I
The United States of Brazil, next to our own United States, form the largest of the American republics. Brazil has an area fifteen times greater than Germany’s, sixteen times as great as that of France, 250,000 square miles greater than ours, excluding Alaska and our island possessions. At its greatest width, the country extends inland more than 2000 miles and its coast line on the Atlantic is more than 3700 miles long, twice the distance from Portland, Maine, to Key West; yet the population, although it has doubled in the last forty years, is not quite a fourth as large as our own. It is estimated that if the whole country were as densely populated as France, the inhabitants would number 622,000,000, or, if as densely populated as Germany, 955,000,000. Some time it may be. Except in the regions near the large cities, only a small part is even sparsely settled now.
It argues well for the industry and enterprise of what inhabitants there are, however, that Brazil’s international commerce is relatively nearly as great in proportion to her population as ours. Some idea of the remarkable progress she has made is given in the following extract from a pamphlet recently published by the Commissão de Expansão Economica, entitled “Do you Know the Wealth of Brazil?”
“In the colonial days, the foreign trade of Brazil was done exclusively through Lisbon, under the protection of Portuguese men-of-war.... The colonial produce was distributed among the principal Portuguese commercial centers and the imports came exclusively from Portugal to the ports of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Pará, and Maranhão. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the foreign trade of Brazil was continued more or less on this basis, but the exports were considerably more than the imports. By decree of January 28, 1808, the King of Portugal, Don João VI of Braganza, lately arrived at Bahia” (when he fled from the Peninsula as a result of Napoleon’s invasion), “resolved to open all the ports of Brazil to the commerce of foreign nations, until then closed for the benefit of Portugal. The first consequence of this decree was the establishment of commercial relations with England. English agencies were opened at Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco for the purpose of importing manufactured articles and exporting sugar, alcohol, gold, cotton, hides, coffee, cocoa, timber, and indigo. After the proclamation of independence in 1822, the trade developed enormously, France, the United States of America, Germany, Holland, and Sweden following the example of England.... From 1846 to 1875 the imports increased 110 per cent. and the exports 175 per cent. From 1876 to 1905 the imports increased 175 per cent. and the exports 272 per cent.... In 1909 its total value was £101,844,549 (over $500,000,000).”
In 1910 it was $545,581,275, in which we participated to the extent of $142,437,986, including $58,808,467 worth of coffee and $47,409,030 worth of rubber that were exported to us. For the principal industry is still, as it has always been, agriculture, though in the mountainous sections there are vast regions containing gold and precious stones and minerals of incalculable value, millions of square miles in the interior still covered with virgin forests; and yet even the relatively small sections that have been cultivated produce more than three-fourths of all the coffee consumed in the world and more than three-fifths of all the rubber, not to mention the other products. But within the last few years immigration has been encouraged and many conditions that were preventing development have been improved. Wonders have been accomplished in making the cities as healthful as any in the world. The railroads have been, and are still being, extended tremendously and facilities for commerce along the great inland waterways continually increased.
The first of the important seaports of Brazil that are accessible by steamer from New York is Belém, the capital of the State of Pará. It ranks only as the fifth in size, but to the tourist it is of surpassing interest because it is situated on the Pará River, the southern or commercial mouth of the Amazon, that mightiest and most majestic of all the rivers in the world.
Imagine!—a river more than 3400 miles in length, with its source in the Peruvian Andes, 16,000 feet above the level of the sea—a river which, with its vast tributaries, many of them themselves from a thousand to two thousand miles in length, drains a territory of 2,300,000 square miles, two-thirds as large as our United States, and so rich in indigenous resources, and so fertile, that many years ago, when it was wholly a wilderness, the great scientist Von Humboldt said of it that “it is here that one day, sooner or later, will concentrate the civilization of the globe”—a river that is a mile and a half wide at Tabatinga, the last Brazilian port to the west, and gradually broadens on its way to the sea until it attains a width of 150 miles at its northern mouth alone, and discharges into the Atlantic a volume of water more than four times as great as the outpour of the Mississippi—a river that is navigable, that is now actually being navigated by ocean liners, for 2000 miles, clear across Brazil to Iquitos in the frontier of Peru.
Yet, although as early as 1541 Francisco de Orellana, one of Pizarro’s little band of conquerors, who had crossed the Andes in quest of the fabulous country of El Dorado, and, after having traversed the whole course of the river through Brazil with a few companions in a canoe, had made his way back to Spain and told amazing stories of the wealth of the region he had discovered, and although a century later the astronomer La Condamine, and still later Baron von Humboldt, Castelnau, and others had successively published alluring accounts of their explorations in the same region, it was not until 1867 that the river was opened to free navigation.
