CHAPTER V

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_.

Cotton (_Gossypium_) belongs to the natural order of the malvaceas, claims more kin in the New than in the Old World, and its parents are genuine tropical dwellers; there seems to be little doubt that the first of the fine, long staple cottons introduced into North America were perennials, and that they became annuals only because they were unable to survive the winter cold. Names of cottons grown in Brazil leave the searcher after details rather hazy on account of the many local appellations given them, but the scientist has classified them by the characteristics of their seeds, dividing them into eleven kinds. The first, _Gossypium herbaceum_, is not a tropical native, was brought in from Asia both here and to the United States, is not common or successful, and so may be dismissed.

_G. mustelinum_ again “is only interesting for botanical reasons,” but is found wild in the hilly interior of Brazil; _G. punctatum_ is said to be identical with the wild cotton of the United States; _G. hirsutum_ is a true native of South America and the West Indies, and is the lineal parent of the “Uplands” cottons of North America. _G. mexicanum_ is, together with _hirsutum_, which it resembles, grown all over the coastal cotton country of Brazil; it is a small plant with a prolific yield. The writer has seen in the vicinity of Campos, State of Rio, tiny plants of this variety not more than eighteen or twenty inches high, bearing forty and more bolls and forms. It is true that the district had suffered from lack of rain and thus the tendency to run to growth rather than production, the agricultural curse of the tropics, had been checked. The field yielded over a bale to the acre.

_G. peruvianum_ is a highly interesting, hardy, prolific variety, relative of the best native cottons of Brazil. Professor Edward Green says that he considers it one of the two most valuable in the country. It is a perennial, grows best in the humid North, often reaches a height of four metres, and yields a crop for at least three years.[13] Maranhão has produced it for centuries, getting a reputation for long fine fibres on its account; the percentage of fibre is over thirty-eight per cent of the total weight of the boll, a very high average, and it is undoubtedly well adapted to the river valleys of North Brazil. It is said to be identified with the carefully cultivated, irrigated cotton of the Incas.

Cultivated forms of this excellent cotton are the famous _Mocó_, grown so successfully in Ceará, Parahyba, and other northerly states, the _Seridó_, and the _Sede de Ceará_, local names of which Brazil is proud.

_G. microcarpum_ appears to have a relationship with the _peruvianum_, and seems also to be derived from the other side of the Andes; it is credited with producing a pound of clean cotton to one hundred and twenty bolls. This is the last on the list of cotton with “fuzz” on the seeds; the remaining four varieties have clean, free seeds. Of these by far the most important is the fine _G. vitifolium_. From this stock most of the cottons described as “Sea Island” are derived, as well as the best of the Egyptian varieties, and in a genuine wild state in Brazil it still produces a beautiful long silky fibre. When grandchildren of its stock have been brought to Brazil from the United States they have rapidly degenerated, delicate nurslings of exotic temperament; beside them the old _estirpe selvagem_ flourishes and yields royally. _G. purpurescens_ is another black-seeded perennial, identified with the “Bourbon” of Porto Rico, and said to owe its introduction into Brazil to the French. _G. barbadense_ is a blood-brother of the _vitifolium_, and like all the Sea Island-Egyptian group, is a highly esteemed producer of top-priced cotton. The fourth of this class is _G. brasiliense_, a true native, observed growing wild by Jean Lery as early as 1557.

The two most precious of the list, _Gossypium peruvianum_ and _Gossypium vitifolium_, possess the advantage of being genuine South Americans; they form a magnificent stock from which the expert cotton grower can develop a product for the market which need not fear Sea Island as a rival.

Cultivation of cotton by the Portuguese colonists began very soon after the granting of the capitanias in 1530. By the year 1570 large crops were being produced in Bahia, chief centre of industrial activity, although they could not equal sugar in value. Europe was just beginning to use this material, for with the acquisition of strips of India by the Portuguese there was an entry into European markets of Calicut “calico.” Before this dawn of the cotton era Europe went clothed in leather, wool, and, on occasions of great splendour, silk. We may conclude that the clothing of the day was probably as comfortable as, and certainly more substantial than, garments of the present period, if not as sanitary: but cleanliness had not yet become a virtue. India taught Europe the use of cotton, and the spindles and looms of the ladies were filled with the vegetable fibre in lieu of wool.

In Pernambuco the culture of cotton became of more importance than sugar; farther south the Paulistas set their Indian slaves to work and were soon producing cotton crops on widely spread plantations. In the seventeenth century cotton was carried into Minas Geraes by the gold hunting bandeirantes, but it was only cultivated in the most desultory manner and when there was nothing else for the slaves to do. So complete indeed was disregard of all agricultural work that actual famines occurred in 1697–98 and in 1700–01 on account of the abandonment of plantations for gold-washing districts.

When the Marquis de Pombal practically ruled the destinies of Portugal good fortune led him to take a shrewd interest in Brazil; especially interested in the comparatively new settlements at Pará and Maranhão, and struck by the fine fibre exported from these northerly regions, he decided upon the establishment of spinning and weaving mills. In 1750 the Marquis de Tavora was given the task of engaging expert weavers for the colonies, and shortly afterwards the first cotton-cloth factories were set up in Brazil. Pombal’s fatherly interest in weaving did not extend to the south; these sections of the country should devote their time to mining and agriculture, he thought, and finding that looms were being set up all along the coast and in the interior of Minas—always a good cotton region—he passed a law in 1766 prohibiting cotton and silk weaving. It had the desired effect of checking the development of any considerable commerce, but did not prevent the use of hand looms in almost every farm, where a patch of cotton was as much a part of the crop as a field of maize. In a _relatorio_ of 1779 the Viceroy Luis de Vasconcellos reported to Lisbon on the “independence of the people of Minas of European goods, establishing looms and factories in their own _fazendas_, and making cloth with which they clothe themselves and their families and slaves....”

In 1785 the Portuguese Government ordered the suppression of all factories in Brazil; they must have been considerably advanced, despite the previous orders, if the decree abolishing establishments for making “ribbons, laces of gold or silver velvets, satins, taffetas, bombazine, printed calico, fustian,” etc., etc., meant anything. In spite of this the weaving of coarse cottons managed to survive, perhaps with the connivance of sympathetic Viceroys, and repeated letters emphasized the inconvenience of factories in Brazil: a _carta regia_ of 1802 instructed the Governor of Minas Geraes not to allow “anyone to present himself before him unless dressed in materials manufactured in the Kingdom or the Asiatic dominions.”

The transference of the Portuguese monarchy to Brazil in 1808 changed all these ideas—which helps to demonstrate the still burning need for all rulers, of whatever denomination, to take a travelling course—and in a few years cotton threads and cloths were freed from duties, the Prince Regent sent a master-weaver at his own expense to set up _fabricas_ in the interior, and by 1820 the industry was thriving. Cotton growing was equally stimulated at this period by high prices in England; in 1818 that country was not only buying raw cotton, but cotton cloth, from Brazil.

With the development of the south of the United States in cotton production on a great scale a shadow fell over the Brazilian industry. Unable to compete with the low prices at which North America offered her bales in the early eighteen-forties the farmers of the southerly states of Brazil checked their planting, and, coffee just then dawning upon them as a commercial possibility, filled up the empty spaces in the fields with the beans of _coffea arabica_. North Brazil, with its special cottons of long staple, kept on producing these varieties for home mills, steadily at work, and for European export; a new incentive came with the Civil War of the United States when Confederate cotton shipments were contraband and English spinners were at their wits’ end for raw material, but prices sank with the declaration of peace.

Since the beginning of the present century Brazilian exports of, and prices received for, national cotton have varied so remarkably that it is worth while glancing at the statistics; almost the whole of the export of this raw cotton, and of cotton seed, went to England. If in addition to this export we reckon about fifty thousand tons as the amount consumed by the factories of the country, the whole production of Brazil can never have exceeded ninety thousand tons.

_Year_ _Tons_ _Value in Gold Milreis_ 1902 32,137 10,701 contos (one conto equals 1000 milreis) 1903 28,235 11,766 „ 1904 13,262 7,347 „ 1905 24,081 10,291 „ 1906 31,668 14,726 „ 1907 38,036 15,418 „ 1908 3,565 1,833 „ 1909 9,968 5,261 „ 1910 11,160 7,934 „ 1911 14,647 8,714 „ 1912 16,774 9,221 „ 1913 37,423 20,513 „ 1914 30,434 16,556 „ 1915 5,223 2,551 „

Exports almost vanished, to 1000 tons, in 1916, not recovering fully until 1920, when 25,000 tons were shipped.

What measures are being taken in Brazil to develop cotton culture? First let us take into consideration new governmental means of assisting the industry. When the drought of 1914–15 scorched up northern plantations the weavers found themselves paying higher prices inside Brazil than the same national cotton was bringing in Liverpool. The Centro Industrial, a very strong and useful body, asked the Government to hold an enquiry, and the also extremely powerful Centro do Commercio e Industria of São Paulo made the suggestion that duties against imported cotton should be remitted so that the mills could get cheap supplies of foreign material. Remarking on the situation the _Gazeta de Noticias_ of Rio said: “On one side we have the cotton planting industry declaring that it will face certain extinction if the door is opened to foreign raw material; on the other is the weaving industry declaring that it must shut its doors if it is not permitted to buy from foreign markets!”

