INDUSTRIES
THE COFFEE INDUSTRY OF BRAZIL
The huge coffee industry in Brazil will not receive a great deal of
space in this book for two reasons: the first is that the subject needs
a special monograph to deal with it thoroughly, and there is an entire
literature on the subject, especially excellent in French, Portuguese
and Italian; the second reason is that coffee culture and marketing is
so highly organized that there is little room for outside enterprise.
Existing plantations are probably quite capable of taking care of what
new planting may be required—and this likely to be in the immediate
future: the drastic checks given to planting by the authorities after
the terrible fright of the great over-production of 1906, that led to
the much-discussed Valorization, have done their work so thoroughly that
at the present, with the elimination of many thousands of trees owing to
exhaustion, there is room for extended planting on São Paulo and Minas
fazendas. Brazilians, to whom life on a fazenda is always pleasant, are
large owners of coffee-producing lands, and are quite aware of economic
conditions, as well as being experienced growers and exporters of
coffee. I do not, therefore, advise any tyro to enter upon the business
of a coffee fazenda; such plantations offer good opportunities for
investment, but apart from that angle do not call for outside activity.
There are many foreigners in the coffee-producing business in Brazil, of
course. Italians, besides supplying a very large percentage of the
labour on the S. Paulo estates, are considerable owners of plantations;
the Dumont Estates, English owned and operated, are world famous; and
the greatest single owner of coffee trees in the world, possessor of
thirteen million shrubs, is Francisco Schmidt, who began life in Brazil
as a poor German immigrant.
The first coffee plants brought to Brazil were of the _liberica_ variety
and were planted in Pará at sea-level, a situation to which this kind is
not averse. This was in 1727 and when in 1761 the Mother Country
remitted taxes on coffee from her American possessions, cultivation was
encouraged and spread south to Maranhão, Ceará, Espirito Santo, Minas
and Rio, eventually reaching the red diabasic soils of São Paulo. The
variety grown here is chiefly _café arabica_, preferring an upland
habitat, but in the course of years Brazil has developed hardy hybrid
varieties of her own.
A couple of sacks of coffee are said to have been sent out from the
south early in the nineteenth century, but real business did not develop
until after Dom João arrived and promulgated laws freeing Brazilian
trade from its swaddling clothes. Between 1835 and 1840 export began in
large quantities, the latter year recording 1,383,000 sacks sent abroad
for sale; slave labour was used, and the interior was searched for the
deepest blood-red lands, found in their richest belts in São Paulo
State.
By the year 1870 Brazil was exporting three million sacks annually (of
sixty kilos, or about one hundred and thirty pounds, each); before the
end of the century the output was ten million sacks, but meanwhile
Brazil passed through a severe labour crisis. Abolition of slavery in
1888 left the plantations without an adequate supply of workers: it was
necessary to supplement the free negro element remaining at work with
more “braços”—the eternal need of Brazil. Experiments had already been
made in colonization by Dom Pedro, and these proved the excellence of
the Italian labourer; prompt measures were taken by the State as well as
by private _fazendeiros_ to bring agricultural workers from North Italy,
the breach was filled, and so successfully that today out of a
population of three million people in S. Paulo State, one million are
Italians. Disputes occurred in early years owing to the disparity of
race, and partly the lack of experience of the planter in dealing with
white labour, but the State Government took up the cudgels on the part
of the immigrant, saw to it that he was paid justly and that his
condition was economically sound—to the great advantage of coffee
cultivation in Brazil. This was the work of the _Patronato Agricola_, a
Brazilian invention which owes much to Dr. Sampaio Vidal; its successful
operation was instrumental in contenting the immigrant who came to work
on coffee plantations, and while it was at first regarded with suspicion
by some _fazendeiros_, eventually received their cordial co-operation as
a source of mutual benefit.
Not only São Paulo but the coffee-growing regions of interior Rio,
Minas, and Espirito Santo, sought immigrants officially: in spite of
efforts there was no section of Brazil so successful as the southern
State. _Colonos_ who were brought to Minas melted away to São Paulo,
perhaps chiefly on account of the “sympathy of numbers.” São Paulo
eventually remained the only State with an organized, active immigration
system.
At the end of the nineteenth century big prices were paid for coffee: on
a few occasions a sack fetched one hundred and thirty-five francs, and
large quantities were sold at ninety-five and ninety-seven francs. Cost
of production was about fifty francs, and sixty-six was considered a
fair return on investment; the industry was greatly stimulated by these
profits and planting began feverishly all along the lines of deposit of
the richest red soils. These new plantations came into bearing four or
five years later, and in the crop season of 1906–07 a staggering yield
was ready for an overwhelmed market. The bounty of nature brought Brazil
face to face with ruin.
São Paulo State harvested 15,392,000 bags; Rio de Janeiro State offered
4,245,000 bags; Espirito Santo and Bahia together had another half
million. Altogether Brazil had over 20,000,000 bags of coffee for sale,
to a world whose annual consumption was then not much more than
17,000,000 bags; and in addition to the new Brazilian crop there was a
harvest from Mexico and Central America of 1,500,000 bags, from Colombia
of 1,000,000, with another half million from the East and 400,000 from
the West Indies—and the not to be ignored contribution of real Mocha
coffee of 115,000 bags.
Nor was that all. There had been a big Brazilian crop in 1901–02,
reaching the then unprecedented figure of 15,000,000 sacks, and with a
world consumption at that time of only 13,000,000 there was a large
surplus of this coffee left in hand, as well as stocks of other
varieties. Prices went down, and the planter was only saved by the
imminence of a fall in exchange which meant that although his coffee
sold for less gold than normally, yet this gold brought so much more
Brazilian paper when exchanged that he was able to pay operating
expenses and still count a profit in national currency.
From a gloomy level of thirty francs a bag, coffee rose in 1904–05 to
about forty and fifty francs; but the threatening feature of the
situation was retention in world warehouses of a stock averaging
11,000,000 bags. When Brazil was confronted with 20,000,000 bags of the
new 1906 crop she thus had to consider a market which already held
seven-tenths of the coffee needed annually by the world, apart from
other sources of new supply.
To throw her coffee upon Europe and the United States meant the ruin of
the premier industry of Brazil. After a series of hotly debated
discussions, which had begun with the menace of the big crop of 1902,
the State of São Paulo, with the support of the Federal Government and
in agreement with the States of Rio and Minas, decided upon the famous,
greatly abused and passionately defended Valorization Plan. The methods
adopted may be open to criticism, but some remedy had to be sought, and
the plan had the merit of boldness as well as the sanction given by
success; the fact that this success was partly adventitious would
probably prevent recourse to like measures at future times. The “Taubaté
Agreement” forming the base of the plan obliged the contracting states
to sell their coffee at not less than a given price,[11] to prevent
exportation of grades below Type Seven; to commence propaganda work
abroad to increase coffee sales; to collect a surtax of three francs per
bag on all exports; and to limit new planting of coffee. It was farther
suggested that the surtax proceeds should be held by the Federal
Government and used for the amortization of the loan to be made,
creating a Caixa de Emissão e Conversão to deal with financial aspects
of the Plan and to regulate exchange—an excellent measure which was
eventually carried out.
Difficulties checked the original agreement and in the end São Paulo
faced the situation alone—meanwhile the harvest was coming in, and the
price of coffee dropped below thirty francs a bag—obtaining a
preliminary loan of £1,000,000 on August 1, 1906, from the
Brasilianische Bank für Deutschland, for a one-year term; in December
£2,000,000 was obtained through J. Henry Schroeder & Company of London,
and subsequently the National City Bank of New York negotiated another
million sterling. The money was used to buy and store the coffee of the
Brazilian plantations, and was rendered sufficient only by the
co-operation of fazendeiros and exporting houses.
In June, 1907, São Paulo held 8,000,000 bags of coffee, buying only high
types and through the sole agency of Theodore Wille and Company, a
strong coffee exporting firm of Brazil. When Minas and Rio protested
against the exclusion of their eight and nine type coffees from the
stores, the Federal Government at last actively assisted, lending the
State of São Paulo ten million francs for the purchase of the lower
types. In July, 1907, S. Paulo stopped buying. She had acquired over
8,000,000 bags, one-third of the total purchase price of 400,000,000
francs coming from foreign loans and the remainder from advances by
commission houses in Brazil on coffee consigned to their keeping.
Subsequent sums for the redemption of this coffee were obtained: two
million pounds sterling came from Rothschild’s through the Federal
Government, and a similar sum was obtained by the lease of the (State)
Sorocabana railway to the Farquhar syndicate.
With the exception of a few hundred thousand sacks all this coffee was
sent to different world markets for storage until opportune sales could
be made; for a whole year not one ounce of it was sold, and then, when
the next Paulista harvest turned out to fill only five million bags, the
preciously guarded coffee was dealt out warily to a firm market at an
average price of sixty francs a bag. Without this action Brazilians say
that the price must have fallen to twenty francs.
At the end of 1908 financial adjustments were made; older debts were
covered by a new loan of £15,000,000 arranged with an international
syndicate headed by Schroeder of London and the Société Générale of
Paris. These houses took £5,000,000 each, and the remainder was
distributed between Germany, Belgium and New York. The loan was
guaranteed by the coffee surtax, raised to five francs a bag, and by the
seven million bags remaining in international warehouses. Havre, with
nearly two million bags, was the greatest holder of the valorized
coffee, and it continued to be sold during the next five years only when
the price offered profits.