It is gratifying to reflect that, probably more than to any other outside influence, it was due to the publication of the report of an expedition undertaken in 1851 by William Lewis Herndon, a lieutenant in the United States Navy, and to the explorations of Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor, that the interest was aroused which at last brought this about. Lieutenant Herndon, like Orellana, started from Lima, and, braving the passes of the Andes, entered the Amazon from one of its western affluents and made the journey in a canoe, with only a Peruvian guide and a few Indian rowers, all the way to its mouth. Professor Agassiz, whose explorations were begun fifteen years later, started from Belém and traveled in a steamboat, such as it was, accompanied by his wife and a corps of scientists, and was given every assistance possible by the late Emperor Dom Pedro, who took a lively interest in the expedition. But even then in Brazil, the Professor says in his book, “so little was known of the Amazon that we could obtain only very meager, and usually rather discouraging, information concerning our projected journey. In Rio, if you say you are going to ascend their great river, your Brazilian friends look at you with compassionate wonder. You are threatened with sickness, with intolerable heat, with mosquitoes, jacaraes (alligators), and wild Indians.”
Lieutenant Herndon, however, had already made known to the scientific world that the climate is healthful, notwithstanding the mosquitoes; that, humid and hot as it is during certain hours of the day, the nights are always cool, and that “the direct rays of the sun are tempered by an almost constant east wind, laden with moisture from the ocean, so that no one ever suffers from the heat;” and, when he got back to Rio de Janeiro, Professor Agassiz assured the Brazilians that this was so. Arthur Dias indignantly protests (in his Brazil of To-day) that “it is not true, as they say, that the climate of this region prevents the existence and the extending of the population.” “It is a legend, a fiction,” he adds. Mozans, who made a similar journey to Herndon’s very recently, also testifies to the same effect.
Here in this Amazon country, Lieutenant Herndon had reported, “we see a fecundity of soil and a rapidity of vegetation that is marvelous and to which even Egypt, the ancient granary of Europe, affords no parallel.... Here trees, evidently young, shoot up to such a height that no fowling-piece will reach the game seated on their topmost branches. This is the country of rice, of sarsaparilla, of cocoa, of tonka beans, of mandioca, black pepper, arrowroot, ginger, balsam, tapioca, gum copal, nutmeg, animal and vegetable wax, indigo and Brazil nuts, of India rubber, of dyes of the gayest colors, drugs of rare virtue, variegated cabinet woods of the finest grain and susceptible of the highest polish. Here dwell the wild cow, the fish ox, the sloth, the anteater, the beautiful black tiger, the mysterious electric eel, the boa constrictor, the anaconda, the deadly coral snake, the voracious alligator, monkeys in endless variety, birds of the most brilliant plumage, and insects of the strangest form and gayest colors.”
More than forty years of progress and improvement have passed since Dom Pedro decreed that the river should be open to international trade, yet all these wonders may still be seen there—the vast expanses of water, the shore lines varied by lofty bluffs and low plains of sand, rugged rocks and dense masses of foliage, the river surface dotted by islands, large and small—the magnificent forest still crowding to the banks and teeming with all the exuberant life and brilliant hues of the tropics—giant sumaumeras, their crests towering high above all other trees, their huge, white-barked trunks and limbs standing out in striking relief from the masses of green; tall cocoanut palms, tufted at the top with fan-shaped leaves cut into ribbons and bedecked with creamy blossoms; slender, graceful assai palms, tall and clean-stemmed like the cocoanuts, but with fluffy, feathery crowns; wine palms from which the flowers hang in long, crimson tassels, studded with berries of bright green; jupati palms with plumelike leaves forty to fifty feet long that start near the base of the trunk and curve upward on all sides in the form of a vase; the familiar fan palm, and a legion of others.
And there are rubber trees, which resemble in this region our northern ash; stately castanhas, the trees on which the Brazil nuts grow, and cacaos, that look like our cherry trees, only they give us our chocolate and cocoa beans instead and have blossoms of a saffron tint; mahoganies, rosewoods and satinwoods and great sheaves of whispering bamboo; myriads of ferns and exquisitely tinted orchids, acacias, scarlet passion flowers, begonias, yellow and blue—flowers innumerable in the wildest profusion. Not little ones like our violets hiding modestly among the mosses and grass, but big blossoms growing luxuriantly on bushes and on the parasite vines that twine about the trunks of the trees and hang in festoons from their branches, until the whole river border seems ablaze with their vivid lights; and there are still the monkeys and beautiful butterflies and humming birds, and the parrots, macaws, herons, egrets, toucans, and countless other gorgeously feathered birds, and the Indian villages, too, in the midst of their orange and banana groves or huddled near the beaches where the turtles breed.
