CHAPTER I

THE HISTORY OF BRAZIL

Brazil and the Brazilians cannot be understood without knowledge of their history, for here as in no other part of Latin America the past has led up to the present without any violent upheaval. While the Spanish colonies of Central and South America were plunged first in revolutionary and afterwards in civil war, shedding not only blood but also tradition and brotherhood with their kin, Portuguese America was saved from similar conditions by the odd turn of fortune that made her a monarchy, independent of Europe and yet ruled by a European prince, during the most critical years of the nineteenth century.

Thanks to Napoleon Buonaparte, no furious chasm, difficult for even thoughts to bridge, was opened between Brazil and the Mother Country; it was never necessary for young Brazilians to be taught that Europe was an oppressor who must be bitterly fought. Brazil gained in the arts of peace and in the retention of pleasant relations between herself and the _lusitanos_, while, in contrast, Spanish American feeling is still so strongly anti-Spanish that in times of unrest it is the immigrant of Iberian blood who is singled out for special ill-will. These republics are without memorials to their Spanish discoverers or rulers; Mexico, for example, has no statue or tablet to the memory of Hernan Cortés, great figure as he was. Admiration for the _conquistadores_ is generally forgotten in bitterness against Spanish rule, all history before revolutionary times is coloured with this deliberately fostered feeling, and only occasionally does there arise a speaker or writer broad-minded enough to take up the cudgels for Spain and the rich inheritance she left to her children.

Brazil was more fortunate. From the time of the first Portuguese settlement down to the present day she has never suffered any great internal conflagration: there were persistent Indian troubles in the first centuries until the survivors of these unlucky natives moved back to the interior forests, but among the population that grew up in Brazil, hardy and prolific, there has been little strife with the insignificant exception of the feuds of the Emboabas, the Mascates and the Balaios.

Brazil was discovered twice. First came a Spaniard, Vicente Pinzon, an old companion of Columbus: he found and reconnoitred the mouth of the Amazon, and sailed south to a point which he named Santa Maria de la Consolación, but which is now known as Cape St. Augustine. On his return to Spain his report roused no interest at a Court where new discoveries of land only added to the _embarras de richesses_, and the attention of the adventurous was already taken up with the West Indies; the second discovery (if we ignore the tale of the sight of Brazilian shores by Diogo de Lepe, whose wanderings were, in any case, unfruitful) was a pure accident, but, occurring to a Portuguese, was immediately seized upon as a basis of claim to part of the new lands in the West. This was on May 3, 1500, three months after the voyage of Pinzon to the Amazon. Spain, to whom the all-powerful Pope Alexander VI had allotted in the famous bull of 1495 all the new lands discovered or to be discovered in the West, while Portugal was given rights to discoveries in the East, might have contested this claim but for two reasons: the first was that the Treaty of Tordesillas had shifted the Pope’s dividing line westward to a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands so that Portugal could retain her Atlantic island discoveries; the second was that either by accident or design the early cartographers drew Brazil’s easterly outline about twenty-two degrees more to the east than it should have been, so that the whole of the enormous tract of what is Brazil today fell within the legitimate claims of Portugal. It was but a matter of equity that Portugal should have a share in the lands of the West, for to the work of that Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, the initiative for sea adventure was due. Henry, inheritor of sea traditions on both sides of his parentage, for his mother was an English princess, daughter of John of Gaunt, spent his life in a long sea dream translated into deeds; for forty years he lived on the lonely promontory of Sagres, his observatory full of charts, the haunt of shipmasters and geographers, with his shipyards below the windows ever busy with the building of stout caravels: from 1420 until his death in 1460 the Navigator urged and bullied his captains to go southward down the coast of Africa, where no sailor had penetrated within Christian times, whatever they had done in the days of the bold Phoenicians.

Thus were the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira rediscovered and settled, the pilots venturing with terror into that “Green Sea of Darkness” where sea monsters threatened their passage, and at last daring to sail farther into the southern waters where not only the water but the land boiled with the terrible heat, they said. Rounding Cape Bojador they found a coast populated with sturdy blacks, began the slave trade that demoralized half the world; in 1486 Bartholomeo Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms” and proved that there was indeed as Henry, dead for a quarter of a century, had dreamed, a southern gateway to the Spice Isles of the East—the goal of adventurers ever since Marco Polo’s tale was spread abroad.

By this discovery the whole imagination of seafaring Europe was awakened: small wonder that Columbus in the end got a hearing when he talked of a sea-path to the East by way of the West, or that, on his return with a story of rich lands, Spain should have been satisfied to believe the theory that the shores of Cathay had been found. Columbus, who became half demented towards the close of his life, never knew that he had found anything but lands on the edge of Cathay; he once forced his men to take an oath to this effect under the penalty of hanging them to the yards of his ship.

To his obsession was chiefly due the lack of any clear conception in Europe of the existence of a great new continent until the Portuguese captain stumbled upon Brazil in 1500, although three years before Alonzo de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci had coasted the Caribbean, charting the north coast of Venezuela and Colombia as well as the east of Central America. That year of 1497 was the great year of discoveries, in sea adventure, for then began the series of voyages of the Cabot family, Labrador being discovered in that first scouring of the north seas by Europeans; from that year also dates that strange chapter of oriental history, Portuguese rule in India, when Vasco da Gama sailed past the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut.

Early in 1500 Captain Pedro Alvares Cabral was despatched with a fleet of thirteen ships to follow up the conquests of da Gama; warned of the calms off the African coast which later became notorious among sailors as the “doldrums,” he stood far out to sea, was caught in strong currents, and found himself to his astonishment off an unknown coast.

Sailing south until a safe landing place was reached (Porto Seguro, some twelve miles north of the little town on the Bahian coast that today bears the name) he landed on Good Friday morning, was received in a friendly manner by the South American natives to whom Europe was thus discovered, took possession of the territory in the name of the Portuguese King, sent a ship back to Lisbon under André Gonçalves to report the discovery, and sailed on again to India.

Dom Manoel was sufficiently interested by the tale of Gonçalves to make farther investigation, equipped three vessels and sent them under the command of the Sevillian pilot Amerigo Vespucci to examine the new Terra da Vera Cruz. On the way they met Cabral’s fleet returning from India, and this explorer put his helm about and with them re-found eastern South America, sailing along and charting most of the coast of Brazil. It is the precision and not the inaccuracies of these sixteenth century maps that form their most remarkable feature.

On this journey much hostility was shown by coast-dwelling natives, and a couple of landing parties met with disaster; the cannibal taste of the “Indians” was plainly demonstrated. No settlement was made. A year later, in 1503, Duarte Coelho came with another fleet, seeking the waterway to India that was one of the dreams of adventurous Europe: another, allied to the first, was the quest of Prester John. Anyone who could find a quick sea-path to India and at the same time find and form an alliance with the mysterious Christian Priest-King, would wield power beyond rivalry.

Duarte Coelho was unlucky. His flagship and three other vessels were cast away on Fernando Noronha island, the other two reaching the shelter of what is today Bahia. Here the natives were kindly disposed, a little colony of twenty-four men elected to stay behind near Caravellas, and after a stay of five months the rest of the explorers went back to Portugal. They took with them logs cut from the coastal forests which proved to yield a dye equal to that known in Europe as “brasil,” a much prized deep red colour: they also carried back Brazilian monkeys and some of the parrots and macaws still common in the north. Many of the old maps of Brazil are marked “Terra dos Papagaios” (Land of Parrots) instead of the official “Terra da Vera (or Santa) Cruz,” but it was not long before the new country became generally known as the Land of Brazil-wood, and finally as Brazil.

