COTTON GROWING AND WEAVING
Cotton is native to Brazil, as to other regions of northern South America, Central America and Mexico, the south of the United States, and the West Indian islands. Wild, or carelessly cultivated Brazilian cottons are despite neglect of such excellent quality that George Watt, in Wild and Cultivated Cotton of the World says that when they are properly selected and standardized they will “make Brazil as famous as Egypt in the production of excellent fibres.” North American cotton buyers, visiting Brazil early in 1916 were astonished to find cotton of long silky fibre produced here, and made arrangements for shipping quantities of the Seridó variety to the United States; England has for a very long time been a purchaser of the same fine qualities of raw cotton, for mixing, as Egyptian cotton is mixed, with the short-fibre product of the United States.
Cotton of one kind and another is grown all over Brazil. There seems to be no region which refuses to mother it. But the best lands, yielding most prolifically and with large areas suitable for cultivation on a great scale are in the centre, on the north-east promontory, and all along the coast to the mouth of the Amazon. Comparatively very small fragments of this belt are under cotton culture, although wild cotton and patches of cultivation of more or less merit are widely scattered; Todd, in his World’s Cotton Crop says that Brazil “might easily grow twenty million bales, but her actual crop does not yet reach half a million bales.” Now, with the encouraging measures taken by the Brazilian Government as well as the enterprise of individual firms and planters, and the new realization of the opportunity waiting for the farmer with small capital but large technical skill, experience and good sense, cotton culture should open up great spaces of land suitable for this well-rewarding form of agriculture. Brazilian cottons or their Peruvian and West Indian kin have endowed the world with fine varieties; it remains for their standardization to benefit the land of their origin.
Cotton was used by the Aztecs for making elaborate clothes, richly dyed and embroidered, long before the Spanish Conquest in 1520. Farther south, the carvings of the Maya show that that race was using textiles hundreds of years previously—as early as the beginning of the Christian Era, if the dates assigned to the Copán and Quiriguá temples are correct. In Brazil, where the inhabitants were much less socially and industrially developed, small domestic use was made of the fibre, but it had its name, amaniú.
Cotton (Gossypium) belongs to the natural order of the malvaceas, claims more kin in the New than in the Old World, and its parents are genuine tropical dwellers; there seems to be little doubt that the first of the fine, long staple cottons introduced into North America were perennials, and that they became annuals only because they were unable to survive the winter cold. Names of cottons grown in Brazil leave the searcher after details rather hazy on account of the many local appellations given them, but the scientist has classified them by the characteristics of their seeds, dividing them into eleven kinds. The first, Gossypium herbaceum, is not a tropical native, was brought in from Asia both here and to the United States, is not common or successful, and so may be dismissed.
G. mustelinum again “is only interesting for botanical reasons,” but is found wild in the hilly interior of Brazil; G. punctatum is said to be identical with the wild cotton of the United States; G. hirsutum is a true native of South America and the West Indies, and is the lineal parent of the “Uplands” cottons of North America. G. mexicanum is, together with hirsutum, which it resembles, grown all over the coastal cotton country of Brazil; it is a small plant with a prolific yield. The writer has seen in the vicinity of Campos, State of Rio, tiny plants of this variety not more than eighteen or twenty inches high, bearing forty and more bolls and forms. It is true that the district had suffered from lack of rain and thus the tendency to run to growth rather than production, the agricultural curse of the tropics, had been checked. The field yielded over a bale to the acre.
G. peruvianum is a highly interesting, hardy, prolific variety, relative of the best native cottons of Brazil. Professor Edward Green says that he considers it one of the two most valuable in the country. It is a perennial, grows best in the humid North, often reaches a height of four metres, and yields a crop for at least three years.[[13]] Maranhão has produced it for centuries, getting a reputation for long fine fibres on its account; the percentage of fibre is over thirty-eight per cent of the total weight of the boll, a very high average, and it is undoubtedly well adapted to the river valleys of North Brazil. It is said to be identified with the carefully cultivated, irrigated cotton of the Incas.
