Brazil today and tomorrow

Front matter

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ASR LAas,

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK + BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO

Contents

DO No ee nee ae OR eR oO ah co, oe em

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

‘Discovery—Henry the Navigator—Search for Cathay— Captain Cabral—Duarte Coelho—The Capitanias— Ramalho and Caramarii—Sio Paulo, Bahia and Pernambuco—The Jesuits—Mamelucos—First Entradas—The Sertaio—The Bandeirantes—Raposo—Fernao 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 Jodo in Brazii—Dom Pedro I—Independent Monarchy—Dom Pedro II—Abolition of Slavery—Republic.

Chapter II

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 Sao fe)

Vill

CONTENTS

Pace

Paulo—Present Status of Colonies—Japanese at Iguape— Numbers of Immigrants entering Brazil—Future Immigration—Best Points of Settlement—Class needed.

Chapter III

TRANSPORTATION. I. RivER AND Roap

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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 ee ey

Early Water Communication—Waterways Penetrating Interior—Great rivers—Early roads—New Automobile highways

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.

DRLORENG 2's ii 4.2 vsinca las Vo KOR oe eee eee ee Steamship River Service—Sea Comriunication-<Netionality of Lines—Brazilian Mercantile Marine.

CONTENTS

Chapter V

MUNA URTR OA NG ac Scie cee On os a cae he oR ev ine

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 S40 Paulo; Textiles; Locality of Mills in Brazil; Labour and Consumption of Material; National Dyes; Water-power.

Chapter VIII

IBRAzrIt’s EXTERIOR COMMERCE. © << 00-02 sss <0 6 )cleeis oie 316 Dominant Districts and Industries—Figures of Ten-year Periods of Commerce—The Nine Principal Articles—Sao Paulo’s Share—United States Purchases—Imports—Their Origin—Balance of Trade.

List of Brazilian States, Area and Population........... 324 (Slocsary of Brazilian terms? 22.4.2 +s. « sw wal yes oe eee 325

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ROMTISDICCEN TON ope Sols Rooms unk oe ee Botafogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro

: Opposite

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ntrance ‘of Rio-de Janeiro Harbour)... 5. sts onda obeeinces Awe ed on 4 Ponte Santa Isabel, Recife; Praga Maua; Waterfront at Bahia,...... 20 [EEA A RITES. ee ae ee eee eM RL cable RE oD ST a2 Rent ane CCW Esta is Unc: oiate, ops ois SY io eer dA ee EE 38 Meio views Orn. Fallon City. = idscecis ho oe cers eee ete orca eae 46 Two views of the Avenida Rio Branco, Rio,..........ecceeeeccees 50

PV eTAO LOIRE Mil SE AUIOs <P os oreo Svcs be i kno SON ere oat 66 Barra Road, Bahia; Resaca, Rio; Upper Amazon,...............0+ 74 Monroe Palacio, Rio; Municipal Theatre, S. Paulo,................ 88 Igapo near Rio Negro; Caripuna Indians, Madeira River,.......... 110 Agricultural School, Piracicaba; Butantan Institute,............... 116 pens Paulo all Ways c cists sel ai..conl bts meen eee ceca chee 132 Rua Bardo da Victoria, Pernambuco; Avenida 7 de Setembro, Bahia. 150 Porto Velho, Madeira-Mamore; Igarapé S. Vicente, Manaos,........ 154 Waterfront of S. Salvador (Bahia); Floating docks at Manaos,...... 162 pene eaueranio Cotes Industry somes oo csd nuts tacda see Eee 176 PRU BISEL TOM) CEPA HAAZONS ods cleus istaiotare nave t nie rte ela ee eee tle aie aici ereieiere 200 Mier CatslenmaCUSeLysn, § cvs asin catneiias ta cAs ens eiaeiaae no oct 212 Carioca Cotton Mill, Rio; Catende Sugar Mill, Pernambuco,....... 244

, Coffee-loading equipment, Santos; Sugar lands in Pernambuco,..... 264 pa Ministry of War, Rio; Avenida Nazareth, Belem,................. 284

Fishing Boats; Rocks at Guaruja; Bertioga; Cantareira Water Supply, 302 On the Madeira River, Amazonas; Victoria Regia lilies, near Manaos, 310

Map showing factories, employees, etc........6...0ececeeeeneeeees 274 Map showing agricultural production,.............00c2eeeceeeeees 324 x. Coloured map of Brazil, showing railways, rivers, mountains, chief

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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 Jodo 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 vary-

ing 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 Parana 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 (Man4os 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 Ravardiére 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 Sdo Paulo and the regions of the carnauba palm and the babasst. No physical contrast could be more acute than that of the flat tropic swamps of Para and the austere, fantastic and beautiful granite peaks of the Serra do Mar near Rio—the slender Finger of God in the Orgao 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.

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 Sao 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 SAo Paulo from Bahia, Bahia from Para, Para from Pernambuco, Maranhao from Victoria, Maceiéd from Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro from Manfaos, Ilhéos from Paranagua, Mossoré from Sao 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’@tre 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 Sio 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

BRAZIL: TODAY AND TOMORROW a 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 thor- ' ough 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

Brazit 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

THE HISTORY OF BRAZIL II

Spanish rule, all history before revolutionary times is

_coloured with this deliberately fostered feeling, and only occasionally does there arise a speaker or writer broadminded 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 Consolacién, 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 embarrasse de richesse, 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 de- _ grees 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 Goncalves to report the discovery, and sailed on again to India.

Dom Manoel was sufficiently interested by the tale of Gongalves 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 coastdwelling 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.