted on van Tromp’s fleet in the English Channel at the
hands of Blake.
Three months later the Dutch commander with all his troops left Brazil,
and the only fragments remaining to the States General after a
tremendous outlay of money and blood were a few islands in the West
Indies and a piece of the Guiana country: small return for great effort.
Portugal paid eight million florins to the Dutch in settlement of
Brazilian differences and agreed to allow Holland free trade with the
American colonies in all articles except the precious brazil-wood.
The chief results of Dutch occupation of the four capitanias of the
north-eastern promontory for twenty-four years were, first, stimulation
of world interest in this part of the vast Americas, for the
sea-captains who carried Brazilian products for the first time into
other parts of Europe than Portugal acted as advance agents of Brazilian
commerce: second, scientific investigation into natural products and
demonstration of the value of drugs peculiar to this part of South
America: third, introduction of better town management systems: fourth,
creation of a healthy national spirit in the northern provinces, with
lasting effect upon character: and the quickening of colonization in the
extreme north. It was not until the Dutch and French settled in Ceará
and Maranhão and on the Amazon that serious efforts were made to develop
these tropical territories under the equator; the year 1620 witnessed
the first arrival of settlers of Portuguese nationality in Maranhão when
two hundred families came from the Azores.
Another interesting and direct result of the Dutch intervention was the
creation of the Companhia do Commercio do Brasil (Commercial Company of
Brazil) by the Governor General, intended as a set-off to the Dutch West
India Company. It was established in 1650, received monopolies and
concessions of a valuable character, and in return was obliged to
provide a powerful armed fleet to convoy merchant vessels through
enemy-infested seas. The Commercial Company did as a fact render great
services to the Brazilians fighting against the Dutch, blockading
northern ports while insurgent armies attacked by land.
While the north was struggling with the Dutch and French and
incidentally becoming solidified by the tussle until a genuine national
feeling came into existence, Bahia, beating off attacks and remaining
the administrative residence of a Captain-General, was the centre of the
wealthiest part of the colony; all the slaves brought from Africa were
sold here, and although they were partly distributed, this was the chief
slave-owning region and is still the place where more pure negroes are
to be seen than anywhere else in Brazil. Farther south Espirito Santo,
one of the oldest of Brazilian colonies, was growing cane and raising
cattle, but suffered from raiding foreigners, as also did Ilhéos; Rio de
Janeiro became the seat of a second Captaincy-General in 1608, for a
time, with command over S. Vicente and Espirito Santo but had no
importance until the discovery of mines made her the chief gateway to
the golden regions. Out of the path of the Dutch, whose object was wide
agricultural lands, Rio neither suffered nor gained as did the North; at
this part of the Brazilian coast the mountain barrier comes right down
to the sea’s edge, the granite wall shouldering into the waters of the
deeply indented bay: there is very little land suitable for plantations
except in narrow valleys until the Serra do Mar is climbed. It was this
lack of sugar land that kept Rio uncolonized, lovely as she is, for half
a century after the colonies on either side of her were started;
settlement by the Portuguese might have been put off still longer if the
French under Admiral Villegaignon had not taken possession of the bay in
1555, made friends with the Tamoyo Indians as the Portuguese were never
able to do, fortified a rocky island, and established a Huguenot colony
here—the ill-fated “_France Antarctique_.” The energetic Mem de Sá,
Captain-General after Thomé de Souza, brought a fleet from Bahia, drove
the French into hiding on the mainland, sent his nephew, Estacio de Sá,
to Portugal to get help, and this gallant young man returned with a
strong force in 1565. In two years’ time, with troops from Bahia and São
Paulo assisting, the unfortunate Huguenots were utterly defeated, the
remnants of the exiles retiring into the woods with their Indian allies
and disappearing from history. The body of Estacio de Sá, killed in the
last decisive fighting, was buried in the shade of the Pão d’Assucar
near the first Portuguese town founded in the bay and named São
Sebastião. Another member of the same family, Correia de Sá, was sent to
head the new Portuguese settlement, and eventually died there at the age
of 113.