From 1503 onwards no attempt at settlement or conquest of the land was made for thirty years; captains on their way to India called at the coast for fresh water, and on the return sailed into some northern wooded bay and cut brazil-wood. The real attention of Portugal was taken up with the splendid spoil that fell so readily to her hands in India; she loaded her caravels with the silks and spices and precious stones of the East, just as Spain a little later loaded her stout ships with the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas. Territory offering nothing more and nothing less than fertile soil and genial climate was little considered in the midst of those visions of gold: since then the whole world has been plunged in blood for the sake of such wide spaces of land. Land in great areas only became highly valorized, both in the Americas and Africa, when the virile races of Europe needed space for their teeming, dominating children.

Brazil benefited from her lack of wealthy cities offering loot. As a consequence of that lack she was not flooded, as were Mexico and Peru, with gold-seeking, brutal adventurers, but was instead slowly colonized by genuine settlers. Some of them did not come willingly, for Portugal used certain tracts spasmodically as penal settlements, but in the Middle Ages severe punishment was frequently dealt out for offences that would today be considered light, and many of the convicts thrust across the Atlantic turned out to be good citizens: good or bad, they were the stuff of which bold pioneers are made, and to their extraordinary hardihood and that of their tireless descendants of mixed blood the conquest of interior Brazil was due.

Portugal delayed occupation of Brazil until other European countries began to establish themselves along different parts of the neglected shore. In 1515 the mouth of the Rio de la Plata had been discovered by Juan de Solis, and Spanish settlements were set up south of the Portuguese claims—still indefinite. In 1540 the Spanish captain Orellana made his wonderful journey from Peru over the Andes and down the Amazon, and roused the interest of Europe, but long before then the Dutch were trying to establish outposts on northerly Amazonian tributaries, and the French had settled a little colony at Pernambuco.

Of these the Portuguese made short shrift, a fleet being sent from Lisbon specially for their expulsion, but the settlement made by royal orders on the same spot met with no better fate, for in 1527 French raiders sacked the infant colony, to be followed a few months later by an English raiding party under Hawkins. The Portuguese Government, forced to take measures, determined on a plan which had already given good results on the island of Madeira. Instead of assuming the burden of colonization on the account of the government, large grants of land were made to Portuguese of high standing or wealth; on them fell the burden of settlement, but on the other hand to them would accrue the chief rewards of tropical adventure and industry. The Crown attained several objects at one stroke—the colonizing of a difficult country, the rewarding of many noblemen whose claims were apt to be troublesome, while at the same time an outlet was provided for the adventurous and turbulent. The waning of her power in India left Portugal with a surging class of stout-hearted folk upon her hands: she sent them to Brazil, and suffered as Brazil benefited.

The allotment of Brazil into separate _capitanias_ (captaincies) was made in 1530; the average coastal strip presented to the holders was fifty leagues, and as to the depth of the land commanded was a matter for the individual captain: he could have as much as he could conquer. No one had any idea of what the hinterlands contained, for, with the exception of the riverine explorations of the Spanish on the Orinoco and the Plata, Europeans had not visited the South American interior east of the Andes.

Martim Affonso de Souza came out in 1531 as Admiral of the Coast, empowered to mark out the capitanias and to keep one for himself; he found French vessels hovering about Pernambuco, seized them, and went on to Bahia (Bahia de Todos os Santos) named thirty years before and frequently visited, where he found a Portuguese sailor, survivor of a shipwreck, married to the daughter of an Indian ruler and living like a patriarch with a large family already grown up about him. This Caramarú, “big fish caught among rocks,” was of great help to the Portuguese when the colony was founded, and his half-breed family, possessing Indian knowledge and Portuguese leanings, formed the nucleus of the true hardy Brazilian of the north coast. Sailing south on his delimitation errand, Affonso de Souza entered Rio harbour, but passed on to mark out his own capitania on the hot sands of the São Paulo coast, near the present Santos, under the name of São Vicente. By a freak of fate, here the story of old Caramarú was duplicated. On the uplands beyond the Serra do Mar another Portuguese sailor was living, one João Ramalho married to the daughter of the native chief Tibiriça, and also surrounded by an extraordinary number of descendants: these children and grandchildren of Ramalho were the first _mamelucos_, that bold tribe who were thorns in the flesh of the Jesuits, but who were instrumental in giving Matto Grosso, Goyaz and Minas Geraes to Brazil.

Martim Affonso de Souza marked out twelve capitanias, but of the accepted applicants few besides himself made serious and systematic efforts to settle and hold their great lands; the rights offered them were very large, including almost every authority of the king himself except that of coining money: possession was perpetual and hereditary.[1] “If these hereditary captaincies had continued to exist,” says the Brazilian historian, Luis de Queiros, “we should have today so many republics, corresponding to the number of territorial divisions, and not a homogenous whole which a nation so full of life and hope as Brazil constitutes. By good luck, however, almost all of the recipients of the grants were unsuccessful in their attempts at colonization, and some of them did not make any real beginning....”

In the far north nothing was done by the _donatario_ to colonize Ceará, and it was not until the French had for years established themselves on that coast and inside the mouth of the Amazon that, in 1616, a Portuguese military expedition from Maranhão turned out these rivals and founded Pará. Genuine colonization work was done at three outstanding points—Pernambuco, Bahia, and São Vicente, or rather, São Paulo, which became active nuclei of agricultural production, of a sturdy population born on the soil, dowered with a clannish fighting spirit that, local as it was, did much that was of extreme value in the evolution of Brazil. The strength of two of these centres, S. Paulo and Bahia, was largely derived from the two old Portuguese castaways, the battered heroes Ramalho and Correia; that of the third markedly successful colony, Pernambuco, was due to the powerful personality and real ability of the Captain, Duarte Coelho; he was aided by the fertility of the soil of the north-eastern promontory, Pernambuco showing itself so prolific a producer of sugar that it began to feed the mother country from very early colonial days, no less than forty-five ships a year calling to fetch sugar and brazil-wood. Settled with good immigrants by Duarte Coelho, who protested successfully against the dumping of convicts upon his capitania and ruled his people like a feudal lord, Pernambuco was the only territory that escaped control by the Captain-General sent out by the Crown in 1549 to try the effect of centralized power upon the languishing capitanias. Hardy and jealous of their independence, the Pernambucanos remained a little kingdom apart, ruled over by Duarte Coelho and his wife’s relatives after him, until the Dutch appeared in strength off the north Brazilian coast and from 1630 onwards for over twenty years held possession of Pernambuco and a long strip of the coast above it. The Pernambucanos have always been a factor to be reckoned with in Brazilian affairs: the territory they hold is richly productive and has never looked back in commercial importance. They do not forget that great tracts of land were in early days won by their ancestors by hard fighting from the Indians, nor that they have sent many an able son to high places in the governing of Brazil. It was the productivity of the Pernambuco (“Nova Lusitania”) and Bahia colonies that made colonial Brazil valuable and attracted hardy settlers to her shores.

[Illustration:

Ponte Santa Isabel, Recife (Pernambuco).

Praça Mauá—one of Rio’s wharves.

Water-front at Bahia, Lower City. ]

Bahia was the queen city of Brazil from 1549, when Thomé de Souza was sent out as Captain-General and made this the administrative and political head of the country, until 1762, when Rio de Janeiro became the Vice-regal Capital; she also was a fighting city, seized and sacked now and again but successful in getting rid of her foes in the end, and she was the centre of tobacco cultivation from early days. When gold and diamonds were discovered in the interior valleys and serras the Bahianos played a plucky part in exploration and opening, as well as charting, regions of forest and sertão hitherto unseen by white men. To the men of Bahia, as well as to the courageous legions of Pernambucanos led by the Albuquerque family, Brazil owes much: but the great pioneers, the unsurpassed confronters of hardship, the men who made Brazil the huge country that she is instead of the strip upon the Atlantic seaboard that she might have remained, were the _bandeirantes_ of São Paulo.