When the European War broke out stocks of this coffee amounting to three
million sacks still lay in the countries suddenly rendered belligerent—
it should be mentioned here that coffee improves by careful keeping. The
combined stocks in Hamburg, Bremen and Trieste totalling 1,200,000 bags
were at once taken over by the Teutonic governments, and the price
(about £4,500,000) paid to a Berlin bank; it got no farther because
proceeds of the coffee sales being mortgaged to London bankers, transfer
would “benefit the enemy.” Germany was in this case only following the
same financial rules as other belligerents, but Brazil was placed in the
invidious position of innocent bystander, and in 1922 was still trying a
way out of the difficulty. Adding the value of the Antwerp stock also
under German control (718,000 sacks) São Paulo was owed nearly seven
million pounds sterling, and this sum together with the price of the
Havre stock, 1,216,000 bags, was about equal to the foreign debt of S.
Paulo.
Although payment for the seized coffee stocks was necessarily delayed,
São Paulo was by this suddenly opened market for her coffee relieved of
the anxious time that might otherwise have been hers after the 1914–15
crop was harvested. A large crop was once more the result of perfect
climatic conditions following small _colheitas_ (harvests) of one or two
previous years.
Early in 1915 the Federal Government prepared to lend São Paulo one
hundred and fifty thousand contos of reis with which advances were to be
made to planters, enabling the retention of surplus coffee—a variant of
the valorization plan which was more generally approved. But by good
fortune sales of Brazilian coffee far exceeded expectation; the
Scandinavian countries enormously increased their purchases and although
a general idea prevailed that it was largely passed on to Germany, no
objection was for a long time raised by the Allies.
_Country_ _1913_ _1915_ _1920_
United States 4,914,730 7,061,319 6,248,000 bags of 60 kilos.
Germany 1,865,632 545,000 „ „ „ „
France 1,846,944 2,449,223 1,540,000 „ „ „ „
Netherlands 1,483,097 1,486,994 376,000 „ „ „ „
Austria 1,016,824 80,000 „ „ „ „
Belgium 444,988 320,000 „ „ „ „
Argentina 249,045 269,987 285,000 „ „ „ „
Great Britain 246,161 413,786 73,000 „ „ „ „
Italy 237,126 710,800 1,002,000 „ „ „ „
Sweden 212,034 2,333,386 386,000 „ „ „ „
Spain 108,928 106,329 145,000 „ „ „ „
Total exports 13,267,449 17,061,319 11,525,000 „ „ „ „
Prices, 1921—down to 7 m. bag; 1922 15816 m. In 1921 shipments were
checked by the slump, and the Brazilian Government bought and held
4,500,000 bags. Prices, fallen to 7 milreis in 1921, recovered to over
15 milreis per 10 kilos in early 1922.
Agricultural maps of Brazil, freely and courteously handed to any
visitor at the Escriptorio do Informações do Brasil in the rue St.
Honoré in Paris, show a huge patch of green in the middle of S. Paulo
State and extending to a point very near the frontier of Minas Geraes.
This patch represents some seven hundred and twenty-two million coffee
trees, covering a total space of over two million acres.
At least one hundred million pounds sterling is invested in coffee
plantations, and, with an output of an average twelve million bags,
income from crops is not less than twenty-five million pounds sterling a
year.
Advancing into the interior when the advent of railroads made
cultivation of the sertão a commercial possibility, the culture of
coffee in Brazil and especially in São Paulo is carried on upon a large
scale: the plantations are great businesses, scientifically operated.
The number of trees on a good estate is likely to run up into millions,
although no other single grower rivals Colonel Schmidt’s production of
eleven or twelve thousand tons of coffee. Visiting a fine _fazenda_ one
is aware of seeing the inside of a commercial undertaking of striking
magnitude, where activity is regularized, the whole life of the
_fazendeiro_ and the _colonos_ subordinated to the supreme interest—at
least during the rush season of the _colheita_. Looking from the windows
of the _fazendeiro’s_ residence, which is generally upon a little
eminence, one sees an ocean of dark green shrubs, planted in perfectly
even lines, stretching away in unbroken symmetry as far as the eye can
see. The São Paulo land chosen for coffee very often lies in long gentle
slopes, its deep purple-carmine tint in sharp contrast to the glossy
emerald coffee leaves, and down and up over the undulations run the
rows, often extending for eight or ten kilometers. The storehouses,
pulping machinery, and great cement drying grounds where the coffee is
laid in the sun, are frequently in the hollow where the indispensable
river runs; rows of neat little houses of labourers, the Italian
_colonos_ who plant, cultivate and gather the coffee, stand within
sight. In the background is the area of wild woodland, for “no fazenda
can prosper unless it has a certain amount of _matto_,” say the
Brazilians. In the flowering season a coffee estate is a lovely sight,
the sturdy shrubs strewn so thickly with waxy white blossoms that it
seems as if snow had fallen on them; the air is clean, cool and sunny,
and bees hum over the sweet-scented flowers. The trees are larger than
those seen in Central America, are unshaded, and generally three or four
roots stand together to make the bush. The ground beneath the shrub is
kept carefully weeded.
[Illustration:
_The S. Paulo Coffee Industry._
Labourers’ houses; the coffee harvest; drying grounds; view of coffee
plantation.
]
When the round berries turn red harvesting begins. Men, women and
children turn out, trained to strip the berries from the slender little
branches without injuring the tree; the whole _fazenda_ is in a bustle,
the water-channels are racing with scarlet berries carried along in the
stream, and the machinery house is noisy. When the berries are pulped
and the twin beans freed and cleaned, the business of packing begins;
day by day wagon loads of sacks leave the _fazenda_ for São Paulo city,
consigned to Santos, and thence to some country overseas. Brazilians
appear to love _fazenda_ life; the wife of a coffee _fazendeiro_ will
often take as keen and business-like an interest in the work as her
husband does, discusses theories of planting with spirit, and will show
you all the details of the new imported machinery. There is a true
hospitality and geniality permeating the _fazenda_ in Brazil; very large
sums are often made, and while quantities of coffee money have been
royally wasted on extravagances, there is a class of strong business men
in plantation work who put profits into improvements, follow new ideas,
and build up their estates from year to year in an admirable manner.
It is in São Paulo, and especially about Riberão Preto, Campinas, São
Simão, S. Carlos, Dous Corregos, Botacatú,—all along the lines of the
fans of railroad—that the great coffee estates are found. The original
_Coffea Arabica_ has some naturalized children in Brazil of great merit
and hardihood; the _Nacional_ or _Commun_, the delicate _Bourbon_,
yellow _Botacatú_, the big aromatic _Maragogype_, all have their
defenders. From these plantations come the hundreds of thousands of tons
of coffee that have made Brazil the premier coffee country of the world,
and brought her to this eminence in a remarkably short space of time.
The development of coffee culture in Brazil, and the simultaneous
development of public taste for its essence, is one of the great
industrial stories of the nineteenth century.
The interior of Rio State, with its endless series of little round hills
crowned with coffee shrubs, is an assiduous producer; farther inland
Minas Geraes substituted cotton with coffee when the United States began
to sweep world markets with her product, but is now going back to cotton
here and there as the demand of her own factories brings unheard-of
prices for native fibres; she is however a regular supplier of coffee,
in common with her neighbour Espirito Santo, and the more northerly
state of Bahia. North of Bahia commercial production ceases, but, as in
the case of cotton, shrubs may be seen all along the Brazilian littoral,
up to Maranhão and Pará—of an African variety which does not need hilly
country.
The world is steadily drinking more coffee. Consumption was only able to
take ten million bags in 1885: the estimate for 1922 is 22 million bags.
It is this reflection which preserves the _fazendeiro_ from having
nightmare whenever he sees a fine _colheita_ promising. Increased sales
of coffee seem to be partly the result of greater world demand for
non-alcoholic drinks, but have been undoubtedly developed wherever a
systematic propaganda has been carried out. São Paulo State went
deliberately and level-headedly into the advertising and demonstration
business; the campaign was first started in Great Britain, by the São
Paulo Pure Coffee Company, which roasts, packs and sells good grades of
beans. Numbers of cafeterias were established in which strong, hot,
sweet Brazilian coffee was perfectly served. Later on the plan was
carried to other European countries—notably France, Germany and Austria,
all good customers of Brazil—to North America and even to Japan.
Recently the São Paulo Pure Coffee Company was acquired by the Brazilian
Warrant Company, an enterprising house established in Brazil, with
branches in São Paulo city, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro, and headquarters
in London: a specialty is made by this company of advances against
coffee, as well as sugar, cereals and general merchandise, while they
are also commission and consignment agents. Exporters of Brazilian
coffee are legion, but it is instructive to note how large a proportion
of the names listed are Brazilian; coffee is not one of the businesses
which the South American leaves to the foreigner.
Coffee accounts for forty per cent of all the Brazilian export. As far
as S. Paulo is concerned, coffee represents over ninety-seven per cent
of her exports. In 1915 the state’s total exports were worth a little
over 465,000 contos, and of this coffee was worth 453,000 contos. In S.
Paulo city itself if one is not in business circles the predominance of
coffee might escape the visitor but not so in Santos; here, in the
coffee port, the apparatus of shipping has largely been constructed with
coffee-loading as the aim: special mechanisms serve the ceaseless stream
of laden coffee bags that arrive at the lines upon lines of _armazens_
(warehouses) on the dock front. In the stony streets the scent of coffee
prevails; at every doorway burly negroes are hauling out sacks of the
aromatic bean; the cluster of banks down the main business street, some
Brazilian and many branches of foreign houses, all live upon coffee. The
dealers, commission men, shippers, roasters of coffee represent the
commercial existence of the port.
The coffee industry is one which is a satisfaction to contemplate
because it is a clean, wholesome business, from first to last; the
conditions under which it is carried on are not only ably organized and
in a prospering state, but the workers as well as the estate owners and
shippers have a chance to make money and lead pleasant lives.