The Federal Government only temporarily remitted dues, believing that the situation would remedy itself with the new crop—rain fell copiously at last in the scourged districts, and Ceará alone foretold a cotton crop of twelve thousand tons for 1916—but prepared to consider measures to open up larger areas of country to this culture. A project submitted to the Legislature at the end of 1915 suggested the construction of good cart roads in cotton districts, and the establishment of modern gins at convenient points, at the expense of the Government.

Already, three years ago, the Government had acquired the services of Professor Edward Green, a cotton expert from the United States who has been working with the double object of classifying and standardizing the best cottons for plantation in Brazil, and of noting the best regions for such plantations. At the _Conferencia Algodoeira_ (Cotton Conference) held in Rio under the auspices of the Centro da Industria in June, 1916, Professor Green gave an address dealing with some phases of his labours, and concluded by saying:

“After three years of observation and experiment in Brazil I am convinced that this country, above any other, possesses excellent natural conditions for cotton production, and that the development of this great national resource depends only upon the adoption of a few simple measures:

“1. The selection and standardization of superior types, and the production of great quantities of selected seeds for distribution.

“2. Introduction of simple, animal-drawn cultivators, with practical instruction on their use to be given to large planters of cotton in the interior.

“3. Stimulation by the Government of all activities related to the cotton industry, and suspension for some years of all connected taxes and duties.

“Extensive propaganda in favor of cotton growing is being animated by the far-seeing and incomparable activity of Dr. Miguel Calmon. If this work is continued in all parts of the country where cotton is cultivated there is no doubt of success. The cotton production of Brazil will find itself doubled if not quadrupled in a short time, and this country will take the high place in world markets which is legitimately hers as the greatest exporter of high-class cotton.”

Both Federal and State Governments have brought technical experts from foreign countries to help in the solution of Brazilian problems; the Directorship of the Jardim Botanico in Rio, where a series of valuable experiments in tropical agriculture were carried out, was for some time in the hands of an English expert, Dr. John Willis, who brought his knowledge of Ceylon and Malaysia to bear upon Brazilian conditions; the work of the eminent Swiss, Dr. Emil Goeldi, on the Amazon, succeeded by the labours of Dr. Jacques Huber, have been invaluable in regard to classification of North Brazilian natural plants and their adaptation to commercial uses, as well as the introduction of suitable tropical fruits, etc., from other regions. The Ministry of Agriculture in Rio is the centre of much live work, and has had a series of excellent men at its head. The brilliant Pedro de Toledo was neither the first nor the last of agricultural devotees in this post.

The work of State Societies of Agriculture is more highly specialized, and cotton has its list of societies just as coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco have theirs. Many big cotton estate owners take a keen interest in improving conditions of production, and have been during the last few years definitely helped by the American expert already referred to and by a Texan cotton grower at the head of demonstration farms operated by the Leopoldina Railway Company. One meets in Brazil an unusually high percentage of finely educated men who are _fazendeiros_, who willingly leave the gay cities of the coast to live in patriarchal authority upon interior farms having as their sole connection with the outside world a narrow mule-track; they appear to have inherited the affection for land of their own possession which sent the early Portuguese so far afield, and which seldom seems to be mingled with any dislike of solitude. It is this feeling which scantily populates the sertão with fazendas, far removed from any town, dotting the vast interior with _nucleos_ of independent life; it may be partly due to a strain of Indian ancestry, for it extends to the upper reaches of the Amazon and its tributaries, lining, at infrequent intervals, the banks of forest-bound rivers with palm-thatch huts, their foundations in the water, where families subsist upon a handful of farinha, and fish caught in the flood below them, looking with unenvious eyes at the passing boats of rubber collectors and apparently quite content with their withdrawal from the world. To such a people, not markedly gregarious, the opening of great tracts of interior is in accord with their instincts, and cultivation is but a matter of communication and transport.

The cotton country of Brazil needs expert growers and good roads or rail service; it will not lack the work of the small native farmer.

There is a cotton cloth factory near Pernambuco which is an excellent example of a self-contained industry in Brazil. Situated seven miles outside the mediæval port-city of Olinda, whose narrow cobbled streets are lined with tiled and gabled houses reminiscent of Dutch regimen, the estate covers forty-five square miles of pasture and woodland besides the area directly occupied by the works and the village of employees; one edge borders on the sea, fringed with coconuts, and there are two little ports where native _barcaças_ bring their loads of raw cotton and merchandise, at the mouths of two rivers flowing through the estate.

Here, on the warm coast of the northern promontory with its tropic vegetation and mestizo population, a Brazilian company started a factory for spinning and weaving; it was not a marked success until Herman Lundgren, an energetic man of Swedish birth, resident in Brazil since 1866 and later a naturalized Brazilian, took over the management of the property. He made an arrangement by which the original owners were paid ten per cent on their investment, all farther profits belonging to himself, and later on bought out the old stockholders; new machinery was brought from Great Britain, technical workers imported from Manchester, and the scope of the business enlarged so that today all processes for producing fine coloured cotton cloths are performed on the estate— spinning, weaving, dyeing and colour-printing. When the writer visited the factory in the early part of 1915 a shortage of dyestuffs was predicted and I understand that since that time experiments have been successfully made with native vegetable dyes, too long abandoned for the convenient aniline varieties.

The factory employs three thousand five hundred people, of whom seventy per cent are women and children; the total population in the village is fifteen thousand. Over thirty-five thousand dollars a month is paid in wages. The manager of the mills, an Englishman, spoke highly of the Brazilian operatives: the company has never taken any measures to import other labour than that of the district; the majority of the workmen’s dwellings are built and owned by the company, and are rented out cheaply, while in some cases these modest cottages of sun-dried brick, thatched with palm or covered with a zinc or tile roof, have been erected by the workmen themselves, their only obligation to the company being the payment of ground rent of two to four milreis a month, the palm-thatched house paying the lowest and the zinc-roofed the highest rate. The company maintains a school, hospital and dispensary, free, for the villagers.

Apart from the mills the estate contains a dairy and stock farm—where some well-known English horses occupy stables, apparently unperturbed by their transference to Brazilian tropics—tile and brick factories, a bakery, blacksmith’s shop, and lumber yard. The company uses one thousand tons of coal a month when it can be obtained, but curtailment of imports since the outbreak of the European War has entailed a greater use of wood fuel. This is cut from the _matto_ on the estate, typical Brazilian woodland of great beauty, containing a marked variety of different trees, but notable for its absence of animal life with the exception of insects and some fine butterflies in the neighbourhood of streams and pools.

The estate produces no cotton, purchasing all of this raw material from Pernambuco and Parahyba; one hundred and fifty bags weighing seventy-five kilos each are used daily, and the monthly bill for cotton amounted to £35,000 or £40,000 even when the price of Brazilian cotton was down to about eleven milreis an arroba (fifteen kilos), equal at the rate of exchange then prevailing to about eight cents a pound United States currency; but towards the end of 1915 native cotton rose in Brazil to twenty-five and thirty cents a pound in consequence of the drought in the North followed by crop failures, and factories all over the country suffered from the shortage.

Pernambuco and other northern factories had an advantage in being nearer sources of supply, the difference in freight enabling these mills to get raw material at a rate at least twenty per cent below that paid by the importers of Rio and S. Paulo. From forty thousand pounds to fifty thousand pounds a year is spent by the factory on drugs, colours and chemicals.

Production of cotton cloth averages one million, five hundred thousand metres a month, woven on nine hundred and sixty looms; the cloth measures twenty-two to twenty-six inches in width and has an immense variety, from heavy blue denim to fine flowered fabrics woven or printed in brilliant colours, beloved by Brazilian working classes. Trains of mules pass daily along the road from the factory, each animal carrying two bales of cotton cloth weighing seventy-five kilos each; the whole of this output is sold in Brazil, distributed over half a score of different States by shops established by the company. There are over eighty of these stores, selling cloth and also ready made garments of simple make, in Pernambuco State alone, as well as others in Bahia, Ceará, Parahyba, Rio, S. Paulo, Matto Grosso, etc.

HERVA MATTE

Herva matte, sometimes called “Paraguay tea,” is the leaf of a small tree belonging to the ilex family. It is, botanically, _ilex paraguayensis_, and has much the appearance of a small, particularly dense live-oak. It grows wild, and very thickly, in the south Brazilian State of Paraná, the forests straying out into Matto Grosso, São Paulo, Santa Catharina, Rio Grande do Sul, and over the borders of the Argentine; but Paraná is the great home of the little tree and of the manufacture of the leaf into a commercial product. Its preferred habitat is from 1500 to 2000 feet above sea-level, and until recently it had never been cultivated successfully except by the early Jesuit missionaries; but now Argentina announces her intention of fostering plantations of matte, and the Brazilian exporters are more alarmed than were the rubber shippers of the Amazon when they first heard of Wickham’s experiments.