Division of Brazil into two captaincies-general in 1608, to be united
again soon afterwards and again subsequently divided, was part of the
experiments made by the European home governments, apparently with the
sincere wish to develop the country; it was supposed that a region so
vast could not be governed by one man, but as a matter of fact the
occupied territory was along the seaboard on the whole, and
communication by sea was fairly speedy; from 1549 onwards, when the
first Captain-General was appointed, the mother country bought up when
convenient the strips of land belonging to the heirs of the
_donatarios_; some new captaincies were also added from time to time, as
that of Grão Pará in 1616, Minas Geraes, Matto Grosso and Goyaz after
the discovery of gold and diamonds, and an independent State of
Maranhão, governed separately from the rest of Brazil was also created
in 1621, thus adding to the governmental confusion in spite of good
intentions. Decentralization was increased by the lack of commercial
exchange between the different regions, and no successful effort
improved this fault until the notable Marquis de Pombal took matters in
hand in a statesmanlike manner in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, buying the capitanias which were yet in private hands, creating
Brazil a viceroyalty and Rio the viceregal capital.
But before that date much water had flowed under Brazilian bridges. It
is not the purpose of this book to give in detail the history of Brazil,
but to show the chief events and their effect upon development.
Following the creation of the capitania system and its series of coastal
settlements came the penetration of the southern interior by the Jesuits
in their “reductions,” and the scattering of these centres of Indian
population at the hands of the bandeirantes; the next happening of
extreme importance for Brazil was the seizure of different parts of the
coast by the Dutch and French, with their stimulating effect upon
Portuguese colonization; it was after this that the gold rush to the
interior of Minas, Goyaz and Matto Grosso populated and opened up the
sertão in tiny patches, but at the same time half denuded the coast of
its settlers and injured the agricultural production of the country, the
prosperity of which was almost entirely owing to the introduction of
negro slaves, another great factor in Brazilian progress.
Today the mining industry of Brazil accounts for a very small item on
her exports lists, chiefly because the diamonds which go out are mostly
contraband, the gold is produced by only two principal mines, and while
there is a promising export of manganese it is insignificant compared to
the big business of the country or to the possibilities contained in
Brazil’s mineral seamed mountains. In the early eighteenth century
Brazil was a famous gold country, and it is reckoned that over five
hundred million dollars’ worth of this metal has been taken out. Nearly
all this gold was found in placers easily washed out by hand in the
crudest manner; when the rich alluvial deposits along river valleys were
exhausted Brazil ceased to be a gold producer on a spectacular scale. In
Minas Geraes rich sands were found near the present Ouro Preto, the
first mining city that was founded bearing the name of Villa Rica; all
about it the whole country is still in heaps, turned over by the miners
who came a couple of hundred years ago. In that day people flocked into
Minas, coming by road from S. Paulo, by the S. Francisco river from
Bahia, and by a shorter cut over the mountain passes from Rio. The bones
of many folk remained by the way: it is said that of one band of 300
Paulistas setting out in 1725 only five persons, two white men and three
negroes, reached their objective, the far interior mines of Cuyabá. It
became necessary for the authorities to forbid the taking of negroes to
the mines, so general was the abandonment of plantations, but the
protest of the Crown was only half-hearted; it was eminently
satisfactory that a stream of gold and diamonds should flow across the
Atlantic to Lisbon, and it was of as little use for governors to point
out the bad economy of coastal depopulation in the seventeen hundreds as
it had been for Governor Diogo de Menezes to write to the King in 1608:
“_Your Majesty may believe me that the true mines of Brazil are sugar
and brazil-wood, whence your Majesty draws so much advantage without
costing the Royal Treasury a single penny_.”
[Illustration:
_Two Views of São Paulo City._
São Paulo, premier city of the leader State of the Brazilian Union,
stands on the breezy uplands of the southern plateau; it is a busy,
prosperous centre with the first modern civic equipment. Population
550,000.
]
Quarrels at the mines led to the “Guerra dos Emboabas,” a factional
disturbance between the Paulista discoverers and stranger gold-diggers;
in the end the Paulistas were driven back, retired to their own uplands,
and Minas Geraes was politically separated. Indomitably energetic, the
men of S. Paulo turned their attention southward, where the Spaniards
had entered and settled, drove the intruders out of Rio Grande do Sul
and thus secured another, and one of the finest, regions for Brazil.