THE RUBBER INDUSTRY ON THE AMAZON
Rubber, the elastic gum bled from certain trees and shrubs, has been so
long associated in thought with the sweltering, shadowy forests of the
great Amazon river, that it is not a matter for wonder that for many
years after Wickham made his famous experiments with rubber seeds, first
in Kew and then in the East, both Brazilians and the general public paid
little heed to the possibility of plantation rubber as a commercial
rival of the Amazonian product. It was not until 1910 that manufacturers
began to take plantation rubber seriously and to use it freely, and not
until 1912–13 that production from these sedulously cared-for trees drew
level with and surpassed the output from Brazil. Today, with plantation
rubber offering something like one hundred and fifty thousand tons of
crude rubber, and Brazil maintaining her average output of about
thirty-seven thousand tons, the race would be a very uneven one if it
were not for one factor, the wonderful resiliency of “hard fine Pará”
which renders it unequalled in quality.
The two industries, that of Brazil and of Malaysia, are strikingly at
variance in almost everything except the fact that they deal with
extraction of the latex of _hevea brasiliensis_. In Brazil we have
enormous areas of dim, sultry, water-bordered forest, where wild rubber
trees are sought for amongst eighty or so other varieties of trees:
where the labourer is, or at least imagines himself to be, a free agent,
bound only by his debt to the central store, working when he thinks fit,
living in a solitary hut without society, and making a little balance of
profit at the end of the season if he is lucky; he buys all his
necessities of food and tools in the dearest market in the world, and
sells at the price forced upon the Amazon by the rival industry half the
world distant. In the East is an organized industry operated by wealthy
companies, where land was cleared, rubber planted methodically, hired
labourers working under control, paid by the day, where the latex is
coagulated in factories, milled into fine sheets, and goes to market in
a form that does not bear outwardly any relation to the big black balls,
smoke-cured in the seringueiro’s hut, sent out from the Amazon.
Nevertheless it is the unorganized, unscientific industry which yields
the product with the highest price on international markets, and, huge
as is the deluge of plantation rubber today, there is no good reason why
the Eastern and Amazonian industries should not continue side by side.
Arabian coffee has not been commercially ruined on account of Brazilian
production of _coffea arabica_.
There are in the world very many plants and trees yielding rubber of
differing qualities. Three kinds of elastic gum are exported from Brazil
in addition to the latex of the _heveas_: they are known as mangabeira
rubber, from _mangabeira hancornia speciosa_; maniçoba, from the
_manihot_ plants of several kinds (euphorbias, and first cousins of
mandioca); and caucho, drawn from the _castilloa elastica_ tree. All
these have their places in world markets, but, as also in the case of
balata from the Guianas, and the gum of the guayule shrub in Mexico, it
is not upon these rubbers that the great manufacturing industries of the
world are based. That distinction belongs to the _heveas_, native
dwellers of the deep, hot Amazonian valleys.
The elastic, resilient, waterproof properties of rubber were first
discovered by the native children of the Americas, both in South and
Central America and Mexico. When Hernan Cortés took his handful of
conquering Spaniards into Mexico he found the Aztecs playing a game with
bouncing balls made from _castilloa_, but during three centuries the
Europeans visiting the New World did not dream of turning the gum to any
utilitarian purpose. The first traveller who took recorded note of
native use of rubber for water-proofing was the French scientist, de la
Condamine, who came to Peru and travelled down the Amazon in 1743. He
took specimens of what he spelled as “caoutchouc” back to Paris. In 1779
Priestly noticed that the gum would erase pencil marks on paper; small
pieces were sold for this purpose, and as the chief supplies came from
the East Indies (from the _ficus elastica_) the name India-rubber clung
to the product. In 1823 Charles Macintosh found that rubber was soluble
in benzine, and so led the way to its commercial adaptation—thinned out,
spread into sheets, rendered amenable; the idea applied to waterproof
coats immortalized his name.
In 1832 the Chaffee & Hoskins firm, founded in the United States, began
manufacturing water-resisting objects, and thus laid the foundation of
the present great rubber business in North America; their company, the
Roxbury India Rubber Co., had in its employ a young man named Goodwin,
and when this experimenter discovered that the gum would resist great
extremes of heat and cold when sulphur was mixed with the solution, the
process of “vulcanization” was the result, and rubber was made
applicable to a score of new uses. Its great commercial employment dates
from this time.
The Amazon valley began to send coagulated gum abroad: before this
occurred, objects, chiefly high boots, were sent all the way to Pará to
be water-proofed with a series of layers of the fresh latex. The
industry was still in existence in the 1850’s, but died a natural death
when rubber manufacturing got into its stride. It did not make this
movement until large quantities of crude rubber began to reach world
markets, and such amounts were not shipped until the Amazon received a
great addition to its labour supplies. In 1877–79 one of the terrible
droughts that scourge the State of Ceará drove the populace out of the
foodless region; hardy, daring, the Cearenses swarmed up the Amazon,
into the reaches of the upper tributaries, into the Acre, searched the
forests for _seringueiras_, and gathered a great harvest of latex. A
little later the bicycle was invented and popularized, rubber tyres were
called for in addition to the established demand from the boot and shoe
trade, and rubber export became one of the big businesses of the
industrial world.
The Amazon had shipped 31 tons in 1827; 156 tons in 1830; 388 tons in
1840. In another ten years she was shipping 1,467 tons; in 1860, 2,673
tons; 1870, 6,591 tons; 1880, 8,680 tons. Three years later she was
sending over 11,000 tons, year by year adding about 1,000 tons until by
1890 the supply and demand came to 19,000 tons. It may be said here that
up to the present demand has invariably taken the year’s supply; with
great volumes coming from the Eastern plantations a surplus may occur,
but with the present greatly stimulated demand such a condition is not
yet in sight.
Steady rises in Amazonian production went on at the end of the century,
and 1903 registered the receipt of over thirty thousand tons; when in
1906–07 the crop attained thirty-eight thousand tons output it had about
reached its maximum with the quantity of labour available upon the
Amazon. Production has fluctuated about this figure for the last ten
years. It could be increased, if the estimate of 300,000,000 untapped
trees in the deep interior forests is anywhere near the mark, to almost
any amount; but the present production is the work of some one hundred
and twenty thousand _seringueiros_, chiefly Brazilians, with some
Bolivians and Peruvians, and there is no immediate prospect of labour
supplies being largely augmented.
The sensational leaps in prices that have occurred in world markets
since rubber became commercialized have brought great quantities of
money to the Amazon; many fortunes rocketed to the skies, and there was
a period when a golden flood flowed up the river as well as down, when
Manáos, the rubber city of the riverine interior, displayed more luxury
for its size than Paris, and the best diamond market in the world was in
this remote spot. Anything sufficiently extravagant could be sold; a
stream of jewels, silks, fine wines and foods, furniture, carriages,
adventuring people and solid cash went up the Amazon, passing for a
thousand miles nothing but the green matted walls edging the huge yellow
river and an occasional palm leaf shack perched half in the water, and
one or two trading points, to find their objective in the brilliant
little mushroom town on the Rio Negro. There was one year when the yield
of taxes from rubber to the public revenue of Amazonas was twenty-three
thousand contos of reis, and this at an exchange of over £66 to the
conto, means £1,520,000 or nearly $8,000,000. Practically the whole of
this money was collected and spent in Manáos, then (1899–1900) a city of
fifty or sixty thousand population—much of it “floating,” as its present
reduction to about forty thousand demonstrates. It was in the golden
period of Amazonian rubber exports that both Manáos and Pará clothed
themselves in all modern civic graces; fine public buildings, well-paved
streets, street-cars, good sanitation, water-supplies of unimpeachable
source, electric light, and numbers of splendid private dwellings remain
as a return for some of the floods of money earned by the gum of the
deep forests. There was at the same time tremendous waste and an
enthusiastic “graft” era, which has left a heavy burden of debt upon the
Amazon. Numbers of unfinished buildings, some begun at great cost, still
stand in Manáos, eloquent witnesses to the headlong gambling spirit that
informed this city a few years ago. The Amazon refused to believe that
any but temporary shadows could fall upon the rubber industry: there had
been several periods of depression from various causes before plantation
rubber loomed into view, but always “something happened to help the
Amazon,” whether quickened demand or a fall in exchange which reduced
local costs; now the European War is operating to stimulate American
demands for Brazilian rubber, and to that extent faith in good luck is
again justified, but the rubber-producing centres will need good works
as well as faith if the present rewards, comparatively modest as they
are, are to be maintained.