Prepared in Brazil, matte has little sale in that country; only the states of the southern border have learned to drink the infusion. Buyers and users of the leaf are, first, Argentinos and next Paraguayanos, with several other South American countries taking smaller quantities; the confirmed matte drinker rejects Indian teas and coffee with contempt, and there is undoubtedly much to be said for this herb. It is tonic, is not accused of possessing nerve-attacking properties to the same extent as tea or coffee, and has a delicate flavour: it has a good opportunity to prove its qualities in world markets, now that a society has been formed in Paraná to defend and advertise it. In the Argentine stock-raising districts every _gaucho_ has his apparatus for making the infusion, and is said to be able to work all day on this drink and a little bread.

The leaves are gathered for three or four months in the year, May or June until August; carried to a central hearth, they are dried over fires, packed in bags and sent on mule-back to Ponta Grossa or Curityba, and there carefully prepared for export. Mills and sieves of Brazilian invention reduce the dried leaves to powder, divide it into qualities according to the fineness of the reduction, and pack for export; Paranaguá is _the_ matte port. Thousands of colonists and isolated dwellers of interior Paraná depend upon matte for the basis of their living; the _hervaes_ (matte forests) are often seen together with the fantastic Paraná pine, a thick green growth below the tall stems of this other tree characteristic of the landscape of southern Brazil. The Paraná pine, besides its value as a yielder of excellent lumber, is noted for its product of pine kernels so large that they often exceed good-sized chestnuts in bulk. They are to be seen in huge sacks on sale in all the markets of South Brazil, are boiled like chestnuts and form a nutritious and excellent food. They should be better known, but their use seems to be largely confined to the Italian population, who have always had a predilection for pine kernels: when the Romans invaded Britain they brought and planted pine trees of the nut-yielding variety.

Each matte _herval_ is invaded in the picking season by local gatherers; the central fire is started, the trees stripped of small branches; care is taken to prune them so that succeeding yields are not injured; there is not a great variety of shrubs in the vicinity of the matte forests, and not much cleaning has to be done. Brought down to the ports, the cost of prepared matte rarely exceeds six cents: including freight and other costs it could be placed upon North American markets as it is in European, at about eighteen to twenty cents a pound in normal times.

During the year 1915 Brazil exported her highest record of matte to date, 75,800 tons, but left this figure far behind in 1919 and 1920, with over 90,000 tons. This was not such a good price as that of 1913, when sixty-five thousand tons fetched 21,000 contos, at an average price of five hundred and forty-two reis per kilo. The amount exported has gone up steadily since the beginning of the century, when thirty-five to forty thousand tons was a fair total.

Argentina, the most important buyer of the “yerba,” has for some years imposed certain restrictions upon the entry of Brazilian matte, insisting, as she is right to insist, on guarantees and proofs of its purity: Brazil has conformed with wishes of the Argentine authorities. In April, 1915, the customs-houses of Buenos Aires were circularized by the Argentine Minister of Finance, requesting tests which would have meant the opening and submitting to chemical analysis of each package of matte. Compliance meant a very large addition to costs, as each separate analysis meant an expenditure of at least ten Argentine pesos, or about four dollars; as a result importation ceased and orders were countermanded. A month later restrictions were modified, but one analysis of each consignment being obligatory; at the same time even more rigid measures were taken to ensure the entry of nothing but unmixed leaves, the Argentine Counsel of Hygiene urging the Government not to admit any matte which did not contain at least seven per thousand of _mateina_ or _cafeina_.

No such rules, meanwhile, have been imposed upon matte of Argentine origin or milling; the product of the home mills is not free from suspicion of adulteration with other herbs, and the _Revista de Economia y Finanzas_ of Buenos Aires (July, 1916) wrote scathingly of the law which “imposes analysis upon the foreign product, with the preservation of public health as object, while the product of our mills, uninspected, may endanger it.” The root of the Argentine obstacle really seems to be a new project for planting the tree on an extensive scale in the territory of Misiones, bordering on the south Brazilian, matte-producing, states; the plan includes plantation of thirty thousand hectares of land and the construction of a railway line. If success crowns this enterprise Brazil will not immediately be forced to search for other consumers of the product of her two hundred thousand square kilometers of matte forests, but in the course of a few years she might find her industry seriously threatened. If the society which has taken up matte defence and advertisement is only half as successful as that specializing in Brazilian coffee propaganda, matte will find good markets north of the equator should those below it fail her. The following is the analysis of matte, compared with green tea, black tea, and coffee:—

In 1000 parts. _Green Tea_ _Black Tea_ _Coffee_ _Matte_ Essential oil 7.90 6.00 0.41 0.01 Chlorophyll 22.20 18.14 13.66 62.00 Resin 22.20 36.40 13.66 20.69 Tannin 178.00 128.80 16.39 12.28 Theine or caffeine 4.30 4.60 2.66 2.50 Fibre & cellulose 175.80 283.20 174.83 180.00 Ash 85.60 54.40 25.61 38.10 Extract and colouring matter 464.00 390.00 270.67 238.83 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 960.00 921.54 517.89 554.41

Out of her total exports in 1915 of nearly seventy-six thousand tons, Brazil sent over fifty-eight thousand to Argentina, fourteen thousand to Uruguay, and three thousand tons to Chile. In 1920, seventy thousand tons were sold to the Argentine, eighteen thousand tons to Uruguay, and rather more than three thousand to Chile, where sales of Oriental teas compete with the matte leaf.

SUGAR

Sugar production is one of the Brazilian industries which have waxed, waned, and with the encouragement of high market prices abroad, has recently again forged ahead. As in the case of cotton, sugar can be and is grown in the great majority of Brazilian states, from the mouth of the Amazon down to the Laguna Mirim, but there are areas, chiefly on the central littoral, where soil and climate are so well suited to sugarcane that production from these regions is able to compete with other world offerings. There was a time when Brazil was the chief source of sugar supplies to Europe, but the industry suffered two great blows—one, the stimulation of cane-growing in the British West Indies, and again the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, which resulted in many instances in the abandonment of the plantations by a large part of the negro population, crowding into the coast cities to enjoy new liberty.

Cane production has all the advantages of an ancient industry whose details have long been reduced to an exact science. Its recorded history goes back to the fifth century, so that we can reckon that there have been fourteen centuries of experiment in cane culture. A native of Bengal, sugar was in cultivation in the fifth century along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; the conquering Moors took it into Spain in the eighth century, and during the following six or seven centuries its cultivation on a limited scale proceeded on the shores of the Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century when Portugal re-found and colonized Madeira and the Azores, sugarcane was introduced into these islands, flourished there, and yielded sugar to the home market in Lisbon. That it was an exotic luxury in Europe generally is proved by its price: a hundredweight sold in London in 1842 fetched £55. Twenty-five years later the price had dropped to ten pounds for a like quantity, but by that time larger supplies were coming in. After the discovery of the West Indian Islands by Columbus cane was introduced into Hispaniola and Cuba by the Spanish settlers, but cultivation was strongly discouraged by the home government, who chiefly aimed at the stimulation of gold-mining. Brazil, whose gold-deposits were luckily not discovered until the seventeenth century, became in contrast to New Spain an agricultural country from the time when the first _capitanias_ were allotted: she began shipping sugar in the visiting Portuguese caravels in a few years after first settlement.

Thenceforth for over a century and a quarter Brazil became the main source of sugar supplies to Europe; when placer gold and diamond-bearing gravels were found by the _bandeirantes_ everyone rushed to the General Mines taking slaves along, until the coast plantations were denuded both of masters and labourers. Consequent languishing of sugar production made it worth while for both England and France to develop cane growing in the West Indian isles which they had seized from Spain. It was in 1662 that the British “Company of Royal Adventurers of Africa” agreed to deliver three thousand slaves a year to the British West Indies, and sugar production in Jamaica, Barbados, etc., began to attract wealthy planters: whole fleets of high-prowed sailing ships came into Caribbean waters to take away sugar, rum and molasses in those palmy days, enduring until Napoleon started the beet-sugar industry and Great Britain, not long after, abolished the slave trade.

Europe only discovered her possession of a sweet tooth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before the great production of sugar from the New World began to be carried to Spain and Portugal, and by them distributed at high prices and in small quantities to the rest of Europe, the only sweetening known to the masses of the population was honey, and this was a luxury. There was no taste for sweets until sweets became common. The real taste of the Middle Ages was for spices; it is not generally realized today to what extent the food of Europe was at this period saturated with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and other spices brought from the Orient. It was for the “Spice Isles” that the early navigators searched the wide seas, spices that they ate with a gusto almost incomprehensible today: they flavoured their beverages and scented their clothes with spices.