When the gallant Martim Affonso de Souza, sailing first to Cananea, eventually built his modest mud and palm leaf town at S. Vicente, he was saved from the hostility of the Tamoyo Indians by the friendliness of Ramalho, father of many children by a daughter of Chief Tibiriça. The Tamoyos as a rule gave a great deal of trouble to the Portuguese, although the French in their numerous attempts at settlement along the Brazilian littoral always managed to make fast friends of this tribe. To anyone who knows the São Vicente of today, it is difficult to imagine on what the first settlers lived; the shore is hot, sandy, backed by mangrove swamps, producing beans, maize, mandioca and sugar. Small wonder that an early chronicler said that to live in these colonies it was necessary to forget all European habits of life, to begin a new existence upon new food, with all old ideas of comfort and even necessity thrown aside.

When a company of Jesuit priests, headed by José de Anchieta, came to S. Vicente, they found their ministrations thrown away on a disorderly and undisciplined band of settlers. Conceiving their duty to be here, as the Padre de las Casas and many of his cloth conceived it in Mexico and Central America, the Christianizing of the natives, Anchieta decided to leave the coast (where Braz Cubas had now built his little chapel and hospital on the island where Santos stands today) and seek converts in the uplands. The mountain barrier was climbed, and on January 25, 1554, an altar was set up on the green and well-watered plains of the interior, and mass was said on a site named São Paulo de Piritininga, in honour of the saint whose day it was. The habit of early missionaries and discoverers of naming new places with the Roman calendar in their hands has helped the historian to fix many a doubtful date.

A few miles away from the mission was the town of João Ramalho, who had been tactfully confirmed in his possession of lands, the “Borda do Campo,” by Portugal, while his settlement was formally named a township with the title of Santo André in 1533. Its site was near the present São Bernardo, an open sunny region of prairie with woods on the horizon.

With this tribe of Ramalho’s making the Jesuits sought no connection; they could not convert those half-breeds any more than they could make the hardy impenitents on the coast give up stealing Indians. Better and more pliable material was to hand in the pure Indian tribes; two groups, one under Tibiriça and the other under chief Cai-Uby, built their cabins in new S. Paulo, Tibiriça’s people forming a line which is now the Rua São Bento, while the other converts guarded the road that led over the hills to S. Vicente.[2] It was not long before trouble came. João Ramalho’s children plagued the priests: the priests retaliated by getting an order from the then Captain-General, Mem de Sá, by which Santo André was razed to the ground and its inhabitants forcibly incorporated in São Paulo. The latter soon changed its character as a peaceful mission settlement, the Indians suffered from aggressions by the whites who now came up from S. Vicente or their own half-white kin, and in the end a concerted attack was made by the natives upon the town, only old Tibiriça remaining loyal. The Indians were beaten, but the Jesuits saw that the mission could not be restored; they determined to carry the cross farther afield. With indomitable energy and indifference to suffering the band of priests made their way across the interior plains and woodlands, until they founded a new city (Ciudad Real) at the junction of the Paraná and Piquery, and began to gather the Indians together in new settlements.

For a time they were undisturbed. But the life of the new Portuguese colonies depended upon agriculture; the white men were neither many enough nor sufficiently acclimated to till the fields themselves, and they seized the unfortunate natives and forced them to field labour. It was unsatisfactory work, as a rule: the native of the eastern coasts of South America was not a cultivator of the soil by habit, but rather a hunter and fisher, as he is still in his interior retreats. They were too on the whole a gentle as well as an idle race, and they died like flies under the whip.

It was not long before the coast plantations of the Portuguese were denuded of workers: to get more slaves it was necessary to follow the Indian across the sertões. It was about 1562 that the first slave-hunting expeditions, the “entradas,” began; they were headed by the _mamelucos_, the descendants of Ramalho, who had no hesitation about betraying their native kinsfolk to the white man. Violence was avoided: the preferred plan was to coax any tribe approached “_com muito geito e enganos_” and only when blandishment failed was force resorted to. Tamed natives accompanied the “entries” and when the children of the woods heard tales of waiting pleasures told in their own tongue, whole clans often followed willingly to the coast, never to return. When they retreated more deeply and became more wary, and it was found that the Jesuits were advising them, a grimmer system was planned; it was decided to conduct open warfare against the missions.

By this time, in the first part of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits had attained remarkable success with their converts; they were not content with teaching them the Christian faith, but insisted upon the girls learning spinning and weaving while the men planted and reaped. Results were much the same as those desired by the coast settlers, but methods differed. About Ciudad Real, in the Guayará region, fourteen great missions flourished when the Paulistas began to disturb them: by the middle of the sixteen hundreds they were all broken up, the fields waste, the priests fled, and the Indian converts prisoners in S. Paulo or hiding in the forests.

To accomplish this, more careful expeditions were arranged than the earlier “entradas,” although the _mamelucos_ had made some wonderful journeys, across the river Paraguay, over the Chaco and into Bolivia, now and again having a brush with the Spanish settlers of the South, who, later on, were expelled from tentative settlements in Rio Grande do Sul: no land was too wide for the Paulistas to hold. But the “bandeiras” were now organized like an army, men enlisted in them regularly and accepted rigorous discipline. Beginning with the deliberate object of uprooting Jesuit control of the Indians, explorations continued in this form for over eighty years with other aims added—conquest of the interior, discovery for its own sake, and search for mines of gold and precious stones, as well as the repression of Spanish entries from the south and from Peru.

At the time when these extraordinary expeditions began the interior of South America was still unknown. The high sertão and the forests were still full of mystery, although the coast had been stripped of such marvels as the giants who frightened Pinzon’s sailors, the men fourteen feet high seen by Magalhães, and the alligators with two tails which Vespucci reported. In the interior magic still reigned, with its trees yielding soap and glass, Lake Doirada with shining cities about its margin, and the marvellous kingdom of Paititi, lure of many disastrous expeditions, where some of the natives were dwarfs, others fifteen feet tall, some had their feet turned backwards and others had legs like birds. The bandeirante opened the sertão and dispelled these wonders.

In his book, _O Sertão antes da Conquista_, Sampaio says that the Paulista “was compelled by his habitat to be a bandeirante: the conquest of the interior was written in his destiny.” If that is true, at least these labours were taken up with a kind of fierce joy. There was scarcely an able-bodied man of the time who did not join one or more of the bandeiras, and there is on record the case of Manoel de Campos who made twenty-four of these journeys. Many bandeirantes never returned, remaining in the sertão to found towns in Minas, Matto Grosso or Goyaz; some, returning after years of absence, found their wives married to other men, while “many heroes brought back from the sertão children whom they had not taken in,” says Rocha Pombo.

The bandeira went always under the supreme command of a leader to whom implicit obedience was due; before setting out the bandeira in a body heard mass, the leader confessed and made his will, invariably including the phrase ... “_setting out to war and being mortal and not knowing what God our Lord will do with me_.”... A priest accompanied each bandeira, not only to shrive the dying and bury the dead, but by way of easing the conscience of the band regarding their mission and “reconciling it with the Divine Mercy.” The outfit for every man was made at his own cost, and if it is possible to judge by the baggage of Braz Gonçalves, who died on an expedition in 1636, and whose goods were scrupulously recorded and sold at auction, it was simple. His greatest possessions were three negro slaves, but he had also an awl, a bit and a hammer, a pair of worn slippers; some lead and gunpowder, one tin plate, a chisel, a mould for casting shot, a ball of thread, an old cape.

It was only possible to face what lay beyond the outposts of settlement when equipped and ready for war; the bandeirantes knew that there was constant risk of attack by Indians and that nature opposed them with as fierce a menace. The country through which they passed was likely to be foodless, and they were prepared to sow seeds of grain in green valleys, camp, and wait until the crop was harvested before going on their way.

The rivers of the interior plateau, flowing westward with the tilt of the sertão, themselves offered a great highway of adventure to the early bandeirantes, bringing them into Paraguay and the outskirts of Bolivia and the Argentine, but as they went farther afield the Paraná was left to the east, Goyaz and Matto Grosso were traversed, and the path of the pioneers led up unknown mountains, through untracked woodland; they marched across boundless prairies as if navigating the ocean, with only a sea-compass and the starry night to guide them. Nothing checked these explorers; had not the discovery of the General Mines turned their minds to gold-hunting, they might have followed Antonio Raposo across the Andes and disputed Peru with the Spaniards. Wherever they penetrated they established outposts and forts counting a collision with the Spanish as the best reason for creating a stronghold: it was the work of these untiring sertanistas that led the way to the present magnitude of Brazil.