In 1874, and for some years afterwards, Amazonian rubber prices ranged
between fifty-two and seventy-five cents (U. S. currency) a pound;
between 1879 and 1880 there was a quick climb, due to the bull
operations of a Brazilian syndicate which bought and held rubber. It was
temporarily successful, prices during the last year of the ring’s
existence touching one dollar and twenty cents and never falling below
ninety-five cents, but in 1884 the bottom fell out, and rubber took a
hasty dive to forty-eight cents—recovering, however, in the course of
the next year, in response to demand for rubber tyres, to ninety-eight
cents. For the next ten years rubber fluctuated about sixty, seventy and
eighty cents, with new industrial uses developing in Europe and North
America and demand always keeping pace with supply; by this time the
total yield offered to the markets was about fifty thousand tons yearly,
the Amazon supplying half and the rest coming from West Africa, Mexico
and Central America. In 1896 the price rose, ranging between ninety
cents and one dollar and twelve cents, and the Amazon boomed again as it
had done twelve years before; Manáos, the terminus of ocean
transportation and the central collecting point for the rubber of the
upper rivers, bedecked herself in these rosy days. Five years later the
failure of the American Crude Rubber Company, a distributing firm
domiciled in New York, threw large stocks of the goma upon unready
markets, and the price slumped. Rubber merchants upon the Amazon would
have suffered more than they actually did had not the factor of exchange
come to their aid; between 1899 and 1906 the value of the milreis
oscillated all the way from sixpence to fifteenpence, and while to some
Brazilian operations a low rate of exchange meant embarrassment if not
ruin, it spelt salvation to the dealer in raw products. In 1906 exchange
was fixed by the establishment of the Conversion Office in Rio, but by
this time rubber was fetching such good prices that the Amazon was again
basking in prosperity. The prices paid for Amazonian rubber during the
period from 1903 to 1915 show the rise of the third great crest of
rubber waves to the dazzling height of 1910, when the merchants who
would have sold at seventy-five cents and made a profit found themselves
with a dollar and a half, two dollars, two and a half and then three,
without knowing why; money came like dew from heaven. In many instances
it also melted as readily:
1903 78 to 1.13 cents
1904 94 to 1.30
1905 1.18 to 1.35
1906 1.22 to 1.37
1907 82 to 1.21
1908 67 to 1.24
1909 1.20 to 2.15
1910 1.50 to 3.00
1911 93 to 1.75
1912 93 to 1.30
1913 59 to 1.10
1914 49 to 1.15
1915 75 to 1.00
While the feverish drama of the Amazon was going through scenes typical
of a gold-mining rush, the curtain was slowly rising upon another rubber
scenario away over on the islands and peninsulas of Malaysia. Its
movement passed almost unnoticed and unheeded by the very people who had
most cause to watch it with alarm.
In 1871 an Englishman named Henry Alexander Wickham sailed from Trinidad
up the Orinoco river, there studied latex-yielding trees and eventually
made his way to the Amazon through the interior forests by way of the
river Negro. His book of notes was published in London in 1872—_Rough
Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness_, with his own excellent
drawings to illustrate his story of actual labour in the “ciringa”
districts. In 1876 he was back again on the Amazon, with the _idée fixe_
of rubber so firmly in his head that, going up the Tapajoz from
Santarem, he filled his cases with seventy thousand seeds of _hevea
brasiliensis_ and carried them over to Kew Gardens in London. Here in
carefully graduated hot houses the oval, mottled seeds were germinated,
and in June of the same historic year Wickham was carrying his baby
seedlings to Ceylon, believing that this island offered the climate most
similar to that of the Amazon to be found under the British flag.
Two thousand nurslings were thus transplanted to the Spice Isle, lesser
quantities going to Java, British Burma, Singapore and other points
which appeared to offer the needed conditions for healthy growth. It was
in Ceylon that the first young rubbers flowered in the year 1881; there
is no earlier record of the blossoming of _heveas_ outside their habitat
in the Amazonian valleys. The resulting seeds were used to create new
plantations, but the whole thing was still in a purely experimental
stage; time proved that many saplings were planted under incorrect
conditions, but the planters had nothing but theory as their guide; they
cleared land—at great expense—kept it clean while the young plants grew,
and waited; they did not know if the _heveas_ would live, or that,
living, they would produce latex coagulating into commercial rubber. Nor
did the Amazon rubber dealers know it or believe it. When tales of
Wickham’s enterprise came to Brazil a law was passed forbidding the
export of rubber seeds, but this locking of the stable door after the
loss of the steed was of no more avail than the subsequent measures
promulgated to prevent export of the uricury nuts used for smoking the
latex.
That the Amazonian industry could be duplicated in the East was not
seriously credited. The thing was impossible! The plants would die; or
if they did not die they would not yield latex; if they yielded latex it
would coagulate into such wretched rubber that no market would accept
it. Disease, blight, drought, would ruin the presumptuous plantations—
something, in fact, must happen to prevent such an incredible, absurd
event as rivalry between the famous and unique “black gold” of the
Amazon and a plantation stepchild. The few people who spoke out about
the danger were ignored.
While unbelievers still protested the deluge of plantation rubber began.
In 1900, 4 tons of crude rubber were exported from the East; in 1905,
145 tons; in 1910, over 8,000 tons; in 1912, over 28,000 tons; in 1914,
well over 71,000 tons; in 1915, nearly 107,000 tons. The output for 1916
is variously reckoned at 140,000 and 160,000 tons, from an area
totalling about 1,350,000 acres in Ceylon, Malaysia, Dutch East Indies,
India and Borneo.
When plantation rubber was first offered to manufacturers they were not
greatly interested; it was taken rather grudgingly and at prices well
below those paid for the black _pelles_ of the Amazon to whose
perfections and imperfections the industry was thoroughly accustomed. It
was the artificial forcing up of prices in 1910 that sent manufacturers
into the arms of the planters, for, while plantation rubber profited by
the golden rain of that year, it did not attain the value of “fine hard
Pará.” Today plantation rubber sent to the markets in sheets of creamy
“crêpe” or clear brown gum is used for almost every manufacture
demanding rubber; there are still some complaints that it is
over-milled, that the treatment it undergoes takes the “nerve” out of
it, and for this reason Amazonian rubber remains triumphant in certain
lines requiring the highest resiliency—as, for instance, rubber thread.
In spite of the preponderance of quantity of the plantation product
since 1913 there has nearly always been a margin of price in favour of
Brazil; during September and October, 1916, “fine hard Pará” fetched
about seventy-five cents a pound in the New York markets while
Plantation only brought sixty-five (due to shortage of Amazonian
supplies through shipping difficulties as well as droughts upon the
upper rivers which, impeding navigation, prevented normal supplies from
finding exit); the difference in price is larger than is apparent, for
reasons resulting from differences of preparation of the two products.
Plantation rubber, product of an organized modern industry, is placed
upon markets in such a form that the manufacturer can send it direct to
his mills; the average amount of impurities contained in the sheets is
less than one per cent. Amazonian rubber on the other hand contains
anything from fifteen to forty per cent of impurities, which may include
leaves, sticks and dirt due to sheer carelessness, or gums other than
that of _hevea_, old nails, lumps of wood and axe-heads, deliberately
introduced by the _seringueiro_ to add weight to his _pelle_. Add to
these considerations the cost of cleaning Amazonian rubber and the loss
in time while this operation is performed, and it is plain that the
manufacturer really pays a great deal more than the few cents’
difference of the market price for the Brazilian product; this money
advantage might be largely retained by the Amazon if methods, not
necessarily those of the East, but more careful and cleanly, were
employed in coagulation.
The entire series of processes of Amazon rubber production, from the day
when the _matteiro_ clears a path in the forest from rubber tree to
rubber tree, until the shipper boxes the split halves of the _pelles_ in
the _armazem_ in Manáos or Pará, is in remarkable contrast not only to
plantation methods, but to the system under which that other great
Brazilian export staple, coffee, is prepared for market. It is the
contrast between an industry that has evolved itself from methods first
discovered by Indians of the forest interior, and another whose
processes are mapped out on a preconceived plan. To this day the rubber
dealers on the Amazon will tell you that they do not know the cost of
production of a kilo of rubber; all that they or the collectors know
with certainty is that it must necessarily cost less than the price at
which the rubber is marketed—a smaller amount must be paid, and
adjustment has to be made in the _seringal_, not in New York or London;
with the inflated prices paid for every simplest necessity of life upon
the Amazon, nearly all imported because the craze for rubber-collecting
some years ago led to the abandonment of even such prolific crops as
beans and mandioca, a time of stress falls most severely upon the people
who are least able to bear it. Remedies for the ills of the Brazilian
rubber industry have been suggested and demanded for many a year by the
more far-seeing Brazilians; there is perhaps no better presentment of
the subject than the _paracer_ read to the Brazilian Congress in
December, 1913, by Eloy de Souza, afterwards published in Rio under the
title _A Crise da Borracha_ (The Rubber Crisis); he speaks of the
condition of “economic paradox” by which Amazonas “gave millions upon
millions of gold without any part of this being used for the prosperity
of the immense region where so much wealth was produced” and tells that
when plantation rubber was looming in competition with the Brazilian
product the authorities were entreated to arm themselves against the
danger, but “the echo of these voices was lost in the wide desert of
national indifference.” When the truth could be no longer avoided steps
were at last taken, with nothing but the waste of enormous sums in the
tragi-comedy of the “Defesa da Borracha” as the result: its failure was
no fault of the men who constantly spoke out about conditions, such as
Miguel Calmon, the Deputy, the journalist Alcindo Guanabara, Dr. Passos
de Miranda, and the “genial and devoted Apostle of the Amazon,” Euclydes
da Cunha.
Almost all of the people engaged or interested in the rubber business of
the Amazon are agreed upon certain measures which should be taken to put
it upon a sounder footing; they are, briefly:—
1. Increased production of cleaner rubber, whether obtained from
Amazonian plantations or by opening out new forestal wild
regions.
2. Reduction of living expenses of the rubber-collector, by increased
Amazonian cultivation of cereals, beans, mandioca, fruit,
vegetables, etc.
3. Creation of a sturdier and larger labour supply, by rendering
rubber regions healthy, improving living conditions, and thus
inviting and retaining permanent dwellers.
4. Reduction of export taxes imposed by the State authorities of the
rubber regions.