The most flourishing centres of sugar production in Brazil are in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where Campos is the focus of sugar deliveries, and Pernambuco, a thousand miles farther north; São Paulo has also an increasing sugar industry, as may be seen from the following list of large sugar mills; small factories, of which there are hundreds in Brazil chiefly turning out _rapadura_, a brown sugar-brick, and _cachaça_, the native rum, are not included:—

Alagôas 9 Bahia 7 Maranhão 3 Minas Geraes 7 Parahyba do Norte 2 Pernambuco 46 Rio de Janeiro 31 Santa Catharina 2 São Paulo 20 Sergipe 15 Piauhy 1 Rio Grande do Norte 3 ——— 139

On almost every cotton, coffee, tobacco or other _fazenda_ in Brazil, besides those given over to sugar production, one finds patches of the bright veridian green that demonstrates the presence of sugar, grown and milled for home uses; altogether the production of sugar in Brazil must be much larger than is shown by any statistics, and there does not exist any comprehensive estimate of the total amount. A few years ago the charge could be made that Brazilian sugar-milling methods were antiquated, extraction low because the machinery employed was inferior: but whoever repeats this tale today has not seen any of the huge, scientifically managed estates and mills of Pernambuco, the _usinas_ of the country about Campos, where the sky-line is punctuated by slim chimneys, or any of the fine modern equipments of São Paulo. One of the first good mills that the writer saw in Brazil was at Piracicaba, in the interior of São Paulo, where an excellent product was marketed by the employment of thoroughly up-to-date methods. Here the installation of machinery is European, chiefly French, but there has been an increasing tendency since the outbreak of war in Europe towards purchases of American equipment, perhaps especially among the _usinas_ of the northern promontory.

Exports of sugar from Brazil have fluctuated in an extraordinary manner since the beginning of this century; swift drops in amounts sent abroad have nearly always spelt “drought,” but there seems to have been a general tendency to decline until the stimulation of war prices helped the industry, due partly to formidable competition from the Caribbean islands and coasts, and partly to increased consumption in Brazil. A marked feature of the Brazilian sugar export lists is a developing sale to Argentina; it has been recently stimulated by the failure of Argentine supplies, but is also part of the symptomatic increase of interchange between the commercial South American countries. Brazilian sugar exports, shipped in bags of sixty kilos weight, 1906 to 1920 in round numbers:—

1906 85,000 tons 1907 13,000 „ 1908 32,000 „ 1909 68,000 „ 1910 59,000 „ 1911 36,000 „ 1912 4,800 „ 1913 5,400 „ 1914 32,000 „ 1915 59,000 „ 1916 54,000,000 „ 1917 138,000,000 „ 1918 116,000,000 „ 1919 69,000,000 „ 1920 109,000,000 „

The price has ranged during this period from two hundred and twenty-five reis per kilo paid for the short crop of 1904, down to one hundred and eight reis paid in 1906 when the crop was large; from that low point it climbed upwards, fluctuating about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty reis from 1907 to 1913, fixed exchange making this price the equivalent of about three and a half to four cents a kilo, or something like a cent and a quarter to a cent and three-quarters per pound. In 1914, with war prices encouraging the sugar market, the price rose to two hundred and twelve reis a kilo, and in 1915 to two hundred and forty-four reis, a figure exceeded enormously in the post-war boom of 1919–20.

The average yield of sugarcane per hectare in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is fifty tons, or let us say something over twenty tons an acre; this does not compare with Caribbean coast yields, where eighty or ninety tons an acre is obtained from lands impregnated with volcanic ash, and fields are to be seen which have not been re-planted for a dozen years. Brazilian soils, chiefly composed of drifts of disintegrated granite, oxidized by the sun to a brilliant red tint, are sometimes very rich, but also are frequently just good honest soils that cannot stand abuse without exhaustion following; with proper rotation of crops these lands will yield generously, but it is scarcely surprising that, in regions where sugar has been almost continuously cultivated for a couple of centuries, the cane crop per acre is comparatively low.

Pernambuco, for instance, counts her cane cultivation from the year 1534, when the first _engenho_ (sugar mill), piously named _Nossa Senhora de Ajuda_, was established near the settlement at Olinda.

Brazilians are large consumers of sugar; the internal consumption has been calculated at three hundred thousand tons a year, or some eighty to ninety pounds a head of the population, and, with the exception of fine sweets imported, chiefly from France, all of the sugar used in Brazil is nationally produced. The sugar growing and refining industry is in an exceedingly healthy condition, is one of the important national resources, and has shown marked revival during the last two years.

[Illustration:

Carioca Cotton Mill, Rio de Janeiro.

Catende Sugar Mill, Pernambuco. ]

TOBACCO

The use of tobacco in Brazil dates back an unknown number of centuries: the natives smoked the leaf, both in the form of rolled cigars and also in small quantities in wooden pipes, made in the fashion which Europe subsequently adopted. The first European to make any record of this habit was that painstaking Frenchman, André Thevet, who came to Rio de Janeiro with Villegaignon’s unfortunate expedition in November, 1555; he says that the native name for the plant was “betun” or “petum,” and the drawing in his book (_La Cosmographie Universelle_) identifies it with _Nicotiana tabacum_. In the Amazonian regions both men and women smoked tobacco as a recognized form of enjoyment, and its effects were so much appreciated by another traveller, Piso, that he declared it to be one of the three American plants which had no equal in the Old World for beneficial uses—coca, tobacco, and the root of mandioca. Tobacco-smoking by American natives had first been noticed by the crew of Columbus in 1492.

During the latter half of the sixteenth century Europeans began to take to the use of tobacco, the Spanish colonies sending it home from the West Indian Islands and the Portuguese from Brazil; it was not until about 1600 that it was seriously cultivated for export in the Brazilian _capitanias_, and when experiments were made with this object it was found that Bahia yielded the best product, although that of Pernambuco was also good, and the plant produced freely all along the littoral, from Amazonas to the lagoons of Rio Grande do Sul. Tobacco became during colonial days one of the important exports of Brazil, together with dyewoods and sugar.

Brazil marks her extensive cultivation of tobacco from about 1850, after her ports had been thrown open to world commerce and the flags of all lands were seen in her ports. In 1860 she exported 4,609 tons; in 1870, 13,276 tons and in 1873, nearly 17,000 tons, of which over 14,500 tons came from Bahia. By the year 1886 Brazilian exportation had risen to 23,000 tons, the value was over 15,000,000 francs (or more than $3,000,000) and a part of this to the value of 3,500,000 francs, “was returned to us made up into so-called Havana cigars,” remarks Almeida. “It was not fashionable to smoke any tobacco or cigars other than of the Havana kind in Brazil fifteen years ago.”

Now ideas have changed: Brazil realizes the value of her own product, and Bahia has no hesitation in challenging Vuelta Abajo to a comparison. Soils of the two regions are similar in qualities. Farther north, the Brazilian _fumo_ has a stronger, less delicate flavour, and is largely consumed at home; cigarettes of Pará, Amazonas, Parahyba, Pernambuco, Matto Grosso, Minas, and many other states are manufactured in large quantities, and sold cheaply; very good Pará cigarettes made of the black local tobacco sell at ten for a “tostão”—a fraction over two cents.

By the end of the century Brazilian tobacco production had grown to some forty thousand tons, largely the result of ready markets in Germany, which practically absorbed the whole of this export until the outbreak of the European War, and the adoption of North American seeds and methods of cultivation. The output suffers fluctuations due to climatic conditions, as will be seen from inspection of the following figures; it will be noticed that prices have on the whole a tendency to rise:

_Year_ _Tons_ _Total Value in Gold _Price per Kilo in Paper Milreis_ Milreis_ 1905 20,390 7,335 contos 636 reis 1910 34,149 14,453 „ 714 „ 1915 27,096 10,328 „ 835 „ 1920 30,561 1200 „

In calculating prices it is well to bear in mind that the gold milreis is always worth twenty-seven English pence, while, although fixed between 1906 and 1914 at sixteen pence, the value of the paper milreis fluctuates. During 1915 it was worth an average of a fraction over twelve pence, so that the price of tobacco—eight hundred and thirty-five reis a kilo—may be considered as about eighteen cents a kilo, or a little over seven American cents per pound. While, as we have seen, thirty thousand tons of tobacco is exported each year from Brazil, enough remains in the country to supply ninety-six per cent of the internal consumption; cigars, tobacco and cigarettes are consumed in the country to the value of 40,622 contos, importations being worth only 1,500 contos of this amount.

Every state in Brazil has its large or small tobacco factories, but the great manufacturing region is that of São Felix, just across the bay from São Salvador (Bahia) city. Accessible to the factories established here are the finest tobacco regions: the product is excellent in flavour and well prepared for a discriminating market. Organizers of the manufacturing industry, as well as shippers to Europe, are largely German; German also is the big cigar factory of the South, that of Poock in Rio Grande do Sul, whose product goes all over Brazil.