The bandeira was the original creation of the Paulista, without parallel in history; not even the white pioneer of North America had the same functions: he neither wandered so far nor performed such deeds. João Ribeiro remarks that “as in the case of the caravans of the desert, the first virtue of the bandeirante was a resignation almost fatalistic, and abstinence carried to an extreme; those who set out did not know if they would ever return, never expected to see their homes again—and this often happened.” The bandeira in its greatest phase was a travelling city, a commune linked by mutual interests, that surged forward over the silent country; nothing deterred them, whether mountain passes, precipices, hunger, weariness, or constant fighting. If they had a path it was that of the crosses on the graves of the men who had gone before them. They went always on foot.

There is a long list of great sertanistas. It includes many names well known in Brazil today—Martins, Soares, de Souza, Barreto, Tourinho, Sá, Leme, Paes, Almeida, Dias, Ribeiro, Carvalho, Rodrigues, and a host of others; few men escaped the lure of the sertão, and some leave stories which are the Iliads of Brazil, putting these among the great adventures of all time. There is for instance Antonio Raposo, who headed a bandeira which left S. Paulo in 1628, and which was “the biggest and most devastating known.” Three thousand people composed the expedition, and its main object was the destruction of the Jesuit missions on the Paraná river, near Ciudad Real. One by one the missions, which had grown into thriving industrial communities, were attacked, besieged, and smashed; as they fell, escaping brothers or converts carried the warning to other convents, stiff fights were made, and in some cases long resistance was maintained. But in the end the Jesuits were broken and dispersed, and the bandeirantes went back to S. Paulo with thousands of Indian slaves. The courageous Jesuits went deeper into the interior, collected such remnants as they could of their property and their protégés, and began the work again.

Raposo, years afterwards, made another journey which brought him into fame as a legendary hero; he crossed the Paulista sertão by Tibagy, thence traversed the heart of Brazil from south-east to north-west, entered Peru, scaling the Andes, crossed to the Pacific and waded into those waters sword in hand; returning, he discovered the headwaters of the Amazon, sailed down it, and when at last after years of travel he came back to São Paulo no one recognized him.

A magnificent figure among indomitable bandeirantes is that of Fernão Dias de Paes Leme. Well may the wild sertão be haunted by the shade of such a man as this, or of his lieutenant, Borba Gato, or that father and son who were known among the Indians of Govaz as Old Devil the First and Old Devil the Second.

Fernão Dias, the “Hercules of the Sertão,” was the discoverer of the emerald mines of Sumidouro, after ten years spent in search. He was a famous slave-chaser of the sixteen hundreds, an extremely religious man whose zeal was only assuaged by much building of chapels and convents with the money earned in long raids; practical, astute, suave, he won his ends by tact rather than violence, among his exploits being that of leading the whole of the allied Goyana tribes to São Paulo. Approaching their territory Dias made no threats, but camped nearby, cultivated fields of cereals and vegetables, and so ingratiated himself into the confidence of Tombu the chief that one day the old Indian collected his people and agreed to go to the pleasant lands of which the Paulista spoke. Five thousand natives thus marched voluntarily into captivity; Tombu remained the worshipper of Fernão Dias until his death, but with the exception of runaways none of the Goyanas ever saw the sertão again.

This was in 1661. Three years later the Portuguese court, greatly desiring the discovery and development of mining regions which should yield tribute to Lisbon, offered special rewards to discoverers of mines, appointed an Administrator of Mines in Espirito Santo, where some coloured stones had been found, and Affonso VI wrote to Fernão Dias asking him to search the interior that he knew so well for the source of the “emeralds” whose beauty raised hopes of finding mines equal in value to those of the Spaniards in New Granada (Colombia), still today the cradle of the finest emeralds. As a matter of fact the green stones found in Brazil are the beautiful but semi-precious tourmalines.

Consenting, the famous bandeirante made some preliminary excursions and in 1676, when he was over eighty years old, led out a great _comitiva_; the first winter’s camp was made in a valley beyond the Rio Grande, the second at Bomfim, the third at Sumidouro. At last in the Serro Frio some showings of gold were located, and on the way back Dias died by the Rio das Velhas, in the far interior across Minas Geraes. The bandeira had gone through great suffering, and scores of men were buried by the way: at one time the remnants of the expedition had appealed to Dias to give up the hunt and return, and on his refusal made a plan to kill him. The conspiracy was headed by a young man who was the son of Dias by an Indian girl, and dearly loved by the old sertanista, but when convinced of his boy’s guilt Dias hanged him, pardoning the other plotters but driving them from the camp.

To Fernão Dias was due the exploration of what is now the State of Minas Geraes, the whole of it falling practically under his sway as the founder of at least a dozen towns in that hilly interior, the majority surviving to this day. His search had a curious sequel: his son-in-law and faithful aide, Borba Gato, who had found gold mines in Sabará and registered them in 1700, was returning to S. Paulo after the death of his leader when he met with a party headed by the official Administrator General of Mines. Borba Gato’s charts and proofs were demanded, refused, a quarrel broke out, and the servants of the pioneer set upon the Administrator and killed him. Not daring to face S. Paulo with this tale, Borba Gato fled to the interior where a tribe of Indians friendly to him dwelt by the Rio Doce, and there lived hidden out of the reach of the law for twenty years. At the end of that time, attempts to find the Sabará mines having failed, he was offered a pardon in exchange for the secret; he accepted the offer, returned to civilization, and presently retiring to a farm with his family died peacefully in his bed at the age of ninety.

A direct result of the murder of the Administrator was the stocking of the sertão of Minas with cattle: the entourage of the dead man, as much horrified by the deed as was Borba Gato, instead of returning to the capital took to the bush with the seeds, stores and livestock without which no expedition set out, and formed nuclei of fazendas in a score of different places.

One of the earliest discoveries of gold in Brazil was made by Bartholomeu Bueno da Silva in the Serra Doirada, in Goyaz, about 1682. He it was who found the Indians wearing scraps of gold as ornament, and tricked them into showing the place of its origin; displaying a bowl of agua-ardente (aguardente—spirit made from sugarcane) he set light to it, telling the Indians that it was water and that he would in like manner set fire to all their springs and rivers if they did not reveal the source of their gold. Southey calls Bartholomeu Bueno “the most renowned adventurer of his age,” and to him is due the opening-up of Goyaz, until then only entered by passing slave-hunters: but his discoveries were not followed up and it remained for his son, nicknamed by the Indians Anhangoera the Second his father having been known to them as Old Devil the First on account of the incident referred to above, to re-find the mines and extend the gold-mining fever to Goyaz. It was in 1722 that this son, then a man of over fifty years, succeeded in obtaining government help for exploration: by this time Minas was overrun with gold seekers from every part of Brazil and the authorities were ready to give active help to new mining expeditions. This bandeira set out with great éclat, crossed the Rio Grande and wandered for three years, the leader seeking landmarks dimly remembered from his boyhood. Persistent, patient, conciliating his weary followers, he founded the town of Barra, at last located the gold mines, returned to São Paulo and got together a new band of men, led the way back and settled them at what is now the City of Goyaz, and so closed with a remarkable colonizing feat the last of the great expeditions into the high sertão.

[Illustration:

_The Falls of Iguassú._

On the boundary of Argentina with Brazil; this series of lovely cascades is said to have altogether four times as much force as Niagara. ]

A little later gold-miners penetrating to Matto Grosso began operating at Cuyabá,[3] and almost immediately the discovery of diamonds at Diamantina brought a new rush of people into this far interior region. The day of the explorer, the true bandeirante, was over, and the age of mining was by this time in its epoch of greatest excitement.