The question of Amazon plantations is hotly debated. A few exist, and
are living proofs of the fact that planted rubber kept clean of other
growth yields latex at four or five years, at which time it is as large
as a wild rubber twelve years old; but opponents of the system ask why
they should plant “_when Nature has already planted_?” and declare that
the best thing to do is to tap the latex of more of the reserves of the
interior, calculated at three hundred million trees. Arguments in favour
of this system include insistence upon the superiority of the latex from
matured trees slowly developed in their native habitat, the chief reason
of the high resilient quality of the Amazonian product; it is along the
upper rivers of the Amazonian fluvial network that the “black” _hevea_
is found most abundantly, yielding latex of the best variety, tough,
elastic, resilient, and always fetching a better price than the _fraca_
(weak) rubber from the latex of the “white” _hevea_, or the product of
the “red,” which coagulates badly, and is listed as “entre fina” instead
of “fina.” It is partly because the seeds which Wickham took from the
Tapajoz in 1876 were of the “white” _hevea brasiliensis_ variety, common
in these lower regions, that the product of the plantations is more or
less of the “fraca” quality; only a few hundred acres of the entire
Eastern area under cultivation is planted with the fine “black” rubbers.
Can the untouched rubber regions of the upper rivers be opened up? The
districts richest in _seringueiras_ are frequently on the margins of
these rivers, accessible by boat, but there are other areas thickly sown
with the trees which, as in the Acre Territory, could be served best by
a railroad line, such as has been projected to run across this region.
Other plans deal with drainage of forestal areas, now rendered
exceedingly unhealthy by their swampy, mosquito-breeding condition, and
the introduction of immigrants accustomed to torrid climates. At present
the working capacity of the collector is reduced from a possible two
hundred and ten days, during the seven months of tapping, to an average
of one hundred and twenty, chiefly as the result of sickness: he
produces thus only about four hundred and fifty kilos of dry rubber,
when under better conditions he could be expected to market about seven
hundred kilos.
A few years ago Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a Brazilian authority on tropical
diseases, made a report upon the health conditions of certain Amazonian
regions and those traversed by the Madeira-Mamoré railway: he said of
Santo Antonio that there are “no natives of this place; all children
born there die,” and that here (its ill-fame is not unique) “the region
is infected in such a manner that its population has no conception of
what good health means; for them the normal condition is sickness.”
Brazilians born are as much subject to disease, it appears, as
strangers, for among the workmen employed in the construction of the
Madeira-Mamoré line ninety per cent of the natives of Brazil and
seventy-five per cent of the foreigners were weakened by hookworm. Sharp
changes of temperature in some districts, producing a devastating
pneumonia; dysentery; beri-beri, and the worst and constant scourge,
malarial fever, haunt certain of the interior regions: until a better
medical service is established, and measures taken to render the country
more healthy through engineering work, and through field cultivation, an
increase of permanent dwellers in the deep rubber regions cannot be
expected. Until then Amazonia can scarcely be other than what Eloy de
Souza calls an “invaded region” which has been subjected to a “social
phase of pure conquest.”
Cheapening of living expenses can be done just as soon as the fertile
Amazon valley again supplies enough food for its population: there was a
time, between 1886 and 1891 when the cereals grown sufficed for needs;
today, with the threat of falling prices for the precious _goma_,
cultivation has been resumed to an extent which is encouraging, but only
a year or two ago Pará, Amazonas and the Acre were together importing
beans, rice, and sugar to the value of 11,346 contos (over three million
dollars); dried meat (xarque) to the value of 7,400 contos; bacalhau
(dried cod), 846 contos; live cattle, 2,000 contos; tobacco, 1,000
contos, and conserves costing 2,600 contos, among other importations.
Almost all the above list could be filled from Amazonia if the
rubber-collecting fever, relaxing, permitted the development of other
industries.
The price paid for many articles of prime necessity upon the Amazon is
fantastic. While such rates are maintained it is a matter for admiration
that Amazonian rubber can be placed upon the markets at all, in
competition with the plantation product; it can only be done by the
reduction of the _seringueiro’s_ earnings to a minimum, and this will
eventually lead to his extinction if conditions are not remedied. The
following is a list of what are considered the chief articles needed by
the collector for his lonely sojourn in the forests during the gathering
season, with prices in milreis:—
_Price _In _In the _Price to
in Rio_ Pará_ Acre_ Rubber-collector_
5 alqueires of farinha[12] 20 27$500 100 175
40 kilos of sugar 14 26 45 80
25 kilos of coffee 24 25 34 100
128 kilos of lard 16 20 36 100
50 kilos dried meat 40 40 77 150
50 kilos of feijão (beans) 12.500 15 51 100
16 pounds of tobacco 11 22 53 120
5 gallons of kerosene 4 4 11 30
Half-sack of salt 1 1$500 8 15
40 kilos of rice 20 20 36 100
Half-case of soap 3 4 11.500 20
30 litres cachaça (rum) 15 15 46 105
3 boxes cartridges 24 30 33 45
Medicines, clothes, etc. 120 130 180 250
——————— ———— ——————— ——————
Total 324$500 380$ 721$500 1.390$
The price of an outfit for the season thus varies from about 324 milreis
in Rio to 1390 milreis in the forest, or between, say, 80 and nearly 350
dollars.
If the collector in the course of his season’s work produces four
hundred and fifty kilos of rubber, worth, at a good price of about five
milreis, 2:250$000 (two and a quarter contos, or about five hundred and
sixty U. S. dollars at 1916 exchange), he has left only seven hundred
and fifty milreis to carry him through the rest of the year, and to
support his family back in Ceará: but even this modest sum is reduced by
the river freight of the rubber before it is marketed at Manáos or Pará,
three hundred reis per kilo; rent of the _seringal_, commission to the
aviador, and frequently freight of the _pelles_ from the interior of the
forest to the water, which items are likely to add up to another four or
five hundred milreis.
Denunciations of the “truck” system, and the prices charged to the
rubber collector are common; but the supplier of foodstuffs, etc. (the
_aviador_) himself takes long risks and is bound to insure himself
against them. His customer (_aviado_) may become ill and unable to work;
he may die; he may, if he can elude the river guards and traverse the
steaming interior forests, run away, although in these regions where the
river is the only highway, this does not often happen. Also the price of
rubber may drop—rubber has been a business so speculative that it has
become a gamble in which the _aviador_, himself caught in a
deeply-rooted system, takes long odds. He makes money nearly always, and
the ownership of much of the great areas of Amazonian rubber forest has
passed into his hands, but he is scarcely to be blamed for securing his
profits in the manner decreed by the system; to change the industrial
routine would be to effect a revolution upon the Amazon.
The approach of the dry season upon the Amazon heralds the incoming from
other northern regions, generally Ceará, of a host of workers. Anyone
who has travelled on the steamers going up the river at the beginning of
the rubber season has looked down upon the deck where throngs of people
are herded together, their hammocks slung in tiers one above the other;
at times of drought whole families come out from the “_distritos
flagellados_,” and men, women and children are crowded in an intimacy
which would be more trying than it is were it not for the apparently
unfailing good-nature and mutual courtesy of these northern peasants.
Much of their simple cooking, washing, and toilet changes are perforce
unsheltered; gentle, easily amused, they never seem to complain, but,
playing their inevitable guitars and singing their _modinhas_, they
watch the yellow flood of the great river, bordered with the line of
distant forest, so vast that ideas of size are lost in its sweeping
monotony. Arrived at Manáos the collector goes to the store of the
_aviador_, gets his outfit of tools—cups for collecting latex, big knife
(machado), little axe, bucket, and metal cone for smoke-regulation in
the coagulating process—as well as food and such clothes as he may need,
possibly adding a gun, and when the cost of his lodging has been added
to the bill, he may set out in one of the _gaiolas_ that ascend the
upper rivers, en route to the _seringal_ where he has arranged to work.
An average _seringal_ contains fifty _estradas_; to each _seringueiro_
(collector), two _estradas_ are allotted, tapped on alternate days and
each _estrada_ (literally road or walk) contains, in a good _seringal_,
an average of seventy to one hundred and twenty trees. Before the
_seringueiro_ does a stroke of work there has been a heavy outlay by the
owner (_patrão_) of the estate for its preparation. Forestal opening is
done by the _matteiro_, the expert forester whose work is probably
better paid than any other manual labour of the Amazon; it is he who
enters the wild forest, locates the rubber trees within a given area,
and makes paths from each _seringueira_ (rubber tree) to the next in the
central part of each estrada, always ending by cutting an encircling
road which runs all about the _estrada_. On this outer road the rubber
collector usually builds his little hut—“more of an oven than a home,”
says Eloy de Souza—of palm thatch, and the tiny smoking room
(_defumador_) where each day’s supply of latex is coagulated.
The work of the _matteiro_ is paid according to the number of rubber
trees found and prepared for tapping; he gets about the equivalent of
one dollar for each tree; Woodroffe reckons that in the cases when the
patrão of an estate has advanced money for the steamship fares of his
imported labourers, advanced food and equipment, and paid for
preparation of the _seringal_, each man represents an outlay of “quite
£100 by the time he stands up under the trees to tap them.” It must not
be supposed, therefore, that because rubber is wild upon the Amazon that
it costs nothing to collect it; on the contrary in spite of the lavish
hand of Nature expenses in the wild regions of South America are far
higher than they are in the East, where land has been cleared and each
sapling patiently planted and tended.
[Illustration:
_Rubber on the Amazon._
Hevea brasiliensis tree, scarred by tapping.
Smoking the day’s collection of latex.
Hut of the Seringueiro.
]
The _seringueiro_ has no easy life. He gets out of his hammock before
dawn, and with his lantern fixed to his head makes his way through the
forest, laden with his little _machadinho_, the universally used and
abused axe with which the trees are gashed, with the big knife, the
_machado_ or _machete_ inseparable from the Central or South American,
and perhaps a gun in case any edible animal of the woods is encountered.