Since the beginning of the European War the absence of German and Austrian shipping movement has paralyzed tobacco sales, and as this item forms about thirty per cent of Bahia’s exports it was necessary to seek unimpeded sales channels. Negotiations were opened with the _Regie Française_, the great French tobacco-buying organization, and the packing, quality, fermentation and other conditions studied with reference to sales.

CEREALS

Wheat growing is only possible on a commercial scale in the south of Brazil where temperature and climate are not unlike those of the European lands of origin of this cereal. At present Rio Grande is the only great wheat producing state, although Paraná has a budding industry; the great Italian firm of Matarazzo has recently acquired large areas of land in that state with the object of growing wheat and establishing a flour mill.

Rio Grande, which owes the major part of its opening-up to the German settlers who emigrated there about the middle of the nineteenth century, already grows half enough wheat to satisfy the internal needs of the State, for although she still imports 361,000 barrels of flour, and 236,000 bushels of wheat (equal to another 47,000 barrels) yet she also grows enough wheat to yield 407,000 barrels of native flour. She has, it is calculated, over 83,000 hectares of land under wheat, employs 29,000 field hands, and has over a thousand grain mills. Many of these are equipped with out-of-date machinery, and are small, but there are others fitted with good modern systems producing fine flour.

Two of the best wheat producing municipalities are Alfredo Chaves and Caxias, each of which have over four thousand hectares under wheat and produce an average of six thousand tons of this grain; the first municipality has fifty-one and the second sixty-seven mills. To show the “riograndense” growth in wheat production:

1909 15,250 tons 1910 31,267 „ 1912 52,332 „ 1915 55,000 „

Santa Catharina is a cereal State, but does not today produce notable quantities; São Paulo, the high interior of Rio de Janeiro, and the hills of Minas, are all suitable; fine wheat, barley and oats are often seen in the vicinity of European colonies. But Brazilian production is not yet within measurable distance of coping with internal demands, and as a result wheat, with wheat-flour, accounts for one-fifth of Brazil’s total import values. The bulk of the grain imported comes from the River Plate.

Linked with the agricultural production of cereals is the flour-milling industry, which dates from the time when wheat entered Brazil free of duty while wheat-flour paid thirty reis a kilo: this was the condition of the tariff until December, 1899, by which time two large mills had been established in Rio de Janeiro. In January of the following year imported wheat was taxed for the first time, ten reis a kilo, while the duty on flour was reduced to twenty-five reis; national milling profits suffered correspondingly.

In 1906 other alterations were made in the tariff as regards flour from the United States, in addition to certain manufactured articles; it was suggested to Brazil that the United States was a good customer for Paulista coffee and Amazonian rubber, and that she expected “most favoured nation” treatment in return: a tax of three American cents per kilo against coffee was indicated as a short way with objectors. Brazil yielded, giving the United States a twenty per cent reduction on flour import duties, as well as for condensed milk, manufactures of rubber, clocks, dyes, varnishes, typewriters, ice-boxes, pianos, scales and wind-mills. Four years later the preferential tariff was extended to dried fruit, cement, school and office furniture, and in 1911 the rebate on flour entries was changed to thirty per cent.

As a result American sales of the goods indicated have increased very largely, although sales of rubber and coffee have remained, on Brazil’s part, about the same for the last seven or eight years; her more markedly larger shipments to North America are cacao and hides. But American flour imports into Brazil have increased from a little over twenty-four thousand tons in 1906 to nearly sixty thousand tons in 1920, with rises in other articles equally pleasant for the northern manufacturer—cement sales, for instance, increased from one hundred and twenty tons in 1908 to over 76,000 tons in 1920; but in 1921 Germany, selling 30% below her rivals, captured this trade. Reduction of taxes on American flour is actively opposed from two points; the first is the group of flour mills operating in the country, and the second in the sister republic of Argentina who also has flour to sell.

The flour mills in Brazil of commercial importance are eleven in number: the Moinho Fluminense and the Rio de Janeiro Flour Mills, in the city of Rio; Moinho Santa Cruz, across the bay in Nictheroy; Grandes Moinhos Gambas and Moinho Matarazzo, in São Paulo city; Moinho Santista, in Santos; there are three modern mills in Rio Grande State, at Pelotas, Porto Alegre, and Rio Grande City; Paraná has two, at Paranaguá and Antonia.[14]

The great cereal of Brazil is that wonderful plant developed by the aborigines of the Americas, maize: it is commonly known as _milho_ in Brazil. Only recently has the wild plant, mother of all the different kinds of maize in the world, been identified—a proof of the long culture which brought it to the perfection which the first European conquerors encountered; yet such was the hardihood of this cereal that thirty years after the Conquest it had spread all over the warm parts of Europe and was thriving in Africa and Asia.

It is, with mandioca, the great food of all South and Central America and Mexico, grows under almost any conditions, apparently, and while the seed is seldom carefully selected, strongly marked varieties of prolific habit are found in Brazil, the red, white and yellow all yielding well. It is found in patches outside every little hut, and in enormous fields in Central Brazil. In spite of the large importation of wheat nowadays to satisfy the more luxurious tastes of the cities, Brazil could not live without maize.

Rye is grown by the Russians of the southern colonies, and the south also produces a limited quantity of oats and barley.

FIBRES

Among the fibres of Brazil which are offered extensive markets is the wonderful _paina_, known in European markets as kapok, which is thirty-four times lighter than water and fourteen times lighter than cork. Produced chiefly in the Orient, its qualities were many years ago appreciated by German manufacturers who were until recently the largest purchasers of the fibre, using it for life-belts, mattresses, etc. Today an unsatisfied demand for kapok comes from the _Société Industrielle et Commerciale du Kapok_ of Paris and London, which is said to expect enormous calls after the close of the war, when rehabilitated Belgium and northern France will need pillows, mattresses, coverlets, and quantities of other things with the qualities of lightness, warmth, elasticity and impermeability possessed by this renowned fibre. At present world supplies come from Java (best fibre, cleanest, best packed), British India, an inferior grade, as is also that of Central Africa and Senegal; a few years ago, at the suggestion of Germans interested in Venezuelan railways, the kapok tree was introduced there; but when the cotton was sent to Europe it was rejected on account of its condition “the greater part of the bales containing stones, refuse, etc., which sometimes amounted to thirty per cent of the total weight; thus, in spite of the fine quality of Venezuelan kapok, French importers were obliged to cease purchases,”—a lesson for careless exporters.

Many parts of Brazil display this beautiful tree. When the writer was first in Petropolis, in bright May weather, the avenues of that mountain city were gay with the large bright pink flowers of this grey-trunked, spreading exotic. Later, when the bolls ripen, the fibre is collected, sold by the kilo over many counters throughout the country, and used locally for stuffing pillows and cushions.

The price paid by France for paina fibre is about one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty francs per hundred kilos of good-grade material: she imposes no duties against its entry. Brazil has many good fibres, but their extensive industrial use is as yet limited to _aramina_, of which coffee bags are made in S. Paulo, a flourishing industry, and the _pita_ which is used by the Indians of Amazonas to make hammocks. These are woven with great art, interspersed along the edges with delicate feathers of gay-coloured Amazonian birds.

Fibre production in a scientific manner and on a commercial scale is only in its infancy in Brazil, but has recently shown interesting development. There are numbers of fine fibres native to the country, yielded not only by a large number of palms, one of which supplies the _piassava_ exported for broom-making, but also by many plants of the aloe tribe. Some of these produce fibres equal in commercial value to the famous _henequen_ (sisal) of Yucatan, upon which the rope-making industries of the United States so largely depend.

Banana fibre is used by the lace-makers of the north for the production of a curious, stiff, shiny lace of fairly intricate workmanship. The best specimens which I possess of this lace were bought at Maceió, but the great home of the lacemaker is Ceará. She usually works with linen or cotton threads, and is to be seen at every cottage door, with her pillow bristling like those of the Devonshire lace-makers, with scores of pins, while she throws the myriad bobbins to and fro, working her pattern on the pins.

Some of the lace produced is quite beautiful, of extreme fineness and intricacy, some of the most prized being the _labyrintho_, with its darned-in pattern of heavier, silky thread, among the fine filaments of the background. Lace-making is one of the small industries of Brazil which are little known, but deserve a better market.

CACAO

Cacao culture and preparation is the great absorbing industry of southern Bahia, where soil and climate, particularly along a couple of river valleys, combine to render the pretty little cacao tree fruitful. Not even coffee presents a more charming sight than a good cocoa plantation ready for harvest, the sun filtering through the light branches, and these, as well as the trunk thickly clustered with the big heavy red or yellow pods, looking something like elongated melons attached, almost stemless, to the strongest parts of the tree. Methods in use on many native plantations in Brazil are fairly primitive, and it is the exception to see the elaborate machinery for fermenting, washing, and drying such as is common in Trinidad; but the cacao produced is good, has a ready sale in a market which never seems to have too much cocoa and chocolate, and has made remarkably good prices since the European War began. Bahia is the great producing state, but Maranhão, Amazonas and Pará also send contributions to the export lists; the chief Bahian centres of production are Ilhéos and Itabuna, which send two-thirds of the crop, the rest coming from Cannavieiras and Belmonte primarily. The groves run inland for more than two hundred miles along the river valleys, full of the red triturated paste which is the base of Brazilian soil.