In 1750 King John V of Portugal died. The death of Portuguese monarchs
did not as a rule make more than a perfunctory difference to the
Colonies, but in this case the succession of José I was important
because, with infinite faith in his brilliant Minister Sebastião José de
Carvalho e Mello, afterwards Marquis de Pombal, he left the chief
affairs of the kingdom to these able hands. Pombal has been bitterly
attacked: he was without doubt a man of iron; but he was a man of
unusual foresight and intelligence who thoroughly realized the great
value of Brazil, and did much to improve economic conditions in that
huge possession. He seems to have had what Brazilians call a _palpite_
concerning the destiny of Brazil and Portugal.
Almost the first act of this statesman was the curtailing of the powers
of the Inquisition: he abolished _autos da fé_, which must have given
relief to Brazil if the historian Porto Seguro is correct in saying that
no less than 500 Brazilians had been burnt alive in Lisbon by the Holy
Office. With a special eye to Portuguese America he reduced taxes on
tobacco and sugar, had the diamond traffic strictly supervised, created
commercial companies to trade with Pará, Maranhão, Pernambuco and
Parahyba; specially encouraged the plantation of rice and cotton in the
North; legislated most of the commerce which was in the hands of the
enterprising English into Portuguese channels; inaugurated good
ship-building yards in Brazilian ports; settled boundary disputes with
the Spanish on Brazilian borders; brought all capitanias still in
private control under the Portuguese Crown—Cametá, Caeté, Ilha de
Joannes, Itamaracá, Reconcavo de Bahia, Ilhéos, Porto Seguro, São
Vicente and Campos dos Goytacazes; and as his most powerful and bitterly
assailed effort he laid hands on the Jesuits. The Society, overwhelmed
in the South, was strongly entrenched in the North since the opening of
Pará and Maranhão; they had done wonderful and self-sacrificing work
there; but they hostilized the colonists and made the mistake of arming
their protégés the Indians against the settlers. They constituted
themselves in Brazil as Bartolomé de las Casas did in Mexico and
Guatemala, the Defenders of the Indians; they were extraordinarily
successful with them, and it is not impossible that if some working
arrangement could have been found between the colonists and Jesuits a
great problem might have been solved—that of obtaining some control over
the natives and teaching them industries without undermining their
peculiar physical constitution. With the best intentions in the world,
more modern efforts made to hold the Indian tribes in civic life have
ended in their speedy dwindling and extinction; no one except Colonel
Rondon seems able to teach the Indian and keep him alive.
To break up the Jesuit missions, Pombal in 1755 decreed the
“emancipation of the Indians of Pará and Maranhão,” a curious corollary
to the laws that the Society had themselves obtained earlier forbidding
the Portuguese settlers to enslave Indians. A little later occurred in
Portugal an attempt against the life of the King: the Jesuits were,
quite unjustly, accused of being concerned in it, and on this pretext
they were ordered expelled in a body from Portugal and from all
Portuguese possessions. This was in 1759, expulsion from Brazil taking
place during 1760; not content with this, the abolition of the Society
of Jesus was obtained from Pope Clement XIV in 1773. This severe measure
was rescinded in 1814, and the Jesuits came back to Brazil as to other
world dominions, doing excellent educational work at the present time;
their colleges are magnificent institutions, and it is commonly said in
Brazil that the very best education for men is obtained in the Jesuit
college at Itú, in the interior of São Paulo State.
José I died in 1777, and Pombal promptly descended from power; but his
work in the stimulation of Brazilian industries, the creation of a
genuine Brazilian entity through strong centralization, and the erection
of Rio into a viceroyalty, paved the way for the next great change.
Early in the nineteenth century, when the North American colonies of
Great Britain had successfully revolted, and the French Revolution was
an accomplished fact, ideas of republican independence began to agitate
many heads in South America. Brazil had only one uprising, the famous
Conspiracy of Minas, which got no farther than plans; it was headed by
one of the influential Freire de Andrade family, and all the plotters
were eventually pardoned except one scapegoat, who was executed publicly
in Rio in 1792, and thus achieved immortality: his nickname of
_Tiradentes_ is preserved in the name of a square in Rio and a public
holiday on the anniversary of his death.