As each tree is reached it is hastily gashed, a little metal cup
(_tigelinha_) fixed below each wound to receive the milk which
immediately runs out; when he returns at last by way of the outer path
to his hut it is past six o’clock and quite light. If he has a family
with him, his _senhora_ has prepared his coffee, but if as is usual he
is alone he will now light a fire, drip his coffee, prepare a little
food, and smoke a _cigarro_. Later in the morning he must make a second
round, if the milk is not to coagulate in the cups; he takes his bucket
(the _balde_), tips the contents of each little cup into it, carefully
inverting these on sticks at the foot of the tree, to prevent the
clotting of drippings and the invasion of insects. When he returns he
may have four or more litres of milk which must now be coagulated in the
_defumador_; the process may take half an hour or over two hours,
according to the amount brought in and the quality of the latex. A fire
is made with nuts of one of the _attalea_ palms, generally “uricury,”
which give off a remarkably acrid smoke with properties for rendering
the rubber just what it should be that are the despair of chemists: no
substitute has been found that equals it. A metal cone a couple of feet
high is placed over the well-started fire, to bring the smoke into a
narrow channel at the top; the _seringueiro_ takes a prepared piece of
wood, dips it into the bucket of milk, or pours milk over it with the
_cuia_ (little bowl made of a half-gourd) and holds it over the smoke.
The milk coagulates instantly, turning pale brown on the outside; layer
after layer is added, a skin at a time, until all the latex in the
bucket is coagulated. It may be late at night before the _seringueiro_
has finished his work, for in the course of the day he has walked
anything from six to ten miles, and every part of the operations has
been performed by him alone. It is fortunate that his housekeeping work
is limited to the preparation of his food: practically the only
furnishing of his hut is his hammock.
To produce a _pelle_, the big black ball which may be seen in Pará and
Manáos on the wharves, in warehouses, on the pavements, whole or sliced
in halves with their creamy hearts displayed, or floating down the
tributary rivers on rafts, the _seringueiro_ has to work for about a
month. Each day’s collection of latex is coagulated on top of the
previous rubber until the ball is made to what the _seringueiro_ thinks
is a convenient size. Day after day, only interrupted by sickness, he
labours in the sweltering forest at this toil, eating food of very
limited variety, without exchanging a word, perhaps, with another human
being for weeks at a time; each _seringal_ is supposed to be under
inspection, to avoid maltreatment of the trees, but as a rule this
supervision is a fiction. Small wonder that when the collector at last
leaves the _seringal_, and takes his rubber to Manáos, he spends a few
riotous days, limited by the amount of his money balance remaining after
the debt has been paid to the _aviador_. The aviador it is who also buys
the pelles and in the busy season when rubber begins to come in, these
stores present a curious sight. Sometimes the _seringueiro_, in good
years, saves money; he may buy a seringal or a little store of his own;
a few fortunes have thus been made from the collector class, but they
are rather the exceptions that prove the rule.
These conditions, under which a nominally independent collector works in
a rented _estrada_ and sells his rubber to the store-keeper to whom he
is in debt—and who is often also the owner of the _seringal_—are general
as regards the collection of the latex of the “black” rubber trees of
the upper Amazon. This is the origin of the _fina_ class of rubber, with
_sernamby_ or scrap as a kind of by-product, result of carelessness; the
_fina_, however, is usually at least eighty per cent of a good workman’s
product, and this is the rubber which, with _caucho_, has made Manáos.
_Caucho_ is rubber produced from the milk of _castilloa elastica_,
growing in profusion along the banks of the Rio Branco, tributary of the
Negro, in North Amazonia and on many streams of Peruvian origin; the
industry connected with this tree is really independent, the result of
individual searchings for trees. Parties go up these rivers, hunt in the
bordering woods for the _castilloa_, straightway cut it down and bleed
it for the last drop of latex, and go on their way.
Down near the mouth of the Amazon, where the “white” rubber trees are
most commonly found, it is not unusual for collectors to own sections of
forest with their little homes at its edge; they, too, are almost
independent—of everything except the industrial conditions upon the
Amazon, and the rubber prices fixed far away in London or New York.
Nearly all South American States depend upon export and import taxes for
their main revenues, and it is a fairly general rule that native
products leaving the country pay heavily for that privilege. In Brazil
all import dues are imposed and collected by the Federal Government, and
are similar throughout the country without respect to the special
conditions of separate states; the export taxes are imposed by the State
Governments, without restraint. In some regions the “pauta” or export
tax is changed every week or so in conformity with prices in world
markets, a board sitting specially for the purpose of making these
constant adjustments. Some Brazilian products are taxed to what may be
called a reasonable extent, but in others exports have been bled out of
existence, while still others are barely able to enter world markets,
staggering under their load. How many exporting countries would put upon
a product facing competition abroad a tax equal to one-third of its
value? This is the weight with which Amazonian rubber went to market for
many years: the combined charges of the State, municipalities, and other
smaller items added up to over thirty per cent of the “official value”
of the product.
In response to appeals, export taxes were reduced after the outbreak of
the European War, and during the year 1916 State taxes, together with
dues put on by cities, amounted to about twenty per cent of the value of
the rubber—a sufficiently heavy burden, but which Amazonas proposes to
increase again; at the same time the product of Matto Grosso pays only
twelve per cent, an equal amount is imposed upon rubber originating in
the Acre Territory, while that exported from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia,
but finding its exit by the water highways of the Amazon, pays only five
per cent. As a result of these lesser dues collected by sister
countries, there is a certain amount of smuggling done: rubber
originating near the boundaries is passed across, and exported as if
coming from one of the three Republics named; that such evasion of taxes
is limited is due to the lack of roads or of any communication means
besides those of the rivers, all of which are watched by Government
agents. At the same time that the Amazon imposes this burden upon her
rubber, the Eastern (Plantation) product pays nothing at all when the
market price is below 18 pence—say thirty-six cents—a pound, and when it
stands above two shillings a tax of two and a half per cent of the value
is paid.
Consumption of the entire supply of marketed rubber was, immediately
prior to the European War, almost evenly divided between North America
and Europe: one of the industrial adjustments made after hostilities
began was the shifting of a larger share of rubber, and rubber
manufacturing, to the United States, so that in 1914 she took fifty per
cent of the marketed total, one hundred and twenty thousand tons, and in
1915 increased these purchases to nearly sixty-two per cent of the total
marketed, or ninety-seven thousand tons out of about one hundred and
fifty-eight thousand.
Distribution of the world’s crop in 1915:—
United States 61.5 97,000
Great Britain 9.6 15,072
Russia 7.6 12,000
France 7.2 11,500
Italy 4.8 7,500
Germany, Austria 3.8 6,000
Canada 2.5 4,000
Japan and Australia 1.6 2,500
Scandinavia 1.4 2,252
The course of the next few years may see Brazil herself on the lists as
a rubber-consuming country. For fifty years she has exported rubber,
crude, and such manufactures of rubber as she has used have been
imported from the United States or Europe; she imported in 1915 about
six hundred and eighty-three tons of rubber manufactures, chiefly tyres,
worth a million dollars, which was less than the imports of 1913, and
which might show greater diminution if the unfortunately conceived law
intended to protect “fine hard Pará,” but which resulted in paralyzing
rubber imports, were sustained. This alteration in the tariff, operating
early in 1915, changed the old import tax of five per cent ad valorem to
a scale with violent differences; rubber manufactures made with the
Brazilian product were charged one hundred reis a kilo (a fraction over
two cents U. S.) while articles made with foreign rubber were taxed ten
milreis (say two dollars and sixty cents) a kilo.
An excellent idea, warmly applauded; but when the time came to apply the
law it was found impossible to discover the real origin of the rubber,
and in order to avoid any chance of letting in foreign material
practically scot free the official valuers charged all entering articles
at the high rate.
Thus a consignment of two hundred pneumatic tyres which under the old
law would have paid about 2:200 milreis in duties for entry were under
the new tariff charged 22:000—or let us say about $5,500 instead of the
former $550, for import taxes alone. Needless to say, importing houses
left rubber goods in the customs-houses while they appealed to the
authorities for relief from this too paternal measure. Some of the
Amazonian rubber merchants have defended the idea, which is good enough
in theory, but in practice it seems to have been as little useful as
that extraordinary commission charged with the _Defesa da Borracha_,
which in the years 1912–14 spent about twenty-eight thousand contos of
reis (over $7,000,000) in salaries, investigations, recommendations,
experiments and printed matter, and has today not an iota of improvement
of Amazonian conditions to show for the money.
Brazil has a few rubber factories of her own, generally small, but doing
a satisfactory and increasing business; the Brazilian Government has
also concluded an arrangement with the Goodyear Tire Company for the
erection of a factory which should greatly increase national rubber
manufactures. The first modern rubber factory in Brazil was established
in São Paulo State, in 1913, by Theodore Putz and Company, where solid
tyres, tubes, stamps, valves, and other articles are made; it has a
capital of two hundred contos and an annual turnover of three hundred
contos, paying twenty-five contos a month for labour. Five hundred kilos
of Pará, and one thousand kilos of _mangabeira_ rubber are used monthly.
Another firm of recent origin is that of Berrogain & Cia. in Rio,
turning out a variety of manufactures and prospering.