The cacao year is reckoned from May the first to April the thirtieth, and there are two gathering seasons: the _safra_ proper begins in September and goes on until April, while the summer crop, the _temperão_, begins in May and has a less important yield. Practically, picking goes on all the year.

Cacao is native to the Americas, but its first cultivation and export from Bahia appears to date no earlier than about 1834, when there are records of shipments of 447 sacks of sixty kilos each. In 1840 the export was nearly 2,000 sacks, and in 1850 had risen to more than 5,000 sacks. In 1915 Bahia shipped about 750,000 sacks, as a result of the enthusiastic planting which has gone on in this favourable region for the last twenty years.

Until the war broke out the average price for six years for Brazilian cacao was about 725 reis a kilo—about seven cents a pound. It was at this price that Brazil sold an average of thirty-two thousand tons. In 1915 the price soared to 1$248 a kilo, or about twelve cents a pound, and Brazil with the biggest crop then on record exported 44,980 tons, a total exceeded in each of the following five years, 1919 showing exports of 93,000 tons, at 1$500 per kilo.

Cacao is a very good business, because there is seldom a surplus in world markets; a demand exists for every pound, and the populations of great centres seem to consume it in increasing quantities; it is a valuable food, against which as yet no analytical chemist has laid one of the charges that seem designed to warn us from most things that are agreeable to eat and drink.

Anyone accustomed to warm climates, with a little capital to invest, and able and willing to wait three or four years for his first returns, could do worse than to take up cacao planting in Brazil.

Agricultural methods in Brazil are in many regions quite primitive. When wild land is taken up, it is denuded by the axe of its big trees, and the small scrub disposed of by burning the land over. Frequently the next process is little more than that of making holes in the ground with a stick, dropping in seed, and waiting for it to come up: a fertile land, Brazil gets her crops with a minimum of trouble. That is all very well for the little owner of a small property, but it has already given way in more advanced districts to sound agricultural methods. Modern scientific agricultural implements of American and European make are commonly seen in the centre and south, but in the extreme north and the deep interior they are more rare. There is an excellent market for small, light hand ploughs, harrows and cultivators, for in some parts of the country, such as interior Rio, the land in the bottoms of valleys is very good, has been neglected because only coffee, planted on the hilltops, has pre-occupied the small farmer, but there is not sufficient flat space for the use of large motor or animal operated machinery. A campaign of agricultural instruction has been inaugurated for some years by the Department of Agriculture, some good statistics and maps and literature sent out, but perhaps less theory and more practical instruction is needed. A recent writer in the _Estado de S. Paulo_ remarked upon this, rather caustically: “... instructions for the culture of squashes—plough the ground with a plough with a disc of such a number, harrow it with such or such a harrow, drill it with such or such a drill; afterwards fertilize it with so many tons of phosphate of lime, so many of potash, and a few kilos of powdered gold; cultivate it with such a cultivator, harvest the crop with such and such methods, and take it to market in a certain kind of motor-truck, et cetera, this ‘etcetera’ meaning that the farmer must hand over his farm to his creditors and go to hunt a job as sanitary inspector....”

Other countries have also suffered from a plethora of agricultural theory, but there is plenty of room for instruction of a practical character and several good agricultural schools in Brazil, notably that at Piracicaba, São Paulo, are leading the way.

BRAZILIAN FRUITS

There are many fine fruits in Brazil, unrecognized abroad, which may some day, with refrigerating spaces in outgoing vessels multiplied, find a way to international tables; there is already a pineapple export to Europe, arriving in time for Christmas, and Brazil’s sweet bananas are shipped to the Plate. But who realizes that Brazil is the native home of the finest oranges in the world? Bahia is the place of origin of the seedless orange; slips of this tree, taken to California, have created a tremendous daughter industry whose products are spread far and wide by steamer and train; there is no export from Brazil, the Bahian orange, which is greatly superior in size and flavour to the Californian, hardly creeping down the coast to the markets of Rio and São Paulo. There is room for a huge industry in growing and shipping in this direction, and some of the planters of California, trembling of nights when the frosts come and smudges have to be burnt—sometimes in vain, would do well to transfer their skill and energy to a land where frosts are unknown, land is cheap, and the best oranges known are produced without any great care or science.

MINING

Brazil was for more than a hundred years after the discovery of placer deposits in the interior the source of important gold exports; altogether she is estimated to have yielded gold worth more than a hundred million pounds sterling, but her fame diminished with the exhaustion of the gold-bearing river sands. It was easy enough to wash out gold grains with the _bateia_, but when it became necessary to seek mother lodes and to use machinery, native capital and technical skill were lacking. Two gold-mining companies are working today in Brazil, both British owned and operated, and both in the State of Minas Geraes. One, at Morro Velho, property of the S. João del Rey Mining Company, is worked at a depth of a mile and a quarter, pays dividends regularly, and is a standing tribute to British energy and skill: it is a magnificent social organization as well as an engineering triumph.

The second company of importance using modern equipment is that of Passagem, close to the old capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto; it is excellently operated, but has not had equal good fortune with the Morro Velho mine. In 1916 Brazil’s gold exports, in bars, weighed 4,564,523 grams, were worth about £480,000, and went entirely to England, but Brazil subsequently forbade gold exports, and now takes over all the product.

A certain amount of Brazilian gold is absorbed internally every year by the excellent native goldsmiths, for the fabrication of special jewellery objects, but no estimate of the value is obtainable.

Until diamonds were found in South Africa Brazil was the cradle of the most important diamonds put on foreign markets; the stones are still sought by native _garimpeiros_, mostly, in the interior of Minas and Bahia, and from the _grutas_ of the latter State are obtained the finest white diamonds known. But they have practically disappeared from export lists together with the black _carbonados_, even more valuable, for a reason commented upon by the _Diario Official_ of Bahia, discussing 1915 trade: “If diamonds and carbonados have been, since the war, sent to Europe or North America, their exportation, which is for the most part unknown, has been realized by the habitual processes of smuggling.” Brazil is the main source of these “carbonados,” black diamonds of great hardness and therefore value, used industrially.

The precious stones openly shipped from all Brazil during 1915 were worth only about one hundred and seventy-six contos of reis (say forty-four thousand dollars), of which about fifty-five per cent went to the United States and the rest to France. During 1916 the export of precious and semi-precious Brazilian stones to North America has been greatly stimulated by the access of luxury-purchasing which has coincided with the accumulation of war profits, and out of American purchases of jewels from abroad at the rate of a million dollars a week Brazil has her share. The stones of Brazil have long been appreciated in Europe—I am thinking of a certain shop in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and another at the top of Regent Street in London—and deserve to be better known in North America; the diamonds are beautiful, and their distribution among not only the wealthy but the “middle” classes in Brazil is so usual, the possession of good diamonds is so universally considered the right of every woman, that a gala night at the theatre in São Paulo or Rio is a display of brilliant stones which would put, for choice jewels, many capitals of the world to shame.

The lovely sea-blue _agua-marinhas_, with exquisite transparency and lustre, the soft green _tourmalinas_, the pink and golden topazes and purple amethysts are all found in great quantities in the Brazilian interior: many are native cut, and the wheel of the lapidary using beautiful coloured stones may be seen at work in Bello Horizonte, Rio, Bahia, and São Paulo.

If half that geologists have said of Brazil is true, this country is destined to become one of the greatest mining regions of the Americas; it has an extraordinary variety of minerals, but their location in the interior where little transportation exists, added to the restraining influences of archaic mining laws, has checked enterprise. Before the European War began plans were well under way for development of important iron mines in Minas Geraes by an English company, but work is in abeyance at present. There has been, however, a marked increase in exports of high-grade manganese, chiefly from Minas, chiefly shipped away in the newly operating line of freight steamers owned by the United States Steel Corporation, which bring manufactured products to Brazil. Out of the total of more than three hundred thousand tons of this ore exported from Brazil in 1915, over two hundred and sixty-six thousand tons were sent to the United States, the price paid being over two and a half million dollars; Great Britain also took ten thousand tons, but Germany and Belgium, former customers for this ore, were eliminated from the lists.

During 1916 production, mainly from Minas deposits, rose to over five hundred thousand tons, again increasing to five hundred and thirty-three thousand tons in 1917; after this time depression was experienced, due in great measure to lessened demands from the United States using home-produced low-grade ores for steel hardening. Post-war prospects of development of the great Itabira iron deposits suggest iron and steel industries within Brazil.

Large manganese deposits also occur in the neighbourhood of Nazareth, on the mainland side of the Bahia de Todos os Santos (Bahia State), situated conveniently for shipment; its export was reduced to practically nothing from this point during 1914 and 1915, probably for the same reason that shipments of another famous Brazilian mineral, monazite sand, vanished about the same time from Bahian lists. This reason was the imposition of strangulating export taxes, amounting to about twenty-two per cent of the value of the mineral. Manganese deposits are known to exist, in addition to the beds in Bahia and Minas, in Matto Grosso, Santa Catharina, Paraná and Amazonas; the total quantity available is estimated at one hundred million tons.