Cultivated forms of this excellent cotton are the famous Mocó, grown so successfully in Ceará, Parahyba, and other northerly states, the Seridó, and the Sede de Ceará, local names of which Brazil is proud.
G. microcarpum appears to have a relationship with the peruvianum, and seems also to be derived from the other side of the Andes; it is credited with producing a pound of clean cotton to one hundred and twenty bolls. This is the last on the list of cotton with “fuzz” on the seeds; the remaining four varieties have clean, free seeds. Of these by far the most important is the fine G. vitifolium. From this stock most of the cottons described as “Sea Island” are derived, as well as the best of the Egyptian varieties, and in a genuine wild state in Brazil it still produces a beautiful long silky fibre. When grandchildren of its stock have been brought to Brazil from the United States they have rapidly degenerated, delicate nurslings of exotic temperament; beside them the old estirpe selvagem flourishes and yields royally. G. purpurescens is another black-seeded perennial, identified with the “Bourbon” of Porto Rico, and said to owe its introduction into Brazil to the French. G. barbadense is a blood-brother of the vitifolium, and like all the Sea Island-Egyptian group, is a highly esteemed producer of top-priced cotton. The fourth of this class is G. brasiliense, a true native, observed growing wild by Jean Lery as early as 1557.
The two most precious of the list, Gossypium peruvianum and Gossypium vitifolium, possess the advantage of being genuine South Americans; they form a magnificent stock from which the expert cotton grower can develop a product for the market which need not fear Sea Island as a rival.
Cultivation of cotton by the Portuguese colonists began very soon after the granting of the capitanias in 1530. By the year 1570 large crops were being produced in Bahia, chief centre of industrial activity, although they could not equal sugar in value. Europe was just beginning to use this material, for with the acquisition of strips of India by the Portuguese there was an entry into European markets of Calicut “calico.” Before this dawn of the cotton era Europe went clothed in leather, wool, and, on occasions of great splendour, silk. We may conclude that the clothing of the day was probably as comfortable as, and certainly more substantial than, garments of the present period, if not as sanitary: but cleanliness had not yet become a virtue. India taught Europe the use of cotton, and the spindles and looms of the ladies were filled with the vegetable fibre in lieu of wool.
In Pernambuco the culture of cotton became of more importance than sugar; farther south the Paulistas set their Indian slaves to work and were soon producing cotton crops on widely spread plantations. In the seventeenth century cotton was carried into Minas Geraes by the gold hunting bandeirantes, but it was only cultivated in the most desultory manner and when there was nothing else for the slaves to do. So complete indeed was disregard of all agricultural work that actual famines occurred in 1697–98 and in 1700–01 on account of the abandonment of plantations for gold-washing districts.
When the Marquis de Pombal practically ruled the destinies of Portugal good fortune led him to take a shrewd interest in Brazil; especially interested in the comparatively new settlements at Pará and Maranhão, and struck by the fine fibre exported from these northerly regions, he decided upon the establishment of spinning and weaving mills. In 1750 the Marquis de Tavora was given the task of engaging expert weavers for the colonies, and shortly afterwards the first cotton-cloth factories were set up in Brazil. Pombal’s fatherly interest in weaving did not extend to the south; these sections of the country should devote their time to mining and agriculture, he thought, and finding that looms were being set up all along the coast and in the interior of Minas—always a good cotton region—he passed a law in 1766 prohibiting cotton and silk weaving. It had the desired effect of checking the development of any considerable commerce, but did not prevent the use of hand looms in almost every farm, where a patch of cotton was as much a part of the crop as a field of maize. In a relatorio of 1779 the Viceroy Luis de Vasconcellos reported to Lisbon on the “independence of the people of Minas of European goods, establishing looms and factories in their own fazendas, and making cloth with which they clothe themselves and their families and slaves....”