The future of rubber production is a question frequently discussed. It
is not immediately probable that the Brazilian output will greatly
increase from its average of twenty to thirty thousand tons, not only
because more labour is not as yet available, but also because the
untapped resources away from the easily reached river banks can scarcely
be reached without large outlays on roads, drainage, and other expenses
connected with opening-up, which are not more than planned for the time
being. Plantation rubber has not yet reached its expected maximum, but
no very great areas have been added since 1911, and it is reckoned that
with an average yield of four hundred pounds an acre the world’s output
will in a few years place from three hundred thousand to three hundred
and thirty thousand tons of dry rubber on the markets. Demand by the
year 1930, if it kept up at the same ratio as the last five or six
years, would require a great deal more than this, no less than three
hundred and seventy-three thousand tons of rubber. This will not occur
unless automobile sales in the United States keep up also at the same
rate (tyres for this industry already take over 100 thousand tons of
rubber) but even with a diminution in the increase there appear to be
good prospects ahead for the rubber industry: Germany, for instance,
will be demanding crude rubber in great quantities when the European War
comes to an end, for in spite of the ingenuity of German chemists it is
plain that synthetic rubber is not a success. If it were anything like a
substitute for the real thing the Central Powers would not have made
such constant efforts to obtain even small quantities of the precious
gum through the blockade of the Allies. The war has definitely disposed
of that spectre. Synthetic rubber requiring a base of a special
turpentine is said to be produced at a cost four times that of the gum
of the _hevea_, and that figure alone would dispose of it as a
commercial possibility, apart from the limitation of turpentine
supplies, the need for mixing the solution with real rubber, and the
practical demonstration of its unsatisfactory quality.
PACKING-HOUSES, MEAT EXPORT, AND CATTLE RAISING
The meat business is not a new one in Brazil, for her cattle raising
states have had a surplus of beef animals ever since the first
_donatarios_ sailed out to take possession of their strips of coast, and
brought seeds, saplings, ducks and chickens, goats, horses and cattle
along with them: the cattle throve, soon ran wild in the interior, and
becoming modified by natural selection developed national types which
are today quite distinctive although their European origin is
recognizable. The first cattle were shipped to Brazil to the Capitania
of S. Vicente in 1534 by Dona Anna Pimentel, consort of the first
captain, and manager of the interests of the colony during his absence
in India.
Brazil has thirty million head of cattle. That is to say, two or three
million more than the Argentine possesses. But her herds are only worth
a fraction of the Argentine value because the stock is poor, some of it
thin and scrubby, with but one steadily developed type of first-class
quality. The scientific breeders of Brazil—and there is quite a list of
them—have lacked a reason for developing their work until recently. In
the absence of the packing-house there was no demand for beef beyond
that of the _matadouros_ (town slaughter-houses) and the _xarque_
factories. For the _xarque_ makers any class of animal would serve: a
Hereford of pure blood would bring no more than a _zebu_ unless he
happened to weigh more.
_Xarque_ making is the ancient meat-drying industry, invented by who
knows what hunter in bygone ages; it is the _biltong_ of Africa, the
_tasajo_ of the Argentine, the jerked beef of the North. Well salted and
dried, it is good food enough, and France did not disdain to buy it from
Brazil for the use of her troops in 1915–18. The southerly states of
Brazil are the great supporters of cattle stocks, and there are the
extensive beef-drying factories; Rio Grande slaughters over half a
million head of cattle for this purpose every year, the number rising to
its maximum in 1912 with nine hundred thousand head, and chiefly ships
the _xarque_ produced to other Brazilian regions; it is the _carne
secca_ of that beloved Brazilian dish, the _feijoada_, eaten all over
the Union. The coastal and northern regions of Brazil, comparatively
poor cattle regions, are so much dependent upon dried beef imports that
the _xarque_ industry should have a ready market in the future as in the
past: but since 1914 a rival has risen up seriously threatening the old
industry in prestige.
Almost simultaneously two packing-houses, both in S. Paulo State, began
demanding cold storage space in vessels calling at Santos, and
refrigerator cars on railways leading to the port. Brazil, to the
astonishment of the markets, was offering chilled and frozen beef. At
any other time she might have received a welcome less enthusiastic, but
her offer came at a time when Europe needed every pound of meat for army
use; the Brazilian product was tested by Smithfield standards, found
good, and today has its place in overseas meat markets. It is a modest
place, but today beef is taking its stand among the “principaes artigos
da exportação”—hides have long stood in the list of thirteen favoured
names—although the end of the war diminished overseas demands.
During 1915 shipments were made in increasing amounts month by month,
the total for the year reaching about 8,514 tons, with a value of 6,122
contos. In 1916 shipments rose to nearly 34,000 tons; in 1917 to over
66,000; but sales decreased after the close of the war, when contracts
for supplying troops in the field ceased, and markets closed in the
slump of 1921.
The first _frigorifico_ of Brazil was built by Paulista enterprise with
Paulista capital, in the far north-west of São Paulo where the best
pastures extend. The Companhia Frigorifica e Pastoril built its plant
near the terminus of the Paulista Railway, at Barretos, and is headed by
Dr. Antonio da Silva Prado, an energetic builder-up of his State and a
man with many honours and interests. Opened in 1913, the _frigorifico_
first supplied chilled meat to the city of S. Paulo; export was not
seriously considered until the war in Europe began with its demands upon
world food supplies. The first Brazilian shipment of exported meat was
sent to England in November, 1914, an experimental ton and a half.
During the ensuing year that country took four thousand, three hundred
and sixty tons, Italy over two thousand tons, and the United States
nearly the same quantity.
The figures displayed a steady rise all through 1915, January’s ten tons
being quickly outclassed by April’s two hundred and ten and June’s over
five hundred and seventy tons; by November Brazil was shipping two
thousand tons a month. The standard was more than maintained as time
went on cattle raisers improving animals for sale to meet demands, and
proving the fattening quality of Brazilian pastures. But until after the
close of 1918 little blood stock could be imported, and in 1922 an
expert calculation gave 12% as the proportion of fat cattle in Brazil.
The output of Barretos was speedily rivalled. In May, 1915, another
packing-house started operations, at Osasco on the outskirts of S. Paulo
city. It is the property of the Continental Products Company, capital
and personnel originating in the Sulzberger house at Chicago, and it is
independent of, but has friendly relations with, the Farquhar group of
interests, which include large railway control and a thriving land and
cattle company.
The Osasco plant is, like Barretos, an excellent specimen of its class,
operating with fine up-to-date machinery and all modern packing-house
devices; on the edge of S. Paulo city, separated from the railway only
by a strip of open grassy country, this establishment has the advantage
of a short haul for its meat. The São Paulo Railway has to carry the
product but fifty miles to Santos port. On the other hand, the Barretos
plant’s position has the advantages of being in the heart of the best
cattle country, and of getting both animals and labour at low prices;
the journey from Barretos to S. Paulo, by the Paulista line, takes about
fourteen hours. Brazilian employees are used at both packing-houses, the
industry occupying about a thousand workmen. During 1916 a third
_frigorifico_ was opened, on the docks of Rio de Janeiro, but this
chiefly performs cold storage functions, and before the close of 1919
ten packing-houses were in operation or building. General world
depression in 1921 was responsible for the closure of most of these
establishments for more than local demands. Few complaints have been
registered in regard to quality so far; the Brazilian beef is on the
whole smaller than that to which the meat markets are accustomed, and it
was found that the quarters did not fill the space allowed for similar
Argentine and Uruguayan meat when shipping first began. Dr. Prado says
that the average weight of beeves slaughtered for export during the
first year of operation at Barretos was only two hundred and eighty
kilos. But this small, fat-less meat has a superior flavour—as anyone
who travels in South America knows well.
[Illustration:
_The Cattle Industry._
The two _frigorificos_ (packing-houses) in operation, at Barretos,
top; at Osasco, below. Also humped “zebu” cattle of Indian descent,
and, lower, a calf of native Caracú stock.
]
It is generally reckoned that ten per cent of a cattle herd is fit for
the slaughterhouse: but Brazil cannot offer three million of her
existing stock to the yards. She has too many varieties, probably too
much of the humped breed derived from Indian ancestry, although it has
warm defenders, and there is a conspicuous lack of young fat cattle. As
an example of the speed with which poor stock may be improved by good,
unified methods, there is Brazil’s neighbour Argentina, a country which
thirty-five years ago had less than nine million head of cattle, and
these of a breed inferior to the Brazilian average today. Setting about
her task methodically, Argentina created a complete transformation in
the character of her herds, and while exporting great quantities of meat
at the same time increased her stock so largely that by the year 1910
she had thirty million head. Sums spent on breeding stock were enormous
during this period: in 1906, the banner year of importation, Argentina
purchased (almost exclusively from Great Britain) 2,450 pure-bred
cattle, 7,500 thoroughbred sheep, and one thousand blood horses. As a
result she has animals today which take prizes side by side with pure
Herefords and Durhams; the average _abattoir_ price for steers is about
two hundred Argentine pesos, or say eighty American dollars; she is able
to record the sale of thousands of splendid creatures, amongst them a
champion bull bred on her pastures which brought the price of thirty-two
thousand dollars in United States currency. Today Argentina has more
herds of thoroughly pure stock cattle than any other country in the
world; _estancias_ full of animals of fine blood, so much alike that to
see them in endless lines, with white star on breast and head, is like
looking at a concrete arithmetical calculation, are handed down as
inheritances. Yet when the Argentine began her work she had no such
advantages of modern invention as lie to the hand of Brazil; cold
storage was not commercially developed, packing-houses were immature.
She had to face the competition of the United States, and world markets
were not educated to the reception of South American meat. Now cold
storage is an art, steamers are fitted with refrigerator space as a
matter of course, South American meat is welcome on world markets, and
the United States is no longer taken into consideration as a rival meat
exporter.
In 1901 the United States exported 352,000,000 pounds of beef; in 1910,
76,000,000; in 1914, only a little more than 6,000,000 pounds. Argentina
had caught up with her North American sister in 1905, passed and
out-distanced her until she was able last year to say that her only
serious competitor was Australasia. It is true that the European War has
caused a revival of meat export from the United States, but home demands
are today so acute that no more than a temporary reaping of high prices
is at the bottom of the movement. Argentina may look for a more
formidable, because a younger, rival, nearer to her northern border.