A few years later Napoleon was overrunning Europe. Portugal, friendly to
his enemy England, incurred the Napoleonic wrath, tried to make terms
too late, and was being actually invaded by the French when an English
naval squadron appeared in the Tagus commanded by Sir Sidney Smith; the
Portuguese royal family and a host of courtiers went aboard Portuguese
vessels and were convoyed across the Atlantic, out of Napoleon’s reach,
to Brazil. It would not at all have suited England for the Braganzas to
fall into hands which already held too many royal prisoners. It was one
of the most remarkable transferences of a crown in history, this
emigration of Dom João to his American colonies; it was a useful and a
dignified refuge for him and at the same time was of great value to
Brazil, probably saving her from years of disorder and bloodshed.
[Illustration:
_Two Views of the Avenida Rio Branco, Rio de Janeiro._
The beautiful Avenida, over a mile long, was driven through the city
from the docks to the Avenida Beira Mar as part of the extensive
city improvements costing over £20,000,000 begun in March, 1904; the
avenue was completed in November, 1905. Rio has 1,250,000
population.
]
The royal party arrived first at Bahia, where the town turned out in
enthusiastic welcome and invited Dom João to make this city his seat of
government; but his destination was Rio, and he sailed on, first giving
out a proclamation which ensured him a good reception in the Capital—the
_Abertura dos Portos_, or opening of the ports of Brazil freely to the
ships of all the world “friendly to Portugal.” Public printing presses
were now permitted, a newspaper was started, chiefly engaged in training
the minds of the _nascidos no Brasil_ (Brazilian born) to appreciation
of the monarchical presence, but still the commencement of Brazilian
journalism; foreign capital began to come, and active Europeans,
attracted by the advertisement that the transference of the monarchy
gave Brazil, entered and established businesses; the Banco do Brasil was
inaugurated; fine buildings were erected in Rio; the Regent’s collection
of pictures and books, brought with him, formed the nucleus of the
excellent museum and library of modern Rio; the harbour was improved, a
School of Art and Naval College founded. By the time that Portugal was
free from the Napoleonic shadow, and, in 1821, called Dom João home
again, he left behind a Brazil to which a tremendous impetus had been
given, and which had been raised to the dignity of a kingdom equal in
importance with Portugal and Algarves six years earlier. North and south
of Brazil the newly freed Spanish American countries were deep in
troubles born of a sudden injection into independence of unaccustomed
populations. Brazil herself could scarcely have avoided being drawn into
the vortex had her citizens still to complain of the narrow policies and
repressive measures of the colonial system; they had become too proud
and too strong for development to be longer retarded, and the European
turn of fortune came in the nick of time. It was lucky that Dom João was
a man of shrewd good sense. Dom Pedro, son of Dom João, remained in
Brazil as Regent, and the country was still linked to Portugal; it was
soon apparent that this condition could not endure. The jealous
legislature in Lisbon wished to reduce Brazil again to the level of a
colony under tutelage, despite the efforts of Dom João; the news came to
Rio together with a peremptory order for the return of the prince, and
he, a good diplomat, elected to throw his lot in with Brazil, and
declared the Independence on the historic hillside of Ypiranga, in
1822.[4]
Proclaimed Emperor soon afterwards, Pedro ruled for nine years and then
abdicated in favour of his five-year-old child, Dom Pedro _segundo_. To
this rather stormy period of control is due the commencement of
deliberate colonization of Europeans into Brazil; it was a policy widely
continued later on by Pedro II, and afterwards adopted both by the
Federal Government and by separate States of the Union. A regency lasted
until Pedro was fourteen years old, the most remarkable hand on the
reins of power meanwhile being that of the astute priest, Father Diogo
Feijó.
Pedro II endeared himself to Brazil by his kindly and tactful spirit,
his genial broadmindedness; he was a scholar by instinct, and did his
best to advance Brazil by the encouragement of railroad building,
invitation to foreign capital, and the throwing open of wide spaces of
southern land to good class immigrants. It was during his reign that the
English, who had established themselves firmly during the first
monarchical periods, sending ships regularly and opening markets for
Brazilian products, were followed by the commercial French and later by
the German merchant. The industrial and educational advance of Brazil is
largely owing to the personal initiative of Dom Pedro II. His reign was
one of the longest in history, from 1831 to 1889, and the development
within this period includes inauguration of city tramways as well as
railroads; the discovery that coffee would grow in Brazil and its
systematic cultivation; discovery of the properties of rubber; the
introduction of factories; use of hydraulic power.