In 1785 the Portuguese Government ordered the suppression of all factories in Brazil; they must have been considerably advanced, despite the previous orders, if the decree abolishing establishments for making “ribbons, laces of gold or silver velvets, satins, taffetas, bombazine, printed calico, fustian,” etc., etc., meant anything. In spite of this the weaving of coarse cottons managed to survive, perhaps with the connivance of sympathetic Viceroys, and repeated letters emphasized the inconvenience of factories in Brazil: a carta regia of 1802 instructed the Governor of Minas Geraes not to allow “anyone to present himself before him unless dressed in materials manufactured in the Kingdom or the Asiatic dominions.”
The transference of the Portuguese monarchy to Brazil in 1808 changed all these ideas—which helps to demonstrate the still burning need for all rulers, of whatever denomination, to take a travelling course—and in a few years cotton threads and cloths were freed from duties, the Prince Regent sent a master-weaver at his own expense to set up fabricas in the interior, and by 1820 the industry was thriving. Cotton growing was equally stimulated at this period by high prices in England; in 1818 that country was not only buying raw cotton, but cotton cloth, from Brazil.
With the development of the south of the United States in cotton production on a great scale a shadow fell over the Brazilian industry. Unable to compete with the low prices at which North America offered her bales in the early eighteen-forties the farmers of the southerly states of Brazil checked their planting, and, coffee just then dawning upon them as a commercial possibility, filled up the empty spaces in the fields with the beans of coffea arabica. North Brazil, with its special cottons of long staple, kept on producing these varieties for home mills, steadily at work, and for European export; a new incentive came with the Civil War of the United States when Confederate cotton shipments were contraband and English spinners were at their wits’ end for raw material, but prices sank with the declaration of peace.
Since the beginning of the present century Brazilian exports of, and prices received for, national cotton have varied so remarkably that it is worth while glancing at the statistics; almost the whole of the export of this raw cotton, and of cotton seed, went to England. If in addition to this export we reckon about fifty thousand tons as the amount consumed by the factories of the country, the whole production of Brazil can never have exceeded ninety thousand tons.
| Year | Tons | Value in Gold Milreis | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1902 | 32,137 | 10,701 | contos | (one conto equals 1000 milreis) |
| 1903 | 28,235 | 11,766 | „ | |
| 1904 | 13,262 | 7,347 | „ | |
| 1905 | 24,081 | 10,291 | „ | |
| 1906 | 31,668 | 14,726 | „ | |
| 1907 | 38,036 | 15,418 | „ | |
| 1908 | 3,565 | 1,833 | „ | |
| 1909 | 9,968 | 5,261 | „ | |
| 1910 | 11,160 | 7,934 | „ | |
| 1911 | 14,647 | 8,714 | „ | |
| 1912 | 16,774 | 9,221 | „ | |
| 1913 | 37,423 | 20,513 | „ | |
| 1914 | 30,434 | 16,556 | „ | |
| 1915 | 5,223 | 2,551 | „ | |
Exports almost vanished, to 1000 tons, in 1916, not recovering fully until 1920, when 25,000 tons were shipped.
What measures are being taken in Brazil to develop cotton culture? First let us take into consideration new governmental means of assisting the industry. When the drought of 1914–15 scorched up northern plantations the weavers found themselves paying higher prices inside Brazil than the same national cotton was bringing in Liverpool. The Centro Industrial, a very strong and useful body, asked the Government to hold an enquiry, and the also extremely powerful Centro do Commercio e Industria of São Paulo made the suggestion that duties against imported cotton should be remitted so that the mills could get cheap supplies of foreign material. Remarking on the situation the Gazeta de Noticias of Rio said: “On one side we have the cotton planting industry declaring that it will face certain extinction if the door is opened to foreign raw material; on the other is the weaving industry declaring that it must shut its doors if it is not permitted to buy from foreign markets!”