Few writers on Brazil have refrained from scourging the bandeirantes for their cruelty to the wretched natives and for their destruction of the Jesuit missions. It is true that they were brutal, but theirs was a brutal age, and in explanation, not extenuation, of their deeds it should be remembered that they, the white civilian colonists, were fighting for their own preservation against hostile Indians whose hand, quite naturally, was against the invader, and secondly against their economic ruin by the line of action taken by the Society of Jesus. Not only did the patient Jesuits coax and catechise the Indian, but they put him to work in the fields and sold abroad the product of his hands: when later on conflict raged in North Brazil between colonists and Jesuits the chief grievance was that the Society, for whose support the civilian community was taxed heavily, used the Indian labour denied by Royal decree to the settlers, and also maintained great stores (_armazens_) where every kind of European merchandise was kept.

It was for this reason, and not because they were bad Christians, that the colonists of Maranhão once stood on the shore with guns in their hands and refused to allow a shipload of Jesuits to land until they had given a solemn promise to do nothing with the Indians except to convert them; they regarded the members of this religious body as business rivals. Nor were the Jesuits tactful in their dealings with colonists or colonial government authorities; secure in the support given them not only by the Pope but, especially perhaps in the period of Spanish rule in Brazil under Philip II, by the King, they made no concessions, defied the civilians, and apparently courted trials of strength: right or wrong, they were able to count upon judgment in their favour in any quarrel referred to Europe.

When the bandeirantes began their unmerciful raids upon the Jesuit communities in the south Brazilian sertão the number of missions had increased from thirteen in 1610 to twenty-one in 1628, and to them had been largely drawn the natives who once, as Thomé de Souza said in writing to Portugal, had been so thick that “even if they were killed for market there would be no end of them.” Attacked, the _padres_ might well have counted upon help from the Governor General of Brazil, but for the fact that about this time the whole military attention of the authorities was taken up with the determined aggressions of the Dutch upon the northern capitanias; the affairs of São Paulo were left in the hands of the Paulistas. The great matter of regret is that in the case of the Jesuits much excellent constructive work was wasted, just as the fine colonizing work of the French in Rio and in Pará and Maranhão was destroyed, and that of the Dutch on the Amazon and in Pernambuco; the spirit and the interests of the times forbade the Portuguese to allow settlers of other races a foothold in Brazil, but nevertheless it was unfortunate that so much good blood and good work was thrown away in a huge land that so badly needed both.

While the Paulistas were exploring and adding great tracts to the colony in the south, a law unto themselves, undisturbed by invasion except an occasional attempt by the Spaniards from the Plate and attacks on S. Vicente by English and French corsairs, the history of the north was one of constant aggression and desperate defence. Until the year 1578 no concerted attempts were made by England, France and Holland against the colonies of Portugal, a country towards which feeling was not unfriendly but in that year King Sebastião of Portugal, with the flower of his nobility was killed in North Africa in the terrible battle of Alcazar el Kebir, and Philip II of Spain, the “Demon of the Middle Ages,” seized Portugal and all that was Portuguese two years later. The South American colonies automatically came under his sway, and at once fell heir to the feud between Spain and her European neighbours. Brazil was fair game, and during the sixty years that elapsed before Portugal was able to re-assert her independence the easily approached northern capitanias were threatened, sacked and occupied by one or another of the three chief enemies of Spain. Sackings of coast towns made no great difference to the development of Brazil; when the ransom was paid the raiders sailed away and the business of life was resumed without any vital change; no towns were ever ruined by such predatory visits. Occupation of districts was another matter, and, with the exception of loss of lives every one of which was precious in young colonies, the effect was good rather than harmful; the period of Dutch rule on the northern coast of Brazil was a lasting beneficial stimulus. Nor was Spanish control of any direct hurt to the Portuguese colonies: their internal management was little interfered with, Portuguese officials continued to be appointed to Brazilian posts, and if Spain did not adequately defend them because her hands were already desperately full she at least did Brazil the kindness to leave it alone. The one serious administrative measure she took was the formation in Lisbon of a Junta to care for Brazilian commerce, similar to the Council of the Indies sitting in Madrid, and this was undoubtedly useful: the narrow monopolistic trading policy pursued was simply in line with the ideas and practice of the times. It was protection carried to an extreme, was useful at the time of its initiation, and, if it outlived its usefulness in its most irksome manifestations, the principle has so far survived that today, in the third lustre of the twentieth century, it may be said that only one great commercial nation has ever definitely thrown it aside.

The group of capitanias extending from Espirito Santo northwards to Ceará were when Brazil came under Spanish rule the most productive of all; it was but eighty years from the date of Cabral’s discovery, and only fifty from the time of colonization, but flourishing populations were settled along the seaboard, growing sugar, tobacco and cotton and cutting stacks of dyewoods to fill the fifty ships a year that called at the main ports. Bahia, seat of the Captain-General’s administration, was also a bishopric, and the chief religious orders had settled in each considerable town and founded churches, schools and convents. In 1570 a Royal Decree forbade the compulsory use of Indians as labourers, and to fill the ranks of field workers Africans were brought in: to this idea the Portuguese were inured, for the West Coast of Africa had been a source of labour supply for them since 1440; it was the discovery that negroes could be transplanted to the Americas and would there work with docility, thrive and multiply, that made possible the cultivation of thousands of square miles of land, both in North and South America, and warmly as we may reject the principle of slave labour now, it was the only one which could have opened American lands to the extent which they attained in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The white man could not have performed this physical labour.

Indian labour was abolished at the instance of the priests; it was remarkable that to the enslavement of Africans under circumstances equally brutal no objection was made. Negroes were brought to Brazil from 1574 onwards until the abolition of the slave trade, though not of slavery, in 1854. The debt of Brazil to the African negro is a very heavy one.

Soon after the junction of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns there began the series of purely plundering attacks delivered by European enemies of Spain which lasted until the establishment of the Dutch at Pernambuco, but which were of so little political importance that in the meantime the Portuguese authorities were able to destroy entirely the French settlements at Maranhão and Pará which lasted from 1594 to 1615. The work of replacing French with Brazilian settlements was carried out by Jeronymo Albuquerque, son of a dominating Pernambuco family, and not only were well-started French colonies ruined but the exploration of the Amazon, commenced by the famous Daniel de la Touche (Seigneur de la Ravardière) was abruptly ended.

In 1621 the Dutch Company of the West Indies was founded, companion organization to the rich East Indies Company; with the approval of the Dutch Government the Company was equipped for settlement and conquest, and could call upon the home authorities for the help of ships and armed men if war occurred in the course of operations. A fleet of thirty-six vessels under Admiral Jacob Willekens sailed for Brazil early in 1624, made directly for Bahia, and took the city without much trouble. Holding it was a different matter, the population taking to arms, and a year later a combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet arrived and forced the Dutch to capitulate. Another impermanent attack was made in 1627, and in 1630 a different point of aggression was chosen by a great fleet of seventy vessels: the Pernambucan city of Olinda was besieged and taken, the Dutch secured themselves in power and remained masters of this and three other capitanias afterwards seized; they were governed by the West India Company for nearly twenty-five years.

Evidences of the occupation of Olinda and its sister settlement, Recife, now the capital and a very flourishing city, are to be seen in the many houses surviving with curved gables, high unbroken fronts, the exterior walls shining with blue and white glazed tiles; the Dutch brought with them their love of order and cleanliness, good methods in plantation management and excellent organizing power, and the only genuine objection to the rule of the Hollander in Brazil was that the country did not belong to him. All Brazilian historians bear witness to the merit of Dutch methods.

[Illustration:

_Old and New Brazil._ ]

A Remnant of Colonial days; street Modern residences near the Gloria in Olinda, old capital of Gardens, facing the bay, Rio de Pernambuco. Janeiro.