The qualifications of Brazil as a future land of fine cattle are three
in the main: first, her possession of an existing _rebanho_ of
30,000,000 head; next her natural pastures and good climate which permit
stock to remain in the open during the winter; third, tremendous
expanses of suitable lands at moderate prices. Argentina has no natural
pastures; she sows alfalfa, needs five acres of it to fatten one animal
for six months and is thus at an expense of $7.50 for this purpose
against Brazil’s outlay of rather less than three and one-half dollars,
counting the value of the five acres of alfalfa land at three hundred
dollars, the cost of twelve acres of Brazilian _capim gordura_ at one
hundred and thirty-three dollars, and interest on the two investments at
five per cent. In regard to available territory there is no comparison;
Brazil’s one state of Matto Grosso could swallow the whole
cattle-raising country of the Argentine, without taking into
consideration Goyaz, Minas Geraes, S. Paulo, Paraná or Rio Grande do
Sul.
Space and climate, however, are not all that goes to make a cattle
country fattening fine stock, and it need scarcely be said that much
must be done before the cattle lands of Brazil can seriously compete
with those of the Argentine: the time is not yet ripe for the wild
pastures of Goyaz and Matto Grosso to fatten cattle in the same
proportion as Rio Grande State. This state, with an area of two hundred
and thirty-seven thousand square kilometers feeds about nine million
head of cattle, a remarkably good showing in comparison with the premier
cattle province of Argentina, Buenos Aires, which, with a superficial
area of not much more than 305,000 square kilometers, feeds seven and a
half million head.
Pastures are not—except by careful fazendeiros—planted in Brazil because
there happens to be a gift of nature in the way of natural grasses, the
_capins_ of the sertão. Some of these are good, and some would feed
nothing but a goat. Brazilian stock-raisers who combine earnestness with
capital plant their own best grasses and appear to get satisfactory
results, while I have also seen some interesting experiments made with
“Soudan” or other of the wonderful varieties of grasses with which
Africa is endowed. For lack of interior pastures the cattle of Brazil
are periodically brought on foot for distances which may vary from a
hundred to six hundred miles; many die by the way, and the unfortunate
beasts are mere skin and bone when they arrive in the good grass
country. On the São Paulo side of the Paraná river are some of the
finest natural pastures of Brazil, but in many parts of the São Paulo
uplands, interior Rio, Paraná, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande,
admirable cattle lands are to be seen. Rio Grande, especially towards
the Uruguay boundary, is one of the most delightful grazing regions
imaginable; Minas, too, shows some fine lush green grass lands, with the
special advantage that cattle need never be put under shelter in the
mild winter which visits this region. The good grass lands of Minas and
interior São Paulo are frequently at an elevation of 1,400 feet, on the
sloping plateau which is densely wooded near its dips to the rivers, and
which is on the wide uplands covered with light _matto_ alternating with
sturdy native grass. It is not unlike the high veldt of the Western
Transvaal in appearance, with the same exhilarating freshness, light and
space, and the same miracle of nature performed immediately after the
rains, when every inch of ground is covered with little dancing flowers
and every bush is transformed into a nosegay.
Brazil possesses half a dozen technical breeding “posts” maintained by
State or Federal Governments, but their number is insufficient to attack
the work needed, and needed quickly; private enterprise must and does
supplement government labours, but there is room in Brazil for scores of
expert cattlemen with knowledge of semi-tropical conditions.
Three-fourths of the State of Paraná, all Santa Catharina and all Rio
Grande do Sul are below the Tropic of Capricorn, but although the great
sertões of Brazil are inside the tropical belt, the effect of this
latitude is partly nullified by the height of the plateau to which the
largest area of the country attains.
One of the best breeding stations in Brazil is situated at the good,
modern, actively-managed School of Agriculture at Piracicaba, in S.
Paulo State, reached by the Sorocabana line; good imported bulls are
stationed here, as well as some fine specimens of types developed in
Brazil, notably the Caracú, a well-formed animal with a pale buff hide
that is well fitted to form the base of standardized herds. The Caracú
already has its official herd-book. Some attempts made to introduce pure
blood foreign animals have ended in the death of the importations,
perhaps chiefly because their accustomed food was lacking; for this
reason the opinion of many stock-raisers in Brazil is against efforts to
create pure herds of, say, Herefords, as Argentina has done, preferring
the selection of a sound national type, acclimated, hardy, which can be
improved by careful breeding. Controversy rages about this question in
Brazil, and without trying to enter into it I will quote the opinion of
Dr. Cincinato Braga, one of Brazil’s authorities on the subject of
cattle, who says that at least six thousand pure-race bulls should be
imported annually to improve the existing stock, while as a matter of
fact only a few hundred enter yearly, and these chiefly as a result of
private enterprise. The vexed question as to whether the introduction of
Indian cattle, with its resultant inheritance of a hump in the zebu type
(the hump has the disadvantage of not “packing,” say some of the buyers
for frigorificos), is good or bad may be safely left to those ardent
cattle-breeders Drs. Pereira Barretto, Eduardo Cotrim, Assis Brasil,
Fernand Ruffier, and many others; it is undoubted that in the Triangle
of Minas Geraes, with its centre Uberaba, fortunes have been made from
prolific Indian cattle, but public opinion remains perplexed. Writing
from Minas in early 1916, J. Nogueira Itagyba told the tale of his
experiences as a cattle-breeder—how he imported a bull from Holland,
bought Caracú cows, obtained a young herd, and then when droughts came
in 1913–14, lost “thirty or more head, under a deluge of ticks, tumours,
insects of all kinds....” He then bought a Nellore (Indian) bull,
obtained a breed that was “a revelation” and came to this conclusion:
“In Paraná and Rio Grande, where the climate is cold and there are fine
pastures, a stock breeder with capital can raise the Devon, Hereford,
Flemish, Durham, Jersey, etc.; he will have appropriate forage, and can
use dips and calf-foods ... but in wild rural regions only strong,
acclimated races resisting climate and insect plagues can prosper.”
Until the development of the meat industry for export Brazil sold
nothing abroad as the product of her vast herds except hides, just as in
the early days of Texas when only the skins of her cattle were worth
anything. Today the cow-hide leather industry of North America in
particular is largely dependent upon South American production, the
three republics of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay together furnishing
fifty-five per cent of all the hides sold in world markets. Now and
again the export of hides leaps for reasons that do not mean good
business, as when Ceará in 1914–15 shipped out, in addition to her
normal sales, the hides of animals that died of the terrible drought to
the number of eight hundred thousand head; looking north to Mexico we
find another big leap of hides exports after revolution invaded the
cattle states, owners slaughtering their stock to avert theft by
bandits.
Rise in sales by the Argentine and her neighbours since the European War
has, however, been largely on account of increased slaughter in response
to calls from the meat market: in two years Argentina has doubled her
export of hides, Uruguay has multiplied her contribution by five, while
Brazil between June, 1915 and March, 1916 shipped out thirty-seven
million pounds of hides as against two and a half million pounds in a
corresponding period two years previously.
The total value of Brazilian hides exported in 1915 was $13,260,000 U.
S. currency; the amount was thirty-seven thousand metric tons. Of this
nearly twenty thousand tons went to the United States, Great Britain
taking 6,000 tons, France less than 3,000, and Uruguay 3,400 in round
numbers.
War orders account for the marked stimulation of the leather business
which is dependent to a considerable degree upon supplies of
cattle-hides, the United States alone increasing her exports of leather
from thirty-seven million dollars’ worth in 1914 to eighty million
dollars’ worth in the fiscal year June 1915–16.
COTTON GROWING AND WEAVING
Cotton is native to Brazil, as to other regions of northern South
America, Central America and Mexico, the south of the United States, and
the West Indian islands. Wild, or carelessly cultivated Brazilian
cottons are despite neglect of such excellent quality that George Watt,
in _Wild and Cultivated Cotton of the World_ says that when they are
properly selected and standardized they will “make Brazil as famous as
Egypt in the production of excellent fibres.” North American cotton
buyers, visiting Brazil early in 1916 were astonished to find cotton of
long silky fibre produced here, and made arrangements for shipping
quantities of the Seridó variety to the United States; England has for a
very long time been a purchaser of the same fine qualities of raw
cotton, for mixing, as Egyptian cotton is mixed, with the short-fibre
product of the United States.
Cotton of one kind and another is grown all over Brazil. There seems to
be no region which refuses to mother it. But the best lands, yielding
most prolifically and with large areas suitable for cultivation on a
great scale are in the centre, on the north-east promontory, and all
along the coast to the mouth of the Amazon. Comparatively very small
fragments of this belt are under cotton culture, although wild cotton
and patches of cultivation of more or less merit are widely scattered;
Todd, in his _World’s Cotton Crop_ says that Brazil “might easily grow
twenty million bales, but her actual crop does not yet reach half a
million bales.” Now, with the encouraging measures taken by the
Brazilian Government as well as the enterprise of individual firms and
planters, and the new realization of the opportunity waiting for the
farmer with small capital but large technical skill, experience and good
sense, cotton culture should open up great spaces of land suitable for
this well-rewarding form of agriculture. Brazilian cottons or their
Peruvian and West Indian kin have endowed the world with fine varieties;
it remains for their standardization to benefit the land of their
origin.
Cotton was used by the Aztecs for making elaborate clothes, richly dyed
and embroidered, long before the Spanish Conquest in 1520. Farther
south, the carvings of the Maya show that that race was using textiles
hundreds of years previously—as early as the beginning of the Christian
Era, if the dates assigned to the Copán and Quiriguá temples are
correct. In Brazil, where the inhabitants were much less socially and
industrially developed, small domestic use was made of the fibre, but it
had its name, _amaniú_.