Monazite sands lie all along the southerly shores of Bahia, extending into Espirito Santo; their peculiar glow and lustre was first noticed by an Englishman, John Gordon, who had samples examined and found that they contained thorium, used in making incandescent gas mantles; he was in the shipping business in Brazil, and had no difficulty in thenceforth sending large quantities of the precious sands abroad, as ballast; the story goes that only by an accident was the fact revealed to the authorities that the sands were valuable above the ballast of most vessels, after some years. Duties were put on, and eventually exports slumped. The largest amount officially sent abroad in one year was 2,114 tons, 1908, with a value of 609 contos of reis. In 1915 only 439 tons were exported, all to the United States.

These three meagre items, precious stones, manganese and monazite sands, complete the 1915 official mining exports of a great mineral country. Probably increases will be shown for the year 1916, for, in addition to manganese increases, there has been great stimulation of coal mining in the States of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catharina and Paraná. More than one Brazilian railway, exasperated at the prices demanded for foreign coal, has been using native coal and helping in its production, and during the latter part of 1916 experimental shipments were made to the Argentine. Results are said to be good, but a little caution must be used before serious claims are made concerning the existence of very extensive deposits of fine hard steam coal. In any case the production of useful coal is a blessing to the east coast of South America, devoid as this region has been up to the present of any source of reliable _carvão de pedra_; every ton has been imported, chiefly from Wales but latterly from North America. Chile, on the other side of the Andes, has been mining coal for years, but the quality is not satisfactory for all purposes, and supplies have been supplemented from Australia in normal times.

Brazil has, it is known, important deposits of nickel, copper, lead, mica, platinum, wolfram, and many other minerals, but there has been no real attempt at operations, and until prospecting is systematically undertaken and money put into good equipment, Brazil cannot take her place as a great mineral producing country. She has the minerals, but she needs roads to get them out, and favourable laws to encourage mining development, as well as abolition of strangulating taxes. With intelligent assistance, Brazil’s manganese should be able at the close of the European War to compete with that of Russia, and her monazite with that of Travancore (India), aside from the other rich deposits.

BRAZILIAN MANUFACTURES

There is much controversy in Brazil on the subject of national manufactures. I have heard extremists declare roundly that Brazil ought not to manufacture anything at all, because each mill-hand is one more person taken away from the fields to which all Brazilian attention should be given.

“Brazil is an agricultural country,” a cotton planter said to the writer. “She cannot legitimately compete with the manufactured products of great industrial countries because the price of living is too high here. To obtain large revenues from the import taxes which are the Federal Government’s source of support we have heavy duties against large classes of goods entering the country; the barrier has been so high that it has been worth while for factories to be started here, sometimes making things from material produced in the country, which is not bad policy when we have enough labour, but often making goods every separate item of which is imported, an absurdity.”

He went on to say that there is a considerable manufacture of matches in Brazil, but that the igniting chemicals, the little sticks, and the boxes were all imported; nothing was done but the mere putting together. “It is only remunerative because the tax on imported matches is so high, and in many districts owing to want of communication the match factory has a monopoly of local trade—a purely artificial condition.” This fazendeiro was equally opposed to the silk and velvet factories of Petropolis, declaring that “every item, raw silk, colours, machinery, even the skilled weavers, are imported” and that until Brazil produces national silk—a beginning has been made—she should not have silk factories.

[Illustration:

Coffee-loading equipment at the port of Santos, State of São Paulo.

Sugar lands In Pernambuco. ]

This view was that of the agriculturist who sees a menace to labour supplies in the growing manufactures of Brazil: I give it for what it is worth, as an interesting view point with force in some of the argument. But there are industries in Brazil which the agriculturist will admit to be legitimate in themselves and helpful to himself in that they tend to raise prices for his raw products. Of this class the most shining example is the list of cotton mills. They are already so active that the national supply of raw cotton is not sufficient for their needs, demand being so acute in 1919 that the price in Brazil rose to forty cents a pound. The output is sold in Brazil, supplying over eighty per cent of the fabrics used, with a surplus for export since 1918.

It is not generally recognized to what extent Brazilian manufactures have developed. The great industrial region is Rio de Janeiro. Her industrial advance has been made possible in this direction, as in agriculture, by the influx of sturdy Italians, Portuguese and Spanish workers.

At the same time the manufacturing section is not confined to S. Paulo; it is notably active in Minas and Rio, especially where electric power derived from waterfalls is employed, and in Bahia and Pernambuco where tobacco and sugar create legitimate home industries, and where there is a sufficiency of native and negro labour, the latter an inheritance from slavery days.

The total value of the products of Brazilian factories is about 2,000,000 contos of reis, equal at twelve pence exchange to £100,000,000 or in U. S. currency, $500,000,000 _mais ou menos_. This is a larger sum than the value of Brazil’s exported agricultural and forestal products, which was about 1,811,000 contos in 1919, and 1,464,000 contos in 1920.

This calculation, however, is not quite fair because it does not take into consideration the agricultural produce consumed in the country; there are no figures available on this subject.

In a review of commerce published in May, 1916, the _Jornal do Commercio_ said that out of the ninety-four classes of Brazilian manufacture, eighty were free from internal taxes (the “imposto do consumo”) while fourteen were subject to tax, as well as to foreign competition.

It was demonstrated that in these fourteen classes Brazilian manufactures fell below fifty per cent of the total consumption in only one instance, that of pharmaceutical specialties. The most important items are these, in round numbers:

_Brazilian-made_ _Imported_ Woven fabrics (chiefly cotton, but 450,000 contos 47,300 contos 82 some silk and wool) Beverages (mineral waters, beer, 101,300 contos 47,640 contos 68 wine, spirits) Footwear (leather shoes and boots, 150,225 contos 2,425 contos 97 and _alpagartas_) Prepared tobacco, cigarettes and 39,000 contos 1,565 contos 96 cigars Hats 29,000 contos 3,800 contos 86 Matches 18,000 contos 4 contos 99.9 Conserves 13,300 contos 9,800 contos 58 Pharmaceutical specialties 11,700 contos 15,780 contos 43

In 1921 the number of home-made goods paying imposts rose to 21, and the value to well over one million contos, and includes, besides those detailed above, vinegar, walking sticks, salt, candles, perfumeries (of which Brazil makes sixty per cent of the consumption) and playing-cards.

Among the large class of manufactures free from internal taxes are the important items of cotton thread, jute products (rope, cord and coffee bags) the products of ironworks, potteries, furniture factories; goldsmiths and jewel-workers, soap makers, paper and paper-bag factories, biscuit and bottle, shirt, mirror, trunk, ink, pipe, pin, and window-glass makers; but all of these pay a contribution to their State or municipality or both, appearing in revenue lists under “_Industrias e Profissões_.”

In the city of São Paulo this tax upon industries and professions, the latter list embracing bankers, lawyers, barbers, shoe-shiners, hotel-keepers, doctors, newspaper sellers and so on with true democratic impartiality, brings in over forty per cent of the municipal income; it is now worth some three thousand five hundred contos a year, or let us say nine hundred thousand dollars, the cotton factories paying the biggest item, twelve thousand dollars, while shoe factories, jute mills, potteries, jewellers, furniture makers and metal works each pay about eight thousand dollars.

It is plain that manufacturers do not have things all their own way in Brazil, and must be prepared for fairly heavy taxes, but one does not hear the same complaints about petty taxation for every trifle as in the Argentine; on the other hand, the mill owner has not to face cut-throat competition as in older manufacturing countries, is able to get an excellent price for his products, is able to buy land at inexpensive rates and to obtain comparatively cheap labour. As soon as a district becomes thickly sown with factory chimneys prices of land and labour automatically rise, of course; this natural law has operated already in the now densely populated and built over suburbs of São Paulo, Braz and Moóca, and is, under one’s eyes, transforming the windy upland flats of Ypiranga. A year or two ago much of this area was red clay swamp, with a cottage here and there and a few Italian market gardens producing vegetables for the city dwellers, and land could have been bought for ten milreis an acre or less; today it is worth from two hundred to five hundred milreis; the wet lands have been filled in, an enormous undertaking, rows of workmen’s houses extend for miles to the crest of the hill where the Monument stands commemorating the _Grito da Independencia_, and from its summit one has a view that is mottled with factory smoke and punctuated with tall chimneys. To see this and to watch the crowds of pretty chattering Italian girls pouring out of Braz and Moóca factories at noon or evening is to obtain a revelation of the newer South America. It is no longer a land of sugar and brazil-wood only and although the agriculturist may shake his head over the lack of hands on the farm, manufacture in Brazil is a live, energetic phase of her modern development. São Paulo City was employing, by the end of 1921, over twenty-five thousand horsepower of electrical energy in her factories.