Only now all these may be seen from the decks of ocean liners, or, if one starts from Belém or Iquitos, from river steamers as safe and comfortably equipped and setting as good a table as most of those in our northern waters. Now the alligators and snakes and tigers have been driven far from the beaten tracks—not too far, though, for the sportsman who loves the excitement of hunting big game—now the negro slaves have been freed and the Indians are no longer hostile; now, in many places, lands have been drained and clearings made in the forests, and waste marshes and giant trees have made way for pastures and thrifty-looking plantations, where grain, coffee, sugar, tobacco and cotton, and pineapples and many other things are cultivated; now the rubber and cacao and nut gatherers penetrate far into the woods; now small, isolated communities have grown to be large ones, that send their produce directly from their own docks to the markets of the world.
There is Manãos, for instance, the capital of the State of Amazonas. Manãos is situated at the mouth of the Rio Negro, which empties into the Amazon a thousand miles from the coast. When Lieutenant Herndon was there in 1851, it was a wretched little town, containing but four hundred and seventy houses, most of them one story in height, and had a population of about four thousand—whites, Indians, mixed breeds, and negro slaves all combined. To-day it is a modern, rapidly growing city, with a population already numbering fifty thousand, perhaps more, including many foreigners. There is an imposing stone State House, a white marble Palace of Justice, and a splendid monument commemorating the opening of the Amazon to international trade. It has broad, shaded, well-paved streets, lined with handsome buildings; it has electric lights, trolley lines, a telephone system, water and harbor works, an ice plant, banks, hotels, newspapers, up-to-date shops, warehouses and public markets, a good library and excellent educational institutions, and is rated among the greater ports of South America because of its extensive shipments of rubber and other products of the country round about.
A visit to the beautiful public gardens, where an orchestra plays in the evenings, and to the Amazonas Theater is well worth while. It is said to have cost $2,000,000 in gold, that theater—which is not at all surprising to any one who has seen it, for it is truly superb, a structure of stone with marble supporting columns, that stands on a great causeway of masonry occupying a commanding site on the Avenida Eduardo Ribeiro, the principal thoroughfare and fashionable promenade, and has a lofty, brightly colored dome that can be seen from the harbor, and a magnificent foyer adorned with paintings by a famous Italian artist.
Obydos, too, perched on the bluffs beside an old fortress near the mouth of the Trombetas, and Santarem, at the mouth of the Tapajos, about midway between Manãos and the coast, are other progressive cities that offer opportunities for agreeable breaks in the long journey. As it was in the Tapajos that gold was first found in the region, Santarem is one of the oldest if now one of the most up-to-date of the towns. It is possessed, besides, of a peculiar interest for North Americans because after our civil war it became the home of quite a number of our “unreconstructed” Confederates.
But Belém, or Pará as it is more generally called by foreigners (one may take his choice, since the full corporate name is Santa Maria de Nazareth de Belém do Grão Pará), is by far the largest and most interesting of them all, for not only has the wealth that has poured into it in recent years transformed it into a big city of about two hundred thousand inhabitants, boasting, like Manãos, all the modern public utilities and conveniences, but it is old and rich in relics associated with its romantic history, much care has been taken in the adding of the new to beautify it, its climate is much more delightful than the others (the mean annual temperature is only 82° F.), and it is also charmingly clean and picturesque. “Who comes to Pará,” runs a local proverb, “is glad to stay; who drinks assai goes never away”—though assai need have no real terrors for that reason. It is nothing more seductive than a most refreshing beverage made from the fruit of the assai palm.
Almost at the very threshold of the city, on the approach from the sea, one encounters some of the wonders in which the region abounds—first the “pororoca,” which is the name originally given by the Indians to the huge waves that are created by the conflict of the descending waters of the river with the inrushing current of the Atlantic and follow each other in series of three or four, with thunderous intonations. For nearly an hour in the progress through the great estuary the conflict can be observed. Then the river seems to prevail; its surface grows more placid, the color changes from the dark hue of the ocean to light green, and, on beyond, to the tawny yellow of the Amazon. Yet they say the ebb and flow of the tide is perceptible as far up as Obydos, 700 miles away, and, when it ebbs, that the tawny yellow can be seen many miles out at sea. Then, scattered about, here, there, and everywhere on the twenty-mile-wide bosom of the Pará, as though in the titanic struggle some larger body had been broken into bits, are hundreds of wooded islands, moist and radiant in the sunlight, their varied greens in delightful contrast with the silvery sheen on the waters and the bright turquoise of the sky.