The West India Company was able to induce an admirable Governor to take charge of the new possession, Prince John Maurice of Nassau; he reached Recife in 1637, and inaugurated a conciliatory policy towards such Pernambucanos as would accept Dutch rule: those who would not were pursued into the interior forests where they retreated under one of the Albuquerques, and were forced to flee from Alagôas into Bahia. When such resisters were caught they were shipped to Dutch settlements in the East Indies.

Religious freedom was promulgated by the Protestant rulers, more systematic administration of settlements and estates inaugurated, better sugar milling methods introduced as well as farming implements, and the scientific exploration of the interior was made. Prince Maurice brought with him map-makers, geologists, botanists and expert mineralogists, and sent them to the valleys and hills of the Bahian hinterlands. Elias Herkmann took an expedition of one hundred men from Recife in 1641, to make scientific investigations, and although he did not find mines of importance he studied native relics and language, subsequently publishing a book on the Tapuyo race.

George Marcgraf and Wilhelm Piso are also Dutch names of note in connection with Brazil; the former studied Brazilian topography and water systems and wrote a treatise on the subject as well as the _Historia Rerum Naturalium Brazilium_; the latter was the first classifier of Brazilian flora and fauna. “We owe to him,” says Dr. Egas Moniz of Bahia, “the discovery of the emetic-cathartic properties of ipecacuanha and copaiba” as well as the therapeutic virtues of jaborandi and red mangue and several other drugs obtained from the Brazilian _matto_. The first scientific charting of the sertão behind Pernambuco, Alagôas and north Bahia was done during this time; herds of cattle already wandered over interior pastures, and settlers led by the independent spirit which renders the Brazilian indifferent to solitude had formed fazendas along river borders; explorers had wandered by these water paths looking for mines, but systematic maps and charts were lacking.

In 1640 Portugal revolted from Spain, regained her independence, and offered the crown to a member of the House of Braganza, a line which retained its inheritance until a few years ago. The effect upon the Americas was again notable; the Pernambucanos, still carrying on guerilla warfare from the forests, were heartened, obtained help from an enthusiastic Bahia, and redoubled their efforts; the Dutch came to an agreement with Portugal that all possessions conquered by them during the Spanish régime should be held, and tried to extend their holdings farther north—an effort which was vain in itself, costly in life and money, and hardened the determination of the colonists to do for themselves what the mother country would not do on their behalf. In 1643 Prince Maurice returned to Holland: he had the interests of the colony as such at heart too much to please the West India Company. A liberal minded man, he wished to see the colonial ports opened to free commerce, succeeded in getting the Company to forego all monopolies except that of taking dyewoods away from Brazil and sending in slaves and munitions of war, any Dutch captain being free to visit ports controlled by his compatriots; these were not agreeable pills for a monopolistic organization to swallow. On the other hand in recalling Maurice of Nassau the Company lost prestige, henceforward carried on a losing struggle with the virile Brazilians, and were forced out of section after section until by 1648 only the forts of Parahyba, Rio Grande do Norte, the island of Itamaracá and the city of Recife were in Dutch hands. A certain embarrassment was created in Europe by this situation, and the Portuguese Government, taken to task by Holland, sent emissaries to the insurgent Pernambucanos to order suspension of hostilities: the leaders replied that they “would go to receive punishment for their disobedience after they had turned the invaders out of Pernambuco,” and went on with the war. Holland herself, now at loggerheads with England or rather with Cromwell on account of her support given to the Stuarts, could not help her Brazilian colony; a severe defeat was inflicted by the Pernambucans in 1649, at the battle of Guararapes, and the Dutch, never recovering from this blow, were finally obliged to capitulate to Francisco Barretto in January, 1654. The Pernambucan attackers were nerved to this final effort, the storming of Recife, by the news of the disaster inflicted on van Tromp’s fleet in the English Channel at the hands of Blake.

Three months later the Dutch commander with all his troops left Brazil, and the only fragments remaining to the States General after a tremendous outlay of money and blood were a few islands in the West Indies and a piece of the Guiana country: small return for great effort. Portugal paid eight million florins to the Dutch in settlement of Brazilian differences and agreed to allow Holland free trade with the American colonies in all articles except the precious brazil-wood.

The chief results of Dutch occupation of the four capitanias of the north-eastern promontory for twenty-four years were, first, stimulation of world interest in this part of the vast Americas, for the sea-captains who carried Brazilian products for the first time into other parts of Europe than Portugal acted as advance agents of Brazilian commerce: second, scientific investigation into natural products and demonstration of the value of drugs peculiar to this part of South America: third, introduction of better town management systems: fourth, creation of a healthy national spirit in the northern provinces, with lasting effect upon character: and the quickening of colonization in the extreme north. It was not until the Dutch and French settled in Ceará and Maranhão and on the Amazon that serious efforts were made to develop these tropical territories under the equator; the year 1620 witnessed the first arrival of settlers of Portuguese nationality in Maranhão when two hundred families came from the Azores.

Another interesting and direct result of the Dutch intervention was the creation of the Companhia do Commercio do Brasil (Commercial Company of Brazil) by the Governor General, intended as a set-off to the Dutch West India Company. It was established in 1650, received monopolies and concessions of a valuable character, and in return was obliged to provide a powerful armed fleet to convoy merchant vessels through enemy-infested seas. The Commercial Company did as a fact render great services to the Brazilians fighting against the Dutch, blockading northern ports while insurgent armies attacked by land.

While the north was struggling with the Dutch and French and incidentally becoming solidified by the tussle until a genuine national feeling came into existence, Bahia, beating off attacks and remaining the administrative residence of a Captain-General, was the centre of the wealthiest part of the colony; all the slaves brought from Africa were sold here, and although they were partly distributed, this was the chief slave-owning region and is still the place where more pure negroes are to be seen than anywhere else in Brazil. Farther south Espirito Santo, one of the oldest of Brazilian colonies, was growing cane and raising cattle, but suffered from raiding foreigners, as also did Ilhéos; Rio de Janeiro became the seat of a second Captaincy-General in 1608, for a time, with command over S. Vicente and Espirito Santo but had no importance until the discovery of mines made her the chief gateway to the golden regions. Out of the path of the Dutch, whose object was wide agricultural lands, Rio neither suffered nor gained as did the North; at this part of the Brazilian coast the mountain barrier comes right down to the sea’s edge, the granite wall shouldering into the waters of the deeply indented bay: there is very little land suitable for plantations except in narrow valleys until the Serra do Mar is climbed. It was this lack of sugar land that kept Rio uncolonized, lovely as she is, for half a century after the colonies on either side of her were started; settlement by the Portuguese might have been put off still longer if the French under Admiral Villegaignon had not taken possession of the bay in 1555, made friends with the Tamoyo Indians as the Portuguese were never able to do, fortified a rocky island, and established a Huguenot colony here—the ill-fated “_France Antarctique_.” The energetic Mem de Sá, Captain-General after Thomé de Souza, brought a fleet from Bahia, drove the French into hiding on the mainland, sent his nephew, Estacio de Sá, to Portugal to get help, and this gallant young man returned with a strong force in 1565. In two years’ time, with troops from Bahia and São Paulo assisting, the unfortunate Huguenots were utterly defeated, the remnants of the exiles retiring into the woods with their Indian allies and disappearing from history. The body of Estacio de Sá, killed in the last decisive fighting, was buried in the shade of the Pão d’Assucar near the first Portuguese town founded in the bay and named São Sebastião. Another member of the same family, Correia de Sá, was sent to head the new Portuguese settlement, and eventually died there at the age of 113.