The fabric-weaving factories in all Brazil, including cloths of cotton, jute, linen, silk and wool, were 303 in number in 1914, employing 75,000 workpeople and capital totalling over 368,000 contos of reis; in 1920 they had increased to 328 including 242 cotton mills which alone employed 109,000 hands. The premier producer of cotton cloth in 1920, in values, was Rio de Janeiro (Federal District) with an output worth 102,000 contos; next came S. Paulo State, 92,000 contos; then Minas Geraes, 91,000; Rio de Janeiro State, 46,000; Bahia, 32,000; Pernambuco, 21,000; Alagôas, 16,000; Sergipe, 12,000; Maranhão, 11,000; Rio Grande do Sul, 9,000; Ceará, 3,000; and Piauhy, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraná, Parahyba and Espirito Santo, about 1,200 contos each. The States absent from cloth manufacturing returns are the great forestal territories of the extreme north, and those of the vast interior uplands, where conditions are not greatly changed from the time prior to the Portuguese discovery so far as development is concerned.

In numbers of mills São Paulo again comes first with seventy-eight mills making cloths: fifty-five of these weave cotton alone, leaving a higher proportion of fabrics made from other materials than in sister States; generally speaking cotton cloths occupy the greatest share of capital and labour, as for example in Minas, where sixty _fabricas de tecidos_ operate, and out of the total value of the production, 23,500 contos, cotton accounts for over 22,600 contos. With a larger number of cotton-cloth mills at work than S. Paulo, but with production worth not much more than one-fourth, it is clear that factories are very much smaller in the interior State; nevertheless, she is able to pride herself upon a thriving industry, occupying nearly nine thousand people, twenty-five thousand contos of capital, and using ten thousand tons of raw cotton. In common with the other weaver States of the Brazilian Union, Minas ships her cloths to less industrially developed regions: in this connection some light is shed upon the ramifications of finance cum industry by the President of the Sociedade Mineira da Agricultura (Minas Society of Agriculture), Dr. Daniel de Carvalho, in an address at the Cotton Conference held in Rio in June, 1916. Stating that the Minas export of cotton cloth (to other States) was nearly 28,000,000 metres in 1915, he showed that, at an average price of four hundred reis (eight cents) a metre, the total value was more than eleven thousand contos: but in the official statistics the value of exported cotton cloth appeared as only 3,893 contos. “This anomaly is an example of the regimen of fiction in which we live, from the taxation point of view. The Minas legislator votes for high and sometimes excessive taxes,—and the Government in a fatherly manner corrects the excess in calculations of ad valorem percentages, accepting a benign interpretation of merchandise values. Instead of products appearing with exaggerated values we find on the contrary that most estimates are well below the real amount, as in the case of manganese....” The cure for this deliberate lessening of values, which certainly does Brazil poor service, would be, said Dr. Carvalho, an all-round diminution of tribute, together with a rigorous application of the law.

In the Federal District the number of weaving mills is thirty-five, several clustering in the mountain valleys of Petropolis and deriving power from waterfalls; the State of Rio has twenty-seven; Santo Catharina, fifteen; Bahia and Maranhão have thirteen each; Rio Grande do Sul, twelve; Ceará and Alagôas, ten each; Pernambuco, nine; Paraná and Sergipe, eight each; Espirito Santo, three; Rio Grande do Norte, Piauhy and Parahyba, one each.

The largest employer of labour in weaving mills is S. Paulo, with (1920) over thirty thousand hands; the next is the Federal District with about twelve thousand; third comes Minas with over eight thousand. São Paulo is also the greatest consumer of raw cotton, using thirteen thousand tons; the Federal District uses eleven thousand tons and the State of Rio nearly six thousand tons, Minas using, as we saw above, about five thousand.

At the end of 1915 when, in spite of great demands upon the national mills consequent upon checked importations of cotton cloth several had to reduce their staff on account of shortage of raw cotton, the Centro Industrial addressed a letter to the President of the Republic in which the plight of the manufacturers was displayed. A cotton famine in the North had reduced the national supply, and raised the price beyond precedent, while importations are always minute in Brazil owing to the heavy duty of about six cents per pound against it. The signatories of the letter explain that the cotton cloth industry never calls for less than forty-five thousand tons[15] of raw cotton produced on national soil, and that this amount was made up in 1913 into cloth worth over 162,000 contos; that, with the exception of aniline dyes, which cost about 2,000 contos a year, no other prime material enters into the Brazilian cotton Industry.

“The time is long past when cotton yarns were imported on a great scale for weaving. Now, our numerous factories have created in their vast and modern mills a perfect industrial cycle from spinning to printing,” so that the present import of yarns is worth only 1,800 contos, and the value of cotton cloths brought from abroad less than 17,000 contos (1914 figures).

At the same time Brazil’s export of raw cotton from the Northern States of fine long staple, usually practically all sent to England, diminished until returns for 1915 show only 5,223 tons against over 37,000 tons in 1913 and 30,000 in 1914, but this restriction did not make up the shortage following the drought. The Centro Industrial asked for a governmental enquiry into cotton conditions; in the middle of 1916 the Conference was held in Rio, samples of cotton, etc., displayed, and, after a collection of facts by a _questionnaire_ sent to all weaving mills, expositions of the highest interest were made by officials of the government, technical experts, and cotton growers. Reference is made to this valuable conference under “Cotton,” but the manufacturing notes of these pages may include the name of Miguel Calmon, Chemical Director of the Companhia Industrial do Brasil, popularly known as the “Bangú” factory, who gave an address on the use of native vegetable dyes; optimistic as regards tints drawn from Brazilian forests, Senhor Calmon spoke with appreciation of the “urucú,” a dye producing hues ranging from yellow to deep red, as well as many other better known colouring matters. There is already a very busy dye factory in Minas, the _Fabrica de Tinta Machado_, using native vegetable bases, and much is expected in S. Paulo from dyes made by the use of “Inglotina,” obtained from mangrove leaves: a factory has recently been established at Cubatão.

It was at the same conference that Dr. Costa Pinto gave details of the threads spun in Brazil; counting in English measurement, Brazilian mills spin from No. 2 to No. 100 thread. From No. 30 upward a long staple cotton is needed, and only a small proportion of native-grown fibres are suitable, although there is plenty of short fibre for the coarser weaves.

Brazilian manufacturing already depends considerably upon the water power accessible, especially in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas. There is enough hydraulic force available in Brazil to turn the wheels of the world but the majority of these wonderful cascades are scarcely known by name, and many were not charted in the interior of Matto Grosso and Amazonas until the work of the Rondon Commission opened great tracts of those unknown lands. It is not possible here to do more than mention one or two of the most important falls. The Maribondo, in the Triangulo Mineiro, has an estimated force of six hundred thousand horse power; Urubupunga, on the Paraná river, has some 450,000 horse power; Iguassú has 14,000,000, four times as much as Niagara; and the force of the Sete Quedas, or Guayra Falls, on the Paraná near the Paraguay boundary, is calculated at 80,000,000 horse power. The Light and Power companies of Rio, São Paulo, Campinas, Petropolis, and other cities obtain their force from falls, hundreds of little townships in the central interior sparkle with electric lights, run factories and public utilities as a result of a nearby source of water power.

Allusion has before been made to the variety of Brazilian soils and climates which result in her possession of several important and utterly diverse industries; the list is so long that many interesting embryo industries, or others of local or internal importance only, can only claim space for passing mention. Among these is the wine-making industry of the far south, where European colonists cultivate grapes and have created quite a notable business in the production of fairly light red wines. These are shipped to many other parts of the country, are sold inexpensively in Rio and other cities, and while they lack the mellow tone of imported wines, they are sound, good, and popular.

Salt extraction in Rio Grande do Norte is another busy industry, and here is the chief source of Brazil’s native salt; it is exported from the ports of Macáu and Mossoró. Also in the north are the famous lace-makers, whose yards of fine _rendas_, made on a pillow with scores of bobbins, would not disgrace Malta; the big, thickly woven white hammocks of Ceará are justly prized all over Brazil, and both lace and hammocks should form the base of an export business. In Maranhão, where the babassú palm grows luxuriantly, a local industry extracts the fine oil from the kernel hidden in a stony shell, and experimental exports have occurred during the past year; the babassú is but one of the valuable nuts of the Brazilian north. One, the “Brazil nut”[16] of commerce, has of course been exported from the Amazon for nearly a century, and is a considerable revenue yielder to Pará and Amazonas states, but the _sapucaia_, of the same family but larger and sweeter, is rarer, less known, and fetches much higher prices in sophisticated world markets.

[Illustration: [Agriculture Map]]

In Parahyba State there is at least one considerable coconut oil extracting factory, on a sandy spit south of Parahyba city; several thousand people are said to be employed in this industry and the product is shipped as far south as Rio: in spite of the immense quantity of coconuts on the littoral of the northern promontory there is no copra or fibre industry yet established, apparently because the native consumption of the nut leaves little surplus for the one, and interest is lacking in the other.