The city, seen from a distance, with its background of forests and rows of white-walled, red-roofed houses, separated into clusters by the parks and tree-lined avenues sloping down to the shores of its own spacious bay, has the gay, holiday appearance of a summer resort. Only a closer view dispels the illusion, for its harbor is filled with vessels of every size and description, from the little monatrias, or canoes, of the Indians, to the great liners of the Brazilian Lloyd. Its compact business section in the vicinity of the quay, the Custom House and market and the warehouses of the steamship companies present a commercial aspect substantial and busy enough to command the respect even of a Chicagoan or New Yorker. As already stated, more than three fifths of the rubber supply of the world comes from Brazil, and two of these three fifths pass this very port, to say nothing of the cacao, nuts, oils, tobacco, woods, and other things shipped there, or of the importations.
One of the features of a stay in Belém, by the way—that is, for any one interested in seeing how the first crude form of an article so familiar in its finished forms is produced, is a trip to one of the near-by rubber estates. It has not yet been necessary in this section, if anywhere in Brazil, to resort to cultivation to any great extent, and so the huts of the seringueiros (gatherers) are located right in the woods, where the rubber trees grow promiscuously among the others, and each seringueiro is allotted as many as he can attend to. The sap, which resembles milk in color and consistency, is collected in cups placed under incisions in the bark, then brought into camp in bucketfuls and reduced by a primitive process of evaporation to the slabs or cakes forming the raw article of commerce. One does not have to leave Belém itself, however, to see rubber trees and most of the other species, too, for there the people have been generous enough to preserve within the city limits a large tract of primeval forest, which has been cleared of underbrush and converted into a park, known as the Bosque Municipal. Also there is a wonderful botanical garden and a museum where the rarest specimens of the vegetation, and animals and the birds and reptiles of the country are assembled.
And even in the business section there are charming public squares. The one nearest the quay, named for the Bishop Frei Caetano Brandão, whose statue is in the center, is particularly interesting because facing it is a fine old seventeenth-century cathedral of the Portuguese type, massive and grave, an old marine arsenal now used as a hospital, and an ancient fortification, called the Castello, which has been maintained because of its historical associations. Then there is the Praca da Independencia, where the Governor’s Palace is, and a quaint old blue-walled City Hall, built in colonial times for a Portuguese minister, the Marquis de Pombal, who dreamed of the permanent transfer of the seat of the Lusitanian empire to the banks of the Amazon. In the heart of the city, on its most elevated ground, is the celebrated Largo da Polvora, now commonly called the Praca da Republica, after a superb monument it contains—of marble surmounted by figures in bronze, symbolic of the republic proclaimed when the Emperor Dom Pedro was dethroned in the bloodless revolution of 1889. It is from this point that the four principal avenues extend through the city in the cardinal directions.
“The Largo da Polvora,” Arthur Dias pays it the compliment of saying (though this may, perhaps, be rather too enthusiastic), “shames our Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon; if they could place there the Arc de Triomphe, it would rival the Champs-Elysées.” It may be that for most its fascination lies not so much in its beauty as in its other attractions, for it is the great social and amusement center of a prosperous and pleasure-loving community, the thoroughfare along which the best of its hotels and clubs and the fashionable cafés and concert halls are located and many of its finest residences. It adds the lively mundane touch that is needed to relieve the impressiveness of a region where all nature is so overpoweringly beautiful. In the midst of the gardens, which are separated by luxuriantly shaded streets, is the Theatro da Paz, regarded as one of the best in Latin America, and the Apollo Circus and Paz Carrousel. Near by is the handsome Paz Hotel, with its popular café.
In the evenings, when the cool breeze sets in from the ocean, the whole scene becomes animated. The brilliantly lighted avenues and driveways in the park are thronged with the carriages and motor cars of the “four hundred,” the sidewalks with crowds of pleasure-seekers, cosmopolitan and well dressed. Then the cafés all have out their little zinc tables, jammed with customers of both sexes (these cafés are not mere drinking places, most of them, but a sort of peculiar combination of café, candy store, and ice-cream saloon), dozens of orchestras play, the places of amusement are in full blast, and music and gayety reign supreme.