The Federal Government only temporarily remitted dues, believing that the situation would remedy itself with the new crop—rain fell copiously at last in the scourged districts, and Ceará alone foretold a cotton crop of twelve thousand tons for 1916—but prepared to consider measures to open up larger areas of country to this culture. A project submitted to the Legislature at the end of 1915 suggested the construction of good cart roads in cotton districts, and the establishment of modern gins at convenient points, at the expense of the Government.
Already, three years ago, the Government had acquired the services of Professor Edward Green, a cotton expert from the United States who has been working with the double object of classifying and standardizing the best cottons for plantation in Brazil, and of noting the best regions for such plantations. At the Conferencia Algodoeira (Cotton Conference) held in Rio under the auspices of the Centro da Industria in June, 1916, Professor Green gave an address dealing with some phases of his labours, and concluded by saying:
“After three years of observation and experiment in Brazil I am convinced that this country, above any other, possesses excellent natural conditions for cotton production, and that the development of this great national resource depends only upon the adoption of a few simple measures:
“1. The selection and standardization of superior types, and the production of great quantities of selected seeds for distribution. “2. Introduction of simple, animal-drawn cultivators, with practical instruction on their use to be given to large planters of cotton in the interior. “3. Stimulation by the Government of all activities related to the cotton industry, and suspension for some years of all connected taxes and duties.
“Extensive propaganda in favor of cotton growing is being animated by the far-seeing and incomparable activity of Dr. Miguel Calmon. If this work is continued in all parts of the country where cotton is cultivated there is no doubt of success. The cotton production of Brazil will find itself doubled if not quadrupled in a short time, and this country will take the high place in world markets which is legitimately hers as the greatest exporter of high-class cotton.”
Both Federal and State Governments have brought technical experts from foreign countries to help in the solution of Brazilian problems; the Directorship of the Jardim Botanico in Rio, where a series of valuable experiments in tropical agriculture were carried out, was for some time in the hands of an English expert, Dr. John Willis, who brought his knowledge of Ceylon and Malaysia to bear upon Brazilian conditions; the work of the eminent Swiss, Dr. Emil Goeldi, on the Amazon, succeeded by the labours of Dr. Jacques Huber, have been invaluable in regard to classification of North Brazilian natural plants and their adaptation to commercial uses, as well as the introduction of suitable tropical fruits, etc., from other regions. The Ministry of Agriculture in Rio is the centre of much live work, and has had a series of excellent men at its head. The brilliant Pedro de Toledo was neither the first nor the last of agricultural devotees in this post.
The work of State Societies of Agriculture is more highly specialized, and cotton has its list of societies just as coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco have theirs. Many big cotton estate owners take a keen interest in improving conditions of production, and have been during the last few years definitely helped by the American expert already referred to and by a Texan cotton grower at the head of demonstration farms operated by the Leopoldina Railway Company. One meets in Brazil an unusually high percentage of finely educated men who are fazendeiros, who willingly leave the gay cities of the coast to live in patriarchal authority upon interior farms having as their sole connection with the outside world a narrow mule-track; they appear to have inherited the affection for land of their own possession which sent the early Portuguese so far afield, and which seldom seems to be mingled with any dislike of solitude. It is this feeling which scantily populates the sertão with fazendas, far removed from any town, dotting the vast interior with nucleos of independent life; it may be partly due to a strain of Indian ancestry, for it extends to the upper reaches of the Amazon and its tributaries, lining, at infrequent intervals, the banks of forest-bound rivers with palm-thatch huts, their foundations in the water, where families subsist upon a handful of farinha, and fish caught in the flood below them, looking with unenvious eyes at the passing boats of rubber collectors and apparently quite content with their withdrawal from the world. To such a people, not markedly gregarious, the opening of great tracts of interior is in accord with their instincts, and cultivation is but a matter of communication and transport.
The cotton country of Brazil needs expert growers and good roads or rail service; it will not lack the work of the small native farmer.