Division of Brazil into two captaincies-general in 1608, to be united again soon afterwards and again subsequently divided, was part of the experiments made by the European home governments, apparently with the sincere wish to develop the country; it was supposed that a region so vast could not be governed by one man, but as a matter of fact the occupied territory was along the seaboard on the whole, and communication by sea was fairly speedy; from 1549 onwards, when the first Captain-General was appointed, the mother country bought up when convenient the strips of land belonging to the heirs of the _donatarios_; some new captaincies were also added from time to time, as that of Grão Pará in 1616, Minas Geraes, Matto Grosso and Goyaz after the discovery of gold and diamonds, and an independent State of Maranhão, governed separately from the rest of Brazil was also created in 1621, thus adding to the governmental confusion in spite of good intentions. Decentralization was increased by the lack of commercial exchange between the different regions, and no successful effort improved this fault until the notable Marquis de Pombal took matters in hand in a statesmanlike manner in the latter half of the eighteenth century, buying the capitanias which were yet in private hands, creating Brazil a viceroyalty and Rio the viceregal capital.

But before that date much water had flowed under Brazilian bridges. It is not the purpose of this book to give in detail the history of Brazil, but to show the chief events and their effect upon development. Following the creation of the capitania system and its series of coastal settlements came the penetration of the southern interior by the Jesuits in their “reductions,” and the scattering of these centres of Indian population at the hands of the bandeirantes; the next happening of extreme importance for Brazil was the seizure of different parts of the coast by the Dutch and French, with their stimulating effect upon Portuguese colonization; it was after this that the gold rush to the interior of Minas, Goyaz and Matto Grosso populated and opened up the sertão in tiny patches, but at the same time half denuded the coast of its settlers and injured the agricultural production of the country, the prosperity of which was almost entirely owing to the introduction of negro slaves, another great factor in Brazilian progress.

Today the mining industry of Brazil accounts for a very small item on her exports lists, chiefly because the diamonds which go out are mostly contraband, the gold is produced by only two principal mines, and while there is a promising export of manganese it is insignificant compared to the big business of the country or to the possibilities contained in Brazil’s mineral seamed mountains. In the early eighteenth century Brazil was a famous gold country, and it is reckoned that over five hundred million dollars’ worth of this metal has been taken out. Nearly all this gold was found in placers easily washed out by hand in the crudest manner; when the rich alluvial deposits along river valleys were exhausted Brazil ceased to be a gold producer on a spectacular scale. In Minas Geraes rich sands were found near the present Ouro Preto, the first mining city that was founded bearing the name of Villa Rica; all about it the whole country is still in heaps, turned over by the miners who came a couple of hundred years ago. In that day people flocked into Minas, coming by road from S. Paulo, by the S. Francisco river from Bahia, and by a shorter cut over the mountain passes from Rio. The bones of many folk remained by the way: it is said that of one band of 300 Paulistas setting out in 1725 only five persons, two white men and three negroes, reached their objective, the far interior mines of Cuyabá. It became necessary for the authorities to forbid the taking of negroes to the mines, so general was the abandonment of plantations, but the protest of the Crown was only half-hearted; it was eminently satisfactory that a stream of gold and diamonds should flow across the Atlantic to Lisbon, and it was of as little use for governors to point out the bad economy of coastal depopulation in the seventeen hundreds as it had been for Governor Diogo de Menezes to write to the King in 1608: “_Your Majesty may believe me that the true mines of Brazil are sugar and brazil-wood, whence your Majesty draws so much advantage without costing the Royal Treasury a single penny_.”

[Illustration:

_Two Views of São Paulo City._

São Paulo, premier city of the leader State of the Brazilian Union, stands on the breezy uplands of the southern plateau; it is a busy, prosperous centre with the first modern civic equipment. Population 550,000. ]

Quarrels at the mines led to the “Guerra dos Emboabas,” a factional disturbance between the Paulista discoverers and stranger gold-diggers; in the end the Paulistas were driven back, retired to their own uplands, and Minas Geraes was politically separated. Indomitably energetic, the men of S. Paulo turned their attention southward, where the Spaniards had entered and settled, drove the intruders out of Rio Grande do Sul and thus secured another, and one of the finest, regions for Brazil.

In 1750 King John V of Portugal died. The death of Portuguese monarchs did not as a rule make more than a perfunctory difference to the Colonies, but in this case the succession of José I was important because, with infinite faith in his brilliant Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, afterwards Marquis de Pombal, he left the chief affairs of the kingdom to these able hands. Pombal has been bitterly attacked: he was without doubt a man of iron; but he was a man of unusual foresight and intelligence who thoroughly realized the great value of Brazil, and did much to improve economic conditions in that huge possession. He seems to have had what Brazilians call a _palpite_ concerning the destiny of Brazil and Portugal.

Almost the first act of this statesman was the curtailing of the powers of the Inquisition: he abolished _autos da fé_, which must have given relief to Brazil if the historian Porto Seguro is correct in saying that no less than 500 Brazilians had been burnt alive in Lisbon by the Holy Office. With a special eye to Portuguese America he reduced taxes on tobacco and sugar, had the diamond traffic strictly supervised, created commercial companies to trade with Pará, Maranhão, Pernambuco and Parahyba; specially encouraged the plantation of rice and cotton in the North; legislated most of the commerce which was in the hands of the enterprising English into Portuguese channels; inaugurated good ship-building yards in Brazilian ports; settled boundary disputes with the Spanish on Brazilian borders; brought all capitanias still in private control under the Portuguese Crown—Cametá, Caeté, Ilha de Joannes, Itamaracá, Reconcavo de Bahia, Ilhéos, Porto Seguro, São Vicente and Campos dos Goytacazes; and as his most powerful and bitterly assailed effort he laid hands on the Jesuits. The Society, overwhelmed in the South, was strongly entrenched in the North since the opening of Pará and Maranhão; they had done wonderful and self-sacrificing work there; but they hostilized the colonists and made the mistake of arming their protégés the Indians against the settlers. They constituted themselves in Brazil as Bartolomé de las Casas did in Mexico and Guatemala, the Defenders of the Indians; they were extraordinarily successful with them, and it is not impossible that if some working arrangement could have been found between the colonists and Jesuits a great problem might have been solved—that of obtaining some control over the natives and teaching them industries without undermining their peculiar physical constitution. With the best intentions in the world, more modern efforts made to hold the Indian tribes in civic life have ended in their speedy dwindling and extinction; no one except Colonel Rondon seems able to teach the Indian and keep him alive.

To break up the Jesuit missions, Pombal in 1755 decreed the “emancipation of the Indians of Pará and Maranhão,” a curious corollary to the laws that the Society had themselves obtained earlier forbidding the Portuguese settlers to enslave Indians. A little later occurred in Portugal an attempt against the life of the King: the Jesuits were, quite unjustly, accused of being concerned in it, and on this pretext they were ordered expelled in a body from Portugal and from all Portuguese possessions. This was in 1759, expulsion from Brazil taking place during 1760; not content with this, the abolition of the Society of Jesus was obtained from Pope Clement XIV in 1773. This severe measure was rescinded in 1814, and the Jesuits came back to Brazil as to other world dominions, doing excellent educational work at the present time; their colleges are magnificent institutions, and it is commonly said in Brazil that the very best education for men is obtained in the Jesuit college at Itú, in the interior of São Paulo State.

José I died in 1777, and Pombal promptly descended from power; but his work in the stimulation of Brazilian industries, the creation of a genuine Brazilian entity through strong centralization, and the erection of Rio into a viceroyalty, paved the way for the next great change.

Early in the nineteenth century, when the North American colonies of Great Britain had successfully revolted, and the French Revolution was an accomplished fact, ideas of republican independence began to agitate many heads in South America. Brazil had only one uprising, the famous Conspiracy of Minas, which got no farther than plans; it was headed by one of the influential Freire de Andrade family, and all the plotters were eventually pardoned except one scapegoat, who was executed publicly in Rio in 1792, and thus achieved immortality: his nickname of _Tiradentes_ is preserved in the name of a square in Rio and a public holiday on the anniversary of his death.