Following the world agitation against slavery, Brazil in 1854 forbade
the introduction of negroes; there were however still large numbers of
these people in bondage as well as a much larger number free.
Public feeling was much excited about the question in the eighties, and
at last in 1888, when Dom Pedro during a period of illness had made his
daughter, the Princess Isabel, Regent, the powerful influence of many
highminded Brazilians was brought to bear, and the decree of abolition
was signed.
Slave holders were not so pleased as statesmen, when their farm workers
immediately forsook the field and flocked into the cities; agriculture
undoubtedly suffered, and to the discontent of the planters is credited
the agitation that now gathered head against the continuation of the
monarchical system. The truth seems rather to be that the Empire had
outlived its usefulness, and surrounded by republics could not survive.
There was also a general fear lest Isabel, said to be priest-dominated,
should be permanently appointed Regent, and this idea hastened the day
that would otherwise have been postponed, in all probability, until the
death of the good and highly revered Dom Pedro. A growing band of
republicans, some of the foremost men in Brazilian affairs today, found
themselves strong enough to proclaim the end of the Empire; Dom Pedro
was informed and asked to leave the country within twenty-four hours,
and did so; the Republic in Brazil dates from November 15, 1889.
The first years of the new régime were darkened by disorders, the worst
being the revolt, long-drawn-out, in Rio Grande do Sul. Two military
presidents were succeeded by four civilians, and these in turn by a
third militarist, and notably extravagant, presidency from 1910 to 1914.
The present President, a lawyer, Dr. Wencesláo Braz Pereira Gomez, is
making heroic efforts to redeem the financial condition of the country,
and is fortunate in being aided by a group of exceedingly able men. The
country became deeply involved during the last twenty-five years; if she
were an old land the burden would be severe: her strength lies in her
youth, internal vigour, and unsurpassed abundance of untapped resources.
The tremendous money spending of Republican times has been sharply
censured since the outbreak of war in Europe suddenly pulled up the
country to a realization of her debts; it is probably fortunate that she
was just too late to arrange yet another, for which negotiations were
opened in 1914. But while it is true that literally tons of money were
borrowed and spent after 1889, it is also from that date that the great
leap forward of the country is reckoned; her extravagance was a wide
advertisement—the attention of the world was called to this spoilt child
of the nations as no modest jogging along the beaten track would have
done. Bankers, commercial firms, writers, settlers came to Brazil; there
was a feverish expansion in railroad building, and from this period
dates the inauguration of good modern port works in Rio, Bahia, Pará,
Pernambuco, Santos, Victoria, and many other points of call for
ocean-going vessels; waterworks and town drainage, the better paving of
a score of cities, extinction of yellow fever and other tropical pests,
were all accomplished with money borrowed in the hey-day of Brazil.
The check in facile borrowing of very large sums on easy terms has
undoubtedly acted as a cold shower upon South America in general,
somewhat accustomed to financial sunshine; the result has been salutary
in awakening the people all over the continent to the need for
unprecedented personal effort. It has, too, brought about a new sense of
North American relations, created and needed, with South America. The
European War has turned the United States from the position of a debtor
to that of a creditor country, and while up to the end of 1922 her loans
to the whole of South America have not exceeded two hundred million
dollars, chiefly short-time State borrowings, caution is mutually
beneficial. There is, however, much work to be done which calls urgently
for gold supplies, and it is but logical that the country accumulating
money rapidly should be willing to take up a due share of the
development work waiting; European interests need not and should not be
ousted, but can be readily and happily supplemented.
The United States of Brazil today contain over 24,000,000 people, still
largely concentrated upon the sea coast, in a score of thriving cities.
She is at peace with her neighbours, with no shadow upon her political
horizon; her only great problem is the industrial, financial one, and
this, with the concentrated effort of Brazilians and the right kind of
external help, can be solved. The entry of Brazil into the War upon the
side of the Allies, after the torpedoing of the Brazilian vessels and
the declaration of war by the United States against Germany, brought
about a new international comradeship, and has awakened the world to a
better understanding of the spirit and power of the country.