There is a cotton cloth factory near Pernambuco which is an excellent example of a self-contained industry in Brazil. Situated seven miles outside the mediæval port-city of Olinda, whose narrow cobbled streets are lined with tiled and gabled houses reminiscent of Dutch regimen, the estate covers forty-five square miles of pasture and woodland besides the area directly occupied by the works and the village of employees; one edge borders on the sea, fringed with coconuts, and there are two little ports where native barcaças bring their loads of raw cotton and merchandise, at the mouths of two rivers flowing through the estate.
Here, on the warm coast of the northern promontory with its tropic vegetation and mestizo population, a Brazilian company started a factory for spinning and weaving; it was not a marked success until Herman Lundgren, an energetic man of Swedish birth, resident in Brazil since 1866 and later a naturalized Brazilian, took over the management of the property. He made an arrangement by which the original owners were paid ten per cent on their investment, all farther profits belonging to himself, and later on bought out the old stockholders; new machinery was brought from Great Britain, technical workers imported from Manchester, and the scope of the business enlarged so that today all processes for producing fine coloured cotton cloths are performed on the estate—spinning, weaving, dyeing and colour-printing. When the writer visited the factory in the early part of 1915 a shortage of dyestuffs was predicted and I understand that since that time experiments have been successfully made with native vegetable dyes, too long abandoned for the convenient aniline varieties.
The factory employs three thousand five hundred people, of whom seventy per cent are women and children; the total population in the village is fifteen thousand. Over thirty-five thousand dollars a month is paid in wages. The manager of the mills, an Englishman, spoke highly of the Brazilian operatives: the company has never taken any measures to import other labour than that of the district; the majority of the workmen’s dwellings are built and owned by the company, and are rented out cheaply, while in some cases these modest cottages of sun-dried brick, thatched with palm or covered with a zinc or tile roof, have been erected by the workmen themselves, their only obligation to the company being the payment of ground rent of two to four milreis a month, the palm-thatched house paying the lowest and the zinc-roofed the highest rate. The company maintains a school, hospital and dispensary, free, for the villagers.
Apart from the mills the estate contains a dairy and stock farm—where some well-known English horses occupy stables, apparently unperturbed by their transference to Brazilian tropics—tile and brick factories, a bakery, blacksmith’s shop, and lumber yard. The company uses one thousand tons of coal a month when it can be obtained, but curtailment of imports since the outbreak of the European War has entailed a greater use of wood fuel. This is cut from the matto on the estate, typical Brazilian woodland of great beauty, containing a marked variety of different trees, but notable for its absence of animal life with the exception of insects and some fine butterflies in the neighbourhood of streams and pools.
The estate produces no cotton, purchasing all of this raw material from Pernambuco and Parahyba; one hundred and fifty bags weighing seventy-five kilos each are used daily, and the monthly bill for cotton amounted to £35,000 or £40,000 even when the price of Brazilian cotton was down to about eleven milreis an arroba (fifteen kilos), equal at the rate of exchange then prevailing to about eight cents a pound United States currency; but towards the end of 1915 native cotton rose in Brazil to twenty-five and thirty cents a pound in consequence of the drought in the North followed by crop failures, and factories all over the country suffered from the shortage.
Pernambuco and other northern factories had an advantage in being nearer sources of supply, the difference in freight enabling these mills to get raw material at a rate at least twenty per cent below that paid by the importers of Rio and S. Paulo. From forty thousand pounds to fifty thousand pounds a year is spent by the factory on drugs, colours and chemicals.
Production of cotton cloth averages one million, five hundred thousand metres a month, woven on nine hundred and sixty looms; the cloth measures twenty-two to twenty-six inches in width and has an immense variety, from heavy blue denim to fine flowered fabrics woven or printed in brilliant colours, beloved by Brazilian working classes. Trains of mules pass daily along the road from the factory, each animal carrying two bales of cotton cloth weighing seventy-five kilos each; the whole of this output is sold in Brazil, distributed over half a score of different States by shops established by the company. There are over eighty of these stores, selling cloth and also ready made garments of simple make, in Pernambuco State alone, as well as others in Bahia, Ceará, Parahyba, Rio, S. Paulo, Matto Grosso, etc.