A few years later Napoleon was overrunning Europe. Portugal, friendly to his enemy England, incurred the Napoleonic wrath, tried to make terms too late, and was being actually invaded by the French when an English naval squadron appeared in the Tagus commanded by Sir Sidney Smith; the Portuguese royal family and a host of courtiers went aboard Portuguese vessels and were convoyed across the Atlantic, out of Napoleon’s reach, to Brazil. It would not at all have suited England for the Braganzas to fall into hands which already held too many royal prisoners. It was one of the most remarkable transferences of a crown in history, this emigration of Dom João to his American colonies; it was a useful and a dignified refuge for him and at the same time was of great value to Brazil, probably saving her from years of disorder and bloodshed.

[Illustration:

_Two Views of the Avenida Rio Branco, Rio de Janeiro._

The beautiful Avenida, over a mile long, was driven through the city from the docks to the Avenida Beira Mar as part of the extensive city improvements costing over £20,000,000 begun in March, 1904; the avenue was completed in November, 1905. Rio has 1,250,000 population. ]

The royal party arrived first at Bahia, where the town turned out in enthusiastic welcome and invited Dom João to make this city his seat of government; but his destination was Rio, and he sailed on, first giving out a proclamation which ensured him a good reception in the Capital—the _Abertura dos Portos_, or opening of the ports of Brazil freely to the ships of all the world “friendly to Portugal.” Public printing presses were now permitted, a newspaper was started, chiefly engaged in training the minds of the _nascidos no Brasil_ (Brazilian born) to appreciation of the monarchical presence, but still the commencement of Brazilian journalism; foreign capital began to come, and active Europeans, attracted by the advertisement that the transference of the monarchy gave Brazil, entered and established businesses; the Banco do Brasil was inaugurated; fine buildings were erected in Rio; the Regent’s collection of pictures and books, brought with him, formed the nucleus of the excellent museum and library of modern Rio; the harbour was improved, a School of Art and Naval College founded. By the time that Portugal was free from the Napoleonic shadow, and, in 1821, called Dom João home again, he left behind a Brazil to which a tremendous impetus had been given, and which had been raised to the dignity of a kingdom equal in importance with Portugal and Algarves six years earlier. North and south of Brazil the newly freed Spanish American countries were deep in troubles born of a sudden injection into independence of unaccustomed populations. Brazil herself could scarcely have avoided being drawn into the vortex had her citizens still to complain of the narrow policies and repressive measures of the colonial system; they had become too proud and too strong for development to be longer retarded, and the European turn of fortune came in the nick of time. It was lucky that Dom João was a man of shrewd good sense. Dom Pedro, son of Dom João, remained in Brazil as Regent, and the country was still linked to Portugal; it was soon apparent that this condition could not endure. The jealous legislature in Lisbon wished to reduce Brazil again to the level of a colony under tutelage, despite the efforts of Dom João; the news came to Rio together with a peremptory order for the return of the prince, and he, a good diplomat, elected to throw his lot in with Brazil, and declared the Independence on the historic hillside of Ypiranga, in 1822.[4]

Proclaimed Emperor soon afterwards, Pedro ruled for nine years and then abdicated in favour of his five-year-old child, Dom Pedro _segundo_. To this rather stormy period of control is due the commencement of deliberate colonization of Europeans into Brazil; it was a policy widely continued later on by Pedro II, and afterwards adopted both by the Federal Government and by separate States of the Union. A regency lasted until Pedro was fourteen years old, the most remarkable hand on the reins of power meanwhile being that of the astute priest, Father Diogo Feijó.

Pedro II endeared himself to Brazil by his kindly and tactful spirit, his genial broadmindedness; he was a scholar by instinct, and did his best to advance Brazil by the encouragement of railroad building, invitation to foreign capital, and the throwing open of wide spaces of southern land to good class immigrants. It was during his reign that the English, who had established themselves firmly during the first monarchical periods, sending ships regularly and opening markets for Brazilian products, were followed by the commercial French and later by the German merchant. The industrial and educational advance of Brazil is largely owing to the personal initiative of Dom Pedro II. His reign was one of the longest in history, from 1831 to 1889, and the development within this period includes inauguration of city tramways as well as railroads; the discovery that coffee would grow in Brazil and its systematic cultivation; discovery of the properties of rubber; the introduction of factories; use of hydraulic power.

Following the world agitation against slavery, Brazil in 1854 forbade the introduction of negroes; there were however still large numbers of these people in bondage as well as a much larger number free.

Public feeling was much excited about the question in the eighties, and at last in 1888, when Dom Pedro during a period of illness had made his daughter, the Princess Isabel, Regent, the powerful influence of many highminded Brazilians was brought to bear, and the decree of abolition was signed.

Slave holders were not so pleased as statesmen, when their farm workers immediately forsook the field and flocked into the cities; agriculture undoubtedly suffered, and to the discontent of the planters is credited the agitation that now gathered head against the continuation of the monarchical system. The truth seems rather to be that the Empire had outlived its usefulness, and surrounded by republics could not survive. There was also a general fear lest Isabel, said to be priest-dominated, should be permanently appointed Regent, and this idea hastened the day that would otherwise have been postponed, in all probability, until the death of the good and highly revered Dom Pedro. A growing band of republicans, some of the foremost men in Brazilian affairs today, found themselves strong enough to proclaim the end of the Empire; Dom Pedro was informed and asked to leave the country within twenty-four hours, and did so; the Republic in Brazil dates from November 15, 1889.

The first years of the new régime were darkened by disorders, the worst being the revolt, long-drawn-out, in Rio Grande do Sul. Two military presidents were succeeded by four civilians, and these in turn by a third militarist, and notably extravagant, presidency from 1910 to 1914. The present President, a lawyer, Dr. Wencesláo Braz Pereira Gomez, is making heroic efforts to redeem the financial condition of the country, and is fortunate in being aided by a group of exceedingly able men. The country became deeply involved during the last twenty-five years; if she were an old land the burden would be severe: her strength lies in her youth, internal vigour, and unsurpassed abundance of untapped resources.

The tremendous money spending of Republican times has been sharply censured since the outbreak of war in Europe suddenly pulled up the country to a realization of her debts; it is probably fortunate that she was just too late to arrange yet another, for which negotiations were opened in 1914. But while it is true that literally tons of money were borrowed and spent after 1889, it is also from that date that the great leap forward of the country is reckoned; her extravagance was a wide advertisement—the attention of the world was called to this spoilt child of the nations as no modest jogging along the beaten track would have done. Bankers, commercial firms, writers, settlers came to Brazil; there was a feverish expansion in railroad building, and from this period dates the inauguration of good modern port works in Rio, Bahia, Pará, Pernambuco, Santos, Victoria, and many other points of call for ocean-going vessels; waterworks and town drainage, the better paving of a score of cities, extinction of yellow fever and other tropical pests, were all accomplished with money borrowed in the hey-day of Brazil.

The check in facile borrowing of very large sums on easy terms has undoubtedly acted as a cold shower upon South America in general, somewhat accustomed to financial sunshine; the result has been salutary in awakening the people all over the continent to the need for unprecedented personal effort. It has, too, brought about a new sense of North American relations, created and needed, with South America. The European War has turned the United States from the position of a debtor to that of a creditor country, and while up to the end of 1922 her loans to the whole of South America have not exceeded two hundred million dollars, chiefly short-time State borrowings, caution is mutually beneficial. There is, however, much work to be done which calls urgently for gold supplies, and it is but logical that the country accumulating money rapidly should be willing to take up a due share of the development work waiting; European interests need not and should not be ousted, but can be readily and happily supplemented.

The United States of Brazil today contain over 24,000,000 people, still largely concentrated upon the sea coast, in a score of thriving cities. She is at peace with her neighbours, with no shadow upon her political horizon; her only great problem is the industrial, financial one, and this, with the concentrated effort of Brazilians and the right kind of external help, can be solved. The entry of Brazil into the War upon the side of the Allies, after the torpedoing of the Brazilian vessels and the declaration of war by the United States against Germany, brought about a new international comradeship, and has awakened the world to a better understanding of the spirit and power of the country.